Halfway through the night I feel like leaving, but don’t want to give the impression of abandoning ship. I keep to the corner of the gallery, sipping on a glass of sparkling white. I should never have done this. The table with the wine and sushi has barely been touched. There are – I count them – a total of four people in the room, two of whom aren’t even looking at the pictures.
‘Fantastic.’ It’s Mardi Redson, who manages the gallery, suddenly at my side. ‘This is a great honour to your father.’
For a second, until I see her face, I think she is being sarcastic.
‘I had hoped it would be.’
‘I can understand you have mixed feeling about it. It is very soon.’
I drain my wine.
‘It’s not about who does or doesn’t come,’ Mardi says. ‘It’s about showing them to the world. That’s enough.’
She has an open, kind face, with crows-feet that struggle beneath a cast of foundation. She touches me on the elbow and moves on.
I watch the progress of the two viewers. They do not linger much over the photographs, but when they come to the last one, Boy Looking at the Sun, they stand talking together in low tones for at least two minutes. I sidle up to them but by the time I get there they are on their way back to the table for refills.
It is a different experience seeing a photo you know on a gallery wall. The harsh lights privilege every detail. Having the image at eye-level makes it a bit like looking out the window at the past.
First I take in the peripheral aspects: the corner of picnic blanket that has made it into the frame. In the top left corner, a fringe of mountain ash, reaching straight as light-poles into the sky. Green rolling hills in the background, a winery, some cows. Then I turn to the boy. He is six, possibly seven. Dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, hair cut short. You cannot see the sun in the shot, only his reaction to it: jaw rigid, hands made into fists, eyes opened wide against their better instincts.
I have a quick look at the other shots, mostly nature shots and some cityscapes, then return to my spot by the table. The four guests are leaving. One of the men comes and shakes my hand and commends dad’s photography. Mardi sees them out.
‘How was that?’ she says when she returns.
‘Breathtaking. How was it for you?’
She punches me lightly on the shoulder.
‘Honestly, did you enjoy it?’
‘Yeah, I did,’ I lie. ‘It was a good way to send off dad.’
‘He would have loved it.’
He wouldn’t have, but I let it slide.
‘They’re going to stay up for three weeks,’ she says, ‘then I’ll get you to come back and help me remove them. Feel free to drop by any time if you have questions or just want to talk.’
‘Thanks.’
Mardi stands on her tiptoes and kisses me on the cheek. There are few things more disarming than a cheek-kiss from an attractive woman. She even makes a little mwah sound as she does it. I feel the colour rise to my face , but she has already disappeared into her office. My burning face smarts when it collides with the cold night air.

Every few weeks on a Sunday we would go for picnics in nature. Mum had an old picnic basket which she’d load with food and we would drive out to the hills or the beach. Dad used to say the city oppressed him, with its hard light and solid shadows. All those windows everywhere. Light and shade for him were living things, part of the ecosystem, in turn malign and beneficent.
It’s difficult to distinguish that day from all the others we spent in nature, sitting on our tartan blanket, eating bread and cheese and pickles. But one think I remember is how toey dad was. He was moving around on this low stone wall, looking for a better vantage of the whole scene. He got like that sometimes when he was trying for a shot. He seemed impossibly big up there, his eyes burning, pacing back and forth like an animal protecting its territory. He kept lifting the camera to his eye, then letting it fall against his chest with a sigh.
‘Ken, come and have some lunch,’ mum said, but he didn’t reply. I’m not sure he even heard her.
Then dad called me over. I had just taken too big a mouthful and I sat trying to get it down. He called me again, getting impatient. I got up and went over to him. The stone wall was up to my chest, but wide on top, so I clambered up. Dad was wearing brown cords and a white shirt, top button undone and the sleeves rolled up. A lock of hair was hanging over his forehead, touching the bridge of his nose.
I stood a few paces back from him, face to face. He watched me for a moment, chewing his lip.
‘Face that way,’ he said.
It was late autumn. His finger pointed in the direction of the sun, which hung low in the sky. I turned the way he asked.
‘Get your hand down.’
‘It’s bright.’
‘It’s only for a second.’
I screwed my face up against the glare.
‘Make your face straight.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Ken, stop it.’
‘It’s just for a second, everyone can look at the sun for a second.’
I took a deep breath. I knew I could do it. I just had to make my eyes do what I wanted them to do. I closed my eyes and made my face straight. One, two, three-

