Dreams of Speaking Read online

  When a year later a second child, Helen, arrived, Alice worried that her sister might capsize entirely, and become so removed from her, so indentured to baby-land, and Michael, and the vague abductions of self that seemed part of early maternity, that they would be permanently and irretrievably estranged. But this time it was different. Helen was a fat, happy baby, bent on conjuring harmony. She slept, she sucked and, at the right moment, she smiled. Norah grew confident and enjoyed her mothering, recovering the backchat to her sister’s teasing, dispensing wit and intelligence, seizing for herself small acts of emancipation. The difference too was in Alice’s presence at the birth. Because Michael had been ill with pneumonia, Norah called on Alice to attend, and she had performed not so much the role of support, as that of witness. For most of the labour, Norah seemed barely aware of her presence, massively sealed in her own irresistible upheaval, and Alice had simply squeezed her hand and supplied encouraging platitudes. Nothing prepared Alice for her niece’s advent. She came as from a mouth, like a kind of fleshly word. There was Norah’s stiff agony, the red lips releasing, and then this completed and precious new being. She was lustrous with fluid and shiny with life. Norah lifted herself on her elbow and was caught in the rapture of the moment. The sisters clasped each other and were unceremoniously elated.

  So this would be their pattern. They would zigzag in and out of closeness and distance, retreating, converging, retreating and converging. For every faraway time, or loss, there would be a return, there would be propinquity.

  When the placenta arrived, Alice was shocked to see this meaty remnant of life, delivered in a second birthing, in hideous imitation. Somehow she had not imagined this stage beforehand. Norah seemed not to notice. She held her daughter, wrapped like a pupa, close to her face. When Alice turned to look, they were a world of just two.

  Cycling was difficult, against the wind, now that Alice could not use her right hand. She rode slightly upright, tensely pedalling. It was a fine, light morning, which would later subside into a dense narcotic heat. As she turned the corner, swinging in a semicircle, she saw that Norah was in the garden, waiting for her arrival. She wore loose Indian pants and a funky shirt Alice had not seen before. They waved simultaneously, Alice sending up her wounded hand like a flag of surrender. Norah’s hair, she noticed, showed no signs of growing back; she still looked newly vulnerable and pitifully thin. Something in the appearance of her skull’s definite shape filled Alice with tenderness. The blank bone of her sister’s cranium. This obscene exposure.

  The children were at kindergarten, and Norah was in high spirits.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked, pointing to the bandage.

  ‘Stupid,’ Alice replied. ‘A stupid accident.’

  ‘I should be so lucky,’ Norah said, and kissed her sister on both cheeks, in the French manner they enjoyed, and turned to lead her inside.

  Now that her chemotherapy was ended, Norah seemed sprightly, rejuvenated, like a prisoner on reprieve. She set before Alice a pot of tea and a plate of scones.

  ‘Quite the little housewife.’

  ‘No way. I’ve started painting again. I’ll show you later.’

  Alice was abashed by Norah’s easy affirmation.

  ‘I still can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘I still can’t believe that no one told me you were ill. I would have returned. I would have come back immediately. Why didn’t Michael ring? Or Mum, or Dad?’

  ‘I’ve told you already. Drop it, Alice. Besides, telephones are such mendacious things …’

  Norah was slicing the scones in two, coating each half extravagantly with strawberry jam and cream. ‘You only live once,’ she said lightly. Her appetite had returned.

  ‘My doctor says,’ she added more gravely, ‘that you should get checked. It’s unusual, so young, and after two babies. It runs in families, apparently. Sisters and mothers, he said. I’ll make an appointment at the clinic. We’ll go together.’

  They consumed the scones messily, like schoolgirls, like their naughty past selves. The tea was sweet and comforting. Norah chatted about her children. David could now count, Helen was an artist, like her mother. There were daubed livid images and colourful tantrums.

