Dreams of Speaking (6 page)

‘There are no beginnings,' Alice said cautiously. ‘Only fragments. Only stories.'

She had kissed him at that moment. She needed his questions to prise her, to release her tight secrets. This is the gift of the lover: to permit disclosures.

 

When she was a very small child, about seven years old, Alice contracted scarlet fever and was confined to the isolation ward of the local hospital. The fear of contagion was not unlike the fear of the devil: imprecise, generalised, bent on marking out the contaminated by macabre tales, tinctures and noxious potions. Or so it seemed, in a simpler version, to a little girl with a pink woollen rabbit and a copy of
Grimm's Fairy Tales
, who was locked in a room with two boys, both likewise infected and untouchable. Ric and James were each two years older than Alice and had already formed a bond of friendship by the time she was admitted. In the daytime they ignored her, at night she heard them whispering in the dark together. But then Ric left, after only a few days, and James was obliged to notice and befriend Alice, if only to alleviate the boredom of their implacably extended days.

The children were allowed no physical contact. Alice's parents and Norah visited, but they stood behind a glass partition, and waved and mouthed messages. Norah held a comic book against the glass, and her mother dangled a brown paper bag of mandarins. James's parents and two brothers also stood in dumb-show, staying only five minutes, clearly unsure how to prolong an expression of love, based on the rigorous spectacle of mime. They too left comic books and a bag of mandarins. James and Alice decided they must have received exact instructions.

 

For hour on hour it was just the two of them. Since they were forbidden to leave their beds, they at first called to each
other across the room, exchanging stories, fears, dreams, intimate confessions. Later they begin to share each other's bed, timing their transgression precisely – just after the morning nurse with the face mask took their temperatures and they knew no one would come for another few hours; and then between their lunch and dinner. They lay close together, talking quietly. Alice read to James from her
Grimm's Fairy Tales
; he shared with her his
How Does it Work?
and
Great Railways of the World
. In their exile the children developed a persuasive, jointly idiosyncratic world, a combination of fabulous transformations, evil characters and life enhanced by modern engineering, by rocket-ships, walkie-talkies, interplanetary transporters. James also had a repertoire of fictitious-sounding sayings – ‘Righto! We'll blow them to billyo! Chins up, jolly good chaps!' – which Alice enjoyed but could not understand. Their confabulations were intricate, a mesh of energies, each child competing with the other to add some new embellishment.

Apart from his wondrous books, James also owned a small transistor radio, sheathed in stippled orange plastic. So in between excursions to electrical utopias populated by heroes and villains and princesses disguised as milkmaids, they listened to the Top Forty, and under the blankets, they sang along. When they investigated how the radio worked, it seemed that, like other technologies, it captured the invisible currents of the air. Voices caught roiling sound waves, surfed into the tightly coiled wires of plastic boxes, spun in sparky rings, then emanated gloriously as hits. Origins, properties, functions, destinations: the universe had within it all these regions of vigorous activity, all these gymnastical stretchings and curvings and changings of form. Alice had seen on television how girls no larger than she flew into aerial contortions and abnormal design; it seemed to her impeccable child-logic
that there must be ways, or devices, by which all of us might find this hidden motion and elastic space, this land of mutable forces, of turbulent speed, of sheer mechanical wonder.

James was less convinced. ‘You need to know things,' he said. ‘This is not for everyone. Only
special
people', he explained, ‘see the inside of things.'

One day a nurse came by unexpectedly and found James and Alice in bed together. With a violence that was rapid, fierce and entirely instinctual, she seized Alice by the elbow, yanked her from the bed, and with a wide sudden swing slapped the left side of her face. Alice felt a quake within her skull and a hand-sized pain. She fell to the floor, hurt, but was too stunned to cry.

‘Don't you ever,' the nurse said tensely, ‘don't you
ever
use the same bed again.'

She had grey hair under her cap, fashioned in tight, unnatural curls. She wore an upside-down watch and a badge that said ‘BARKER'.

James looked pale with fear. He was stammering an explanation: ‘We were only …'

But the nurse was not listening. She lifted Alice in a rough bear hug and forcibly dumped her on her own bed.

When Alice developed a swollen black eye and a purple bruise across her cheek, the explanation was that she had awoken at night, was confused, had tangled in her sheets, and fallen from her bed. Norah looked upset behind the glass. Her oval face was on the verge of tearful collapse and Alice saw her touch her own cheek in a kind of signal of compassion. She would tell her, one day, about BARKER, about the radio. It would be a secret they could share.

Alice and James returned to calling across the room. They shouted paragraphs of story and details from
How Does it Work
?. When Alice complained she could not quite hear the radio,
James sent it sailing towards her, over the three empty beds between them, as a kind of high-flying gift. But the radio fell short of its target and crashed just below Alice's bed. She saw its plastic case split open into two neat halves, and its coppery and silvery components, broken and revealed. At this point both children began to cry. In the cohesion of their little world, in reverence for the orange plastic box that was their symbol of modern magic, they heartily wailed. No grey-haired nurse came running to strike or reprove them. So they each made the most of their intelligent woe, finding in their tears an approximate expression of all that their illness, and their closeness, and their mean separation, had meant.