Dad worked most of life as a welder. That night, as I lay in bed writhing in pain, feeling as though someone had emptied a spoonful of sand into each of my eyes, he told me it was nothing compared with the flashburn he’d gotten when he was eight and his father made him weld for the first time. He said he was good as blind for the rest of the day, and it hurt to blink for a whole week.
He never came right out and said it but I knew he was sorry. He sat next to my bed stroking my hair, telling me the jokes, mostly racist and sexist, that were going around his work at the time. He brought me a cup of cocoa with marshmallows in it.
The day dad got the photo developed he came to my school at lunchtime to show me. He said it was the best thing he had ever taken, that I was luminous. He kissed my cheek through the chain mesh fence.

When I get home there are two messages on my phone. The first is from Mardi, telling me it was an honour to show dad’s pieces and if I ever want to drop by I should not think twice about it. I wonder if she is the kind of woman attracted to men in grief.
The second message is from mum, asking how the exhibition went, and as usual letting me know how great the weather is on the south coast of New South Wales.
After the messages (I listen to Mardi’s a second time) I pour myself a glass of wine and turn on the television. I flick through the late-night programs and turn it off. For a while I sit in the silence of my house, a man in his forties, recently buried his father, drinking himself to sleep on a Thursday night. I’m usually good at resisting those so this is what it’s come to moments, but tonight it feels good to just sit here.
I go into the study – ostensibly a dump for things that don’t fit anywhere else – and come back with a collection of photo envelopes. The hardest thing for me is that my father did not want to be known. I lay out the pictures, and buck against this fact. Even when he was being generous with his time, telling me jokes, kicking a ball, there was a lock-valve against releasing anything meaningful.
Here they are, hundreds of them spread over the carpeted floor, not his photos but mine: the sum total of everything I ever learnt about my father. I fetch myself another glass of wine. It’s been years since I have pored over these fragments. In the past they were tantalising, a taste of what may lie beneath the surface. But now it’s different: there is nothing beneath them. Now they are all I have left.

On my twelfth birthday I received a camera from my parents. I did not ask for one. I hadn’t even shown any particular inclination toward taking pictures. Around that time the changes were coming thick and fast. Hair started sprouting on my face and balls. Overnight my voice became unreliable, prone to embarrassing changes in pitch. My boundaries were changing, pressing outward on the world.
Dad started taking me out with him to take photos. By then we were no longer doing the family picnics. We would go for long drives to the country or out to the industrial areas of the outer suburbs. He taught me the rudiments of photography, aperture and shutter speed and using light and shade to create effect.
He took me into his darkroom, converted from one of the bedrooms in our house. He showed me the process, but told me if he ever found me in there alone there’d be hell to pay.
At first I had no feel for it. I would see things one way through the lens and then when the picture was developed it would be too dark, too bright, out of focus. But over time I got the hang of it, and even began to get flashes of recognition when viewing my pictures, the warm thrill of the artist when he sees his vision made manifest in the world.
Sometimes I would just sit looking into the lens of the camera, and it was not like looking into a thing of workmanship but some great mystery, like a soul.
Dad told me stories about his own father, who died when I was two.
‘When I was young, not much older than you, I wanted to study photography.’ He would speak between taking shots. ‘Dad wouldn’t have a bar of it.’ Click. ‘He wanted me to take over the family business.’ Click. ‘I swore to myself I never would.’ Click. Click. ‘Then one day, while I was out, he went into my room, got my camera out and sold it.’ Click. ‘I had to work for two years just to buy another one.’
Sometimes I would just watch him work. Nothing penetrated his focus. He seemed to grow bigger, to fill out when he was taking photos. It was as though his work carried him to another realm in which the petty drudgery of everyday life ceased to matter.
One day I aimed the camera at him, half as a joke. He kept working for a while, oblivious. Then he must have seen me out of the corner of his eye, because he started.
‘Put that fucking thing down.’
I might have been aiming a gun at him. I knew he didn’t like being photographed – he was always the other side of the camera at family events – but I couldn’t have guessed at the force of his reaction.
I kept the camera on him for a second, seeing what he would do. He rushed at me and yanked the camera out of my hands. He pulled down on the camera, so that the cord bit into my neck. Even when I started crying he didn’t stop.
‘Don’t you ever aim a camera at me, or by God I’ll make you sorry.’
After that we resumed our picture taking, as though nothing had happened.

