Where the Light Falls (16 page)

Saul stayed standing with the cup in his hand. He couldn't keep his hand still and the teacup rattled on its saucer.

‘You know, we saw Kirsten quite regularly,' he said loudly, over the clatter of his teacup. Renee pushed the sleeves of her cardigan up. ‘She came here to visit. She still had her own room here.' He looked out the window as he spoke.

Andrew reached for a biscuit, but realised that neither Renee nor her husband had taken one. His hand hovered as he wondered whether they were only there for display. Renee nodded her head in a very slight movement that made it look as though she didn't want to be seen. He took a horseshoe-shaped biscuit and held it in his hand, waiting for someone else to take one too. The biscuit grew sticky in his palm as he waited.

‘She asked to borrow the car for the day, you know?' Renee's husband started again. ‘She came into the office the week before to ask me. She told me she wanted to go to Canberra to see an exhibition. What was it again, Renee?' He was a man who always spoke with a frown, a man for whom the world seemed to be a very confusing place.

‘She was going to visit the National Gallery,' Renee said, looking down.

‘And when I found out what she'd done, I just—' He stopped and looked into his tea. He spoke as though Kirsten's death had offended rather than upset him. ‘How could I have known what she intended to do?' His cheeks were sharply sunken, forming two divots in his skin.

Saul cleared his throat and looked at Renee, and Andrew understood that by coming here as a person from Kirsten's past, he had invited this. Somehow Saul thought that, if he could explain himself to Andrew, explain how he thought he might have contributed
to Kirsten's fate, he would be forgiven, as though Andrew, being someone who had once loved her, had that power.

He was expecting the biscuit to snap in his mouth when he bit into it, but it was soft and crumbly and broke apart. He cupped his hand to his mouth to stop the pieces from falling to the floor.

‘Did she . . .' he started to say. ‘I mean, had she . . . Was she all right before?' He couldn't say the word
accident
, the word everyone else kept using to describe what had happened to Kirsten, though it hardly seemed to have been accidental. It seemed to be thought out, planned and deliberate. If nothing else, that much was clear.

‘She seemed happy enough, didn't she, Renee? Last time we saw her, anyway.'

‘Yes,' Renee said, looking up, but there was a heaviness to her features, the way a person looks when they are speaking of one thing but thinking of another.

‘Well, Andrew,' Saul said, taking the last sip of his tea. Andrew thought he was being dismissed, so he stood as well, but the other man continued, ‘I'm going out to work in the garden. Saturdays are the only chance I get. I'll leave you two here to talk.'

He sat down again and felt relief as Saul left. Renee was still fiddling with the cross at her neck, as though some memory were attached to it. He was quiet and she was quiet and then they both spoke at the same time.

‘You go,' he said.

‘I'm glad you came. I mean, when I saw you that day at court, it was very sudden.'

He supposed to her it seemed sudden, although to him it wasn't that way; he'd been thinking about what to say to her for days.

‘I heard you say at the hearing that Kirsten had gone back to art school?' he said.

‘Yes,' she replied. ‘She went back to the National Art School. I think she wanted to try to pick up where she left off from her old degree. But it had been too many years.' She pressed her knees against her hands. ‘She was out of practice.'

‘She was . . .' He didn't know how to capture what he thought in words. ‘Her drawings were wonderful. It always upset me that she left university.'

‘Yes, they were, weren't they?' she said gently and he wondered if Renee had ever tried to dissuade her from leaving.

‘Do you know if there was someone else in Kirsten's life?' The words skittered from his mouth and her lips twisted in response to his question.

‘It's so hard to say with Kirsten. She was a bit . . . I don't know. In the end, she didn't always tell me everything.'

He wondered, then, if they'd spoken about him, if Kirsten had told her mother how for years they'd lived apart and slept together. Maybe he should tell this woman that he had wanted to help Kirsten, but he just didn't have what it took to do that for another person.

