Where the Light Falls (24 page)

‘Yes,' he said, but he didn't want to lie and he didn't want to hurt her with the truth.

‘Did you speak to my husband?'

Andrew nodded.

Renee folded her arms around her waist. She was standing on the high edge of the gutter and her car was between them.

‘Thank you for the photos of Kirsten,' he said.

‘Did you come about those?'

He shook his head. What he thought now was maybe it was easier to understand someone else's life than it was to understand your own and maybe that was why he had come all the way back to Australia. He needed to decide what sort of a person he was. Was he a good photographer but a failure as a human being? He wasn't sure it was possible to be good at both things.

He looked at Renee and wondered whether she had ever felt this, if she was someone who had ever really
tried to understand herself. Or whether she was as she appeared to be: someone who lived her life skating across the surface of the world as though it were a lake of ice.

‘I still can't understand it,' she said and her voice assumed a new tone, one that was natural, honest, that he hadn't heard her use before. She must not use this voice very often in the life she led here. ‘I know Kirsten always had her problems, but I always thought these sorts of things didn't happen to people like us. She never wanted for anything, you know.' She gestured to the house behind her, as though the only thing a person needed in life were these physical comforts. ‘Not since I remarried, at least.'

And then she did something he was not expecting. She sat down on the grass as though the weight of her words had dragged her there. He moved around her car and sat down beside her. Through his jeans, the lawn was damp and wetness seeped through to his skin. She sat with her legs stretched out in front of her, her hands behind her, her feet loose, the way a defiant teenager might sit.

‘My first marriage was hard,' she said. ‘I really loved Kirsten's father. I mean, Saul—' she waved her hand behind her ‘—it was different with Saul. Our marriage was more . . .' She paused and sighed heavily. ‘I made a good marriage.' He knew what she meant. She meant in a material rather than an emotional way. Saul had supported her, and was she wrong to have wanted that?

They were silent for a moment and he knew the less he said the better, that the natural inclination of most people was to try to explain themselves.

‘The separation from my first husband affected me as much as it affected Kirsten. I was devastated by it, actually. I had to completely cut off contact with him in order to recover from it. Kirsten suffered from that, and I found I was better than Kirsten was at living behind a veneer.'

A car drove past slowly and its headlights came on.

‘Do you have another girlfriend now?' she asked, looking at him.

He was surprised to hear her ask. In their previous conversations, she had shown no curiosity about his life. He looked at her, but couldn't see her face—the streetlight was too far away from them—and he almost preferred it that way, the two of them sitting there, unable to look upon each other, like two people sitting inside a confession booth.

‘I love someone,' he said. ‘But I've treated her unfairly. I don't know why I keep hurting the people I love.'

She sighed. ‘Sometimes I think it's easier if you don't love the person you marry. Sometimes I think the more detached you are the better.' It was obvious that she was speaking of herself. ‘The day they told me they'd called off the search for her body, I knew my life was over.' Her voice turned low and knowing. It was the voice of a person whose mind is made up and seeks no input
from anyone else. ‘When there's no more love in your life, it might as well be over.' She looked up. ‘My other daughter and I, we don't speak very often anymore. She's much more savvy than Kirsten and better at looking after herself. She left home and never really came back. Saul might as well not speak to me. Kirsten was really all I had. She suffered a lot. In the past few years she was always angry at me and I hardly saw her in the end, but she did let me love her and that was all I could ask of her.'

He looked across at her and saw her eyes glistening like two dark pools. ‘Her father drank, you know. He worried a lot. I see now that Kirsten had that same problem too. I guess I thought she had to learn to be less sensitive. And I thought I was the one who had to teach her that lesson. I was too hard on her. On both my daughters. Sometimes you don't realise what you're doing until after it's done.'

‘What do you think happened to Kirsten that day?' he asked.

‘I don't know. Somehow, I feel this would all be much easier to understand if they'd just recovered her body. I still wonder some days whether she'll walk back through the door.'

