Dreams of Speaking (21 page)

Because Stephen had asked her to, Alice visited his mother, Margaret, in hospital. She had no wish to enter a hospital. Not now, preoccupied with Mr Sakamoto, connected sympathetically in the time of his dying, and the waiting, and the sad wish that it would soon be all over. But maybe, she thought perversely, she could visit Mr Sakamoto by visiting Margaret. Not as a substitution, but as a kind of veneration, a tribute to the expectation of loss.

The oncology ward was for some reason painted grey. Hospitals demanded the surrender of even the barest forms of indulgence. Alice made her way through halls and along labyrinthine corridors that echoed with unseen footfall and the intimation of sharp metal instruments. There were huge lights above, like monster eyes, and the floors were polished to a high, treacherous shine. Alice felt she was sliding, as nurses sometimes appear to do. As one might in a dream. She wondered if this was where Norah had stayed, in this very place. If she had been diagnosed here. Had her operation here. Rested alone, hemmed in by high grey walls. Suffered anguish. Solitude. Alice was ashamed of how little she knew. She must ask Norah. She must recover the lost story. Perhaps she was not here, after all, for Mr Sakamoto, but in expiation for her unintended neglect of her sister. She did not know Stephen's mother well: they had met only a few times, when mother and son had briefly reconciled during his time at university.

Margaret shared her room with three elderly ladies, all in conditions of dire ill health. She was reading when Alice entered, and looked up from her book, holding her place in the text with her index finger. She smiled.

‘Hello, stranger,' she said, turning the corner of her page. ‘Stephen phoned to say he'd seen you and that you were coming in. But I really didn't expect you to visit so soon.'

Stephen should have warned her: his mother was almost unrecognisable. She too was a stranger.

Margaret's face was caved and her skin was semi-transparent, so that the veins were apparent, the contours, the inner face. Filaments of hair flew up from the top of her skull. Alice leaned forward to kiss her and found that her cheek felt like paper. Margaret had a tube inserted in her arm and another leading somewhere under the sheet. Behind her rested a box, blinking with an electrostatic glow. She shifted position and patted the bed, indicating that Alice should sit.

‘Here, now,' she said.

Here, now
. For Alice the words were both overloaded and hypothetical.
Here, now. Nuance and eternity
– everything intersected in these places of despair. Words were mutating, volatile with new meanings. She sat on the edge of the bed, wondering what she would say.

‘How about it, eh?' Margaret said. ‘Stephen and Karen.'

‘They're a lovely couple. And Stephen seems so happy.'

‘I intend to stay around to meet my grandchild.'

‘Good for you,' said Alice.

They talked of everything but her illness. They talked mostly of times past, and Alice explained why she had not stayed with Stephen. Margaret began to reminisce.

‘I don't regret leaving my marriage, but it was hard on Stephen. I should have taken him with me, but I felt a nothing, a nonentity. I felt completely inadequate. Living with Bill had worn me out. When he was drunk Stephen and I would haul him onto the couch, then we'd sit in silence at the kitchen table, drinking cups of tea. We never really knew how to console each other. When Bill started at the whale yards it all
became harder. When he touched me I felt contaminated. I could smell the stink of blood and guts on his skin. I hated the thought of all that butchering. All day, cutting up an animal, knee-deep in flesh. I remember thinking: I married a fiddler, a handsome man dancing a jig, and now he spends his days in a slaughterhouse and carries death into the home. For months I thought about it, then one day I just left. I wrote to Stephen often, but he never replied. Only now, only recently, we've really started to talk. Started to know one another. I think he's scared that I'm going to die, but I'm a tough old biddy, I tell him. I'll go on for ever. And now Karen. And the baby … I always thought it would be you. That you'd be the one.'

When Alice left, she felt that it had been a good visit. Margaret had been pleased to see her and they had talked frankly, and with trust. They had found under the monster lights and the medical machines a few clear honest words.

‘Come again,' Margaret said.

A sliding nurse had come to take her blood pressure and Alice was being sent out the door. She looked back at Margaret, palely loitering, but was again thinking about Norah, her bony body, her diminishment, her teetering-near-death.

In the days that followed, the waiting days, Alice spent time with her family. Fred had aged in her absence, but Pat looked just the same. Her father walked with a kind of shuffle, his maroon slippers scraping unevenly at the carpet, and seemed rather bent, at an angle to the world. They sat on the couch together, watching video-taped football matches, and Pat entered and left, bringing tea and biscuits on a tray. It was their usual ritual. It was the pattern into which she and her parents fitted so that they knew how to be together. Alice and her
mother washed and dried dishes, standing side by side. She raked leaves in their garden and helped Pat with the crossword puzzle in the newspaper. She carried bags of shopping. She arranged a vase of yellow roses they had chosen together from a roadside stall. Casual, quiet actions were their cohesion, their love.

