Where the Light Falls (17 page)

He took the first page out and knew it immediately as a copy of Goya's
Saturn Devouring His Son
. It looked to have been drawn in charcoal and the shading was detailed, the strokes soft and filigree, the attention to light and dark exquisite.

Many years ago, he'd seen the original in Madrid, stood in front of it and something had wilted inside him. The whites of the old man's eyes, the fear and madness he felt at the prospect of being usurped by his own child; between his hands an adult's body, the size of a baby, the old man clutching its waist with both hands like a lover. He couldn't help but think that what Saturn was doing in consuming his son was trying to silence him, and maybe all parents had this instinct in relation to their own children. Maybe all parents fear what their children might have to say to them.

It was hard to look at this image now with the knowledge of what had happened to Kirsten and for a
brief moment he felt that image, when it rushed off the page and towards him. It couldn't have been very long that he stood there staring at it, but it was long enough for him to have the feeling of returning to the room after having been absent from it, of remembering where he was, looking up and around and taking in air.

The man was checking his emails on his computer, his back to Andrew.

‘It's spooky, isn't it? Hard to look at, now. It's a shame she didn't stick at it. Maybe it would have helped.' He was shutting his computer down. ‘Sorry, mate, I really have to go.'

‘Okay, sure,' Andrew said. ‘What will happen to this drawing now?'

The man pulled his office door closed behind them. ‘I'll try the number I have once more, but otherwise, I'll have to destroy it.'

Andrew thought of Renee and wondered whether she didn't want to see Kirsten's work, if she wanted to remain ignorant of what it was that had preoccupied her daughter's thoughts as she drew in those months before she died. He thought of Renee's house, her appearance, the level of control she exerted over the things around her.

He walked out of the building and into the courtyard, where a group of students was lingering after a class, bags over their shoulders, adjusting their bodies to the weight and hugging their books to their chests. A young woman held his gaze indifferently. As he walked
out onto Forbes Street, he realised he'd been gritting his teeth. A pain grew in his temples, a hot, tight feeling like a cramp.

On Oxford Street, he decided he would do something he had not done in years. He would go into a bar alone and find someone to talk to. He found a pub and sat at the bar and watched women loosely, without any specific interest, in order to remind himself what women who came to bars looked like. He tried not to think of what Dom would think if she saw him here in a place like this.

It was early evening and the women in the bar wore dresses and high heels, standing in lopsided, precarious postures. They looked pinched, their personalities folded up into a neat place inside them, the words they spoke and the clothes they wore might have been traced along dotted lines.

He asked the barman for a drink with vodka. The thought of making conversation occurred to him in a distant sort of way. As he sat there he remembered why he rarely did this. He never enjoyed the conversations that took place in bars, the false note of what people spoke of in bars, of two strangers assessing each other and discussing surface concerns.

A woman with straight blonde hair whom he'd been looking at without any real awareness of where his gaze had fallen moved towards him. She lifted one leg and slid onto the stool beside his. This woman had the look about her of someone who is easy in the world, who
could laugh and enjoy herself. He had always been fascinated by people like her, people who were free in all the ways he felt limited.

‘You're here alone?' she asked. Her voice had a sultry, broken quality, striking between two notes.

‘Yes. I'm staying close by,' he said, gesturing in the direction of his apartment with his arm. Somehow, in the space of three weeks, he'd slipped towards this fate. He had become a man who sat in a bar alone and drank vodka.

‘I'm Deb,' she said, and he could smell the alcohol on her breath.

‘Andrew.'

‘And what do you do?' She swayed slightly on her stool.

‘I'm a photographer.' He looked down at the vodka, which was suddenly unappealing.

She inched her hand towards him until their fingers touched. The feeling this gesture provoked in him was of a reptile slipping from a warm rock into a dark pool.

‘A photographer?' she said and signalled to the man behind the bar. ‘I'm a recruitment consultant. I'll have a martini,' she said to the barman. ‘And for you?' He shook his head and held his hand over his drink. ‘Come on,' Deb said. ‘My shout. Whatever that is,' she said to the barman and pointed at his empty glass.

He sat on his stool and thought how sad it was to have come to this bar for company; that at thirty-seven he found himself here.

‘What sort of photos do you take?'

‘Mostly portraits,' he said. He looked up. Every surface around him was reflective. He kept his head down so he wouldn't have to watch himself talking to this woman.

‘So, head shots and that sort of thing?'

‘It depends.'

‘On what?'

‘On what the subject looks like and how I want the image to look.' He had the feeling when he spoke to her that he was bearing his teeth.

‘You know you're not a very easy person to have a conversation with?'

‘You're not the first person to tell me that.' There were people who lived inside themselves and those who lived their lives externally and he had already accepted which of the two he was.

‘I'm an artistic photographer,' he said, looking into his drink. No matter how many years he'd done it, it didn't get any easier for him to admit this fact to strangers. There was always a tentative feeling about what he did with his life. He remained aware that what he did was something that could easily be taken from him.

‘I suppose the people I photograph are unusual in some way,' he said, thinking of the photographs of Phoebe, of her awkwardness and how she was aware of herself in a way that other children her age were not. When he looked at Phoebe he felt he could understand her.

Deb tilted her head at him. ‘Unusual?'

‘Yes, I suppose that's it.' He took a deep breath. He was a person who had to remind himself to be kind. Being hard on other people and himself was something that came to him too easily. Sometimes he felt he moved through the world with edges as sharp as knives.

She readjusted herself on her stool. The music in the bar sounded suddenly louder.

‘It must be wonderful to be able to do that with your life,' she said. Her words were encouraging, but her smile was uncertain. This was the response he drew from people; he knew it too well. His self-consciousness confused them. These were the moments he wished he was someone who could slide through his life and pretend he felt no doubt.