‘Do you think it was deliberate? What she did?'

She shook her head, but not strongly enough to indicate disagreement. She exhaled a long draught of air. She said nothing and he felt the sadness of the large-limbed woman sitting beside him. To most people's sadness there
is a sort of disbelief. Most people's sadness is a thing they try to fight; they think if they struggle with it enough they will eventually overcome it. But Renee's sadness was something different. It was a state that was permanent, that had set in like rot. She pressed her face into her hands. The street was quiet and all he could hear were the sounds of Renee beside him as she sucked back her tears.

‘You know, I used to believe in God,' she said, looking upwards to where the moon was peeking out through a crescent gap in a sheet of deep blue. ‘And in heaven and all those hopeful beliefs. But now what I think is that when I die, I would forgo a death and an afterlife if I could go back to the start of this life, armed with what I know now. I would relive it and I would execute it perfectly. I'd be aware of every second. I wouldn't need an afterlife. I think I could just about get my life right the second time around.'

When she'd finished speaking, she stood up in stages, pushing herself up from the grass with her hands. There was something desperate about the way she heaved herself from the lawn, lifting herself away from her strange, discordant and impossible words.

•

He drove back over the bridge and the harbour expanded out below him with a blackness that didn't seem to move.
He knew, now, about Kirsten. Was it his fault? It was true he had hurt her, but clearly her problems had started well before they met.

This uneasy attraction he felt towards Kirsten, the way he had been drawn to her, he understood where it came from now. He had mistaken the deep sense of empathy he felt towards her for love. As children they had both been made to keep silences and they took their silences with them as adults. The only difference between them was he had found a way to speak.

It was much more than a self-indulgence, this strange thing he'd chosen to do with his life; photography had kept him alive. His need to take photographs was an expression of his deep need to be heard.

28

The night before he left for London, he invited his mother over to his apartment. They hadn't spoken properly in the past two weeks. He wondered if he'd been too hard on her and he didn't want to leave Sydney while there was still this rift between them.

He was cooking a Spanish omelette; it was Dom's recipe. The trick to making a Spanish omelette, she had told him, was in the seasoning. He reached behind him for the salt and pepper grinders. He poured the eggs into the pan in long glistening strands.

His mother arrived in his apartment with a bottle of wine, which she offered to him as she walked in. It was a big thing for her to come to Darlinghurst, he knew, since she so rarely left the inner-west.

‘Thanks for coming over, Mum,' he said, smiling and looking at the pan.

‘Do you need help with anything?' his mother said, stepping towards the kitchen, a small, tentative step, as though the ground below her was fragile and might give way.

‘No, you sit down,' he said, batting her away with a hand. Then, more kindly, ‘I'm making a Spanish omelette, the way Dom taught me.'

‘Have you spoken to her recently?'

‘Yes. We've spoken,' he said. He didn't want his mother to ask him anything else. He didn't want to admit how angry Dom had been the last time they spoke and he worried what she'd say to him when he called her again, so he kept putting it off.

‘We'd better eat soon,' he said. He was suddenly anxious for their dinner to start—the hurry he was in was for it to conclude. He didn't want to talk about his father with her again; he wanted simply to mend things with her so that he could fly away to London the next day.

He served up the omelette and dressed the salad, thinking to himself that it looked quite respectable, the eggs tanned the way they looked when Dom had made it herself. They started in silence, a silence that was still and gaping and one that he felt he needed to fill.

‘The gallery has asked me to come to London a couple of days before the opening,' he said. He rarely spoke about this aspect of his life with his mother and
she looked surprised to hear him mention it. She nodded and carefully manoeuvred a piece of lettuce on a fork into her mouth and pushed the rest inside with a finger.