In the supermarket, at the checkout, a north African woman of extraordinary beauty was passing Alice's groceries across the scanning machine. She appeared bored and exhausted and did not look at her customers. Alice had had this job once, as a student, part time. She understood why a woman might wish to serve in this way, immured, aloof, offering no courtesy. When she announced the charge and accepted the money, she still did not look up; something burdensome weighed on her, something more than just tiredness. Numbers appeared and disappeared in small rectangular frames, black as death. The cash register slid open, sighed and retreated.

In the dark Alice walked quickly, thinking once more of Stephen. She was thinking of the ways in which desire converts to torment, and of the little boy with a bicycle and a hollow heart and a deep bafflement about life, who looked into the distance and saw his father standing on a whale. She was thinking too, thinking again, about the whale-space within which she and Norah had stood. It was like being in a body made of wind; it was englobed, but unbounded; it was strewn
with light. They had laughed together. The day had been sunny and bright. Their enmity had dropped away and they had felt the blessedness of standing in bones.

Untechnical things. A woman's sadness. A boy's revelation. Two sisters compelled by nothing more than what the ocean had cast up and left behind.

Of all the day-to-day systems that categorise and contain, the most remorseless and omnipresent is the commercial bar code. Too much raw data circulates among us. There is a maddening variety to the products of our age. So in 1952, two graduate students from the Drexel Institute, in Philadelphia, USA, invented the bar code. It had the beauty of a hieroglyph and the forensic power of a Holmes, and it ordered everlastingly the consumerist chaos. As products swept across red scanners, there was the triumphal electronic
ping
of a new world order. A new language of capital. A new abacus of money-making. Logical scrutability. The black column of thin lines and minuscule numbers allowed no mystification. The tally of objects was a staunch and irrepressible thing.

Unsurprisingly, the first product to be given a bar code was chewing gum: consumption with no real purpose, repetition with no end. Anti-food. Mere product. Chewable America.

Snow fell lightly, in the barest of flurries. In arabesques, in spirals, in small winding motions. The sky was paper white. Alice opened her mouth and caught snowflakes on her tongue as they passed. There was this insubstantiality to the natural things in the world, of which snow was exemplary. There were sparrows, bare trees. A starkness to things urban. European
winter was so unlike an Australian winter. Here greyness pervaded and a low-ceilinged sky. Stone buildings consolidated the monotonal chill.

As she wrote each day about the objects of modern life, those things wired, lit, automatic and swift, Alice began also to be overcome by memory and dream. Anomalous thoughts occured unbidden, flashes of her past, incursions of primitive intuition. It was not that she wished not to care about such things, it was that, in this context, they were so unexpected. She felt riven, dissipated. In the fretted light of small cafés Alice could be seen scribbling away, a cup of coffee before her, trying to render the world in prose, trying to unlock with words the complicated insides of things, coiled and secret as any radio, flung long ago against authority in the isolation ward of a hospital.

Alice had begun thinking about her father. He had grown up in another age, before television, before astronauts, and had been apprenticed at the age of twelve to an electrician. He was a serious boy, very quiet and respectful, with a mass of black hair, black eyes and olive skin, so that throughout his life he would be variously mistaken as Italian, Aboriginal, Arabic or just plain foreign. His name suited him:
Frederick Black
. It was the name of a man solid and self-assured.

Fred lived in a mining town and from the age of sixteen was employed underground. In the gold mines electricians were necessarily esteemed; the world of perpetual dark, treacherous, base, needed labour that enabled men to conquer the earth. There was the heaving of dirt, the creation of tunnels and the blasting-away of rock, but there was also illumination, strings of yellow bulbs and lamps on hard hats. There were electric-powered machines that assisted muscles and saved men's lives. Fred was a genius with wires, the other blokes said. He worked his trade honourably and with unassuming diligence. He was
a good electrician. Blackie, they called him. Blackie the lights man.

After a cave-in at the mine, in which seven miners were entombed, Fred decided to quit. He had been in the rescue party, trailing caged lamps attached to noisy generators, showing others the way, finding crevices, weak spots, finally scrabbling with his bare hands in the piles of fallen rocks, trying to offer breath, trying to break through. He swore that he heard a human voice, a moan, perhaps, sifting like a secret through the dusty darkness, and the other men, persuaded, dug on their knees beside him. But when at last they recovered the bodies, not one man had survived. Fred moved the lamp over their suffocated faces. They were coated with crushed earth and had become effigies of men, clay and quartz. They did not look peaceful; they just looked
gone
. One man, Jacko, was Fred's close mate. The Jacko before him was curled, like a child asleep. He had rubble covering the length of his body and a layer of rough dirt on his face. It was clear that he had cried. There were encrustations of sand at the eyelashes and trails along the cheeks. Fred wiped his sweaty palms on the seat of his pants, as if cleaning away the deaths.