Andrew woke early the next morning. It was just before six and the light outside his window was sheer. He dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and walked out to the lounge room. On the kitchen bench nearby, petals slipped suddenly from the roses in the vase. Through the window, the shadows were narrow and long in the backyard, stretched geometric shapes that might have been cast by tall buildings.
He loved this time of the day in Sydney, when the city was still quiet, hushed; he could almost pretend in those moments that he had it to himself. Later, when it awoke and the noise rose to a clamour, he was aware that he would have to compete for space and quiet with the city’s other inhabitants.
On his mother’s wall still hung his final year work, Porcelain. Over the years, he’d given her other prints of his more successful work, but this was the only photograph she’d hung in the house. He remained aware that photography was what formed the bridge between his old life and his new one. It connected what he had been to what he had become.
When he took photography as a subject at high school, cameras weren’t yet digital and he preferred it that way. He still used film. He loved the smell of it, that it was something which could be touched rather than an amount of data measured in bytes. Digital photography had made things easier and less messy, it had made the whole process quicker and more efficient, but he couldn’t help feeling that some of the mystery had been lost.
At high school, the darkroom was his domain. His teacher had given him the key and nobody but Andrew went in there outside class. It was downstairs in the basement and he had always liked descending those stairs, knowing that he was entering a space in which the rules were known to him. They only ever printed in black and white at school, but he had enjoyed the limitation of it; he liked the way it took everything that was bright and alive and reduced it to something less.
He loved the warm chemical baths that he submerged his photos in, too; they smelt personal to him, like bodily fluids. There was always the moment of anticipation when the pictures started to emerge evenly, poured across the paper. He sometimes wished he could prolong that moment, the instant before the image was set, before he knew whether what had been recorded on paper had lived up to the idea he had had for it.
Afterwards, he hung the photos up with pegs, like socks on a clothesline. He sometimes wished that his life had remained that simple, that he could spend hours alone in the darkroom and emerge blinking into the sunlight, more sure of himself and better able to face the world. He’d become a photographer in his last years of high school and those years had shaped him, formed his identity; laid down inside him like sedimentary rocks.
Later, he went to art school and focused on learning his craft, becoming lean and serious about photography. Like an athlete, he became efficient at just that one thing; it had become the only thing he could do well.
He hovered in the kitchen and opened the fridge; he was hungry, but reluctant to eat his mother’s food. He walked down the back steps outside into the yard and the cold air prickled his skin. He usually avoided coming out here. This was where his father had died and, from the age of eleven until he left home, he spent most of his time indoors. He wasn’t superstitious. He didn’t believe in ghosts. He’d had to contemplate death from a young age and he knew that there was nothing after death; that, with it, a person slipped beneath the surface of a vast black sea and they were gone.
It wasn’t his father’s ghost that had done the haunting, but his own memories of him. When he was younger he’d wished that, since his father was gone, his memories of his father would leave him too. At that age it seemed unfair, even cruel, that his father could be dead, but the memories remained as though his father still lived. He wanted to push the memories aside, to expel them, to sink them into the same unreachable place where his father now lay. And on a day-to-day level, he felt this was possible, that he could manage to forget him, that the man who had been his father became an outline—until the whole man returned to him suddenly, in an irresistible flood of feeling.
The vegetable patch took up almost half the yard and the plants had grown larger than he remembered: a knotted mass, tangles of tomatoes and a pumpkin vine that crept across the yard towards the garden shed in search of new territory. He pushed his way between the rows, the wet leaves brushing his legs as he passed. Hidden between the leaves of one plant was the curved shape of an eggplant, its skin secretive and dark. Along the back fence the old passionfruit clung to the palings, green fruit tugged at the vine and the flowers were delicate tendrils of white and purple, concentric circles, like pretty eyes that shifted in the breeze.
‘Andrew?’
He heard his mother’s voice behind him. He turned suddenly with the same sick feeling he’d had as a boy, when he thought he had upset her in some way. Just by being out there, he felt, he was reminding her of his father’s absence.
‘I’m making breakfast for us,’ she said from the back veranda, standing in her dressing-gown. Dressed that way she looked small and frail, depleted by age. He walked up to the back steps, went inside and stood on the other side of the kitchen bench as his mother finished preparing their breakfast. The kitchen cupboards were painted a shiny lime green and the drawers were wooden and prone to jam halfway, having to be eased in and out with a wriggle.
‘Oh, I forgot—this came for you,’ his mother said, pushing an envelope addressed to him across the bench. Normally, she sent anything that came in the post for him over to Berlin, which meant he usually received his mail late. He picked it up—the envelope was clean and white and bore all the markings of a bill. But when he opened it, it was a letter from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney advising that two of his photographs would be included in an exhibition of contemporary photographs that was opening the following month. An invitation to the opening was enclosed, on which his name was printed in embossed gold letters.