  After a lapse in conversation Alice found herself asking: ‘Do you remember, when we were small, that time our car hit a kangaroo?’

  There was a pause between them. Norah took a sip of tea and raised her blue skull. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You were brutal. I hated you.’

  ‘I was only …’ Alice hesitated, ‘putting it out of its misery.’ She heard her old words recur, like an emphatic exculpation.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Norah conceded. ‘I looked out through the back window and saw your arm rise, and rise again. Dad just stood there. Your energy at killing frightened me. I saw the streak of blood on the road and was sick at the sight of it. When you returned to the car you seemed so changed.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Alice said pointlessly.

  She did not know what she was apologising for. She sat before her sister, her sister who was bald with her own suffering and entirely without self-pity, who bore the indefensible treachery of her own body with poise and good humour, who baked scones, who was generous and adored her children, feeling like a culprit of some sort. Feeling guilty. So much lay between siblings, so much obstinate history. So much overlapped in inexpressible ways.

  Norah leaned forward. ‘So when are you going to tell me about Mr Sakamoto?’

  The Invention of cellophane

  A Monsieur Jacques E. Brandenberger, a Swiss man with a hefty nose, a large moustache and an imperious mien, was one day seated in a restaurant when a customer at the next table spilled wine on the tablecloth. Being both a textile engineer and a man of daring ingenuity, he conceived at that moment the invention of a flexible, transparent and waterproof material, which might protect tablecloths ever after from the clumsiness of diners. He began by applying liquid viscose to cloth, but found it too stiff and impractical a solution. By 1908, however, he had invented a machine for making transparent sheets and cellophane was born! The same Jacques E. Brandenberger, who had witnessed the inspirational spilling of wine, developed a flexible film and two years later had also invented the visor component of gas masks that, in the largesse of war, bought him his ultimate fortune.

  This was in one of the first e-mails Mr Sakamoto sent. His style was florid and archaic, his disposition melodramatic. His written English was accomplished, a tribute, he once claimed, to the private tutor his father indulgently hired – a man from Manchester, a Mr O’Toole, who arrived in Japan with frayed cuffs and a class-traitorish regard for high-flown expressions and old-fashioned syntax.

  ‘Another time,’ Alice said to Norah. ‘I’ll tell you another time. Would you like to know, instead, about Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone?’

  The white heat blasted her as she rode. She moved her body steadily, driving herself into the glare. Norah had been fulsome, open, and Alice had been secretive. She was not intentionally so; there was a kind of block to her feelings, an abysmal suppression, and a superstition, perhaps, that she should not recover this man too soon by formulations of words. Against the waste of death, no language availed. No words, easy as breath, routinely available, slipped forth to settle her insurgent feelings. She must wait. She must know. She must know exactly what to say.

  Alice bent her head like a penitent beneath the assaulting sun. Her legs were robotic. She barely looked where she was going.

  2

  One year ago, without knowing it, she had been travelling to meet him. Alice was flying to Europe, following darkness around the planet in her north-westerly projection. She would have a doubled night – the nothing-space of jet flight was freighted with black magic, so that passengers bore stoically their extended nocturne, relinquishing the ordinariness of time, relinquishing good meals and intelligent conversation, for this wearisome, dull, zombie imprisoning. The habit of detachment was useful in such situations. In the incessan
t roar of the wind tunnel of flight, Alice watched the serried strangers around her. They were fixed in crepuscular gloom onto screens or magazines, each locked away, looking sad, in a solipsistic reverie. Alice wondered what form of modernity this might be, and how she might include it in her book. Her project was presumptuously entitled The Poetics of Modernity and she wished to study the unremarked beauty of modern things, of telephones, aeroplanes, computer screens and electric lights, of television, cars and underground transportation. There had to be in the world of mechanical efficiency some mystery of transaction, the summoning of remote meanings, an extra dimension – supernatural, sure. There had to be a lost sublimity, of something once strange, now familiar, tame.

