Where the Light Falls (23 page)

‘Great,' he said, feeling his face burn. He looked behind him, wondering whether there was anywhere in the supermarket he could take a seat. He felt dizzy.

Why was it that he cared so much about Phoebe? He'd taken scores of other photographs of children over the years and never so much as flinched. He felt he knew Phoebe; he cared about her. Perhaps he'd allowed himself to grow too close to her, but something about her face made him want to intervene and protect her.

‘So you see, we need those files as soon as possible. Given the urgency, courier would be best, I think,' Marten said.

‘Oh yes. I'll take care of it,' Andrew assured him. He'd let this go too far; he could see that now. He should have told Marten of his reservations weeks ago. Maybe this would be the final and spectacular end to his career. He could annoy an important London art dealer and never exhibit his work in that market again. The thought contained an uneasy attraction.

‘And I take it you'll be here? For the opening, I mean.' Marten said, uncertainly, and Andrew detected an erosion of trust between them.

‘I think so,' he said. He wasn't sure he would go. What he wanted to do now was to fly straight back to Berlin. He didn't want to bother with London at all.

‘What's the date today?' he asked.

‘The sixth of March,' Marten said.

The exhibition was opening in less than a week.

‘Oh, right. Well, I had better get organised, hadn't I?' he said. This was not like him, he thought, this indifference. The things that had once meant something to him now felt so far away he could have been waving at them from a distant shore.

‘Yes, if you could come to the gallery a day or two before the opening to check the proofs that would help us a great deal,' he said.

‘Yes, I can do that,' he said, but what he felt was an
urgent need to end the call and concentrate on buying olives.

‘Great, we can sort out any last minute issues then,' Marten said.

He finished the call and paid for the olives. On his way out of the supermarket, he stopped in front of a poster with black-and-white photographs printed in rows. There were names underneath the photographs like Claire, Matthew and Rachel.
Missing Persons
was written along the top of the paper in large, black letters. There was something odd about these photographs of lost people and it took him a few moments to realise that the strangeness came from the fact that in those photos the lost people were smiling. It would have seemed more natural to him if they looked sad, but of course the photos were taken at a time before these people became lost.

As he walked up the escalator, he thought about how these people were missing to those who knew and loved them, but to everyone else they were no more than strangers.

•

In his apartment, he counted the days. The exhibition was opening that Thursday, which left him barely five days. Did he want to miss this chance to exhibit in London?
He could call Marten Smythe back right now and call the whole thing off.

But no, that was not what he wanted. Instead, he called the airline. The first flight he could get was three days away. He booked himself onto it and another sudden urgency rose in him. He needed to find out what happened to Kirsten and he needed to do it before he left.

27

When his mother was at work that night, he borrowed her car without telling her. He found himself thinking she owed this to him. Sometimes he thought she would always owe him some debt she could never repay, because the life she had given him felt like a weight he had to carry rather than a blessing to be enjoyed.

He drove across the Harbour Bridge and up the Pacific Highway to Gordon. He hadn't given much thought to what he would do when he got there, he wasn't sure what he would say, but he felt he was driving towards a sort of clarity; that when he reached his destination he would finally understand Kirsten, what she had done, her lingering silences and what was hidden beneath them. This was what he had come back to
Sydney to learn, and he needed to find out the truth so that he could leave again.

He parked opposite the Rothwells' house. The light from inside, through the sheer curtain in the window, was a pearled light that illuminated but did not expose. He could see the two of them through the window, sitting at opposite ends of the table, like two children on the opposing sides of a seesaw. They must have been eating dinner, their bodies tipping forwards occasionally to take food to their mouths. What did they speak of over their evening meals? Something made him think it wasn't their absent daughter, that the things spoken of at their dinner table were surface details; the type of things people spoke about when their thoughts were much more difficult.

He wanted to enter that house again, to stand between walls that were a shade short of white, surrounded by photos that suggested a pleasant family life. He wanted to know what it was about those walls that made him uneasy.

He kept thinking of Kirsten, sitting in her car at Lake George that afternoon, with no-one she could talk to but having something important to say. It was hard for him to believe that a person's life could end that way and he somehow felt the answer to the question of why was held between the four walls of the house across the road from him now.

Renee's shape rose from the dining table first. Her movements were fluid, her limbs moved along lines that were as curved and smooth as a figure skater's. She
disappeared from the window and reappeared near her husband, stooping to collect his plate. For the next ten minutes, Saul Rothwell sat in that room with the lights out and Andrew could see the lights from the television wending their way over the ceiling.

Andrew was sitting with his hands on the steering wheel, holding it with both hands, and there was a tightness in his body as though the car was still moving and he was bracing for an accident. He kept his eyes on the house, worried that if he looked away, he might miss something crucial, some vital clue. Everything seemed to hold some significance: the switching off of a light, the orientation of their bodies away from the windows, the front door closed and left in shadow.

When he saw a light from beneath the garage as it opened, he glanced at the clock on his dashboard. It was 8.25 pm. The door rose and the light yawned out, shining onto the street, a corridor of light. The car moved slowly, easing from the driveway and turning smoothly onto the road. It was the same car he'd seen when Renee had visited him in Darlinghurst the day before. As soon as the taillights disappeared out of the street, he unclipped his seatbelt and stepped from the car. The night was cool and still.

There was a knocker, closed and round like a fist, and he struck it twice against the door. It made a hard noise of metal against metal. There was no sound from inside the house. Perhaps they had left together in the car.

Then Kirsten's stepfather opened the door. He
readjusted his glasses on his face and peered at Andrew as if he was trying to remember his name.

‘Sorry to disturb you. We met a couple of weeks ago. My name is Andrew Spruce?' he said, trying to smile and sound as though it was natural that he was there, that he ought to have been expected.

