HE SET THE camera up by the wall in the space he used as his studio. It was one of the many rooms in the too-big house he didn’t need. It was mostly empty – the wallpaper left to peel away from the walls, the plaster to crack and the dust left undusted. In the light that came in elongated grids through the barred windows I watched him move around the room beneath me, holding up the light meter to gauge the exposures.
I was wearing wings sitting high up on the rafters. He had gotten me up there with an aluminium ladder propped by the window. That afternoon he’d found a pair of glittery fairy wings abandoned outside the Woolworths on Illawarra Road. He cleaned them off and asked me to put them on. He had fixed the camera to the tripod. The light was getting away from him. I swung my legs, to watch the shadows ripple across the room like deep water.
Particles of dust drifted down around my ankles each time I shifted my legs. The wooden beams dug into my thighs. My white dress was filthy. Although it wasn’t my dress, exactly. It belonged to him. There was a pile of women’s clothing falling out of the wardrobe on the landing, which at first struck me as strange, because Rowland lived alone. The clothes were from different eras, in different sizes, to match the bodies of the women who had left them behind. There was a sort of leotard in black velvet. A white linen blouse with sweat-stained shoulder pads. An indigo bra that unclasped in front. These things didn’t fit me. They were made in petite size, worn by women who had arms shorter and hips narrower and breasts smaller than mine who lived, I supposed, long before I had been born. He was old enough to be my father, although at the time that hadn’t occurred to me as anything that might matter.
The white dress I was wearing while I waited for him to adjust the camera was the dress I had put on the first time he had steered me to the pile of clothes and asked me to choose. It was a wedding dress, vintage 1940s. The lace held me tight at the top as though I was always just about to burst out of it, but it fell smoothly over my hips. Somebody, either the woman who had owned it before me or the bride who had first worn it, had taken a pair of scissors and cut off the bottom in one jagged gash. It fell in hang-threads at my knees. Now I wore it every time I modelled for him. Something about the stitching or its age or the lace had a strange effect. I felt as if I could be looked at, but remain unknown.
There was a yellowy spotlight Rowland had put in the far corner, but it didn’t reach me up close to the ceiling. From the high window I could look out to the muddy river, and the industrial stretches that lead out to Botany Bay and into the hot evening ocean where Sydney lay immaculate. Earlier, the clouds had piled up over the airport like bruised flesh. The storm went from violet to green, the lightning in the distance making the roofs in Wolli Creek seem to billow up like sheets. In its absence the air felt exhausted. The summer smelled like wet and burning things.
At last he looked up at me and said, ‘When you jump I want you to fall backwards, and reach out to the ceiling.’ In the photograph he took of me that night I’m a blur holding my arms open to the dark.
ROWLAND HAD ONLY gone back to teaching six months earlier. He needed the money. So sometimes he was called into school as a substitute for art classes when one of the teachers was ill or hung-over or lying immobilised by their own irrelevancy in bed. He was meant to start at 8.30 on the dot, but more often than not you’d sit there waiting in unsupervised rooms running at the low hum of no one in charge. Wait long enough and you would at last hear his footsteps approaching down the corridor, the laboured intake of breath as he pushed open the door.
It was a big deal, we had been told on his first day, that in our midst was an artist who had exhibited in London and New York, who had won prizes we hadn’t heard of before most of us were born. ‘Why’s he need to teach, if he’s as special as all that,’ sneered a black-haired girl at the back of the class, not unreasonably perhaps, but not kindly.
He had come across me without meaning to. I had been sitting curled up in the wicker chair cast adrift among the papier-mâché props and faded Brassaï posters of the smallest art classroom. I spent a lot of lunchtimes there. Reading, mostly, and observing other girls below the windows moving about the world not knowing I was watching. Rowland walked in one day in September – he had been searching for a different room. I hadn’t known he was watching until he coughed.
He apologised for having disturbed me. I stumbled over my words, trying to account for my presence. He nodded. And he looked me square in the eyes before backing out of the room. The most unnerving thing about Rowland was that he would hold your gaze a second longer than was necess-ary, as if the intimacy between the two of you was already extant. His eyes, meditative and grave, stayed with me long after he had left the room and the bell rang for fifth period.
Later that week my art teacher mentioned that he had been asking about me. ‘Why?’ I asked her. I didn’t understand why an older man would give any thought to somebody like me – indiscernible, ill-defined, a girl he’d glimpsed only for a moment. She laughed at me and squeezed my shoulder with her clay-crusted hand, then moved away.
I watched out for him after that. I knew he lived nearby, because I saw him on the bus home sometimes, on the rainy days when he didn’t walk. He was tall – he stuck out in a crowd – but he had delicate bones. I thought he might have been handsome when he was young. I never caught his eye, but I tracked him when he got off at the stop on Illawarra Road near the golf course, two stops before mine. I saw him walk up the hill by the river.
