by Penni Russon
Tonight Trout’s room was hot and airless. He climbed onto his desk and opened both his windows, though there was no real relief. He turned on a desk fan he had bought when the heatwave started, and it half-heartedly pushed hot air around the room.
Trout knelt on the floor and rummaged under his bed. When his fingers found the hard flat case he slid it out, unzipped it and began leafing through the large stiff pages. A few weeks ago he had flown secretly to Melbourne, with only a small backpack containing a toothbrush, his camera and a change of clothes. Under his arm he had carried this large folio of his work.
‘How long have you been taking photographs?’ one of the panel of interviewers had asked, smiling encouragingly. There were three altogether, two women and a man.
He’d hesitated. ‘Six months.’ He knew it wasn’t long enough.
She nodded slowly, leafing through his work. ‘And you do your own developing?’
‘My dad taught me how.’
‘What kind of camera are you using?’ another asked.
Trout showed them his dad’s ancient SLR. The male interviewer turned it over in his hands.
‘If your application is successful, you’ll need to update your equipment. It can be an expensive course. There are lots of ongoing costs.’
Trout nodded.
‘So why photography?’ the third interviewer inquired.
It was an obvious question for her to ask really. So why hadn’t Trout prepared an answer? His tongue felt thick and stupid.
‘Stuff …’ he said, swallowing the word as he tried to find a way to give his thoughts shape with words. ‘Uh … stuff …’
‘Stuff made you become a photographer?’ the third interviewer asked, amused.
Trout blushed, but ploughed on. ‘Stuff happens, and it slips away. And the human eye is so fallible, and memories change, distort. I thought photography would be a kind of truth, pinning down memories like an entomologist pinning butterflies to a board.’
‘And is it?’
Trout thought about it. ‘It’s unreliable. I thought it would be kind of … an outside view. I thought a photographer stood outside the frame.’
‘But?’
‘But I am the frame. And I’m in it. It’s only another kind of looking. You can’t … you can’t stand outside the frame because that would be like standing outside a room with no windows and doors and trying to see what’s happening inside. It’s like there’s a crack in the world … and you peer through … You notice different things, different details. I like that. I like recording the difference.’
‘And you’re applying for the science stream?’ one of the women asked. She sounded vaguely disappointed.
Trout nodded.
‘You could get into any science course with these marks,’ the other woman said.
‘I got into medicine in Hobart. But this is the course I want to do.’
The male interviewer took the folio back. ‘This one.’ It was a black and white picture of Lucy and Richard, one of the first photographs he had taken. He had been standing at the front door of the Montmorencys’ family home, looking out. Richard was whispering something into Lucy’s ear, and her smile was secretive and turned inwards, as if she knew something she wasn’t telling. You could see that Lucy was becoming round all over – it was a nice, brief stage of the pregnancy when Lucy had been simply soft.
‘Is it a double exposure? How did you get this effect?’
Trout looked at the photograph again.
‘Here.’ Trout looked where the interviewer was pointing and there on the right side of the frame, ghostly pale, shimmering in the background, was Undine. ‘The true subject of this photograph for me is the girl in the background. She seems so distant, barely present, and yet there’s a sense of belonging in the framing. There’s a real narrative to this photo. It spoke to me, it’s sophisticated in a way the rest of your work is not.’
‘I … it was …’ This was the first time Trout had seen her. But she was clearly there now it had been pointed out to him, shimmering on the glossy paper as if the memory of her had slipped directly from his brain and gotten caught in the developing process. He stared at her. ‘I don’t know how she got there.’
It was an awkward moment. ‘Oh. Well,’ one of the women said brightly, and she reached for the folio. They asked more technical questions, but afterwards Trout couldn’t remember his answers.
At the end of the interview the male interviewer said, ‘I’m telling all our applicants this. There’re just over a hundred places for first year students. Thirty in the science stream. We’ve had over two thousand applications from Australian and international students for the science stream alone. Over the next few days we’ll be interviewing hundreds. It’s only fair to tell you that many of them have already studied photography. You’re one of our least experienced candidates. We hardly ever take people straight out of high school.’
