Shutterspeed Read online

  Like the asshole of a maths teacher, Mr Carey, who checks homework and threatens detentions, despite the students being Year Twelves. So Dustin does just enough work to keep him at bay. Today he does five problems from exercise 43, then turns to the back of his notebook and begins to draw freehand with a 2B pencil. His outlines are sketchy and careless — a horizon in the top third, bitumen road on the bottom, and a Ducati motorbike in the centre. He doesn’t realise he’s sketching her until she’s looking back at him. Even drawn with a scratchy lead pencil, he recognises her — short hair, Kevlar jacket, jeans. Her bold eyes dare him to draw the rest of her. She’s a pulse racing through him.

  The bell rings and he flips back to exercise 43. Mr Carey grunts and Dustin exits, caught up in more important things. He leaves, engrossed, wanting to know her name.

  31

  Jasmine’s already sitting on the grass leaning against the peppermint tree, her size six-and-a-half shoes pointing upward. She looks like a pixie as she plaits yellow crepe paper.

  ‘These stupid shakers are pissing me off. They keep falling apart!’ She holds a limp yellow mess up to Dustin as if he cares.

  He laughs at her instead. ‘You’re going to be a cheerleader, then?’

  ‘I said I’d help out. Shania didn’t give me much choice.’

  ‘I’m not an expert on chick stuff, Jaz, but that looks like crap.’

  She swears and hurls the yellow shaker onto the field, where five seagulls swoop on it as if it were edible. The grey scavengers fight, pecking at each others’ heads and beaks.

  ‘Well, I’m supposed to do something for sports day, and I’m no good at sport. She can’t make me run or anything, can she?’

  ‘Don’t stress, just wag like me.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she considers. ‘What’re you going to see?’

  Dustin shrugs and pulls the wrapper off his warm pie.

  Jasmine leans back again, resting her head against the tree. She takes a pistachio from her lunchbox, prises it open with her fingertips and picks the green nut carefully from the shell. She’s got small hands and her fingers are expert at this. There are other things in her compartmentalised lunchbox too: wasabi peas, pepitas, soya snacks, and hazelnut halva pieces. She grazes, looking out over the field as the sun soaks into her brown legs.

  ‘Geez, you eat loudly,’ he says. ‘Can’t hear myself think.’

  ‘As if you’re thinking anyway.’

  ‘Why does bird food have to be so bloody noisy?’

  ‘Louder than cold dead cow, you mean?’

  ‘Be quiet, vegan,’ he says, like it’s an insult.

  She punches him and grins. Having been raised by a father who is vegetarian and a mother who is biodynamicmacrobiotic, she doesn’t get riled up too easily, especially not by Dustin. She offers him a pistachio instead.

  ‘You know I don’t do green.’

  ‘Just thought you might be bored with beige and brown.’

  ‘I’ve got red,’ he says, fingering the tomato sauce.

  Lying back, she crunches loudly and squints into the brilliant blue. Last night’s storm is long forgotten. The Fremantle sky has the ability to do that: forgive and forget. Her chest rises and falls with each deep breath. She’s all air, Jasmine.

  Dustin shoves his Mrs Mac’s pie wrapper into Jasmine’s top pocket for her to put in the bin later, and wipes tomato sauce from his fingers onto the grass.

  ‘My folks want to know when you’re coming round again,’ she says.

  ‘To their store? You kidding? Are they trying to convert me into a hippy?’

  She laughs, remembering the look on his face when he walked into South Terrace Wholefoods a week ago to catch up before a film.

  ‘It smelt like spew,’ he tells her. There’d been little there resembling human food. The walls were lined with barrels labelled with names he’d never heard of: millet flakes, pot barley, urad dal, quinoa, buckwheat. On the shelves were boxes of prunes, linseed biscuits and suma black-eyed beans. In the corner by the window was a little cafe with fat-free, gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free muffins, and soy decaf dandelion cappuccinos. And two fat grey-haired women with body odour, wearing hemp clothes, talking about flower therapy. Everyone seemed to know each other, except for him, and that’s how he wanted it to stay. He’d finally spotted Jasmine leaning beside the tofu fridge, watching him as though she was enjoying it.