‘Yes. Although I've done it for a long time.' His sigh was heavy.

‘Why do you keep doing it?' It was a question he had often verged on, but never dared ask of himself. He couldn't afford to. He had invested so much of himself in his work, sometimes he wondered if there would be anything left of him without it.

‘There are moments,' he said, unsure how to finish his sentence. Maybe all there were in life were moments, brief occasions when you could look around you and find that the good things in your life had converged. Maybe everyone lived for those moments and in between was just a sort of waiting for things to turn better or to
change. Maybe the question of living was how to survive those in-between times.

She gazed at him for a long moment. ‘You look sad about something,' she said, but he knew that if you looked at anything for long enough you could eventually see its sadness.

‘Maybe I am,' he said defiantly. Sometimes, in the world he lived in, he felt sadness was something that had to be defended. Part of what he did in his work, he thought, was to fight for its rightful place.

‘It doesn't sound like you have that much to be sad about.'

How could he explain it to her, that the things that happened to him in his life seemed to cling to him? The same things other people brushed from themselves like lint.

‘I don't know. Maybe I've done bad things in my life. Hurt other people.' He looked at her fiercely as he said this, perhaps attempting to flash her some sort of warning.

She looked at him carefully.

This was too much. He wasn't a man who discussed his problems with strangers at a bar. He was a man who rarely discussed them with anyone. He also had no desire to stay sitting there and allow himself to become one. He stood and took his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans, removing a twenty-dollar note and pressing it to the bar.

‘Oh, don't go. Come on. Stay. We can talk about something else,' Deb said.

‘Sorry,' he said. ‘I'm just in a bad frame of mind. Honestly, it would be much better if I left.'

She took hold of his wrist. ‘I don't want to go home alone tonight,' she said. He found himself looking at her lips. Her lipstick formed a line around the edges of her mouth. He looked away and tried to muster something, that instinct that had once been so familiar to him, the desire to be inside someone, the urge to move beyond himself.

‘It's just . . . I love someone,' he said and she released her grip on his wrist.

He left the bar. Outside it was windy and he put his hands into the pockets of his jacket and started walking towards Darlinghurst. Along Riley, just past Foveaux Street, he stopped on a corner outside a terrace house painted dark green, the colour of camouflage, as though attempting to hide in plain view. The windows were tinted, reflecting the streetlights, and there was the glow of a red lamp next to the door. Why was it that he never saw people entering these types of places?

Everything about the building suggested discretion, it said you could walk in there and out again without there being any trace of your visit. The traffic lights changed twice as he stood there looking at the door and the traffic swelled past him. Someone yelled as a car passed.

He kept walking. On Oxford Street, the signs were bright and the traffic was loud and the people on the street had a look of hunger about them, as though they had come there to be fed.

•

When he got home, he opened the door and fell against the wall, moving with the sensation of having been thrown. It had been so long since he drank seriously, he had the feeling of slipping. His thoughts skidded towards blackness. In the lounge room, he lunged for his phone and dialled Dom's number. He couldn't get a hold of his thoughts; they plunged forward, falling as though tossed from a cliff.

When Dom answered the phone, he could hear soft, lulling music in the background. A trumpet. Jazz.

‘Dom, it's Andrew,' he said. His head spun and he sat down and held his head between his knees.

‘Oh, hi,' she said, her voice quiet, lowered so it would not be heard by others.

‘Where are you?'

‘At home,' she said. The music softened into the background and he heard a door close. She was moving through the apartment they shared together and he didn't know who else was there.

‘Do you have people over?' His voice sounded shallow.

‘Yes,' she said. He heard a sudden ripple of laughter across the line, a chorus of it. Were they laughing at him? Had he become the joke in Dom's life? Maybe that was what he had made himself into.

‘I found out more about Kirsten. I saw one of her drawings this afternoon. I just—I don't know what happened to her. No-one does really,' he said, aware that his thoughts were leaping from place to place. He stood up, but felt he was standing on sloping ground.

‘Are you drunk?' she said. ‘You hardly ever drink. What's happening to you?'

He didn't answer her. He couldn't really explain it. He wished he'd never come back to Sydney. He'd made a mistake in leaving Berlin and he wondered now if he'd spend the rest of his life regretting it.

‘You know you've been away for a month?'

‘A month?' He hadn't been counting and time had passed so easily. He had left with the intention of returning straight away yet somehow, now that he was here, he couldn't bring himself to leave.

‘Sorry, I didn't intend for it to take this long. I went to the coronial inquiry into Kirsten's death here, remember I was telling you I needed to stay for it? It finished early. Not even her mother really knows what happened to her.'

‘I've been back in Berlin for almost two weeks now,' she said, and there was a flatness to her words.

‘She was just such a talented artist,' he heard himself saying. ‘She was much better than me, you know.' Even
as he spoke, he knew this, all of it, wasn't only about Kirsten, that somehow it was to do with him. ‘She could draw. Just with her hands.' He said this as though the ink she had used had bled from her fingers. He felt tears on his skin, hot tears that dripped all the way down his cheeks and from his chin.

Something changed then in Dom's voice. All the patience was expelled from it and it became thin and hard like steel. ‘What's happened to you? Have you fallen in love with a dead woman?' He heard a clink, the sound of her putting down her glass of wine. It was a definite sound, a certain one—inside her, something had come to an end.

‘No, that's not it.'

‘Andrew, I'm thirty-nine and I love you and you are a difficult man to love.'

He didn't know how to answer her. Of course he loved her, but there were things he also had to know about himself. He'd become so used to keeping quiet in his life that it was difficult for him to speak openly and find a way to explain himself to her.

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