Where the Light Falls Read Online Free Page B

Andrew more of an explanation with the movement of his hands.
    ‘Had you seen her recently? Did Louise and Kirsten keep in touch?’ He’d always wondered if Stewart knew what went on between Andrew and Kirsten for all those years after they’d officially broken up. He’d never spoken about it—mostly he felt embarrassed by it.
    Stewart licked his lips. ‘Louise tried, I think. She always made the effort. We invited her to our wedding. She RSVP’d but never showed up. I think Louise had plans for dinner with her a few months ago, but Kirsten pulled out on the day. Louise feels bad that she didn’t try harder, but I don’t know; you can’t force someone to see you.’
    Andrew stood to go to the toilet and a space seemed to have opened at his feet, like a rupture in the earth’s crust. Around him, this old place was the same as it had always been, but his world had now changed. A part of it that had once meant something to him, a slice of his own personal history, was missing.
    •
    When he thought about Kirsten, what he thought of most were her silences. She was a woman who was always on the verge of speaking, of looking away then back towards him with the sense that there was something important she had to say. Her silences were intoxicating; they held the promise that one day he might know what they were hiding. But she had always kept her secrets to herself.
    He continued to think about her in the years since he moved to Berlin. Sometimes he went through phases where he thought about her every day. He had loved her, but it was the sort of love that was like falling. It was young love, the love you can only ever have when you are still finding yourself. At the time he sometimes thought, This is it . He’d tried to make himself believe those words, but the sensation lasted only a short time. He’d loved her as best he could in that clumsy, incomplete way people do when they are too young to surrender themselves to another person. But she needed more from him than he was able to give. He wanted her, but he didn’t want her problems.
    They separated and lived apart. But he still saw her, sometimes regularly and other times not for months. Occasionally he thought he still loved her, but there was something very intense about Kirsten, and her need for him. He was never exactly sure what it was about her that kept reeling him back in.
    •
    Later, when he came home from the pub, the house was still and his mother was already asleep. As a shift worker, she had always taken her sleep when she could and he had learnt to be quiet and alone from a young age. He turned on his laptop and sat it on his lap, the spool of the hard drive whirring against his knees. Hesearched for news articles about Kirsten, hoping for definite answers, but her disappearance was described in ambiguous and inconclusive terms. There were photos of Lake George, its surface mirrored, like a puddle of mercury that had settled on grass. The silvery stretch of water reflected the world the wrong way up. The abandoned car left beside the lake, cordoned off by yellow tape. All these articles about her—was this what she wanted, for the world to pay attention to her? Maybe, after years of silence, this had been her final scream.
    There was an interview with a man who had been picnicking by the lake with his family and had seen Kirsten sitting in the car. He had glimpsed her walking out through the vaporous haze towards the lake. At the time of the interview, they were still searching for the body. He read article after article, but none of them told a coherent story.
    He turned off the computer and as it slowed and wheezed itself to sleep, he thought about what it would be like to disappear. To leave the past behind, to walk away from it and all the ways in which it tarnished you and held you back. All you would have then was a future. He had felt this way when he left for Berlin: that he was stepping into his future and, as he did so, the door to his