  The lights switched off and passengers seemed instantly to sleep. They had become sluggish, bored. Now they met the extra night with their eyes closed, their heads thrown back, their mouths slackly agape like codfish. Alice watched movies of diverting inanity. The little screen before her was a hide-away to hunker into. At some point she rose to stretch her legs and found the whole population asleep. She crept gingerly up the aisle and saw – as in a science-fiction movie in black and white – that in their steel and aluminium tube everyone was insensible. It was as if the plane was governed by alien air or some creaturely intention. A posthumous blue washed over bodies, faces. Hoping for a coffee, Alice made her way to the hostesses’ enclave, and discovered two uniformed women also fast asleep, one of them with her cheek propped against the shoulder of the other. She retreated quietly, wondering about the automation of planes, how they stayed up, anyway, what antigravitational devices kept them here, defying all instinct, hurtling like a thrown thing through distorted ever-darkness.

  About 4 a.m. in no-time the lights came on. Groggy passengers roused to a putative breakfast. Before the trays with their standard selections and plastic implements were swept away, Alice hailed a hostess and requested a view of the cockpit. She showed her university card, and announced dishonestly that she was writing a book about flight. It was almost true, she reasoned. Almost plausible. The hostess, who was bottle-blonde, in her forties and weary with life, eyed Alice suspiciously and said she would see. Within ten minutes, however, Alice was being led to the front of the plane, past the first-class passengers in their absurdly wide seats, through dark-green curtains and a digitally coded door and on into the cockpit. There she met the two pilots, Walter and Briggs. Before her, in a cramped dome of lights, like the church of some peculiar, unorthodox religion, Alice saw a curve of endless black sky, and far below, a carpet of uneven lights, profuse and lovely. Bright forms constellated and slid beneath them. Patterns of flash, ardent glows, electrified destinations.

  ‘Frankfurt,’ Briggs announced, matter-of-factly.

  Alice felt her old-fashioned heart was racing. Here, in this bubble of impossibility, suspended in heaven, she saw with inhuman gaze how marvellous was this invention, how bold its assertion into pure space. She sensed propulsion and the churning of gigantic engines. She sensed circuits, sparks, powerful calculations. She felt irresponsible delight in her view of Frankfurt. All around her, intricate dials and buttons dramatised the algebra of flight.

  ‘I feel like God,’ she said quietly. This, from an atheist.

  Walter and Briggs simultaneously swivelled their heads to see her. There was a still, awkward moment, then Captain Walter laughed.

  ‘Me too,’ he confessed. His face was ruddy in the glow of the cockpit lights. He smiled wry approval. Captain Briggs blew into his palms: a Muslim at prayer.

  The pilots asked Alice if she had any questions, practical or theoretical, but she could think of none. Her pretext was at risk. But neither seemed to doubt the legitimacy of her invasion. She simply stood behind them, importunate, imposturing, watching the night illimitably unfold. She was watching speed, watching modernity.

  There is little as artificially brilliant as a neon sign.

  Pause and consider. The glow is incomparable. Motel has never before seemed so numinous. Drinks. Dancing Girls. All-Nite Bar. When they were first shown in America, people stopped in the street and stared. ‘Liquid fire,’ they whispered. ‘Liquid fire.’ Since the seventeenth century scientists have observed that certain gasses could be caused, through motion or voltage, to emit a pale glow, a magical quiver. But it was a French man, Georges Claude, who first applied an electrical charge to a sealed tube of neon gas, to create an entirely new-fangled lamp. He saw before him luminosity at the level of atoms, each agitated in a new, utterly sparkly, life. Neon is rather a rare gaseous element – in the air we breathe it is but one part in 65,000. Yet separated, it has this illuminate capacity: even in atmospheric conditions it glimmers bright red. Georges Claude first displayed his invention to the public in Paris, in wintry December 1910. Crowds cheered and clapped. Sacré Bleu! they chorused. They were applauding the very transformation of air. Their eyes were lit with novel amazement. City streets would never be the same again. Pinks rosier, intensified. Blues from outerspace. Words written above buildings in purest white light. On or about December 1910, everything changed.

