Lux – by Linden Hyatt
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
The last rays of daylight pulse in cloud as a memory of sun, faintly lighting turrets and flutes of silvered dolerite, turning rock to castles, which, to the seven-year-old gazing skyward seem as if they are falling. She reaches for her father’s hand to steady herself, but, distracted, he doesn’t take it.
Nightfall will soon come, with colder air in grounded cloud, and devils and possums will snarl in hunger out there, but now in this clear space, watched by his daughter, with a little old camera from his boyhood, he tries to capture an elusive light.
Williamsford is at the end of a road that branched off a small highway, grown over now and winding through forest under oceans of cloud. But for a plaque by the road, nothing remains. Even brick chimneys and the feet under the houses have gone. That which wasn’t taken for building elsewhere was buried. On the hill, where their rented mining company house once stood, nothing remains as reference; even the angles of the hill seem to have shifted.
Emily wants to get back into the warmth of the car. She is asking if she can text her mother again and he cannot bring himself to properly respond, to tell her that the cell phone has been out of range since Derwent Bridge, more than an hour ago.
He looks at Millie blankly, has forgotten already what she said.
To use the old camera and to set F stops for an exposure, you must take readings from a separate light meter. He remembers the measure as units of luminous flux, but is all-thumbs, as if some learning he is not entirely sure he had as a boy has just in this moment fled.
If his sister was here, having never got to leave, she could tell her brother not to worry about his little girl, who, turning eight in days, is older and more grown up than she was when her brother let go her hand.
As a boy he once told his mother that he felt he had pushed his sister. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t, that she fell on ice, that his push was part of his own falling, to help.
How do you tell your own kid that? And how could he explain that he cannot let go of the idea of his sister no matter how much he thinks he has. Let go of the kid with rat-tail hair throwing snowballs in a film that never existed. The screen of forgetting always goes to snow, like the TV without reception, to the revving motor of a sliding school bus. The rest is numb. The wet black sticks of wattle on this hill, like the little camera in his hands, made in East Germany around the time of his own birth, at once real and an object of memory, intricate and of another age, are equally mute.
There is not even a clear roadway now. Just the dozer track they’ve walked from the car.
His sister could tell him to not be so stiff and strict with Emily, when his coldness must seem like anger.
His sister is here in the failing light on every leaf and twig. She is in Emily as a shadow that the girl cannot herself know until her father finds a way to bridge the unreconciled. She is the shadow of this place that is no longer a place, the dark space on a pale afternoon, that void in a photo made indistinct by burning light.
Near the top of what he thinks may be the hill where the house stood, he helps Millie up onto a large stone, which may be the same stone, the top of a glacial boulder of granite and rose quartz spared the dozer’s blade by sheer size, that was once under the clothesline next door. The one on which his sister stood defiant – pirate Janet on an imaginary brig.
For Emily there was blazing light before this. The flare of days, glare of deserts, sun on sheets of sea, rainbows in oil on a wet airport tarmac, stars sprinkled over cities, and pure sky in a parabola over the Pacific. And now there is a pink-and-quartz stone, a darkening clouded sky in high wind up there on mountain crags in another world entirely, and the white car that they collected at the airport, parked on a lonely bush road that peters out from bitumen into dirt. There is water in the potholes so still and constant that tadpoles and rushes grow, and it will be tadpoles Millie later remembers.
Time has a different measure here: the call of black cockatoos.
Emily is tired, made silent by the strangeness of her father, and queasy from the Queenstown hamburger bought on the way. She is standing with him on that rock and looking at her feet, at red shoes with buckles, bought especially for the trip to visit her Nanny, which seem somehow very sad now, when her father realises that she is crying.
‘It’s okay, Millie,’ he says.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, and lifting her into his arms, with one arm under her knees and the other around her back, he carries her away from the rock, resisting that phantom limp in his left leg returned, to walk down the hill that was once a street in which he and his little sister played, which now seems nowhere near as long, nor as steep.
Later he might tell Emily bedtime stories, tied with contrived homilies about the ripple-iron house, mouldy on the south side, a few toys on the back porch, some rescued from the dump along with crockery and furniture, and Emily’s grandmother as a young woman hanging clothes on rare days when the rain stopped, pegs in mouth by the struggling veggie patch and a falling-down paling fence, in smoke from a rusted oil drum incinerator. Of kids playing, never much in the yard, but away in the bush, down by the swift-flowing river of tannin with snake foam caught in ferns on the bank – the rushing water he can hear as he walks to the car with Emily – the Ring River still there and kids long gone. Shanghai slingshots and sheet-iron sleds on moss banks, crackers down pipes in anthills, with no-one now to know the discovery on that road in the sparkle underfoot of fool’s gold in mineral pyrites, no-one now to know of running in the rain, of not knowing rain from tears.
There is nothing here now, he tells himself looking back up at that hill. A final photograph and his very first photograph taken on leaving as a boy will be all that remain.
The sealed bitumen on the way out is still in good condition; the cemetery with its faded plastic flowers and black marble headstones is where twenty minutes ago he stayed in the car while Emily slept, curled beneath her seatbelt. He was reminded then by the beauty of her sleeping, of so much that made him anxious, not wanting to wake her to tell what he had planned to tell.
The idea waits, suspended like a droplet in mist, like that instant in a camera click that is the shutter’s memory of time.
There is nothing in this place now but the car with windows still fogged as the doors softly open to the smell of upholstery and a half-eaten meal. ▼
Image: Joshua Brown - Unsplash
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