Dreams of Speaking
Read Dreams of Speaking Online
Authors: Gail Jones
A brilliant and moving novel about displacement and belonging by the award-winning author of
Sixty Lights
.
Alice is entranced by the aesthetics of technology and, in every aeroplane flight, every Xerox machine, every neon sign, sees the poetry of modernity. Mr Sakamoto, a survivor of the atomic bomb, is an expert on Alexander Graham Bell. Like Alice, he is culturally and geographically displaced. The pair forge an unlikely friendship as Mr Sakamoto regales Alice with stories of twentieth-century invention. His own knowledge begins to inform her writing, and these two solitary beings become a mutual support for each other a long way from home.
This novel from prize-winning author Gail Jones is distinguished in its honesty and intelligence. From the boundlessness of space walking to the frustrating constrictions of one person's daily existence,
Dreams of Speaking
paints with grace and skill the experience of needing to belong despite wanting to be alone.
âLet us sculpt in hopeless silence all our dreams of speaking'
Fernando Pessoa,
The Book of Disquiet
It felt like space walking.
It felt like a suspension of the rarest kind, and she saw herself a floaty astronaut, strung in airless dark, supernatural, abstract, buoyed on who-knows-what force to dangle heroically meaningless. There would be a silver visor reflecting everything, and she would be a shape, just a shape, in what had seemed to her always a sorrowful enterprise. Anything in slow motion, she decided, was intrinsically sorrowful. Even as a child she knew this. Even as a child she saw on television how sadly astronauts moved, smitten by world-historical symbolism and the gaze of too many invisible cameras. Their arms were heavy prongs and their heads ridiculous. Their outsized suits were cartoonish and strange. The engineered umbilicus was truly poignant. Yet they moved â she knew it â incomparably. She was seven when she began to see them in daydreams. They belonged to moments of dismay and quiet estrangement. Alone in their silent worlds. Completely alone.
Alice moved to the bedroom window and stood shivering in her pyjamas, watching the 3 a.m. world outside. From her first-floor apartment she surveyed a wedge of the street. It dozed in its own inky pool, awash with blue dark, dissolved into itself. Someone irresponsible had left a sprinkler running. There was a murmurous spray and tiny arcs of light.
The street was empty, the air was brittle and clear. Beyond sight, traffic moved in a black stream along an arterial road. How terrible to live there, Alice thought, where it is never still. To see car after car, to sense the relentlessness of machines. Night-shift workers perhaps, milkmen, the sleepless, the demented.
Alice looked at the sky and sniffed at the heavens. Night seemed to swallow her. It was true, then, her ancient, girlish understanding. Grief is like space walking. It is nothing terrestrial. Laws of gravity alter, and bodies tilt and float away.
She had grown up in a city full of light.
It was not a city anyone cared for â not even a city by most estimations â but it lay on the edge of Western Australia, complacent in its remoteness, implacably there, an entire desert between it and the distant cities of the east. On promotional films it was composed of aerial shots, which showed at their centre a vast shining river, nowadays full of yacht sails and windsurfers and ferries bearing tourists. On sunlit days the river refracted light everywhere: there was never a city so bleached into a mirage of itself. Alice loved the river and its special effects. All that was solid melting into air. The material assertion â built on mining money and pastoral seizure and colonialist pride â dispersed into bone-tinted visions and a paradoxical sense of deathless impermanency. Tycoons made their homes here, and migrants from Britain and South Africa. It was a refuge for white people who wished not to remember. It was safe, everyone said. It was a good place to raise children.
The city at the edge of the desert had no monuments or community. It was pragmatic, secular, dun-coloured, dull. So for Alice the river had been a spiritual compensation. She
cycled its edges, swam its jellyfish pools, she sat still, looking into its luminous distances, and found in the rippling dissolution a space of repose. When she was a teenager she learned at last to windsurf, and joined others who sped across the water in a flash of spray, bisecting small waves with decisive strokes. Catching the fickle wind, leaning her body into acrobatic balance, finding the velocity of so simple and swift a craft, made Alice feel euphoric. Sometimes she laughed as she rode the water. Sometimes the wind off the river was so strong and the air so alive she felt she was surfing into something elemental.
As an adult she rented an apartment by the river. It was not within view, but she knew it was there. A mere five-minute walk took her to its shore. At night, when she could not sleep, she was comforted by knowing that the water flowed nearby, dark with an oily blackness, silent, deep, dragging with river-tenderness a world of lost things, the silt of history and the plastic detritus of the present, night yearnings, dreams, drowned and buoyant possibilities, misty shapes that would resolve only in some future lens.