Trout nodded. ‘I know.’
The interviewer handed back Trout’s camera. ‘It’s the same as my first camera,’ he said, a bit more kindly. ‘It’s good to start with basic tools.’ He looked at Trout for a moment and then added, ‘You need to learn how to read pictures. You’ve got it. You’ve got light, you’ve got shade, you’ve got depth. But you need to learn to read and write all over again.’
When Trout got back to Hobart he’d pushed his folio under his bed. If he didn’t look at the photo, he could convince himself it was nothing, a trick of the light, that was all. And then the letter arrived in the mail. His fate, signed, sealed, delivered. Literally. Undine was forgotten, kind of.
Now he found the photo again. He prised it free of its protective plastic envelope and sat back to look at it under the light. Whenever he had looked at that photo before, he had seen Lucy’s secret smile and the roundness of her stomach. But as he stared at it now, Richard and Lucy all but disappeared and the photograph was of Undine, made of light, shining in the centre of the frame.
Phoenix did drop in at the Silver Moon that night.
Liv had been right, the band was good: sad and soulful gypsy music, the lyrics in a foreign tongue – Hungarian? – curling upwards like smoke over the crowd of people sitting at tables and on the floor, cupping their drinks in their hands, scooping up the last forkfuls of bumble, or swaying, eyes closed, to the music.
Liv came to him and leaned in. She had to raise her voice over the music, but her words were still warm and intimate in his ear. ‘I looked it up, your word.’
Phoenix laughed. ‘Good for you!’
‘I have to go back to work,’ she said. She slipped a folded piece of paper into his hand. ‘I like number three,’ she shouted, before pushing back through the crowd to serve drinks and fill orders.
He read it. ‘1. A flowing together of two or more streams. 2. The place of junction. 3. A coming together of people or things.’ He smiled and leaned back on the counter, watching her for a minute. A mirror ball spun slowly in the centre of the room reflecting the light, so it was as if a small galaxy of stars drifted around the walls and across Liv’s smooth round face.
It was probably the music, but Phoenix felt an airy sadness blow through him, whistling in the chambers of his heart like breath inside a cowry shell. Maybe it wasn’t the music. Maybe it was him. Things had started tonight that couldn’t be unstarted. The long summer was almost over.
Liv caught his eye and he waved. He pushed open the café door and passed under the perilous silver moon and walked up the street, away from the mournful music, away from Liv, and into the hot night air.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘You all right?’ Stephen asked, after Jasper was put to bed. He was making hot chocolates in the kitchen.
Undine perched on a stool, leaning on the breakfast bar. She nodded, letting herself be mesmerised by Stephen as he whisked the milk in the saucepan till frothy peaks appeared. He liked the finer touches, and cooking was a series of rituals for Stephen. It was strange, because the Stephen she remembered had bee
n hopeless in the kitchen, making rubbery, overcooked eggs and grainy coffee. But now, here, he was a proficient chef. With Jasper’s help he made cakes and muffins and bread, roast dinners and quiches and pasta bakes. As with Lou, love had rounded him out, softened his edges, mended his flaws, as time healed a broken wing.
‘Where’s Lou?’
‘In bed.’
‘Already?’
‘Must be getting old, eh?’
Stephen carried their hot drinks over to the coffee table and flicked on the television. Undine followed, flopping onto the couch beside him. There was a movie on, the kind where someone on a bus had to save the world and Undine half watched, but every time she closed her eyes she saw the same scene: herself, Trout, the two Jaspers and, for some reason, the busker too, as though they were five points of light in a straight line, a constellation of stars, while the people at the pier, the icecream van, even Stephen and Lou, were just dark swirling matter, clouded and grey.
Suddenly a scream tore open the air. Jasper was dreaming.
‘I’ll go,’ said Undine.