Then her tone changed, it turned warmer. ‘She worked for a few years for a barrister as his personal assistant.' She articulated the last two words carefully. ‘She did enjoy that in the beginning.' She rearranged her hands on her lap. ‘He was quite prominent and I think the work made her feel important.'

‘Did you see her?' he asked. ‘Before it happened?'

She stiffened and pressed her knees together. ‘I hadn't seen her properly for a few weeks. She picked up the car from Saul at work. She seemed busy. I thought that was a good thing.' Renee looked up and her eyes narrowed. ‘We really tried. I mean, my husband gave her a job after she'd stopped working for the barrister. Even though she'd said some things to me about Saul that were hurtful.' She looked into her lap.

He could see Renee was angry at Kirsten for dying the way she had. She took Kirsten's death as an insult, a personal accusation. He looked at the biscuits on the coffee table, wondering if it would be rude of him to take another one. He wasn't sure why he felt so hungry suddenly; there was an ache in his teeth for something sweet.

A dark look passed over her face. ‘The barrister she worked for was married,' she said, filling her words with air, as though she was blowing them towards him. There was an edge in her gaze almost of menace. He shifted and underneath him the leather couch protested.

‘Had
you
seen Kirsten recently?' she asked, looking across at him, her gaze steely. She had the look about
her of someone who already knows. He thought for a moment that answering her question might be like handing her something he would never get back again.

He conceded that he had not and he knew what she was doing. With her words, she was questioning his right to be there at all. He felt a sudden urge to make a confession. He thought that must be what she wanted from him.

‘I know that I didn't handle things with Kirsten the way I should have,' he found himself saying. He felt distant from his words. ‘But we were both young.'

From the look on her face he could tell this was not what she had wanted to hear.

On the way out of the house he saw through a window, Saul on his knees in the garden. He wore a white terry-towelling hat and was tilling the soil with a small gardening fork, snail bait sprinkled over the garden bed. The pellets were an unnatural green against the soil.

‘Good-bye,' Andrew said to Renee, turning back towards her as he left.

‘Thank you for coming,' she said. ‘God bless.'

Looking back towards her, the way she stood in the doorway of her own home, formally dressed with her arms folded across her body, he had the impression of someone being slowly smothered, of drowning on air.

21

On Monday afternoon he walked through Darlinghurst towards the National Art School where Kirsten had gone back to study. The only clouds in the sky were long webbed strands, like spidery veins. Though it was late in the day, the heat ebbed and moved across the bitumen in swirls. The sandstone walls surrounding the college were fat and tall, the large wooden gates painted green and held together by cast iron.

The buildings inside were oddly shaped sandstone blocks. One fat, round building in the middle of the grounds looked like a watch house. The buildings he passed obscured the path behind him and he turned back, feeling disorientated, as though navigating his way through a labyrinth.

Students stood talking in small huddles. One young man wore a waistcoat and the woman he was talking to wore a long, pleated skirt that almost brushed the ground. They stood together with their arms folded looking poised, like people waiting to have their photographs taken. He remembered this from art school: the feeling that people were looking at him as though they didn't particularly like him. What the years had taught him since was that mostly what other people felt about him wasn't even as strong as dislike, but was something closer to neutral.

He walked into the building with an open door and it was bigger inside than he expected, the ceilings arched, wooden beams exposed. He might have walked inside the hull of an upturned boat. There were easels set up in the room for a class, but nobody was painting at them. The room smelt of linseed oil and turpentine, hard and metallic. In the centre of the room were stuffed animals on metal spikes. He walked a wide circle around them: a rabbit, a cat and a marsupial he didn't recognise, all with thinning hair. Their eyes glassy and glistening, dead animals that had no other purpose but to be painted. Through a glass door at the back of the building, he could see someone moving about in the small room.

‘Hello?' He pushed the door slightly ajar.

‘Hi,' the man said, looking up. ‘Are you lost?' His eyes were a pale blue, like a husky's. His chin was prominent and he wore his jeans low around his waist.