When my parents bought our house it had two bedrooms in it. Dad took one and turned it into a darkroom. I don’t believe they had any intention of having kids, or at least dad didn’t. When I was old enough to have my own room they were in a bind. Mum suggested dad give up his darkroom but he dug his heels in.
The previous owners had built a retaining wall next to the kitchen to stop the south wall from rattling with the harsh southerlies. The wall finished about a foot from the ceiling. Dad’s solution was to have another wall built and close it off as a bedroom for me.
Soon after the incident with the camera I started spying on dad through the gap at the top of my bedroom wall. He often came home from work late, when mum was already in bed. He would come in and clomp around the kitchen in his steel-toed workboots, filling the place with the smell of welding electrodes and black grease. More often than not he would eat his food cold. I’d stand on the top of my bookshelf, camera in hand, aiming it at him. I wasn’t worried about taking good shots, about using light and shade or any of that. It was enough just to get him in the frame.
Originally I was furious at what he had done. It had taken a week for the welt on my neck to go down. But as I watched him my anger dissipated. He seemed to wear a different face in solitude – softer, more malleable. Sometimes his face was changeable as the holographic images I used to collect from chip packets, as though he was having some sort of discussion in his head, giving all points of view on the matter.
It was weeks before I finally got the courage up to take a shot. I knew he had some measure of industrial deafness, but how much I wasn’t sure. He was sitting in his characteristic stance: hunched over the table, his hairy arms resting either side of his plate like an animal protecting its food. I watched his face, mesmerised. From one second to the next it would change: momentarily soft, reflective, it would suddenly harden, perhaps on some memory. I brought the camera to my eye and clicked. It was loud as an explosion to my tentative ears. I pulled myself back, in case he looked up. When I looked out again he did not seem to have stirred.
I finished a whole roll of film that night. I got him eating, coming out of the bathroom, standing at the kitchen sink drinking a glass of water. I went to bed shaking with excitement.

A few days later I wagged school and developed the photos in his darkroom. I was painstaking in my attention to detail, to ensure I did not leave a trace of my presence. Afterwards I looked through the photos in raptures. It was as though I were seeing him for the first time: pared back, revealed.

They are all here, in front of me, the ones I took that night, plus all the others. I am on my third glass of wine (not counting the ones at the exhibition). If only I could rediscover some of the euphoria, the triumph of that first time. But triumph is only experienced with the defeat of a strong opponent; beating an underdog is always tinged with bitterness.
On a whim I gather them up, form a neat pile and go outside to the front garden. It looks more and more like a jungle every day. God knows what is living in the thicket. I make my way in darkness down the side of the house, where I left the prunings of some plant or other the last time I got the impulse to garden. I bring them back to the main path and make a pile. Inserting some newspaper into the clump of twigs I light a match. Am I really going to do this? I’ve always been against big decisions when I’m drunk.
The twigs must have more sense than me; they are too damp to catch alight. I kick them across the yard, then go inside and put the photos back in their envelopes.

I lie down in bed but can’t sleep. How hubristic of me to think I can pick the scab off the past and then just put it back on the shelf. No more photographs though. I will lie here and think. I feel sober now, grateful I did not burn the pictures of my father. For better or worse, they are all I have left of him. I made the mistake of thinking that by burning them I could free myself of the feelings they inspire, when really those feelings are down there all the time, working away in the darkness, operating the machinery of my character. Perhaps it’s even good to bring them into the light once in a while, see what shape they have become.