  Mr Sakamoto had raised his glass of red wine.

  ‘The difficulty with celebrating modernity,’ he declared, ‘is that we live with so many persistently unmodern things. Dreams, love, babies, illness. Memory. Death. And all the natural things. Leaves, birds, ocean, animals. Think of your Australian kangaroo,’ he added. ‘The kangaroo is truly unmodern.’

  Here he paused and smiled, as if telling himself a joke.

  ‘And sky. Think of sky. There is nothing modern about the sky.’

  Sliding down from the black sky, Alice arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport, racked with sleeplessness. In the passport line she saw that others, too, were bleary, and talked in the thick, muffled tones of the half-awake. Stephen would be waiting beyond the lines, watching for her arrival. She had asked him not to come, but knew he would be there, expecting to touch her, anxious for a kiss. The line moved slowly. When at last she was through, she remembered her luggage, and stood, waiting once more, at the carousel. A kind of desolation suddenly overtook her. What would she say to Stephen? How would she tell him? When her case circled before her she didn’t recognise it at first, then chased, lurching. The conveyer belt rumbled on with its parcels of lives, tagged and ribboned.

  Airports divide people into the leaving and the arriving. The leaving were jittery, bought drinks and unnecessary duty-free items and moved in an intermediate consciousness, halfway gone. The arriving, dulled by their own motionless speeding, relieved to be on the earth and clutching their legitimating documents, were compliant and subdued. In a casual fumble Alice dropped her passport on the floor. She looked down and saw it – a royal-blue square with the kangaroo and emu standing posed in the centre. It was like a surrealist object, displayed in its oddity and drastically misplaced.

  Stephen waited at the barrier with a bouquet of flame-coloured tulips. He hailed Alice at once, and pushed his way forward. There was a moment when they were estimating each other’s appearance. He looked handsome – she could not deny it – in his long winter coat and scarf; and was no doubt noticing that Alice carried in her face the raddled emotions of swooping around the globe. Imperative loudspeaker announcements smothered their hallos.

  ‘You look great,’ Alice heard.

  Stephen leaned to her left side and kissed her cautiously.

  ‘You too.’

  They caught the shuttlebus to the railway station, juddering all the way, jolted at each stop, and then Stephen produced two tickets and carried her case through to the platform. Dawn was breaking as the train rolled towards the city. Stephen reached for Alice’s hand and she tried her best to attend to his friendly chat. He spoke of mutual friends, a new jazz club he had discovered, an article he had published. Alice watched a young black man with dreadlocks bob to his own music, held hidden in his pocket and streaming to him privately through thin yellow wires. He looked possessed, mystical. Music. Why was it she still knew noth
ing about music? Outside, in a fleeting view, she saw a gypsy encampment in old railway carriages, a mother washing her child with water from a metal bucket, a man in a dirty coat gesticulating insanely at the sunrise.

  A neon sign flashed by: an advertising epiphany. Alice was waiting for Stephen to ask her about the flight, so that she could say: I was in the cockpit. It was like a church. I saw the city of Frankfurt appear gorgeously, as a figment of light.

  But he did not ask, and instead filled the uncertain space between them with his own preoccupations and talkative nervousness. When they drew near Châtelet, in the city centre, Stephen simply said: ‘Come to my place. Stay with me.’

  Alice replied that she was meeting the woman who had the key to her studio apartment. She would see him later, she promised. Later. After she had slept.

  They parted at the Métro. Alice watched Stephen diminish, looking forlorn, as her train sped off in the direction of St-Paul. Blur enveloped the crowd on the platform. The booming tunnel sucked the train into darkness. In Alice’s hands the bunch of tulips was damaged, frayed at the edges.