Where the Light Falls (7 page)

‘You shouldn't be here. These are school premises, not public property. If you don't leave now, I'm afraid I'll have to call the police.'

He couldn't help himself. His reaction against being told what to do was automatic. He pointed out that he wasn't actually on school property, that he'd simply been standing on the footpath.

Something twitched behind the teacher's face; some deep instinct which, after a lifetime of being in control of a classroom, responded badly to being corrected.

‘You were talking to this girl without an adult present,' the man said. His voice was low and quavered slightly in response to some suppressed rage. ‘There are rules for contacting students. You have to obtain the approval of the principal.'

At that moment, Andrew looked towards the girl's mother and later, when he thought back on the scene, he realised that this was the moment at which she'd decided to give him the benefit of her doubt. There was a softness in her eyes and he understood that she felt sorry for him, was embarrassed by the way he was being berated.

‘I'll be reporting this incident to the authorities,' the teacher said, as he left, moving through the clusters of small green bodies remaining in the yard, and the woman moved closer to him, her eyes brown and clear, the colour of weak black tea. ‘Do you have a card or something you could give me?' she said, gripping the calico bag that
hung over her shoulder and which seemed to be full of books. Behind them the wind rushed through the leaves of a melaleuca tree, the sound, like water over stones.

‘I don't have a card with me,' he said. He'd had some business cards made a few years earlier, but they remained sealed in a box somewhere in storage because he was too shy ever to hand them out. ‘You can look me up online though; I have a website. I'll write the address down for you. There's an email address for me on the site and I'll give you my mobile number.' He patted his pockets for a pen and the woman found a scrap of paper for him to write on. It was a receipt for some library books; he wrote his contact details on the back.

‘Thanks,' she said. ‘I'll look you up.' Then she took her daughter's hand and walked down to the pedestrian crossing. There they stopped, the woman looking in both directions cautiously before stepping out, as though very aware of all the things that could go wrong.

He started walking in the opposite direction. He'd only gone about a block from the school when he heard tyres crunch up behind him and the sharp bleep of a siren. He jumped and his heart started to race. A male officer stepped out of the car first.

‘We've had a complaint, sir, about a man matching your description who was seen loitering around the school grounds. Was it you?'

He nodded and felt a tight pain across his chest. A female officer emerged from the car and they were
talking to one another, but he couldn't hear what they were saying.

‘Can you tell us your name, please?'

‘Andrew Spruce,' he said. He told himself he'd done nothing wrong, that this was preposterous. He hadn't set foot inside the school gates.

‘Do you have a licence or some other form of identification with you?' The female officer was wearing thick black lace-up boots, a style that had been popular recently in Berlin. The gun in her holster was close; he could have reached out, unclipped it and taken it in his hands. He took his wallet from his back pocket and fumbled for his licence.

‘Your licence has expired, sir,' the police officer observed.

‘I'm living in Berlin. I'm just back for a week.'

‘Are you staying at the address on this licence?'

He nodded.

She carried his licence back to the police car.

‘Okay,' she said when she returned. ‘You're not on our sex offenders register.'

Andrew cleared his throat. Something must have changed about him. It had happened gradually since he moved past the age of thirty. People had stopped giving him the benefit of their doubt. And now he seemed to be regarded as a potential threat. This is what had happened to him as he'd aged, the light illuminated him in a different way. It became less kind.

‘Are you on your way home?'

He nodded. He felt exhausted, suddenly overcome with jet lag and fatigue.

The female officer's face softened with a sudden rush of sympathy. ‘Do you need a lift somewhere?' she asked.

‘Could you take me home? To the address on my licence?'

The female officer looked at the man standing beside the car. He nodded.

When the police car pulled up, his mother emerged from the house.

‘Andy,' she said. Her voice was high and unsteady.

He thought the situation might have even been funny now, being brought home by the police as an adult. That this might finally make up for his unremarkable years as a teenager when his peers were staying out all night partying and he spent his time in the darkroom alone sluicing photographic paper in shallow basins of fluid.

‘In future, try to avoid the school grounds,' the male officer said as he followed his mother inside.

9

The next day he decided to go to Rushcutters Bay, to see again the apartment he had shared with Kirsten for two years. He caught the bus into the city and walked down William Street, a noisy, overwhelming thoroughfare. It had been raining earlier that morning and the cement and bitumen were wet. As he approached the building, there was a heavy feeling in his gut. He remembered that feeling from when he'd lived there with Kirsten, the conflict between the desire he felt for her and the need to have his own space. He loved her, but her way of returning his love was to need him.

The apartment block was built of dark red bricks with windows facing onto New South Head Road, where the traffic tore down the hill and off to the east. Their
apartment had one small bedroom and their windows were in shadow for most of the day. It was so dark inside that they always had to have a light turned on, even in summer. The carpet was worn, with strange ambiguous stains left by those who had lived there before. The bathroom was the only room in the apartment that had been renovated, as though the owner had started the process but hadn't followed through. Sometimes he had stood in the shower with the door closed; it was the only place he felt he had any privacy when Kirsten was also home. The sound of the stream of water hitting the recess around him had washed away the other noises of the apartment. He could almost pretend to himself he was alone.

Their furniture was mismatched and everything they owned had been given to them or was on loan. On the dining table they had set up their computers, one at each end, and they had sat there together, working on assignments, one of them getting up occasionally to make a fresh pot of tea. Their bed was behind a curtain, clothes were flung across the room. Their wardrobe was an open rack. Everything they owned was exposed and neither of them could keep anything to themselves. It was no way to live with another person; he knew that now. But in their youth and inexperience, they had thought this was what sharing a life entailed. In those first six months of living together, he would have given everything he had to her, without understanding what the consequences of doing so would have been. Thinking of that space now,
a warmth passed through him, a memory that felt claustrophobic; it was a place where emotions had started off pleasant but had soured.