  ‘You survived,’ she reminds him. ‘You can order a hot chocolate with full-fat dairy with gelatinous marshmallows if you like. My folks won’t force-feed you anything green or crunchy, I promise.’

  ‘I’m not risking it.’

  They lie beneath the tree, their bodies at right angles. Seagulls squawk overhead. Down on the field, kids shout playing footy, and Nugget’s voice is the loudest. Jasmine licks the salt from her fingers.

  ‘Did you dream it again?’ she asks carefully.

  He swallows, nervous that she knows so much. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Was it the same as the others?’

  ‘Mostly …’

  ‘You saw more?’

  Dustin blinks, thinking back to last night. ‘It’s still all in flickers, you know,’ he says, tapping his left heel against the ground, ‘like snapshots put together to make a short film, old-school style.’

  ‘Did you see her?’

  ‘No, not yet. The car’s still turning, like before, and her hair’s in the way. But I don’t know … each time I dream it there’s a bit more.’

  ‘Do you reckon it’s your mum? Do you think you’d recognise her if you saw her?’

  ‘Shut up, would ya? Eat your bird food.’

  He doesn’t know what to think and Jasmine is the only one who makes him.

  ‘I’m finished,’ she says gently, rolling onto her stomach to let the sun soak into the back of her legs.

  30

  Memories are shifty like ghosts. They haunt the corners of your mind, leaving you wondering if they really happened or if you created them. Memories of his mother are like that. She exists in parts, never as a whole person: a strand of black hair, a bra hanging on the clothesline, a soft black shoe with a silver buckle, a hairclip made from shell. And her smells: green soap in the soap dish, lotions with vanilla and coconut.

  But the memories are probably not real. The more he’s tried to remember his mum, the more he’s conjured her. He was too young, after all, when it happened. And there are no photos of her at home — not on walls or in photo albums. Having grown up without a real image of her, she’s become a montage of his imagining.

  In Year One, when curly-haired Miss Simmons told the class to draw their mums and dads, Dustin closed his eyes until he could see her on the backs of his eyelids. He drew her onto butcher’s paper with Crayola and his teacher called him a ‘little Picasso’. He carried the picture home on the bus and left it on the kitchen bench. But it never made it to the door of Ken’s fridge so Dustin decided he must have got it all wrong.

  One thing he does remember is when his father’s father — when he’d been alive — had asked him to help weed the garden on a hot afternoon. It was in Rockingham, by the sea, and the air was salty and dry. Gulls circled and cried overhead. Inside, the house smelt of old clothes and sounded like a ticking clock. On their knees, the two of them had pulled weeds and thrown them on a pile.

  Dustin liked his grandfather and the way he shook when he spoke. He gave Dustin barley sugars to suck on.

  ‘Everything has to die,’ the old man had said. He broke from his digging to unwrap a lolly for each of them with his soiled hands.

  Dustin nodded. He’d heard about death and had suspected this was why his mother wasn’t around. Other kids at kindy had said so. Dustin let the barley sugar knock against his teeth.

  ‘Your father loves you,’ his grandfather said, turning again to the garden. ‘Very much.’

  ‘When will I see her?’

  ‘You’ll see her in heaven one day. And maybe in your dreams.’

  Dustin pulled
roots apart, dirt sprinkling across his lap.

  ‘She was in a bad accident,’ his grandfather said, his fists filled with roots. ‘Years ago. Cars are deadly things. But you and your father are all right and life can be happy.’

  The two of them filled a bucket with weeds. Beneath his knees, Dustin could see the ground wriggling with earthworms.

  And now, Dustin’s mother exists only as an absence; a phantom limb niggling in the night.

  29

  After human biol, he unlocks his bike from inside the bustling shed. Junior kids fumble with locks and keys, desperate to escape and push out to freedom. Front wheels knock against one another as bikes are spun and rammed through the open Roll-A-Door. He’s restless, too, eager to get to his father’s lab, but before he can get going his phone starts vibrating in his pocket.