I was in the darkroom, developing my latest film, when the front door opened. My whole body went cold; not just cold, frozen. I tried to think what I could do. My father had had the windows removed from the darkroom, so escape was out of the question. Nor was there anywhere to hide. I considered making a dash for it, then leaving home for good.
I listened to the footsteps coming up the hall. They veered off into my parent’s bedroom. Then they went through to the kitchen.
‘Robbie?’ mum called out. I started breathing again. I must have left some trace of myself in the kitchen.
‘I’m in the darkroom don’t come in!’
‘What?’
I could hear the footsteps coming back.
‘I’m in the darkroom. Don’t come in.’
She waited outside for me to finish. When I opened the door she was standing there, arms folded.
‘You’re supposed to be at school.’
‘I know.’
‘What are you doing in your father’s darkroom. He’d be furious if he found you in there.’
‘I’m developing some photos.’
‘What kind of photos?’
‘Just photos.’
‘Let me see.’
She looked through the photos, her brow knitted. I couldn’t read anything into her face. No anger, no surprise. When she was done she handed them back to me.
‘You took these?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does your father know?’
I shook my head.
‘You know how he’d feel if he found out.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, make sure you go to school tomorrow,’ she said, and left out the front door.
Three days later she left dad for good.

Surely it wasn’t my photos that caused her to leave. Good sense says this notion is absurd. Probably she had been planning to leave for years, maybe even decades. But maybe the photos gave her the resolve. Maybe they allowed her to finally see dad for what he was, unblinded by his charisma, his booming voice, the threat of those heavy arms. I should ask her some time, but it’s not really the sort of thing you can discuss over the phone.
When Sarah told me she wanted a divorce, the reason she gave was that she was sick of being married to a shell of a person. She said she was always trying to get at something deeper inside me, but I blocked her at every turn.
The thing is I could not help but agree with her. Sometimes I just feel empty, like the place where I should have grown into myself is a void.

I moved in with mum. Occasionally I would go back and visit dad. There were always dishes piled up in his sink, and his bin was full of eggshells and bean-cans. Most of the time he was sitting in front of the television. His jowls started to sag.
Once I asked him if he wanted to go and take some photos. I thought maybe it would bring a little focus back into his life. But he told me he had sold his camera. Later when I was taking his trash out I found pieces of it strewn on the brickwork.
When I told him I was going to study photography he said nothing. He just made his usual chewing motion and stared at the screen.

The next day, between shoots, I go and visit Mardi. She has clients there with her, and seems distracted. She tells me to wait. I walk around the gallery, looking at the same photos as last night. They are different. No, photos stay the same; it’s people who change, the way we look at them.
Mardi sees her clients out and asks me what’s wrong. She seems surprised at my visit. It isn’t the sort of reception I expected after her multiple offers of friendship. Perhaps the offers are part of the service, not meant to be taken literally.
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ I say. ‘I just… Look, I’ll come right out with it. Would you like to go out for dinner with me some time?’
‘Ah.’ That’s all she says for a while. I can feel my eyes starting to water. I look at the photographs for diversion.
‘You seem like a really nice guy but-’
I hold up a hand.
‘Enough said.’
‘Hang on-’
‘Really, you can spare me the explanation. I’ve made enough of a fool out of myself already.’
‘I don’t think you’re a fool.’
‘Well that’s very kind of you,’ I say, backing out of the gallery. The light seems sharper when I step outside. I’m still shaking from putting myself on the line. Now I burst out laughing. I can’t control it. People walking past stare at me, take a wide berth. I steady myself on a bin. Mardi can probably see me but I’m beyond caring. One of my fits of laughter somehow morphs into a sob, and I’m crying, pinching the bridge of my nose with my thumb and forefinger. I feel a tear slide down into my mouth.
Eventually I compose myself, and make my way back to where I am parked.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 17.01.2012

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