There was a day he remembered well, although the memory seemed faded, the colour drained from the scenes. He had been out all day, working in the studio on his major work, due at the end of that semester. Sometimes he slept in the studio for a few hours, woke and kept working, staying there through the night. He wasn't sure where he got the motivation from and sometimes his interest in photography felt closer to an obsession.

He had come home one afternoon around five. It was late in the year, the air was warm, familiar, with the sense that things were ending. The apartment was still when he opened the door. The air was suddenly cold and he heard a deep-throated grumble, the beginning of a storm. He saw a bowl and a mug in the kitchen from when Kirsten ate breakfast before she left for work that morning. He washed them under the tap. From their apartment, they could sometimes hear noise from the stadium in Moore Park and there must have been a football game on, because the surge of voices drifted towards him, a chorus of exaltations.

He enjoyed those moments of solitude. Outside the traffic moved in bursts, the sound of it reaching him, the buses and trucks through his window like the groans and complaints of people he didn't know, plaintive,
full of sorrow and anger. The gruff exhale of a truck as it shifted down a gear. This was what he loved, this making sense of the world. When he was alone like this, the world could mutate and change; it could become what he imagined it to be.

Fat voluptuous clouds scudded low in the sky. The shadows had become thin, disappearing slowly in anticipation of rain. An old skip sat on the side of the road. Someone had moved out of an apartment in their building and deposited the refuse of their life into the metal bin. There was a plastic doll with its arm missing, its hair teased out. He could have stood there forever at that window, from where he could see the world but it couldn't touch him.

He moved into the bedroom, where the room smelt of their bodies from the stale sheets. From the rack, he took a fresh shirt off a hanger. He had been wearing the same clothes for two days. That was when he noticed the shape on the bed. Kirsten was lying there. He moved around to her side of the bed and watched her for a moment.

She was beautiful and still. The sheets followed the contour of her body. In her silence she was perfect. He found himself thinking what a fine photograph this would make: Kirsten lying in bed with the sheets wound around her. He thought of his camera in his bag in the lounge room. It was the moment he realised that he saw the world in terms that could be framed.

Her arms were flung up over her head, the way she often slept at night, and as he watched he noticed that along her arms were long red marks, scratches with a thin line of blood, like lines drawn with a felt-tip pen. They were evenly spaced along the inside of her arms, from her wrists to her elbows and up into her armpits. It was the first time he noticed these wounds. She lay there unmoving, the expression on her face soft and contented.

He picked up the clothes strewn across the floor, thinking it would be a good time to put on a load of laundry, when the communal machines weren't often in use.

As he was loading the clothes into the machine, the rain broke, big tropical beads of water scattered over the roads outside, bouncing like glass beads. The rain hit the windows in a chorus of drums.

He returned to their bedroom and saw Kirsten stir. A twitch of her foot and then the movement of an arm as she rolled to her side.

‘Are you awake?' he asked.

She sat up and there was an expression on her face, first of disorientation and then of panic.

‘It's only just after five. Didn't you go to work today?' He's not proud of the fact that, when he was living with her, he couldn't always find it in himself to be kind to her.

She rubbed her head. ‘Migraine,' she said.

‘Oh, okay. I stayed at the studio last night. I was working. Sorry I didn't call.'

‘You didn't call?' she said, rubbing the side of her face with her hand.

He shook his head. She lay back down. He went to the kitchen to make himself a cup of sweet, milky tea. When he came back into the room later, she'd fallen asleep again. The rain outside stopped suddenly. Its noise ceased at once, subsiding like the passing of a violent temper.

He went out that night, to the bar near his art college, with some friends in his year. When he came home, Kirsten was awake, watching television in the dark. The television light hit her face.

‘You're still up?' he asked.

She nodded. ‘I'm not tired now. I slept too long in the afternoon.'

He sat down beside her on the couch. She was wearing a long-sleeved shirt. She put her arm around him and he flinched.

He moved back to his mother's house the following week.

•

He stood looking at the apartment block. Sweat prickled on his palms. She'd kept doing it, too, making those marks on her arms. After they stopped living together, they were more frequent and deeper and when they healed, they became thin white scars. He knew he
should have said something to Kirsten about it, but he didn't know how to deal with the immensity of what was wrong in her life.

He rubbed his arms as though something unpleasant had settled on his skin. He wanted to be away from there; his limbs were loose with a sudden desire to flee. He walked back up the hill towards Kings Cross, away from that terrible memory, over the footbridge, up the hill and down Darlinghurst Road to Oxford Street. This strip of road was so well known to him that walking down it now, after he'd just been to visit the old place, seemed hyperreal to him, a sequence taken from a recurring dream. As he walked, he felt a separation from the world, one so definite it might have run along a perforated seam.

This discomfort he felt could be cured only by taking photographs, though he had nothing now to photograph. He'd heard nothing from the girl he saw in Leichhardt and most of his equipment was still in Berlin. He felt a flicker of anxiety as he thought of his lights and screens, these things that were so essential to him in the darkness of winter while he stood in a world washed with light.

He passed a butcher's shop, and his eye was caught by the careful arrangement of the meat in the window, the glossy shades of red and pink. He stopped and stared. Different sorts of meat had different shades, the pork cutlets were a weak pink, the steak blue-red and trimmed with a rind of fat. The chicken breasts appeared slightly
grey. At the back of the display, almost hidden, he saw a silvery mass of offal, jumbled and formless shapes. It was impossible to tell what it might have once been. He touched the glass and the butcher frowned at him. He wore a white apron with red stains smeared across his thighs where he wiped his hands clean.