  ‘I swear you’re getting quicker,’ Jasmine says. ‘Hey, I’m just checking if you want to catch a movie this arvo. Just Once is on.’

  ‘Seen it.’

  ‘When? Who’d you go with?’

  ‘No-one.’

  ‘Dustin, you know you don’t have to do that.’

  ‘It’s dark. I don’t need friends in the dark.’

  ‘So where are you rushing to now then?’

  ‘Motorbike store. Nugget’s dad’s getting him one for his birthday and I’ve gotta help him choose it.’ He’s surprised at how easily the lie comes out.

  ‘Tell him to get a green one.’

  ‘Okay, see ya.’

  ‘Or purple with green pinstripes. Something funky. Actually, I think I’d better come too.’

  ‘No, don’t,’ he says into the phone, not liking this. He’s never lied to her before.

  ‘Come on, let me meet you there. It’ll be fun.’

  Her persistence grates at him.

  ‘Actually, I just remembered I’ve gotta help at the lab today.’

  ‘What? Since when do you work Mondays?’

  ‘Since there’s a big backlog.’

  The lies keep slipping out and he wonders if she can tell. He doesn’t wait to find out. Within minutes he’s cruising along at 30k an hour, with the school dissolving behind him.

  It’s the ‘in-between’ bits that Dustin prefers: in-between home and school, in-between school and work, in-between work and home. These are the times he can breathe and anything is possible. The in-between places matter. If he’s got an hour or two, he’ll criss-cross through Fremantle on his bike, or straightline it down the coast to Woodman Point and back. If he’s got more time he’ll spend it in a cinema, and it doesn’t matter what the story is or who’s in the movie, as long as it’s fiction. Twenty-four hours in a day is too much to dedicate to reality anyway.

  But today there’s something he needs to do, so he cruises south-west, weaving through suburban streets to reach the esplanade where pine trees prick the blue sky. He cycles past picnickers with greasy fish and chips spread out on paper before turning right into Collie Street, past the new row of expensive clothing stores and the waffle place that makes his stomach churn with the sweetness of it. He pushes on past the cinema and its wafts of salty popcorn, but he’s not stopping for a movie.

  He drops his pace along the cafe strip to avoid running into pedestrians preoccupied with gelati. Beside him on the pavement, umbrellas shade latte-drinkers from the late afternoon sun. Window shoppers walk and talk slowly, not rushing anywhere either. He sees it all at 14k an hour and knows they’re just like him: in-between places, in-between meals, in-between chores and responsibilities. Like him, everyone along the cafe strip delays the inevitability of being where they’re supposed to be. He grins because he likes it here where laziness is cool.

  And the Freo noises make a soundtrack as he rides through the strip: chinks of crockery, teenagers chatting outside Simmo’s, Japanese techno music from the games arcade, clip-clopping heels on pavements, squeals of braking CAT buses, fragmented conversations that fill his head and leave no room for thinking. He lets it all in.

  But the soundtrack fades as he heads north to his father’s lab. Dustin lets his momentum roll him along High Street, and that’s when the gut-feeling returns — the feeling that had distracted him this afternoon, especially in chemistry whenever his attention lagged and the picture of her came to mind. The woman with the Ducati. She’s been occupying his head without good reason today, and he doesn’t feel entirely right about it.

  He stops out the front of the photo lab and chains the Avanti’s cool chrome alloy frame to the light post. He knows he’s got to have another look, to see if she really is worth this fuss, or if he’s just making something out of nothing.

  28

  The sharpness of processing chemicals hits him at the door. Even after twelve years of coming here he’s never got used to it. The reek of developing fluid reaches out to every corner, filling his lungs, clinging to his skin. Sometimes he lingers under the shower at night, waiting for the lab’s smells to wash away.

  The store’s empty of customers. No-one loiters here; this isn’t an in-between place. Stands are covered with old frames in various sizes. Orange-and-green film canisters line the shelves.