‘Oh yes, I remember. You're the old boyfriend.' Saul looked relieved that the mystery of Andrew's sudden appearance had been solved. He relaxed back into himself. ‘Renee's gone out for a little while. To do some grocery shopping, I think.' It seemed strange to Andrew that he might not know where his wife had gone at 8.30 on a Sunday night.

They stood staring at each other and it occurred to him that Saul wasn't used to having visitors; that he didn't realise that the appropriate way to proceed from this point was to invite Andrew inside.

‘I wondered if I could ask you a few more questions about Kirsten? I'm sorry to take up more of your time.'

‘Oh yes. Yes, you can ask me about Kirsten,' he said and he pushed his glasses up his nose. He stayed standing there, as though he was expecting Andrew to ask him where they both stood.

‘Should I come in?' Andrew asked.

Saul took a step backwards. ‘Okay,' he said. ‘Though I wasn't really expecting anyone tonight. My wife's out.'

Andrew couldn't decide whether the man's confusion was real or contrived.

He followed Saul to the lounge room, noticing a patch of pink at the back of his head where his hair had thinned. They sat down on the couch. The television was turned off and he wondered what Saul had been doing since Renee had left.

‘I went to see Kirsten's sister,' Andrew said.

‘Lydia?'

Andrew nodded.

‘Oh yes, Lydia. We don't get to see her very often. She works in Canberra, you see. She went to university at ANU. She's quite senior in the public service.'

‘It sounds like Lydia and Kirsten were quite close?'

Saul nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes, they were very close.'

‘Lydia mentioned that there might be some—' he stopped and looked at the bookshelf, where the spines of the books were aligned so neatly they looked never to have been read ‘—some differences between you and Kirsten.' He decided that the only way to speak to this man, a man who sought to hide behind confusion was directly.

‘Differences?' His cheeks were sunken, nestling into the space under his cheekbones as he'd aged. ‘We had . . . Kirsten was . . .'

Andrew wondered for a moment whether Kirsten's stepfather was trying to work out how much he already knew. All he could think of was the night they had all had dinner together, the way Kirsten had jumped when Saul had said her father's name, as though in response
to a threat. He felt somehow that this response and her death must be connected in a way he could not see yet. Some invisible line drew them together.

Saul finally finished his sentence. ‘She was seven when we married.'

‘Seven?' It took him a moment to understand that he was speaking of Kirsten's age.

‘Yes. She was very upset, you know. About the divorce. Her father had only been gone for a year before we met. Kirsten couldn't move on.'

Andrew thought of the words
moving on
and how they sounded more like words that would be spoken about an adult than a seven-year-old girl.

‘Lydia was better; she was three when her father left and couldn't really remember him anyway.'

‘Her father lived in Townsville, didn't he?'

‘For a time, yes. More recently he moved to Western Australia and was working in the mines over there. But we don't hear very much from him. He couldn't make it to Kirsten's funeral service.' Saul nodded sagely. If he had any opinion about this, he didn't disclose it. He looked at Andrew as though trying to determine whether he had said enough to satisfy Andrew's curiosity.

When Andrew didn't speak, he sighed. ‘She always hoped Renee and her father would get back together. Even after Renee and I married. I mean, it didn't matter how often we told her he wasn't coming back.' He sat up
straighter, as though possessed of a new idea. ‘Would you like to see her bedroom? Some of her things are there. She kept them there for when she stayed here.'

‘Sure,' Andrew said. He felt tired. All he wanted was to have his question answered and to leave again, but this man was speaking in circles.

They walked down the hall and Andrew felt his resolve crumble. Perhaps he was seeking to discover something that could never really be understood. When he opened the door, there was nothing about the room from which he could have identified the woman he once loved. It looked like a spare room, in which a bed had been set up for visitors.

‘Oh,' Saul said softly. ‘I keep forgetting that Renee took Kirsten's stuff to the charity bin last week. Sometimes I sit here, on the bed.' He moved to the bed and sat down on it, slumped. It looked like a position he had often assumed.

He imagined Renee moving through the room in a fury, picking up Kirsten's belongings, tearing things from the walls, disposing of everything that had once belonged to her daughter, losing control for a moment and then regaining her composure and walking back out into the hall.

‘Did something happen to Kirsten? When she was young?' he asked. It was strange hearing those words aloud. It was something he had often wondered.

The question lingered between them.

‘Kirsten and I, we didn't see eye to eye. It happens, sometimes. I wasn't her father,' he said.

Looking at Saul sitting there on the bed, Andrew thought he didn't even look like a man; he looked more like a boy.

Saul shifted. Something in him was stirring. ‘After Renee and I married, I told Kirsten not to talk about him anymore.' He pressed his knuckles against each other and the grooves didn't quite align. ‘I thought it would be easier for her mother if Kirsten didn't speak about her father.' Those silences of Kirsten's, so long and deep she often seemed lost in them. ‘Don't tell Renee, though, will you? She doesn't know about that.' He looked up fearfully, as though telling the truth might be something that brought this clean and quiet life around him to an end.

•

Andrew showed himself out. As he walked across the Rothwells' lawn, he was thinking about silence. How it made a person skirt around what they couldn't speak of like the rim of a deep pit. The way it limited a person.

He knew now that this was what he had really seen in Kirsten that day they first met: this common trait between them. That in their own ways they were both struggling against this instinct they had not to express their feelings.

He didn't notice Renee's car parked on the street as he walked past. He had taken the keys from his pocket when he heard his name called out from behind him. He spun around and his heart gave a few hard knocks. Renee was standing at the edge of a beam of streetlight like a person trying to avoid exposure.

‘I saw you sitting in your car when I drove out earlier,' she said, and he wondered how long she had been sitting there, waiting for him.