Extract: Residual Images, by Gayna Vettor

Roused from exile in Aotearoa, 27-year-old photographer Etzel Baumann returns home to the American Midwest only to be re-immersed in a toxic family dynamic.  

She finds solace—and secrets—in a hidden, rusting trunk of family photographs. Etz’s parents are revealed as she never knew them: relaxed, gorgeous, happy and in love. But who is this other handsome man her mother clearly adored?

Driven by a need to understand the past, Etz’s illicit excavation of her family’s history lights a dangerous fuse. Around her, old resentments bubble up and violence brews, exploding in a final, brutal act of humiliation.

Extracted with kind permission from Residual Images by Gayna Vettor, RRP $35.00

She leans in and studies the man’s face, the lines that etch themselves deeper with time in the bath. Rubbing her finger gently on his cheek draws out fine wrinkles that she can just make out under the red light of the darkroom. She watches the texture developing on his shirt, and spots a light stain near the top button that she hadn’t noticed before. She rocks the developer tray and strokes highlights to see if there might be more detail there.

The cosy dark is punctured by the phone’s double-trill from the next room. Etz flinches. She counts out loud, ‘One. Two. Three. Four.’ The ringing stops at twenty. A familiar technique, she thinks. She hum-sings along to the radio’s Top songs for March 1984: ‘Mmm so inspired by you, mm mmmmm for the longest time...’ Focusing back on her work, she concentrates on the image’s subject. The man is arched over a rubber-soled walking stick, waxy fingers clamping the handle, gritted smile shifting his lips sideways rather than up—everything about him is old. ‘But he isn’t much older than Grunt, if Grunt were alive,’ she shakes her head as she says this.

Swallowing and taking a deep breath, she uses tongs to move the developed image into the stop bath, then into the fixer, intuitively measuring the time, into the pre-wash and finally the wash. She slowly rocks the tray and watches the old man float. The phone rings again. It rings and rings and rings. ‘Dammit, must be something,’ she growls, grabs a t-shirt stained with brown blooms of dried photographic fix, wipes her hands and opens the door. A swirl of aggressive light spills into her dark world, and she closes her eyes for a moment before moving toward the phone.

Etz grabs the receiver and shouts, ‘Etz here,’ bringing it to her ear and hearing a familiar voice on the other end.

‘Jan? My gawd. Jan!’ Etz shouts.

Her high school friend’s voice is distinctively deep, but it lacks her usual jokey response; something’s not right. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Wrong?’ Jan replies, and Etz hears the familiar flippancy.

‘International phone call?’ Etz shrugs as if Jan could see. ‘Can’t be good.’ She moves the phone to a makeshift table, where a pine box lies on its side, holding tins of food. The ultimate in DIY shelving.

‘I tried a while ago – you must have been out.’

‘Nah. Just developing. Ignored the phone.’ She cinches the receiver between her shoulder and ear, her hand hovering over tinned beets and beans but swerves to pick up the tuna. ‘So what is it, then? Calling to tell me you’re finally coming to New Zealand?’

The response is silence.

Etz shifts the receiver while she opens the tin, leaving the lid slightly attached. ‘So then, who’s died?’

Silence, but she detects a faint noise, like a breath.

‘Jan? You there?’

‘Etz, it’s Nola. I wondered if you heard.’

Etz has never heard Jan speak like this. Careful. Serious. So much silence. She puts the can-opener down, takes the receiver in her hand and holds it as though she’s shielding her voice. ‘No. I haven’t heard anything from home.’ She cocks her head, looks at the tin as if it were Jan’s face.

‘She’s sick. The family is circling, so I figured she must be pretty bad,’ Jan says.

‘Oh.’ Etz stares at the tuna chunks. ‘You’d think they’d call me if it was bad. Wouldn’t they?’

Jan goes silent again. The stillness of someone not getting involved.

‘Well, then. Thanks for calling, Jan.’ She gently places the receiver in its cradle, hearing Jan’s ‘OK, then.’

She wipes her nose the length of her forearm to clear a tang of tuna clinging to her nostril hairs, then glances around the one-room flat. But all she sees are images which flit across her mind, scratching at her psyche like fingernails down a blackboard. A floating wedge of light from a gap in the curtain mimics the graininess of Tri-X 400ASA film shot in ambient light. It forms a spotlight that exposes fragments of the mess of her life: a mug from Oxford, spoon from Amsterdam, pen from Paris, tea towel from Melbourne, wooden-handled spoon from camping cutlery used in Grand Teton National Park. Cheap treasures from nine years of wandering that got her as far away as possible. So what would draw her back now, another parent’s death? Being orphaned at twenty-seven? Will they blame her for this one, too?

Etz returns to the bathroom she’s rigged as a darkroom and mulls this news while she finishes the old man. She moves him into a final rinse, tapping her foot to time it, then lifts and lets him drip over the tray. When he’s done dripping, she clips him to a string suspended over the bathtub in line with three other near-dry images she’d printed before the intrusion.

Besides the old man, the other moments she’s captured this morning are a worn wooden porch strut, a sharply focused bone china teacup patterned with red roses against a blurred backdrop of pitted concrete, and a chipped enamel pitcher with a tatty teddy slumped against it, its knitted-button eyes staring beyond. She made these images along Worcester Boulevard near the Arts Centre, and the old man had been tapping his way past the Archery Lawn in the Botanic Gardens.

She takes the trays of chemicals she had balanced on a board laid over the sink, tips them into the bath, rinses the trays, and leans them in the tub to dry. She leaves the old man to drip from the string.

Residual Images is available from bookstores now.