Best Australian Yarn: After Image by Kerry Munnery

Alan peeled away the wrapping and revealed a camera. There were boxes of attachments – lenses, flashes, a stand. All of this looked expensive, more than they could afford. Carla was waiting for his reaction, twisting her ring. He raised an enquiring eyebrow. He had expressed no interest in photography. She picked up the wrapping paper. ‘It’s not digital. You know, old style, with film. It was second hand, very cheap, but they said it all works. I thought a hobby...’ She folded the silver paper in her hands over and over, smoothing it into the smallest possible square. ‘Anyway. Happy birthday.’ ‘Happy birthday. Happy birthday. Happy birthday,’ the children echoed one by one. ‘Dad.’ Alan weighed the camera in his hands. It was different from those dinky little digital things that were like plastic toys. This was substantial but also somehow had the feeling of space inside it. He attached the long telephoto lens and aimed it at his family. They were contained in the glass like figures in a tiny fishtank, and as he twisted the lens they swam away. It had been a long time since life had been something which he could hold in his hands. His job’s only meaning was in the clock at the bottom of the computer screen, ticking its way down to payday. He observed his children as if they were stars of individual reality shows, glancing up half interested from the couch. His wife sent him desperately affectionate emails to which he responded with household practicalities that needed attending to. The waiting figures shivered in the tiny rectangle. Carla laughed nervously. ‘Alan.’ When he took the camera from his face they loomed before him, fleshy, immediate, too large. Carla set the wrapping paper on the coffee table where it unfolded of its own accord. Alan raised the camera again. ‘Stand together,’ he commanded. The youngest, Chloe, jumped up, and shuffled behind the shoulder of her brother Tom. No one else moved. Carla froze, the boys hung their heads, but by stepping back he could enclose them all in the frame. ‘Smile,’ he said. Kane, the first-born, disappeared from the square of glass and there was the sound of the living room door slamming, like a car backfiring. Scrawny Tom put his arm around his little sister and said quietly: ‘There’s no film in it.’ They had inherited this nervousness from Carla, and it irritated him sometimes. It wasn’t as if he beat them, he hardly even raised his voice. Only now and again. You have no idea what a bad father is, he thought. He turned the camera towards the kitchen door as it closed behind his family and pushed the button. The click - authoritative, controlled – was highly satisfactory. Alan learned the camera’s capacities and experimented on his family. At first he got them to stare down the camera lens in ones or twos, or lined up on the couch like wary hens. Posed shots with forced smiles and unnatural composition. He found a place that still developed film but when he disgorged the yellow envelopes he regarded the results with a vague sense of horror, then tossed them in the bin. He tugged at his lip, considering. Kane finished mowing the lawn in the backyard and stripped off to his sweaty underwear. He balanced on the edge of the pool and raised his arms, rising on the tips of his toes, the skin of his chest tightening to his muscles in anticipation of the cold water. He was growing into a young man. Alan aimed, but the boy turned his head and saw his father lurking, and lost his balance. The camera clicked as the boy tumbled into the water, one hand briefly, instinctively catching at the hard edge of the pool. He stayed under a long time, refusing to emerge. After a few moments a burst of bubbles floated to the surface. Alan shrugged and turned away into the house. The sun was harsh to Carla’s wrinkles, and an arc of thin flesh hung under each raised arm as she pegged a pair of torn boxer shorts to the drooping line. She examined the picture, holding one corner between thumb and finger. ‘Those are your underpants,’ she said, shaking her head, laying the picture face down on the table. ‘I bought them for you. Last year.’ She smoothed her hair and rubbed at the line between her eyebrows, to no effect. Chloe was lying on the couch in a corner of the living room, tilting her book to the window, a strand of hair looped around her finger. She was absorbed in a book whose cover showed a dragon in lurid orange and blue. Alan watched unseen from the kitchen, and attached the hulking heavy flash. He entered the room quietly, and the burst of light illuminated the gloom. Chloe raised her head towards her father, but she was blinking away tears and swivelling her head blindly, trying to find his face. After an early morning trip to the hardware store Alan disappeared into the small shed in the back garden for the whole weekend. He lined the rough walls with heavy black plastic, and set up benches and troughs, and cleaned out the filthy sink, knocked together some shelves for chemicals and packets of paper. Carla found a receipt and gasped at the cost of these things. ‘Well, this was your idea,’ he said. He spread the monochrome results over the table. There was still something amiss. He checked the settings of the camera carefully, and reread the instructions in their quaint language and tiny type. He got books from the library, and read them sitting on the shed step. He snapped the final book shut and concluded his photography was not the problem. Tom was washing their genial Golden Retriever in a tub in the back yard. The dog jumped out and shook flecks of foamy water all over the boy. Chloe, holding a towel, laughed. ‘No,’ said Alan from the doorway, and the children turned with matching fearful expressions. He had asked Carla, once, back when they still tried to talk. ‘What is it, exactly? What is it that I do?’ He stared at her, so intently he could feel his mouth slightly open, his brow furrowed. ‘It’s not what…you don’t…’ Carla stuttered and finally, loudly for her, burst out with ‘you’re doing it now!’ And he was still none the wiser. He grabbed the towel and dried the boy off roughly, picked up the dog and put it back in the tub. He tossed the towel to Chloe. ‘Do it again,’ he said. But the dog shivered and whined and lifted up its feet, and when the boy tipped the bucket, it just bowed its head and allowed the water to seep into its yellow hair. Chloe put her face against its muzzle. The smell of wet dog rose from them both. Alan wrinkled his nose and went to search for something else. In the middle of sex, he rose up on one arm and reached over with the other hand to pick up the camera. ‘That’s horrible,’ Carla said pushing away the lens with a damp hand. ‘Just your face,’ he said. ‘Only your face.’ She squirmed from under him. He rolled over and examined the black curves of the camera. His fingers had left a moist trail, darker black and shiny, running across its surface, and the lens was smudged. He took up a corner of sheet and rubbed it gently. Carla watched him, her face cast into shadows by the light of the lamp. His head tilted and his eyes narrowed, and Carla flinched. ‘No more,’ she said. She stumbled away to the spare room, and never returned to their bed after that. But she had been looking for an excuse for ages, Alan thought, as he stretched his limbs to the corners. Chloe turned thirteen. There was a cake, buttercup yellow, her name in pink icing. Candles. He made her blow them out over and over, trying to capture the exact moment before the flame was extinguished, until she was hyperventilating and again in tears. Hormones, Alan thought. ‘Leave her alone,’ said Carla, at last. ‘Just leave us all alone.’ His family moved as one away from the decorated table. He stood and stared at the mess, smoke still rising from one candle, remnants of party food and smeared plates. He paused, and lifted the camera once more. As the result emerged from the chemicals in the plastic tub, he realised what the problem had always been. From then on, he acceded to his family’s expressed wishes that he take no more photos of them at all. At his younger son’s soccer final, the camera remained in his bag during the game, and afterwards when Tom was presented with his medal. But when the event was over, and the families retired for sausages and cordial and beers, he took picture after picture of the empty ground, with the scoreboard black against the grey sky and a plastic water bottle blown onto the churned mud in front of the goal. Eventually there was the sound of his family’s car starting up, and driving away. Chloe went to hospital with an asthma attack. Noises like woodchips issued from her throat. Carla pressed her lips to her child’s forehead, but the girl’s eyes stared and stared at her father as if they would pull something from him by force of will. He considered the quality of the fluorescent light on the white hospital walls while the doctor conducted the examination. When they were sent home he let his wife and child go ahead, and snapped a shot of the hospital doors just as they closed behind them. Not quite shut, a thin line of darkness visible. The dealer examined his folio and said he was ‘adept at capturing the quality of these moments, the aftermath of everyday events.’ This was printed on the catalogue. The half-lit shots of the empty schoolyard on the night of Kane’s high school graduation, blown up to cover half a wall, were particularly successful. The viewer ‘could almost hear the applause coming from the lit auditorium in the distance.’ His pictures sold. He was able to give up his day job. He told his workmates he did not want any parties, and they gave him a framed photo of his empty desk. This was meant to be a joke, he supposed. It was poorly composed. There was abundant material in weddings, sporting events, any happy gathering of people. Alan would find an obscure corner and stare off into middle distance, waiting. Sooner or later it would be over, and something would be left in the detritus for him to claim. ‘What do you want, mate,’ a couple of heavy-set fathers said, towards the end of a family barbecue dense with children on a warm night in the local park. ‘I’m a professional,’ he said, showing his card. ‘I’m just waiting.’ The large man crumpled the card and dropped it in the dirt. ‘Yeah well,’ the other one said, shoving his shoulder. ‘You can piss off.’ Alan left, but later came back to shoot the crumpled card where it lay in a heavy footprint, turning to dirty brown as it absorbed water from its edges. The evening shadows threw the dents and tears in the cardboard into high relief. At a party Carla was introduced to a man who ran his fingers tenderly over her face. Carla did not turn away, but tilted her head back, and the frown eased from her brow, and her lips parted. Alan watched for a while, then closed his eyes and became aware of the cold surface of the beer he held in his hand, the thin smear of water warming between glass and flesh. The man had lost his vision, Carla told him later. When his family moved out, this man stood at the car and arranged boxes in the trunk by touch. ‘He can pick up the slightest change in Chloe’s breathing,’ said Carla. ‘Almost before she notices herself.’ Alan watched as Chloe approached this man and asked a question. He bent his head low. She leaned against him, almost imperceptibly, the tilting of her weight on one foot enough to bring her shoulder into contact with his arm. The boys had not come. ‘It was their choice,’ said Carla. Alan listened to the sound of the car receding, then went methodically through the rooms of his house. He turned away from the obvious things, the soccer trophy overlooked on the top of a wardrobe, and the blue swimming goggles hanging on the laundry door. He captured instead a stripped bed, a closed window, the view of the empty garden from his daughter’s curtainless window. No one but he would know exactly what was absent. I didn’t do anything, he thought. It wasn’t my fault. The two statements balanced like a see-saw. They rose and fell, rose and fell, and could not be made to settle. His photos began to fail. The prints came out as flat representations of empty places. Meaning slipped away. People shrugged or looked puzzled. The gallery lost interest. He was reduced to taking studio portraits, but the subjects had dead eyes and blank, almost frightened expressions. They fell away too. He finally had to get a job at another office, a different one, on the other side of the city. The day before he was due to start, he hung up his empty suit on the back of the door. His shirt was ironed, the bed was made up with clean sheets. He had learned how to do these things. He went downstairs and out into the back yard. It was autumn by now, a cool evening. From a barbecue next door came smells of smoke and meat and the sounds of chattered banalities. Alan switched on the outside lights and stood at the side of the neglected pool. It still held water, now turning green and supporting a spattering of dead leaves and light-bodied insects. It needed draining, but he somehow hadn’t got around to it. He leaned over, and the surface showed a murky reflection of his face. He was the age now that his own father had died. ‘Father,’ he thought, weighing the word, finding nothing inside. It was Alan who had found him, who had wept with relief, who had waited until this unseemly crying had stopped, and wiped his eyes, and concocted an appropriate expression, before leaving the room to tell someone. I will never be like him, he had vowed, closing the door. Alan held the camera out over the pool and dropped it into the murky water. His reflection rippled, and re-formed. A champagne cork popped next door. He turned away, and headed back inside. The mozzies were starting to bite.

Best Australian Yarn: After Image by Kerry Munnery

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