What was it Mr Sakamoto had said that day?
Everyone needs inside them an ocean or a river
.
Just before sunrise there was an explosion of birdsong. Wattle-eaters and magpies claimed the world. Alice could hear them call diagonally across the sky, their sounds a crisscrossing net that fell over the morning. She had made herself a coffee and was sitting like a child, knees drawn up protectively against her chest, staring at nothing in particular. She watched her book-filled room gather yellowish light. The spines of the books were a kind of reproach â a life lived too inwardly, too
much alone, too given over to perplexity and complication.
Must ring Norah, Alice thought.
On the table, against the wall, lay the pages of her manuscript, a book almost completed. She had written it in feverish excitement, contracted into purpose, fierce, engaged, absorbing the whole world, and now it seemed to her like so much litter, like something dead and unconnected. Perhaps all authors come to despise the words they trail behind them. Or perhaps this feeling was another consequence of her astronautical detachment. She wanted latency, silence. The stacked pages of the manuscript glowed faintly in the dawn. She must send them, or dispose of them. Those pages, her words.
When she had finished her coffee Alice threw her cup towards the sink and heard it smash noisily against the wall. An act of casual destruction, which she will now have to clear away. Refusing to consider the mess, Alice pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, padded down the stairs, and left the apartment building, neat as a thief.
Already the paths along the river were full of cyclists and joggers, heading with moral earnestness into the new day. The joggers looked grim and determined, as joggers invariably do; the cyclists were humped in speedy condescension. Alice turned west, with the sun behind her and a salty breeze from the Indian Ocean detectable in the air. Before her the river was flush with gold; it swelled like a live thing against the stone embankment. People moving in the distance wore a pelt of shine. The trees were aflame, the sky was stretched like cellophane. Yet none of this â how keenly Alice felt it â seemed to her beautiful. Even when dolphins appeared in the little bay, a family of four, curving in and out of the water with the fluent solemnity she had always admired, Alice was unmoved. A jogger, a young man, brushed her shoulder accidentally as he pounded past. In his streaming wake floated song lines from
his over-loud headphones. Something about becoming nothing. Something about wanting to be woken. She recognised the song: âWake Me Up Inside'.
Alice turned back into the light wishing it would scorch her.
âIt doesn't matter anyway,' Norah declared.
Alice had been trying to persuade her sister to exchange names.
âBut it does matter. It does.'
In her seventh year, the year, she understood later, of one's most radical perceptions, Alice realised that Norah was surely her own true name, and that her sister was an Alice. She deplored the fact that her name had a storybook precedent, that it sounded hard and fragile, like cold glass cracking, that it was girlish, with frills and an upstanding bow. Norah sounded like wind, like the breath of a mystery.
But her sister was stubborn and would not be persuaded. Alice pinched her, and knocked her down, and when the younger girl began to sob, stooped to comfort her, asserting her power once again.
With her wrong name she grew, as misnamed children will. Alice was the clever one, declared her parents; Norah was arty. The sisters competed in everything and were not companionable. In their humble iron and weatherboard house in the suburbs, they quarrelled and fought. Pat and Fred Black, their nice-enough parents, wondered what they had done wrong to produce such warring creatures, who scratched at each other's faces and destroyed each other's possessions. But in the adolescent years, when they gloomily expected an intensification of hostilities, the girls one day â miraculously â became firm friends. Alice and Norah looked into each other's faces, and found there no mirror, but a reassuring encounter. Their violent language
fell away; their animosity, sharp as acid, diluted and evaporated. It was one of those homecomings, like falling in love. It was a confirmation of the intimacies held within separate beings, waiting to be disinterred, waiting only to be recognised. The sisters began dressing alike and walked with linked arms. They kissed in the street, swapped notes and confidences. And when, at fifteen, Alice tried again to exchange names, Norah's adamant refusal won her respect. Under a high pergola of blooming wisteria â their father's pride and joy â they embraced and laughed.
âSo I'm stuck with it,' said Alice. âNo chance of a bribe?'
Norah hauled herself up, stood erect on the outdoor table, and announced in a loud voice: âI am Norah! For ever!'
Alice knew she would carry for the rest of her life this moment of reconciliation, this image of her sister's broad face, haloed by a ceiling of mauve flowers, defiant in the act of possessing her own name.
Norah almost fell when she descended too quickly. Alice caught her, toppling, and they were both bruised against their parents' ugly hard furniture. In the smattered space of blown petals they groaned, and then they laughed.