Where the Light Falls (21 page)

Beside them, the ferries floated imprecisely towards wharves and lurched against the wooden docks. On the opposite shore, houses crept up a hill, staggered one behind the other like tiered seating. They walked towards the MCA—it had been so many years since he'd been there. He loved the building, the warm evenness of the sandstone; walking inside it always felt welcoming to him. On his first visit there, he had not been impressed by the art so much as the names beside the works. He saw the dates and places where the artists had been born and died. It was a revelation to him, that these were real people. People actually did this with their lives—they made art. It was the first time he understood that if he dared to want it, there was a life in which self-expression might be possible.

As they walked into the shadowy recesses of the building, there was a long cry of a boat from the harbour, singular in tone and sorrowful, like the call of a wounded whale. As they stood in line for their tickets, Phoebe pulled out a plastic purse and a twenty-dollar note unfurled from inside it. She held it out to him, awkward and honest and beautiful.

‘No, it's okay,' he said. ‘I'll get our tickets.'

‘But Mum gave me the money,' she said, looking at
the note in her hand. The right side of her face made a small, slipping movement.

‘Maybe you'll see something you like at the shop when we come out,' he said.

As they walked through the exhibition, he found himself checking on her now and then, making sure she was within sight, convinced that nothing bad could happen to her as long as he could lay his eyes upon her.

On the ground floor was a series of Tracey Moffatt photographs. They passed the self-portrait of her looking coyly out from the image, the saturation of red, yellow and blue and the background behind her that might have been painted. He had never felt he could work with such dramatic colours. To him, bright colours felt artificial.

On the next level were three Bill Henson photographs and he worried as they moved past them that Phoebe was too young to be looking at them, the nakedness of them and the suggestion of sex they had about them. He had a sudden urge to cover her eyes with his hands, but maybe they suggested carnality to him and to her they suggested something different.

He stood for a moment and watched the people around him. This was what he loved most about galleries, the way people slowed down in order to look at art.

In the next room, there were two photographs by Loretta Lux, dream-like pictures of children who looked like incorrectly proportioned dolls. He didn't say anything when they passed his photographs. The first was
Teething
and the next was a photo he'd taken of a woman with a cochlear implant which he'd called
Silence
. In that photo, the woman was parting her hair with her hands to show where the implant had been inserted and it looked like a computer port into her head. He had wanted somehow to capture what she experienced, the total absence of sound she lived with.

He was proud of that image, of the detail of it, but mostly he was proud of its stillness. The final photograph he had produced, somehow, didn't look like her at all. It didn't even look like anything that resembled life. Instead she looked like something carved from stone.

‘That's you,' Phoebe said, pointing to his name beside the photographs. His first reaction was one he knew well, but the feeling sank quickly. He wondered if this was why he had brought Phoebe there, to prove that his photographs were not the work of an amateur. That he was a professional artist.

He looked at the little white sign beside the work.
Andrew Spruce. Born 1972, Sydney
. It always surprised him that he could be reduced to so few words and that his art said more about him than any description ever could. Alongside his photographs, these were the only facts that mattered about him.

He moved into the next room and looked at a series of Nan Goldin photographs. A couple in bed, the woman naked, facing away from the man who sat on the edge of it with his chin caught in his hand. A man submerged
in a bath, his nipples a ripe purple through the water; the bruised body of a man who looked to be recovering from surgery. Images of suffering and cruelty, of what it was like to live in a world populated by people who lived separately.

When he stepped back from the photograph, his eyes swept the room. Phoebe wasn't there. His thoughts accelerated from
I lost her
towards
someone has taken her
. And then he was thinking about what he would say to Pippa when he came home without Phoebe. His mind was trained this way, at rushing towards catastrophe. For him it was the closest destination.

He moved into the next room and stopped. Someone was saying his name.
Andrew
, he heard.
Andrew, Andrew.

For a moment, through the bodies, he thought he caught a glimpse of Kirsten standing in the corner of the room, between two white walls, her hair the blackest thing in the room. Not even looking at the art, just observing people around her with small, ungenerous eyes, looking for what might cause her harm, actively seeking it out. He stepped to the side to gain a better view of the woman, but he lost sight of her. In that moment he thought he'd seen Kirsten and the look on her face was a wounded look, her stance was crooked, her body askew. He had never found out what it was that had made her that way, how she could look at the world and all she saw were its threats.

He heard his name again and orientated himself towards the sound. Through the crowd he saw Phoebe,
her little handbag over one shoulder, strapped across her body, the small pocket of plastic resting above her waist. She was smiling at him and saying his name, her voice bright, like something ripened in sunlight. She was waving him towards her. When he reached her she was pointing towards a photograph, her finger almost touching the glass. He felt himself draw breath.

‘I like this one,' she said. It was a photograph of a dead bird, a native parrot on a white porcelain plate, sitting on a table next to a bowl of fruit. He smiled at her, unsure what to say, troubled that she liked something that had such a connection with death, concerned that because of his own taste in art he had encouraged this in her. He didn't want to tamper with her view of the world until all she saw was its darkness.

‘How about we go and get something to eat?' He found himself rubbing her back, a warm gesture, and he wasn't sure where it had come from inside him.

Phoebe nodded.

Before they left the museum, he took a last look behind him to see if he could see someone, anyone, who he might have mistaken for Kirsten. There was a young woman with dark hair wearing a dark blue dress, but she was taller than Kirsten and he saw her only from behind before she disappeared into the next room.

They walked out of the MCA towards a French patisserie he knew a few streets away in The Rocks. Outside,
the light had turned thin and silken, falling over the buildings in folds.

They sat out in the back courtyard and he brushed the scattered sugar crystals from the table with the back of his hand.