  Leaning against the counter are sample photos to demonstrate the different dimensions of enlargements. There are seven copies of the same image — a woman with permed hair, shoulder pads and pink lipstick. She hangs from the ceiling too, sometimes in matt, sometimes glossed. Tall people like Dustin bump their heads on her. These prints — like the rest of his father’s equipment — are so out of date they irritate Dustin every time he comes in. It’s as though the lab were a time capsule, incapable of evolving with the outside world.

  On hearing the bell above the door, his father emerges from the stock cupboard, anticipating a customer. He seems disappointed. ‘I wasn’t expecting you.’

  ‘I left my maths here last night. I won’t be long.’

  ‘I didn’t see it.’ Ken sighs. The in-tray is bulging and there’s little chance of him closing the shop on time. He could use some extra help but won’t ask for it. ‘Take your time,’ he says, and returns to the stockroom while the old processor continues its whir. A pedestrian walks past the shop’s glass windows but doesn’t come in. Dustin’s on his own and there’s nothing to lose. He slides the top drawer open. Inside, cardboard dividers separate letters A to Z, each section fat with packs of photos waiting to be collected. There’s nothing stopping him but time.

  He doesn’t know her first name, let alone her last, so his only strategy is to start from the beginning. She’s not in A or B. He opens packets in a rush, finding a repetition of themes — babies, pets, cars, holidays — but he doesn’t find her. The urge to find her is greater than the trepidation he thought he’d feel.

  From inside the stock cupboard, his father’s pen taps as he counts. She’s not in C or D. Where is she? Where is this woman with the dark eyes and the Ducati?

  ‘Dustin, can you get that?’

  She’s in front of him, standing across the counter. She’s the length of a ruler from him.

  ‘Dustin?’ Ken repeats.

  ‘Hi. I’ve got some photos to pick up.’

  She’s speaking to him. She’s not wearing a leather Kevlar jacket, but a white shirt. He senses her dark eyes but can’t bring himself to look at them. She’s so close he can smell her perfume.

  ‘Dustin, you got that?’ His father emerges from the stock cupboard. ‘Oh hi, Terri. Dustin will sort you out. Dustin …’ Ken’s unaware of the adrenalin rushing through his son’s body.

  Dustin’s skin prickles him, like pins and needles all over. Each second drags on.

  ‘… he’ll sort you out …’

  Dustin fumbles through the remainder of the photos in the deep drawer. He’s the only one who can see his hands shaking. He needs to ask for her last name but he doesn’t know how to look at her, let alone speak.

  ‘Under P for Pavish.’

  He flicks to P and works his fingers through the bunches of packets. Terri Pavish. Terri Pa
vish is standing across the bench. His head is down, focusing on the bundles of photos, but he can feel the weight of her eyes upon him. There’s no Pavish.

  ‘Or F for Fremantle Herald. Sometimes it goes under F,’ Ken calls from the stock cupboard.’

  ‘Yeah, this one’s for work. Most of it anyway.’

  And so Terri Pavish speaks — casually, easily, as though her world goes on as normal. He tries to pull himself together, to use reason to regain control of his body. She is just a stranger after all, just another one of his father’s boring customers. She’s not drop-dead gorgeous, so why is he so nervous? Why can’t he stop his stupid hands from shaking?

  He finds F and there are three packs of photos for Fremantle Herald.

  ‘You got it, Dustin?’ his father calls again.

  And still he feels reckless. He knows he only has seconds to do this. In the privacy of the top drawer, his fingers rush through the contents of one of the packs: black-and-white shots of people, athletes, cars. There’s nothing he wants. The second pack is more of the same.

  ‘Dustin? Did you hear me? Try F.’

  But from the third pack he separates two photos and slides them away. There are others of her in there, seen in a blur. He doubts two will be missed.

  His father swoops behind him and scoops the three packets up in his hands.

  ‘Sorry Terri, we’ve got a stack of orders at the moment. Three, was it? You must be getting a lot of work. At this rate they’ll make you go digital.’