At Norah's house, Alice played with her niece and nephew, lying on the floor among a scattering of plastic toys. They climbed on her body and treated her as furniture. It was wholly delightful. Helen and David had grown quickly and were little individuals now, each particular in their habits and tastes, and each competing for her attention. She had brought them Japanese sweets, spongy gelatinous flower shapes, coated in sugar. She watched as they stuffed their mouths and cheeks. Norah disapproved, and tried to regulate their gobbling. The children threw their arms around Alice's neck, cheeky, mischievous, dragging her again into play, spraying her with sugar.

When the children were in kindergarten, the sisters talked. Norah unfolded the story of her illness. The tests, the results, the eventual surgery. She was philosophical. She had found, she said, a truer self, one tucked inside what she had thought she was. It was a self uncompromising and wide awake. She had started painting again.

‘I've returned from somewhere,' she said.

Alice looked at her sister with admiration. Then she told of her life, her travels, her impossible book. Norah was inquisitive about Japan.

‘I was there for less than a week; I feel completely ignorant,' Alice confessed. She mentioned Mr Sakamoto, but was secretive about him – not sure what she might say that would preserve him alive and disallow the past tense, or fatalism, or some unthinking wording away of his tenuous presence. Norah sensed his importance.

‘Tell me,' she said.

‘Later,' Alice replied. ‘Later I'll tell you about Mr Sakamoto.'

‘Well then, tell me about one special thing that you saw.'

Alice hesitated. She did not want to speak of the museum. Of her fall into the bomb's crater. She sifted images.

‘On my last day in Nagasaki, just before I caught the train, in fact, I walked up the steep slope behind my hotel to see the temple of Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy. I had packed in the night and hardly slept; I was just filling in time before I went to the train station. It was first built as a Zen temple, sometime in the seventeenth century, but had of course been destroyed, along with countless artworks inside it, by the atomic bomb. In 1979, the temple was rebuilt, dedicated to the souls of the war dead, and to the victims of the bomb.'

Alice heard her own calm voice, sounding like an historian. Norah nodded.

‘The form is very unusual. There's a massive tortoise, a holy tortoise, about thirty feet high, and you enter the temple by walking under the tortoise's neck. Into its body, as it were. Then above the tortoise, riding on its back, is Kannon, a woman in long flowing robes, very poised, very noble. She has a headdress and a halo of multiple spokes, like a star. She's about eighty feet high.'

‘This is the memorial?'

‘Yes, essentially. Inside, the remains of many bomb victims rest under an altar. There's a tombstone in the shape of a huge metal helmet, under which lie the belongings of soldiers, collected in the Pacific region. And there's a cracked globe tombstone, covering A-bomb victims. In a separate room, outside, are articles found and collected at various battlegrounds. Some have names on them. Canteens. A pair of glasses. If visitors feel entitled, they may claim an item.'

Alice sees again in her memory these small battered things, abandoned in death. Poignant traces. Remains. The detritus, after all, of unmentionable acts and evil prosecutions.

‘When I arrived,' continued Alice, ‘it was quite early in the morning. I was the only visitor. I wandered around alone, my footsteps echoing, not really sure what I was looking at. A terribly scarred woman, who must have been about ninety years old, appeared from nowhere to act as a guide. She spoke almost no English, but had a handful of nouns, which she simply listed. In any case, I felt I could understand her. She was very humped and bent, about half my height, but she had a great forcefulness to her, a kind of moral insistence. She would say: “Helmet, tomb, Pacific, dead.” It was very affecting, this loss of conjunctions, this reduction of language. Skeletal translation, I guess. Making do …'

Alice paused. The woman had taken her hand. It was a kind of body-memory, now, the warm, dry sensation of fingers between hers, the clasp of a survivor.
Hibakushai
.

‘Two other things,' Alice said. ‘The old woman took me outside, unlocked a gate, and then a door, and led me underground, down high steps, right under the temple. Suspended inside the statue of Kannon is a Foucault's pendulum.'

‘What's that?'

‘It's a pendulum that demonstrates the rotation of the earth. A perpetual motion device. A heavy ball, swaying at the end of a long rope. The idea, I think, is that it represents prayers for perpetual peace, just as the earth perpetually moves.'

‘Ah,' said Norah.

‘Perhaps every visitor is shown the pendulum. Perhaps there are real guided tours, with large groups of people and someone giving details and speaking with authority. But I felt pleased to be taken alone underground, to hold hands with this old woman, to hear her spare list of nouns.'

‘The other thing?'

‘The other thing is a bell. It tolls every day at 11.02 a.m., the time of the detonation. I was on the train by then. But I was still thinking about the temple. I followed the minute hand on my watch, and at 11.02, on the train, I tried to imagine the bell sounding …'

Alice wandered around her apartment, unloosened from things. The clock-face kept staring at her. She tried to revise the manuscript of her book on poetics and modernity, but everywhere, on every page, she met Mr Sakamoto. There are texts, she thought, even one's own, full of surprising and unexpected personifications. Texts that summon known faces to fit unknown stories. Novels that split open to reveal one's family. Tales that appear exotic, but drive one home. Recognitions. Returns. Ineluctable associations. Finally she gave up.