Black Wattle Creek (Charlie Berlin #2)(8)

As he smoked he studied the yard in the moonlight. The weatherboard War Service house was on a decent-sized block of land and the backyard was huge. Even with half a dozen fruit trees, a big vegetable patch, a toolshed, a run for the chooks, a Hills Hoist for the washing, and the outside dunny covered in passionfruit vine, there was still room for Rebecca’s yet to be finished darkroom.

For almost a year now she had been making extra money helping out the local wedding photographer on weekends. She would shoot for him for a flat fee when he was overbooked, using her own camera and flash and handing over the rolls of black and white film when the job was finished. She’d grown up helping her father in his rural Ballarat wedding studio, so she knew what she was doing on the technical side even before her air force training. Postwar she had combined journalism with photography as a social-pages reporter for the now defunct Argus newspaper. That job had ended of course when she married Berlin and became a mother.

The wedding trade was booming right now, with many of the bookings being made at the last minute. A high proportion of the young brides were already expecting, and on the wedding day their emotions ran the gamut from nervous to ashamed to hysterical to terrified. Female photographers were rare, and Rebecca had developed a reputation for being adept at soothing and reassuring her subjects, as well as being very creative with the camera. More importantly, she was reliable.

A few months back she had surprised Berlin by suggesting she could make a lot more money by photographing weddings off her own bat and selling the prints and albums. There was definitely no shortage of brides and of course all her father’s darkroom equipment was available. Failing eyesight had forced him to close his studio several years back and all his gear was sitting in storage in a shed in Ballarat. The only sticking point was the lack of a darkroom to develop her film and make the prints.

Berlin’s initial surprise at her suggestion was because he knew that she didn’t like the wedding work very much. Her heroines were people like Margaret Bourke-White and Dorothea Lange, photographers who had made it to the top internationally in a profession usually dominated by men.

Rebecca taking on her own wedding clients made perfect sense – she would have more control and they could really use the extra money she’d be able to bring in. The kids were getting older and Maria next door, with five of her own, was more than happy to watch Sarah and Peter on Saturdays, if Berlin was working when Rebecca was out shooting. After weighing up the pros and cons they had decided to take the risk and go ahead.

The darkroom was his biggest carpentry project so far, and still a long way from finished. But after building the fence and the kennel and a wooden bin to hold the winter supply of briquettes for the living-room heater and hot-water system, Berlin figured that a simple, light-tight shed to function as a darkroom was not beyond his abilities.

When finished the darkroom would be ten feet long, eight feet wide, and have a ceiling height of eight feet. The structure was based on plans he’d found in an old hobby magazine for a military PI hut, scaled down to make a garden shed or a sleep-out for a couple of boys. Since it needed to be completely dark inside he was omitting the windows, which reduced costs and made for much simpler construction. Berlin had had some experience of the miserable old PI huts from his early days in the air force, at the camp at Somers. Rebecca, with her own air force experience, accepted that the darkroom would be hot as hell in summer and freezing in winter, would creak and groan as she walked around inside and shake and rattle in autumn gales.

Berlin’s additional plans called for a bench and shelving for the enlarger and photographic paper along one wall, and along the other a long shallow sink for the trays that held the processing chemicals. A long extension cord looped across from the house would provide electrical power for the enlarger and orange safelights, and running water and drainage would be connected by the apprentice-plumber nephew of a friend of Berlin’s late grandfather.

But that darkroom was still a long way off. Right now it was just a double row of hardwood stumps set in concrete along with the cross bearers for the floor. Two of the wall frames were finished, lying on the grass and waiting to be erected. Along the side fence next to the structure were several neat piles of building and plumbing materials that Berlin had scrounged.

So far he had managed not to steal anything, despite the temptations of a suburb with multiple houses under construction whose building sites were abandoned by three o’clock on Friday afternoons. Even scrounging as much as he could in the way of building materials and doing almost all the construction work himself on weekends and days off, the project was costing more than they could afford and any delays would put them deeper into a financial hole. But now having the whole of next week to work on the project would really put him ahead.

Money worries aside, Berlin was looking forward to the week’s worth of manual labour that had dropped in his lap. The measuring and cutting, the blisters and the aches, the smell of pine sap in new timber and the way his hammer sometimes threw sparks when it struck the head of a four-inch nail took him miles away from the stress of police work and having to deal with the bastards at Russell Street.

Berlin was a loner. Loneliness suited him. He had Rebecca and the kids and that was all he needed. At work a man who was teetotal and happily married was a wowser and of course suspect. They had given up on inviting him to the long boozy lunches at the pub and the regular men-only, cops-only fishing or hunting expeditions to the country. He had a fair idea of the state of most of their marriages and knew from stories overheard around the office what they were really hunting on those trips away.