Frame, Angus Hansen [best story books to read TXT] 📗

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