That evening, he emailed the images to the gallery in London as thumbnails, including the photos of Phoebe. He hadn’t heard anything from Pippa and it had been more than a week. He hesitated before he pressed send, wondering if he should call Pippa just to make sure she had no objection, but part of him didn’t want to give her the opportunity to say no.
The gallery called late that night, while he was asleep.
‘It’s Marten Smythe here,’ a clipped voice said when he answered the phone.
‘Sorry?’ He sat up in bed, his thoughts rushing back towards consciousness.
‘Marten Smythe, London Six,’ the voice said.
‘Oh yes. I’m in Australia—it’s late here. Could you give me a few moments?’
‘Oh, you’re back in Australia, are you? Of course, take your time.’
He walked to the kitchen with the phone and filled the upturned glass on the sink with water. Through the kitchen window he saw the moon glowing through a thin layer of cloud as though behind silk, light bleeding out around it. He picked up the phone again.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, still feeling foggy from sleep.
‘That’s quite all right. I was just calling to talk about your photos.’
He worried suddenly that Marten was calling to say the images weren’t what he wanted. That he was calling off the exhibition and everything Andrew had been working towards would be for nothing.
Instead, Marten said, ‘We’re really excited about this work. We’d like to have the prints ready as soon as we can. Could you send the high-resolution images over on a USB stick? By courier, if you could.’
It took him a moment to readjust himself to this development and there was a sudden jerk of feeling, a leap from one place to another.
‘Oh right, wow. Yes, of course.’
‘Splendid. Also, the girl with the face . . .’ The girl with the face. He wanted to tell this man that her name was Phoebe and that she was a lovely, complicated girl. That she was more than her face. Marten continued, ‘It’s almost excruciating to look at, the level of detail, it almost makes me want to look away. I have a feeling about it. It’s unique. I think it will sell well. The photograph of the young boy with his eyes closed, too. I think you called it Smiling Alone. Very striking. Really, in my opinion this is your most sophisticated body of work yet.’
He didn’t like to be reminded of the fact that art was a business and that, like any other business, in the end it turned on money. These conversations with gallery owners and curators stripped him of his naive belief that art was about art. And now he was acutely aware of how he was involving Phoebe in this fickle world of his. He thought of the images of Phoebe and started to worry that somehow they were too honest. They took advantage of her openness and maybe they were too exposing to be shown. Maybe if he exhibited those images, he would be putting on display a personal transaction that had taken place between him and Phoebe; an interaction that was essentially private and should not be shown to the world.
In the morning, he put the exhibition photographs on a USB stick but saved the photographs of Phoebe on a separate stick. He sent the first lot of photos, but the photographs of Phoebe he kept. He put them in a drawer in his apartment. He would take a few more days to think it over.
•
The next day he went back to his mother’s house to collect some clothes he’d left there. It was just after one in the afternoon and he had chosen a time when he assumed his mother would be at work and he could slip in and out without seeing her. He didn’t want to risk her trying to talk to him again about his father. He had gone too long without speaking about it and now his only natural response to it was silence.
But his mother walked in from a shift at the hospital in her black slacks and white blouse just as he was about to leave.
Since she’d brought up the matter of his father’s death, they hadn’t spoken properly. When he had seen her, the words that passed between them were reduced to what was necessary, they were quick and brief and spoken with no feeling.
She made herself a cup of tea and sat down at the kitchen table. He sat down opposite her.
‘I thought you were supposed to be heading back last weekend?’ his mother said, gently.
‘I was,’ he said. He wasn’t sure how much he wanted to share with his mother now. He sighed, trying to keep his lingering anger hidden from her. ‘But there was a coronial inquiry into Kirsten’s death. It finished on Wednesday. I stayed for that.’
His mother looked up, eager for whatever words he was prepared to share with her. She might have accepted anything from him just then, even an insult.
‘She took some pills before she drowned.’ He heard the hardness in his voice, and the callousness in those words as he spoke them was aimed at her.
He watched the words impact her.
‘Oh, Andrew. What happened?’
‘I still don’t know exactly. The coroner hasn’t handed down her findings.’
‘God, that’s terrible,’ she said. She went quiet, moving to the kitchen without saying anything more. He watched her closely in order to observe the effect his words had had on her.
Darkness passed across her face. ‘She was always so . . .’ His mother hesitated. ‘She always seemed so troubled.’ She blew on her tea and continued before he could answer her. ‘I could always see that about her—that she was too fragile for the world. Everything always seemed to affect her very deeply.’ His mother’s words were faint. She looked out into the yard without saying any more, but he could tell that Kirsten was still lodged in her thoughts. There was something about Kirsten that always seemed to linger, a mystery, and he understood by looking at his mother now that he wasn’t the only one who had sensed it.
•
That night, he had just stepped out of the shower when his telephone rang.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s Renee Rothwell.’
‘Oh, hello,’ he said, realising abruptly he was speaking with Kirsten’s mother.
‘My husband and I would like to invite you to have morning tea with us. Tomorrow if that would suit you?’
Morning tea sounded very formal.
‘Okay, that suits me.’ He spoke the words too quickly and tried to settle his own feeling of urgency.
‘Why don’t we say eleven, then?’
‘Great.’
She gave him her address and directions from the train station at Gordon. He had the feeling of having been summoned and that night, he waited and paced and ate and slept like someone waiting to receive bad news.