‘What would you like?'

Phoebe looked at the menu. The waitress waited to take her order, poised, pen over her pad. He ordered a coffee for himself. Phoebe looked at the menu and bit the inside of her cheek, unable to make up her mind.

‘I'll come back,' the waitress said, looking towards another table.

‘Would you like something to eat?' he asked Phoebe, feeling impatience rise in him. He was so used to being productive, to getting things done, he had forgotten that a child's sense of time is endless. He envied her for that. He could no longer live his life without the awareness that the time he had was limited.

‘How about a milkshake?' he asked.

Phoebe nodded and licked her top lip.

After he'd ordered, he noticed that the other people in the café were looking at them and he could see them wondering what the relationship between he and Phoebe was. For the first time he realised that people might assume she was his daughter. He arranged himself around that thought, knowing that he was easily old enough to fill that role. If his life had turned out differently, he might have already been responsible for another
human being, but he had given himself, instead, to other things.

From above, a flower from a frangipani tree fell to their table, its white petals bruised. ‘How often do you see your dad?' he asked, thinking of the photograph he'd seen of them together in her bedroom. He thought of what he had seen in that picture, the sort of possessiveness in the way her father looked at her.

‘It depends. It's supposed to be every second weekend and one week in the school holidays.' She spoke these words very formally, as though reciting the orders of a court. ‘But sometimes he gets busy.' She didn't sound disappointed by this. It was something she had accepted long ago.

‘What does he do?'

Their drinks arrived and Phoebe started playing with her straw, stirring her milkshake as though trying to decide whether it was okay to drink.

‘He's an engineer,' she said, lifting her head and fitting her mouth over the straw. ‘He has a girlfriend.' There was a glint of something in her eye when she said those words, an invitation for him to agree this was a bad thing.

‘Do they live together?' he asked.

Phoebe nodded. He watched her milkshake lower in the glass as she drank it.

‘My dad moved into his girlfriend's apartment last year, but I don't have a bedroom there, so I sleep on a
fold-out couch when I stay.' It didn't sound like this was something she resented.

‘Does your mother have a boyfriend?' he said and felt himself turn red, worried she might think he had some interest in Pippa.

She shook her head resolutely, as though she thought this was the proper order of things.

‘Did you enjoy the exhibition?'

‘I liked it, but I still don't know what makes one photograph better than another.' Her mouth hovered over her straw as she spoke.

‘That's a good question. Even I don't always know. Sometimes it's the composition, or the idea behind it. Almost always it has something to do with light.'

She lifted her straw from the glass and licked it clean.

‘I want to be a photographer,' she said loudly, hopefully, and then looked back into her lap, recoiling from the strength of her own words.

‘Really? You don't want to be something else? Like a doctor or a vet?' he said, hearing his voice high and jangling, jostling for a sense of control over his feelings. He wanted to take her firmly, hold both her arms and say
don't
.
Don't do what I did with my life. Don't make your career so bound up with who you are at the expense of everything else. Do something that matters to other people.

‘I think so,' she said less decisively, looking at him for some sort of encouragement, but he couldn't bring himself to give it, knowing what sort of a life it might mean for her.

They drove home down Parramatta Road in his mother's car and the sun was in his eyes. He folded down the sunshade, feeling exhausted. Being with Phoebe was draining. She absorbed so much of his attention, more than he was used to giving over to another person. The traffic started and stopped and he tried not to tap his fingers against the steering wheel or show his impatience to get her home.

When they finally pulled up outside her house, Pippa opened the door almost immediately, as if she had been watching for them. The way she looked at that moment reminded him of a bird, with bright, darting eyes, sitting on a nest, aware of everything, of the way in which things could go wrong, the threats to her eggs. Phoebe disappeared behind her mother and inside the house.

‘How did you go?' Pippa asked and her face looked awkward, her features bunched, as though a drawstring had been tightened behind her face.

‘I think she liked it,' he said.

‘Thank you for doing this,' she said, her words halting, hesitating between each one. He understood, then, that she was someone who hadn't allowed herself to accept other people's kindness very often.

‘Well, I was glad I could take her.' Phoebe appeared at her mother's shoulder. He could tell already that she was going to be taller than her mother when she grew up.

‘Bye, Phoebe.' He waved to her and as he saw them there so close together he felt a stab of unexpected envy.
Pippa had given her life to being a mother and, in return, she had produced this shy and glorious girl. It made the thing he had done with his life, these photographs he'd taken, seem very static and small.

‘Bye,' he said to Pippa, turning suddenly, feeling he was on the brink of tears.

‘Thank you,' he heard from Phoebe as he walked out to the car.

As he left, he thought of Kirsten and how she had been his only real chance at a life like this, at children and a family. It was what she had wanted, to tie herself to the world through him.

In the front garden, along the fence, was a plant with light green leaves and timid yellow flowers. They were the type of flowers that closed for the night and opened for the day in order to absorb the sunshine.

25

The phone rang on his way back into the apartment. It was almost seven and he felt a tenseness move through his body like the tightening of screws. He needed a period of silence in order to process the photographs he'd seen and the time he'd spent with Phoebe. He didn't want to be distracted by speaking to another person straight away.

‘Hello?' he said sharply, hoping to make it clear to the person on the other end of the phone that he had no time to talk.

‘Hello. It's Renee Rothwell speaking.'

‘Hi,' he said, wondering what she had to say to him now, after the coroner's findings had been handed down, when there was nothing more that could be done. He wondered if she knew that he'd seen her other daughter,
if the two had discussed him since his last visit, if she was calling to ask him to explain himself. Perhaps he was walking unknowingly into some sort of bitter domestic dispute. Outside his apartment, night had fallen.