In the dark room Jasper was sitting upright in bed. He was not awake though his eyes were open. He’d had night terrors like this since he was little more than a baby. This was the first time Undine had seen it happen in this world. He never remembered the dreams the next day and in fact Lou said he probably wasn’t really dreaming at all, because night terrors happened in deeper sleep than dreaming. The doctor said they were merely physiological rather than a disturbance of the psyche, though for anyone witnessing a night terror that was rather difficult to believe.
Jasper’s skin was burning and heat emanated from him, so Undine unbuttoned and removed his pyjama top and gave him sips of water from the cup beside the bed. He stared straight ahead without seeing, swallowing automatically.
‘Hush-a-bye,’ said Undine, easing him down so that he was lying on his side with his head on the pillow. She smoothed his hair. ‘Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry.’
His lidded eyes looked blueish, almost bruised. This was just youth, the babyness of his four years young, thin, translucent skin. It wasn’t hauntedness, or ghostliness. Still, Undine felt, for a moment, that she was being haunted and by the spectre of Jasper. Not by this boy here, solid underneath her soothing hands wrinkling out the furrows in his brow, but by the Jasper of the other world, the Jasper who belonged to her and to whom she belonged.
She half closed her eyes. The room flickered and for a moment she thought she could see space, as if it were a pale, layered organza dress. Behind space, that’s where the other Jasper lived, behind the filmy, almost-white of this world. ‘Deep space’ already had a meaning. People used it to talk about the blackness far far beyond earth, out where stars lived. But if she could reclaim the phrase she would use it for right here, on earth, for this kind of looking. She could see deep, deep into space, the fibre of it, like looking into the warp and weft of silk with a powerful microscope.
She closed her eyes fully now. She didn’t want to see deep space. She didn’t want to see differently from other people. She thought about what Trout said, about time moving in little hops. Maybe space behaved like that too, for her. Maybe it was a series of frames, like – what do you call it? – stop motion animation, where movement was created through a series of still photos played one after the other very fast. And maybe her frames were muddled together. But she didn’t want her life to progress in hops, she didn’t want to jump between places, back and forth, in and out.
She leaned against Jasper’s wall, the cool, smooth plaster surface soothing the back of her head where another tight headache had begun to build. She wanted to stay. She wanted this to be her place. And, she admitted to herself guiltily, she wanted this to be her Jasper.
A shaft of light from the lounge room entered as Stephen pushed open the door, blocking part of the light so that Undine could see only the dark outline of him.
‘Everything okay?’ he whispered into the room.
‘Everything’s fine,’ Undine said, and Stephen seemed satisfied with that. He returned to his movie, leaving the door ajar. Undine sat where she was, watching Jasper’s luminous face, made golden by the light that Stephen had let into the room.
That night, Undine dreamed not of this world, nor of the other. She dreamed of that grey, awful space between worlds. At first the dream was the same as the real life experience had been, standing in the grim flecked nowhere place. She could feel the other presence stalking at the edges of her, circling her as if she was prey. Again there was something wounded about that presence – wounded and hungry. The greyness seemed to filter in to Undine until she wore it on the inside too. It deafened and blinded her, it clouded her brain until she was hardly herself anymore.
Undine seemed on the verge of disappearing altogether when the darkness – the other presence – spoke to her. At first it was just the same sibilant hiss as before: ‘Sisss, sisss …’ Then the voice became clearer, as though someone was fiddling with a radio, tuning it in and out of the station.
You come from the same place as me, it said, the cave of bones and hair and teeth. We breathe black. You’re savage like me. The girl is a skin you wear. The dark is closing in. Can’t you feel it? It crushes against my skull like a hard, blunt, moonless night. I will not survive it. And then the voice called her something, a name which shocked Undine awake.
She sat up in bed, looking at the reassuring half-moon, pale as a pearl in the expansive dome of night sky she could see out her window. But the word crept into the night air, crawling like an insect out of the dream and into Undine’s waking life.
Sister! the voice called her. Sister! You must come.
