The Photographs Were for After

Anth spent the afternoon watching the sun. Warmth was the whole brief. The photographs had to show Sal as someone a stranger would feel safe talking to, and the flat light of the middle of the day would never do that. So we waited for it to drop, and a little before golden hour we set out from the bus with the camera.

The photographs were for the business. It had been a word at campsite tables for most of the journey, ever since we first found some clarity on it at Bannons Park on the Leven River, a month into the whole thing. Sal's Masters of Counselling had never been only about the qualification. It was meant to let us take the work online, in the same field, and carry it wherever the bus went. Anth had been building the website for a while. What it still lacked was Sal.

The bus was parked out the front of Jan's place in Nicholls, on the same kerb where the Canberra stay had begun in early August. We walked the streets around it, Anth scouting for a wall, a hedge, anything that was not a bus. Canberra in the third week of September was in full bloom. Blossom weighed down the street trees, colour filled the front gardens, and a faint sweetness came and went on the air as we turned the corners. Anth came away with a few he was happy with. Then one of us remembered the place where we had eaten ice cream on her birthday a fortnight earlier, the afternoon Jess drove. It was a short drive, and the light was still coming, so we went.

It was better there. By then the sun was low and the light had turned warm, lying sideways across the flowers. Anth stepped back to find the frame, and for a moment he saw the two years behind the picture instead of the picture. He saw Sal at the fold-out table, laptop open, a coffee at her elbow that never lasted long enough to go cold. He saw her on video calls from the cab at Lake Broadwater while the corellas screamed overhead. He saw her finishing the last assignment at Mannus Lake, in a week of frost most mornings and fog slow to leave the water. Every one of those hours had been spent so that one day there would be this: Sal standing in the last warm light with the blossom behind her, looking at someone she trusted to make her look like herself. He took more photos than he needed. She let him.

Back at the bus, Jan had hardly been home all week. She was house sitting somewhere else, which made us the odd arrangement of guests camped outside a house whose owner was living in another one. But she came back one evening to cook us another proper home-made meal, the kind that tastes of a kitchen rather than a camp stove. Her friend Pete came too. Jan and Pete were seasoned 500 players, the sort who bid their tricks without appearing to think about it and count what has fallen without appearing to count. A fortnight earlier Anth had won most hands of a card game at Liz and Jeff's and had perhaps begun to believe something about himself. A few games of 500 were played. We will leave the scores to history, where they are safe.

There was one more gathering ahead. Jan and Sal had planned a farewell dinner at Liz and Jeff's for the Thursday, and that was where we would say goodbye to Jan and to Jess. Before it there were two more placement days to get through, a Monday and a Tuesday, and one last drive south from her place into Trinity. Seven weeks of Canberra had quietly become a routine: Jan's kerb, Liz and Jeff's driveway, Jeff's cooking, pool nights, card nights and the Monday run to the school gate. The goodbye was coming, and neither of us was in a hurry to look at it directly.

In the meantime there were the photographs to sort through. In most of them, Sal was looking straight down the lens at Anth.Read more