Dreams of Speaking (2 page)

As she was clearing the mess of smashed cup, Alice cut her hand. She gashed her palm when kneeling, she steadied herself, and leaned directly onto a shard.

‘Fuck.'

The word, Mr Sakamoto said, to be reserved only for unanticipated annoyances.

Alice pressed the wound closed, but blood dripped onto the floor, amazingly bright. She became efficient in this ordinary crisis, scooping the fragments of shattered cup, wiping away the blood, binding her hand – the right – with a nearby
teatowel. Exhaustion swept over her. This was all too difficult. Even her own small world had begun offering wounds.

It was full light now, and morning, but Alice decided to return to sleep. Nursing her wrapped hand, she lay back on the couch and closed her eyes, falling immediately into a dream: something lurid, tormenting, which she will later forget. When she woke, an hour later, aroused by throbbing and blood from her hand soaking into her pants at the crotch, she was overcome irrelevantly by the recollection of a childhood event.

 

She was ten years old and had been travelling with her family in the country, heading for the south coast. She and Norah were squabbling in the back of the car; their exasperated parents kept turning their heads to scold. They were driving through karri forest and Alice remembered the straight high trees, the shafts of filtered blue light, the sense of magical transportation as shadows and brightness flitted by. She had leaned her cheek against the icy clear glass of the window and thought how wonderful it was that someone had invented cars, how wonderful to slide like this, past whole forests, through tunnels of trees. But then her father braked suddenly, they were all flung forward, and in the same instant she heard an abrupt and hollow-sounding collision. The car had hit a kangaroo, which had bounded across its path. Fred pulled to the side of the road, his hands trembling on the steering wheel, his face ashen with shock. He wound down the window and looked back to see what he had done. The kangaroo was large and grey, fallen onto its shank, unable to move. It looked intact and unharmed, but blood was seeping in a shiny pool from somewhere beneath it. The head was cocked. The eyes were glazed and accusatory.

‘Do something,' said Pat. Her voice was nervous, taut.

It was remarkable, Alice thought afterwards, how there are actors and watchers.

Fred and Alice together left the car and walked back up the road to inspect the kangaroo. As it saw them approach, it became helplessly agitated; its paws began to shake and it kicked with one leg. Alice saw that her father was close to tears, but she felt she must, since she was the clever one, act in a sensible way.

‘We have to do it, Dad. We have to put it out of its misery.'

These words had arrived with glossy facility from television or cinema. Alice was surprised at how easily she knew what to say, and how simple it was to announce an execution. She will wonder, later on, what channels open in mouths that speed into everyday life these lines of screen-written dialogue. Her own voice sounded synthesised, produced by a machine. Power sounded like this. Decisiveness. Authority.

Fred and Alice decided they would hit the kangaroo's head with the back of a small axe they carried in the car. When they returned to the car, Pat and Norah had both begun to cry.

‘We have to do it,' Alice repeated. ‘We have to put it out of its misery.'

Her father leaned into the boot, and retrieved the axe. He stood poised for a moment, and looked like a storybook woodchopper, but for his white and stricken face and his unsteady hands. He would never act, she knew. Without speaking Alice took the axe from her father. She strode off, up the road, intent on action. She was animated, purposeful. Behind her the car was ticking as it cooled. A sour smell of burned rubber lingered on the road.

The grey kangaroo kicked again in a vain effort to escape, surprisingly lively, given its loss of blood. Fred dragged it by the tail onto the grassy verge, leaving on the bitumen a slick
smear of red. Alice considered its silence. Perhaps these animals were mute. Perhaps its injuries had sealed it prematurely in a deathly quiet. She realised she was grateful it had not cried out, or whimpered, or made some endearing pet-like sound. Alice did not look at the face. She brought the blunt end of the axe down upon its head, once, twice, and then a third time, before the skull smashed and the animal at last quivered, and was still. The face lay to one side, averted, as if in private sorrow. Alice felt the sweat on her hands, knew her own tough heartbeat, heard the amplified hush that was death, ringing through the forest.

Her father stood beside her, softly weeping. He looked mottled and old, and had a tremulous, vulnerable aspect. He took the axe from Alice's hands, wiped it on the grass, first this side, then that, with what seemed to her an unfeasibly slow motion, and then they walked side by side, back to the car, saying not a word. Alice's mother and sister were wiping their tears, each with a fist of crumpled tissues. There was such distress in that small, metallic space. The way cars heat up with emotion, their mysterious responsiveness.

As Alice slid into her seat, Norah hissed, ‘Murderer!' Alice fell back into herself, wondering whether life was always going to be like this, full of sudden and irreversible things, full of an anguish contained in the small events within families, in bloody accidents, in difficult moments, that force one member of the family to act, and then to feel ashamed. And not just momentarily, but for ever and ever.

Alice's hand was being stitched by a competent doctor. She had been embarrassed to admit that it was a domestic mishap.

‘Quite a gash,' said the doctor in an admiring tone, pleased
no doubt to be relieved of flu cases and colicky infants, faced instead with a serious rupture of flesh.

Her palm was cross-stitched in a way that recalled B-movies.

‘A monster,' she said.

‘Pardon?' the doctor asked, not wanting a reply.

He bound the wound with white gauze and gave his handiwork a pat.

‘There,' he said conclusively.

Alice tucked her hand under her armpit, as children used to do after a caning. She walked outside into the summery air, looked up at the cloudless sky, saw an aeroplane climb across the blue in a high lyrical curve, and remembered once again that she must ring Norah.

They had loved each other, and then diverged, dragging their lives behind them in entirely separate directions. Norah went to art school and met there a student architect, Michael, by whom she became pregnant within four months of their meeting. They moved in together and their child, David, was born much too early. In those precarious first months, Michael and Norah transformed into a haggard, obsessive couple, strained with new love, tired beyond measure, desperately preoccupied with their ailing baby. Alice had visited them often, but felt excluded. Michael looked at her suspiciously; Norah struggled to make conversation. When Alice held her nephew she felt a momentary pang of terror: the fragility of the infant – which seemed to her crimson, insensate and perpetually wailing – was awful to contemplate. She realised maternal tenderness was an overweening obligation, some contract that, having been entered into, could not be broken. Norah had twin violet rings beneath her eyes and had never before seemed so unhappy. Michael had begun smoking, much
to Norah's disgust, and blew furious threads of foul air about the house in a wretched rebellion against his own feelings of entrapment.

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.