In Phoenix’s dream he was kissing Liv, his mouth full of her mouth like it was dark, exotic cake: red and velvety. And then they stopped kissing and Liv murmured, ‘Where do you go, when you’re not with me?’
He could still feel the kiss, trickling through him right down to his belly, warm and sweet as honey. He lay with his eyes closed, holding on to the dream.
His ears woke fully first, listening to the strange metallic acoustics around him. The air even smelled like metal, like cold hard surfaces and anaesthetised air. He’d almost forgotten about this place; he’d almost forgotten that this was where he really belonged. It had been a while – days? weeks? – since he had been here. He had begun to believe his life was ordinary, that he belonged with Liv in the Silver Moon instead of … well, this. This place, this twisted body, this life. Half-life. No-life.
He didn’t open his eyes. What was there to see? Colour didn’t live here, neither did light or dark. Just the beige curtains that hung around his bed, always closed, as if he were going nowhere fast.
He kept his eyes shut and tried to recapture his dream, but Liv’s kiss was gone. He slipped simply into darkness.
CHAPTER NINE
Trout woke early. Saturday stretched out emptily ahead of him. Inside he felt empty too. The photograph lay on the floor and he reached down and tucked it under the bed without looking at it. He had slept her away, Undine, and this morning she seemed as unlikely as a dream he had once had where wishes fell out of the air like shining gold dollar coins. After all, he knew how to survive Undine – he’d been surviving her for years.
He heard a key jiggling in the front door lock. He pulled on shorts and went upstairs. Reina was coming in, carrying her shoes.
‘Are you just coming home?’
Reina nodded. She smelt sour and smoky, like cigarettes and coffee and sleeplessness. ‘We went back to Amy’s place after the gig.’ She yawned, large and exaggerated and noisy, showing a mouthful of teeth. The yawn seemed to be the equivalent of eight hours’ sleep, because immediately afterwards she looked quite perky. ‘It’s nice out now though. We should go for a walk before it gets too hot.’
Reina left her shoes behind, but Trout pulled his boots on. His booted feet seemed huge compared to her slender nut-brown ones. He was always worried he might accidentally stand
on one of her feet and crush it.
They walked up to the French patisserie in Hampden Road and sat outside, drinking hot coffee and eating sweet breakfast pastries.
‘Yum.’ Reina licked custard from her fingers. ‘Sugar and caffeine, my two favourite food groups. Do you want another one?’
Trout knew he could learn a lot from Reina. She lived in the moment, she seduced life, she bit into its soft skin with her sharp teeth. Mrs Montmorency called Reina Bohemian, and though she hadn’t meant it to be a compliment, Trout thought it suited Reina – she was like a gypsy, wandersome in her spirit. Her mother was Portuguese and her father was Hungarian, and Reina had come out as rich and dark and elaborate as chocolate.
‘Do you know what I love?’ Reina asked. The morning light through the trees dappled her golden face, but the light shining in it was entirely her own. ‘I love tickets.’
‘Tickets?’
Reina reached into her pocket. ‘Two weeks till I go.’ She pulled out an airplane ticket. ‘You know it’s all electronic ticketing these days, but I said dammit, I’ve just given you a couple of grand. You can at least give me something I can stick in my diary.’
Trout looked at it. ‘Paris?’
Reina clapped her hands together. ‘Paris,’ she said, joyfully. She closed her eyes, breathed in deep. ‘Paris.’ She opened her eyes, which sparkled like diamonds.
With the patisserie behind her, the tables on the street with their chequered cloths, and Reina’s European looks, they could almost have been in Paris right then. Trout thought about how much he would have liked to photograph her in France, walking the back alleys or through the markets. He imagined shops selling wheels of cheese and long sticks of bread and sweet pastries, attended by men in berets or plump aproned women with flour on their cheeks, and Reina with her dusky feet and her guitar and her long slender arms. He wanted to go to the Louvre with her, or sit in cafés with artists and students and talk about literature and science and philosophy. Briefly he wanted it more than anything. He was stung with sharp, bittersweet desire.