During October, I began to skirt down his street when I walked to the Vietnamese FoodWorks to pick up things my mother had scrawled on the back of the unpaid gas bill. I would pause behind the paperbark tree and peer at the house I thought he lived in, the front yard all long grass and bougainvillea engirding the second-floor balcony, white paint peeling from the weatherboard. I would glimpse his profile sometimes, slumped in a deep chair with a glass balancing on his chest.
The summer began early that year. Exams came in November, but the Christmas beetles had already begun to swarm the streetlights and the air grew thick with oleander. The heat made people hopeful. Children ran in their swimmers through the spray of garden hoses, in contempt of the city’s water restrictions. A man with a paunch at the end of my street bought a Triumph and polished it in the driveway in the late afternoons. His wife rolled her eyes in the thick shadow of their mosquito-netted windows. Families began to put up plastic wreaths and fairy lights.
In the afternoons when I had nothing to do I took long meandering walks. Waiting for something to happen. I wandered along the street, passing the spoiled-meat-coloured facades of new apartment blocks, shuttered moneylenders, an Ogalo branch, a Domain real-estate agent, eight different Vietnamese restaurants all specialising in pho, grocery stores smelling of feta and durians, an implausibly large Chemist Warehouse, white stencilled ‘Advertise Here’ pleas by the stairway leading down to the train station platform, where a City Circle-bound Bankstown-line train plunged eastwards towards the skyscrapers. And beyond, the distant red Caltex sign at the bottom of the hill like a circular star to guide me home.
Taking the long way home after one of these walks, in which I went out searching for signs of a more interesting life, I veered down his street. The air was sticky. The banana trees were swelling and fruiting, viridescent. The smell of rot drifted from wet hibiscus flowers trodden mushy and grey into the pavement. I stood behind the paperbark tree across the street, but his lights were off. I didn’t notice when he walked up behind me, holding a bottle in a brown paper bag. He had been right behind me all the long walk down Illawarra Road.
When I turned I realised I was blocking his path. I was carrying a canvas shopping bag filled with rice and lemons, and shifted it from hand to hand in front of my body to shield myself from what might be coming. An uncomfortable moment convulsed between us before he said anything.
‘You were my student.’
I nodded. He looked at me closely, and I suspected that he knew exactly how many times I had hovered outside his front window.
As he walked across the burning bitumen towards his house, I heard him say, ‘Come on then.’
And so I followed him.
The front door opened into a corridor with a staircase beyond. He turned right into the front room, where I’d seen him moving about in the half-light from the street. It was a room with bookshelves and two sofas facing one another, with not even a crate or a stool in between. I stood in the middle of the room in darkness. Rowland brought a bottle of whiskey out from the kitchen beyond and picked up two dusty shot glasses with the fingers of the same hand. He guided me to one of the sofas, then walked to the wall near the foot of the stairs and with a switch that was wiry and loose from the plaster he turned the lights on. I still hadn’t said a word.
Later I learned that people didn’t often come to his house. He had cut away from the people he knew. His closest friends had died years ago – overdoses, one suicide, junkie diseases of the liver and heart. There were some people he knew who were still in Melbourne, and there were a couple in London, I think. And in Budapest, where he had spent three years living in a rat-infested apartment leased to him by an old man who let him have the place for next to nothing provided he could use it once a week to host a rotation of delicate Chinese women with broken Hungarian, who dressed in black and cheap high heels and whipped him as he lay across their knees in the spare bedroom while Rowland watched television with the volume low.
In the incompleteness of the lounge room he sat opposite me on the other sofa and, balancing the shot glasses on each knee, poured fat man’s fingers of whiskey. He handed me the glass and I took it from him while shaking my head.
‘I don’t drink,’ I said. The truth was I had only drunk vodka mixed with sugary orange juice – once, because my friend Clemmie had insisted – and I was afraid to spit it out or even retch in front of this man who had seen me on his street and beckoned me into his house.
‘You don’t have to drink it,’ he said. ‘Look upon it as a courtesy.’
He moved to the record player mounted on a cardboard suitcase directly underneath the window. He turned the music on low. Something pretty and violent I didn’t recognise. He talked about himself or, rather, he talked around himself, telling me stories about the record he was playing, the sofa I was sitting on, the stolen ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts on the bare floorboards, knowing perhaps that I was struggling for words. He spoke as he drank, and half mouthed the words to the song, searching in my face for something all the while. Never breaking the gaze. My fingers almost tapped to the music on the olive velvet of the sofa’s arm. There were cushions with needlepoint white violets strewn across the couch he was sitting on, opposite my bare knees. They were the only sweet or reassuring things in the room.
On the wall behind Rowland was a huge photograph framed in glass, very black. The naked shoulder of a girl giving into the caressing hand of an upright headless man. There was an assured signature in the right-hand corner where the paper was white. His. On another wall, I would see later, was taped a letter written on ageing milky stationery with the letterhead of the Menzies Hotel emblazoned across the top. It was a scrawled message, in what was unmistakably his hand. Ghastly, with open eyes, he attends, blind. All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears; thinking.