The museum had acquired two of his photographs several years before, but there had been no interest in his work from them since. By next month, he would be back in Berlin with Dom. He wondered if he should suggest to his mother that she go in his place, but he knew she wouldn’t.
The electric stove in the kitchen was old; the hot element glowed in a coil of red. Steam from the saucepan had misted the kitchen windows. His mother turned the stove off and lifted the pan into the kitchen sink. She’d made hard-boiled eggs and toast, the meal she’d often made for breakfast when he was a boy; it was a nurse’s meal, quick, easy and nourishing.
They ate together at the bench, then she readied herself for work. He still remembered the morning of his mother’s first day back at work after his father’s death. He said goodbye to her through the gauze of the flyscreen door, her fingers still attached to the door handle. It was the only time he’d seen her cry. She was frozen there behind the fine crisscross of wire, her face pixelated by the gauze. Her image was uncertain and blurry, though her sadness was palpable and real. She didn’t say a word, but withdrew her fingers from the door and turned to leave. Her small, diminished body disappeared down the front steps and across the front lawn to the gate. In the sky a black cockatoo wailed over her head.
When he removed his hands from the gauze they tasted of salt. It hurt him to see his mother engulfed in sadness and to know there was nothing he could do to help her. It caused a physical pain in his chest. From then on he made an effort never to show his sadness in her presence, never to even think about his father when she was there. He swore he would never cry in front of her and he never did.
He knew photography was somehow connected to this. In photographs there were no feelings, only tangible objects. He accumulated images and eliminated emotions and every photo he’d taken, every success he had with it, was moving him away from this terrible time in his life.
•
That night, he dialled Dom’s number and took the phone out to the back veranda so that he wouldn’t disturb his mother as she slept.
‘Hi. It’s me.’ He thought of her strong jaw and her dark coiled hair. How it had smelt of lavender on the first night they’d spent together and every night since.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘How are you?’ He could hear her breathing over the phone; she might have been standing at his shoulder, though he knew she was very far away.
‘I’m fine. I still feel a bit jet-lagged though. And I don’t really know where to start to find more information about Kirsten.’
‘You only found out about her death a few days ago and now you are on the other side of the world. It must be disorientating.’ Dom had always possessed a clarity he lacked, an ability to understand how another person felt.
‘I know. It’s also because they didn’t find the body. I’m not sure it will really sink in until I find out what happened to her. I haven’t really been able to speak to her family about it yet. They didn’t say anything about what happened at the funeral.’
There was a pause, then she said, ‘I was thinking, would you like me to come over? To Australia, I mean. I’m sure I’ll find someone who can cover the rest of my classes here. I’ve actually never been to Sydney—it might be a good time to finally make the trip.’ Her tone was tentative, the words halting. ‘And it would be nice to meet your mother.’
He knew immediately he didn’t want Dom to come. He wanted her to stay where she was until he could return to her.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘You don’t know?’ she repeated, articulating each word carefully. After almost three years together, this was all he had to offer her. This ambivalence.
He wanted to find out what had happened to Kirsten, that was all. He didn’t want the additional complication of having Dom there with him. He wanted to preserve their life as it was in Berlin, so that he could return to it.
Maybe, in truth, he didn’t want her to know this part of him, the part that belonged in Sydney. The version of him that had struggled for years without success, who’d treated Kirsten badly. He wanted to quarantine that part of his life from Dom, to protect her from it. In Berlin he could live with everything he’d made with his life; in Sydney he was aware of all the ways in which he’d fallen short.
When he didn’t respond, she said, ‘Tell me this, do you love me?’ The word was soft in her mouth, the ‘v’ pronounced as an ‘f’. Lofe, she always said; what she felt for him was lofe.
‘Come on, Dom, of course I love you. And I’ll be home soon—there’s no need for you to come all this way. I just want to get this done as quickly as possible then fly home and focus on the London exhibition. We can come out again together another time, when it’s less rushed. Maybe later this year?’
As he said the word ‘home’, he realised that something about the way he viewed the world had shifted. He understood that the place where he stood was no longer where he belonged; his home was the place that he and Dom had created for themselves. And now he had said something that threatened it.
Dom exhaled slowly, audibly, a low heave that sounded as though she was dislodging something from her chest. ‘I don’t know. You don’t want me there. What am I supposed to think? I’ve never met your mother. Sometimes I feel like I don’t really know you at all. Sometimes I think that’s the way you prefer it.’