Andrew stood in the doorway, while the man continued to work. ‘Just having a bit of a sticky beak. Screen-printing?' he asked, looking at what the man was working on. The bench was cluttered; a wide brush with coarse black hairs, a pot of black paint and a spray can of fixative.

‘Woodblock prints,' the man replied. He cut into a block with a small chisel and a fine shaving curled up, which he brushed away.

Andrew moved around to the opposite side of the table, in order to see the prints the right way up. The shapes were strong and bold, a print of a woman, her face elongated and limbs thick, like a stone sculpture from Easter Island.

‘Great shapes,' he said.

‘Thanks.'

‘Do you work here?'

The man nodded. ‘It's handy for my own work,' he said, smiling easily.

Andrew gripped the back of a chair. ‘Did you ever come across a student named Kirsten Rothwell?' he asked and the man looked at him for a long moment.

‘Yeah, I did.'

‘What did you think about her?'

‘Not a journalist are you, mate?' the man said, dipping the block of wood into a basin of fluid.

‘Nah, a photographer actually. Artistic. My name's Andrew Spruce.' He cleared his throat. He could feel something loose inside it, like the movement in a rattle.

The man looked up, his blue eyes striking Andrew's for the first time. ‘Oh yeah, I know your work. The man with the teeth, right?' He looked back down. ‘She only studied here for one semester. And she was a bit unusual.'

‘Unusual how?'

The man was older than he had initially thought. As Andrew moved closer, he saw the lines in the man's face were deep, like grooves in wood.

‘Are you a friend of hers?'

Andrew nodded.

‘She just didn't really fit in,' he said. He shrugged. ‘I don't know why. Maybe because she was older than the other students. That, and art schools can be difficult places to fit in at the best of times.' The man looked up at him with eyes that betrayed none of his thoughts. ‘Don't get me wrong. I thought she had talent. I had her in one of my classes. I mean, you know, there is a lot of talent in a place like this. The thing was, she only ever copied other people's work.'

‘She plagiarised?'

‘No, she'd see something in a book and draw it exactly as it was, without any interpretation of her own. The drawings were technically good, but that's not enough. I tried to encourage her to find her own subjects, to work out what meant something to her, but she found any criticism quite difficult.'

He wanted to know about Kirsten and yet he was apprehensive, for fear that what he discovered might lead
back to him. Everything he heard about her he scanned for implication, for the direction in which it cast out its lines, for which way it pointed.

‘Did you hear what happened to her?' he said, aware that the way he was speaking of Kirsten made it sound as though she was a stranger to him, that through this man he was allowing himself some distance from her.

The man wiped his hands on a grey rag and looked up. ‘Yeah, people talked about it here, after it happened.'

‘What did you think?'

‘Well, I don't know. It wasn't exactly clear what she did, but I can't say it entirely surprised me either.' He tipped the basin of fluid into the sink and moved towards the door. The smell of chemicals lingered in the air. ‘Sorry, mate, I have to lock this place up now.' He closed the door and looked at him. ‘Actually, I think I still have a drawing of hers in my office. I called the contact number on her admission form, but I could never get hold of anyone. I left a message on the machine. I can show it to you if you're interested?'

‘I'd love to see it,' he said. ‘It's been a long time since I saw any of her work. I mean, I always thought she'd do something with it.' He remembered how her drawings had always produced a feeling with sharp edges, an envy at the fact that Kirsten had produced that work with her own hands.

At the door to his office, the man slipped the key into the lock and pushed his weight against the door. He
switched on the fluorescent lights and they fluttered and buzzed with a static charge like neon signs.

‘Actually, she's an old girlfriend of mine,' Andrew said, tying himself to her and aware that this information might cast him in a different light.

The man didn't respond. ‘Here they are.' He lifted a large cardboard folder from behind his desk and Andrew saw Kirsten's name written across the front. He recognised her handwriting, an artist's script in which attention is paid to the shape and symmetry of each letter.