Dreams of Speaking (23 page)

‘Why didn't you tell me?' Alice insisted. She could hear herself sounding plaintive, like a querulous child.

‘We planned to,' said Fred. ‘But the time never seemed right. Because you and Norah didn't get along, we both knew it would make things much harder. And then, when you became close, we thought we'd wreck the peace if we told you. And it didn't seem to matter so much. When you loved each other.'

‘We always loved each other.'

‘Funny ways of showing it.'

Fred was puffing at his cigarette. Pat didn't usually allow smoking in the house, but seemed prepared, on this occasion, to overlook it.

‘Maybe we thought you'd guess,' Pat added. ‘And ask us.'

‘I didn't.'

‘No.'

Alice could see that her parents were somehow hurt. Fred was looking away; plucking a fragment of tobacco from his tongue. Pat was blowing on her tea again, her eyes downcast. Alice tried to set things right.

‘It doesn't change my love for you both,' she said, sounding unconvincing.

‘But we should've told you,' Fred conceded. ‘You were bound to find out, sooner or later.'

Estrangement settled upon them. They drank tea in a taut and unfamiliar distance, so that Alice felt she had been crass with the directness of her question. She wanted to know the name of the adoption agency, but couldn't ask now, not yet, anyway. She wanted to say: ‘And what do you know of the
birth mother? What was she like? What was her name? What name did she give me?'

In a way she did not quite understand, Alice resented this soap-operatic turn in her life, as though her growing up had been a delusion, or a lie, as though this new orphaned self had arrived to make her feel less sure, less authentic, somehow, an impostor daughter.

 

The room that contained them bore traces of all their lives. Alice raised her teacup and looked ahead. On the mantel-piece were portrait photographs and images of special moments. Pat and Fred's wedding, Alice pushing Norah on a swing, Norah dressed for a formal dance, Alice receiving an award at school, her right hand clasping a rolled certificate. Here were habits and stories, the referential system of personal signs, the shadows of times past. Certain objects replenished memory or pushed it into beige dusty corners. Ornaments of particular ugliness held sweet associations. The immediacy of these things, these family things, these ordinary things knotted into the crisscross of four disparate souls, seized Alice with a force she was not prepared for. A web of connective tissue somehow linked what she saw. She looked across at Pat, caught her quick gaze, and found herself smiling.

Alice decided to ring Haruko. It was night time – 8 p.m. – an hour behind the time in Japan. The phone rang and rang, four times, six times, then an answering machine switched itself on. The voice was Mr Sakamoto's. He said something brief in Japanese, and the instructive beep sounded. Alice put down the receiver. Almost immediately she wanted to hear his voice
again. Alice dialled the number once more and listened to the same message. Mr Sakamoto's voice fell towards her, recalled his presence, disturbed her with its deep and intrinsic familiarity. The beep sounded, and again Alice replaced the receiver. Then she dialled a third time, not really knowing what she was doing, but strung out, now, wishing to follow the thin thread of his remnant presence, his faint verbal ghost. So much inhered in the brief, untranslated words. In the voice beyond extinction, in this nocturnal recursion. A telephone in Japan. The handset still in its cradle. On the third beep, Alice began to talk.

‘Ah, Mr Sakamoto, I have so much to tell you, so much to say. The night is abysmally dark and seems endless without you. What love was it we shared, that played itself out in conversations? What did we know of each other? What understandings? I visited Nagasaki, but was not able to see you. In the museum I thought I saw a glimpse of your childhood; I thought I saw a boy in silhouette, his feet flying up behind him, running down the hill near his home into the site of catastrophe. You were fast and determined. You flew like the wind. I don't know what you saw, but I felt some sympathetic vibration, like the pianos you told me about, a vibration that I took to be the sound we had established between us …

‘And later, back in Australia, I found again that tonal register with my sister and my family and thought again of Bell, and of your work, and of your long and sweet dedication … How you described things. Your stories. Your collection of inventors …

‘It's lonely without you. I feel I'm floating in space. There is suffocation here. And a dark visor across my eyes. Your carved Spanish astronaut has nothing on me; he's too solid, too visible. I seem to have lost my bearings, with grief for your
passing. I seem to have lost certain knowledge of my precious family. They are kind and patient; they know something is wrong; something inside me is missing. To be lost is to be invisible, to have no voice. Uncle Tadeo touched my hair and seemed to understand. Haruko was there, and Akiko, already mourning. I sense how they miss you and join them in sorrow. We are blasted by your leaving. Blown open. Apart. We are full of unspoken words, we, your family. Noise seems everywhere to occur, but none of it is your voice. Rest well, Mr Sakamoto, dear Mr Sakamoto. Rest preserved in that telephone, preserved a little longer, stretching syllables, sentences, across the planet, greeting me in Japanese, in your sure, gentle tone …'

Alice and Norah were lying with their heads beneath a fig tree. Their legs stretched out into the sunshine. The large leaves shifted sideways in the slight breeze, altering the shade, opening up jagged spaces of light, opening, closing. The sisters had feasted on figs and now were lying on their backs, talking.

‘Tell me about Mr Sakamoto,' Norah said.

And in the quietest of voices, Alice began.

Gail Jones is the author of two collections of short stories,
Fetish Lives
and
The House of Breathing
. Her first novel,
Black Mirror
, won the Nita B. Kibble Award and the Fiction Prize in the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards in 2003.

Her second novel,
Sixty Lights
, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2004, short-listed for the 2005 Miles Franklin Award, and won the 2005 Age Book of the Year Award for Fiction, and the Fiction and Premier's Prize in both the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards 2004 and the South Australian Festival Award for Literature in 2006.

Dreams of Speaking
was short-listed in 2006 for the Queensland Premier's Literary Award, and in 2007 for the Miles Franklin Award, the NSW Premier's Literary Award and the Nita B. Kibble Award. Gail's latest novel,
Sorry
, was published to great acclaim in 2007.

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