His mother had only ever been to one of his exhibition openings, his first solo show in Sydney, and she had worn a black dress, stiff and crisp and bought especially for the event. She stood in the corner of the gallery, gripping the fabric with one hand and holding a glass of wine in the other. She favoured her right leg when she stood, tipping that way, uncertain about her own presence in the room. It was difficult for her, all the people and being in an environment in which she didn't know the rules.

‘What time is your flight tomorrow?'

‘It's around one,' he said. ‘I'll go straight out to the airport after breakfast. The real estate agent has a tenant who wants to move in at the end of next week.'

‘That's good to know it's been a worthwhile investment for you, hasn't it?'

‘It has.'

She looked around at his apartment. ‘The old place is still holding up.' She smiled gently. ‘Have you ever thought about renovating it?'

He smiled awkwardly at her. ‘Maybe when I get some more money.'

She was quiet, but he could tell there was something she wanted to say to him. He felt himself recoil from her; whatever it was, he didn't want to hear it. He wanted things between them to be easy again.

‘I'm sorry I never told you about your father. I've been thinking about it a lot, since we had that conversation. At the time I was grieving and I didn't want to speak about it, not to anyone. I thought it would be easier if I just kept quiet and dealt with it myself. I actually thought that would make it easier for you when you were a boy.'

In doing that, she had damaged him. It was a surprise at thirty-seven to realise suddenly that his upbringing had been so flawed.

‘Mum,' he said, feeling tears bank up beneath the bones in his cheeks. ‘I do understand. I know it was hard for you.'

‘God, Andrew, I'm so sorry. I didn't even see the effect I was having on you.' She looked away. Outside it was dark and on the road below him he could see a bright line of headlights moving up the hill from Edgecliff towards Kings Cross, like a row of nocturnal animals in the darkness, marching through the night.

He thought about Pippa and Phoebe. How Phoebe had been hurt, even though her mother thought she was doing the right thing. Phoebe would wear the damage on her face for the rest of her life. The only chance she had for surviving was to understand what had happened and to find some way to accept it. If she could do that, Phoebe would grow into a fine young woman; she might even flourish because of it.

‘I found out about Kirsten, Mum. I went to see her mother yesterday, that's why I'm back here I suppose.
Somehow I can't help feeling that what happened to Kirsten must be my fault.' A sob rose in his throat, a large uncontrollable sound. All the feelings he had about Kirsten were held in his chest.

‘Andrew, Kirsten was a very troubled woman.' He looked at her and wondered how his mother knew that about Kirsten.

‘I know, but, Mum, you don't really know what happened between us. It went on for years. After I moved out from that apartment we shared, I couldn't live with her, but I kept seeing her. I'm not sure what was wrong with me. I'm selfish and other people end up hurt.'

‘I knew that, Andrew. I knew you saw each other.'

‘How? Did she tell you?'

‘No. I guess because of the way you spoke about her and the way she spoke about you.' She lifted the edge of a napkin with her finger. ‘But, Andrew, what Kirsten did, it wasn't your fault. You must know that. Her family—it was a very difficult situation. And she was very sensitive. That had nothing to do with you.'

‘I don't understand, Mum. I cared about her. Why was it so hard for me?'

His mother took his hand.

‘Do you think your dad's death might have had something to do with it? The fact that you hadn't got over it, you hadn't come to terms with it?'

‘I don't know. Dad died years ago. I should have been over it by then.'

‘I know, but grief takes a long time. I'm starting to think I will always be grieving, but that it just gets easier to live with.'

He found himself crying now, hot tears falling from his eyes and onto his omelette.

‘I tried to encourage Kirsten to see a counsellor. Funny that it never occurred to me I should see someone myself.' His mother tore a piece of bread in her hands as she spoke.

‘I left without saying anything, Mum. I didn't say goodbye. I slunk away to Berlin and never spoke to her again; I don't know what she thought. What if it was my fault, Mum? Why couldn't I have been kinder?'

‘People also have a responsibility to themselves. Not everything's your fault, Andrew. Not my grief. Not Kirsten's death.' She sighed.