Where the Light Falls (14 page)

•

When they were together, Kirsten used to see her mother often, though she rarely went home. They met for coffee or lunch and afterwards Kirsten would tell him about it.

‘I met Mum today.' Her eyes would be flashing something at him, some signal he never understood. Even though their relationship was volatile, he had the impression that she shared things with her mother, things that she wasn't prepared to tell anyone else, even him. Her mother also gave her money, sometimes a few hundred dollars, and for a few days they would feel rich and spend the money on wine and French cheese. He used to see Kirsten counting it, placing the notes in piles and squaring off the corners. There was always a look of concentration
on her face as she performed the task, about the way she counted the money and looked at it as though it bore some significance other than its monetary value.

In spite of the amount of time he'd spent with Kirsten, the only occasion he'd met Kirsten's mother and stepfather together was for a dinner to mark her twenty-first birthday. They went out to an Italian restaurant with Kirsten's mother and stepfather, crossing the bridge to Mosman. Beside him at the table, Kirsten kept shifting in her chair, a small movement that made the chair creak beneath her—it strained as though about to break. Their dinner was strangely quiet, the conversation intermittent; there was a politeness and formality to their words, as though they were being spoken across a great distance, and they seemed unclear about the details of each other's lives. There was a moment when Kirsten's stepfather had to be reminded of what she was studying at university. The silences spread open between them, pockets of air that held an unspoken sadness.

After one of those silences, as he'd spun the last piece of spaghetti around his fork, her stepfather said suddenly, ‘Did Peter call today?' There was something in his eyes, something cold and definite like glass that made Andrew think that her stepfather already knew what the answer to his question would be. That might have been the first time he understood that parents have this power over their children, one which it must be tempting to misuse.

In response to those words Kirsten had pulled her arms into her body, like a person caught in an act of
theft. She shook her head in a small, almost imperceptible movement.

When the waiter had brought out her birthday cake that night, nobody sang ‘Happy Birthday'. Kirsten stared out from behind the glow of the orange flames and Andrew kept having to clear his throat.

Later, on their way back across the bridge to their apartment, she told him as she looked out of the window of the train that Peter was her father's name and that she hadn't seen him in over five years. She rested her head on his shoulder as she spoke.

•

In court on the third morning, Kirsten's mother gave evidence, sitting in the witness stand with her knees pressed together. Her voice was soft and difficult to hear, diffuse with air.

‘Could you state your name and occupation for the record?'

‘Renee Rothwell. I'm a chartered accountant. Retired.'

‘And what was your relationship to the deceased?'

‘Her mother.' Her gaze drifted towards him, but her eyes never quite settled on his. Had she recognised him? He must have changed a great deal in the years that had elapsed. He was aware that he no longer looked like a young man; he had silver flecks through his hair, lines around his eyes.

‘What was your daughter's occupation, Mrs Rothwell?'

‘She was unemployed at the time of the . . . the accident. She went back to university. She had been employed by my husband for a short while, but it didn't work out. Before that, she worked for a barrister as his personal assistant.'

‘What did she do for your husband?'

‘She worked in the office, answering phones. Administration. Some accounts as well, I think.' She looked beyond the people in the courtroom to the back wall.

‘And she was studying?'

‘She went back to finish her degree in fine arts. She'd started it straight out of school, but never finished.' Renee looked down. ‘Kirsten could draw,' she said, and there was a flash of pride on her face, a brief flicker, like the shine off a coin. Her eyes met his again for another brief moment and then glanced off somewhere behind him.

Spoken in this room full of strangers, among people who would not know what those words meant, they sounded thin; they didn't capture what Kirsten was capable of doing with her hands. Oh, how she could draw! She sat down at the desk in their spare room and the world was lost to her. While she was drawing, he didn't exist. She would copy something—usually a painting from a book—and when he saw her sitting there, inside her fortress of concentration, he envied how easy it was for her to withdraw. While they lived together, she had copied all of the paintings from a book
on Vermeer she picked up second-hand at the Glebe markets. She captured the same light of his paintings, a light that rained down like water. She could do it just with the shading of her pencil. Her drawings were precise, somehow more exact than the originals.

‘She was at the National Art School last year. I helped her financially, so she could go back and study, but I was told she dropped out. I hadn't known that.'

This was how Kirsten's life was accounted for in the end, with these few things that she had attempted but at which she had never quite succeeded. If his own life were summarised at the end, and if he took away photography and Dom, it might look as empty and insignificant as Kirsten's.

•

The faces he saw each day in the courtroom became familiar and he watched some of the journalists filing into court together and shuffling out again in the afternoon, exchanging comments about the proceedings. They were all waiting for that moment, for the critical revelation, the one fact that would unravel the mystery of Kirsten's death, as though there were a single explanation, one way to understand what she had done that day.

Outside the courtroom, Kirsten's mother spoke to no-one. At lunchtime, she sat on the wooden bench outside the court room and ate a sandwich, taking very small
bites. A journalist approached her during an adjournment and Andrew watched as she held her small palm up to him before he drew too close. He watched her from the foyer of the court, standing with his back to the wall, waiting for the right opportunity to speak to her, but in truth he was frightened of what her reaction to him might be.

Would she blame him? Accuse him? There were moments in a person's life, and once they had happened, one could not always recover from them. He felt that way about his father's death: he was not the same person after it as he had been before it. Perhaps Renee Rothwell would accuse him of being that to Kirsten, of somehow breaking her. He feared she would tell him that all of this, Kirsten's decline, had somehow started with him.

He watched her intently. During the proceedings, Kirsten's mother spoke to no-one except occasionally to counsel assisting the inquiry, when he swivelled around in his chair to ask a question during the course of the hearing, and even then her answers were restricted to one or two words.

Andrew spent more time observing her than watching what was happening in the hearing. He observed how still she sat; she might have been a marble bust. There was something about the way she sat unmoving that suggested reluctance and made him think she was there against her will.

•

The police officer who'd been responsible for investigating the death gave evidence on the fourth day of the hearing. It was late in the morning and he sounded weary, the words he spoke dredged up from a dark and difficult place. Kirsten drove to Canberra from Sydney that morning in a car she had borrowed from her stepfather. It had been purchased by her stepfather's company three months before Kirsten's disappearance. Kirsten had stopped at Goulburn.

‘Was there any reason that you're aware of for her making that stop?' counsel assisting asked.

The police officer shifted in his chair and his eyes flicked briefly towards her mother.

‘She bought fifteen dollars' worth of petrol and a loaf of bread.'

‘Sorry, did you say a loaf of bread?'

‘Yes. She went back to buy it after she'd paid for the petrol. I reviewed the CCTV footage.'

Bread, Andrew thought, clutching at this detail, holding it to his chest, trying to locate the significance it held within it. A person who buys bread surely intends to live. He wanted to stand up and say,
There, you see, she wanted to eat! She wanted to live!

He imagined her in the grainy black-and-white footage, walking in and out of the shop alone. There must have been footage of him like that everywhere, doing everyday things that, when you looked back at them, appeared strange and inexplicable to others. But when you died the way Kirsten did, this was what
happened: people raked through the details of your life and tried to make sense of it.

In Canberra, Kirsten went to Ainslie, where she'd driven up and down the same street—Campbell Street—a number of times. It had been reported to police as suspicious. The police officer said he wasn't sure if there was any significance to that street and it was the only time Kirsten's mother moved. She stood from her chair, rising above the seated bodies towards counsel assisting. She whispered something into his ear and the barrister tilted his head towards her. It looked intimate, even solicitous.

When she sat down again, counsel assisting stood and said, ‘Your Honour, I'm informed by the deceased's mother that Campbell Street in Ainslie is where the deceased's sister resides, at number fifty-two.'

Kirsten had spoken of her sister to him, although they'd never met. The tone of Kirsten's voice whenever she'd uttered Lydia's name was bright and warm, like someone standing in darkness and speaking of light.

Counsel assisting then asked about the search for her body.

‘We spent two days there conducting a full-scale search. We flew in divers from the search and rescue squad in Sydney,' the police officer said, his voice higher, tighter, as though anticipating criticism. He looked to the magistrate and back to the barrister. ‘We didn't have the manpower to search the whole lake,' he conceded.
‘It's twenty-five kilometres long and ten wide, and was fuller than it's been in years. It holds hundreds of millions of litres of water.'

•

That afternoon at three, counsel assisting stood and declared there was no more evidence. Somehow, just like that, in a single sentence and a sweeping gesture of this barrister's hand, the hearing was over.

The magistrate stood abruptly and left the room, and everybody else stood and lingered, as if waiting for a more emphatic conclusion. Not Kirsten's mother though. She stood and moved straight to the door with her head down, like a criminal absolved of a crime. Andrew hurried out behind her, pushing the weight of the heavy courtroom door away from him with both his hands.

‘Mrs Rothwell?' he called, but she didn't seem to hear him. ‘Excuse me?'

She was almost at the front door when she turned around to face him. Outside, the traffic on Parramatta Road sped past, the sound reaching him through the door in snippets, like a radio station not quite tuned to a signal. He felt a nerve next to his eye twinge.

‘I'm not sure if you remember me,' he said, wishing as he spoke the words that he could explain it to her more delicately, that he wasn't always racing towards a resolution. ‘I used to—I mean, Kirsten used to be my
girlfriend.' He ran his fingers through his hair. He wasn't sure what Kirsten had told her mother about them.

Kirsten's mother tilted her head, as though with this movement, she was trying to recall a younger version of him. She was wearing a small gold cross on her necklace that hung over the sunken space at the base of her neck where her collarbones met. She had a strong jawline and the wrinkles around her mouth were ambiguous, he couldn't be sure whether they had been formed from laughing or pursing. As he kept talking, he had the sensation of swimming in dark water, aware that he couldn't see the bottom and there might be something lurking not far beneath him.

‘I'm sorry. Someone else—a mutual friend—told me about the inquiry and I wanted to know more about it. I suppose this must be quite strange for you?' He knew as he said it that the word
strange
wasn't quite enough, that it did not carry the heft it needed, because what they were discussing was the death of this woman's daughter.

When she spoke, her eyes were fixed on his chest. ‘I see. Well. I think I remember you. I'm glad you introduced yourself,' she said. But glad was not how she appeared. Her face was heavy and hard, set like a theatre mask. She took a step backwards and reached for the door. ‘It's nice to know you still cared about Kirsten.' She said this with an air of finality.

He didn't want her to go. His instinct was to reach for the door and press it closed, to prevent her from
leaving. ‘I wondered whether you'd be willing to talk to me about her. You see, we lost touch and . . .' He saw her frown. He licked his lips and continued. ‘I wondered if you could tell me a little more about what happened to her. I've been living overseas for the past few years. I'd like to know more.'

Mrs Rothwell straightened and tightened her grip on her handbag. They stepped away from the door to allow other people to leave. He noticed the way she moved her hands, how she reached for the front door and held her hand now, to her bag, touching things so lightly she looked reluctant to make contact. Her hands might have been covered in gloves.

‘Well, I'm sorry. As I'm sure you can understand, the last few days have been quite difficult. I need some time. What if I call you?' She looked past him. She was speaking in a breathy voice that sounded as though it should have been coming from another person's mouth, someone younger and less sure of themselves.