Dreams of Speaking (14 page)

‘Imagine,' she said, ‘bones as big as a house. Just there. Just for us. Shining on the sand.'

Pat insisted the girls stay in the beach hut as a punishment, but Fred gave in. He followed his two daughters, who seemed, unusually, to be in a state of truce, back along the beach, beyond the far cove, into the little bay where the skeleton rested.

It was – he knew it immediately – a beautiful thing. He could see the girls' footprints all around, and curving in the centre. They had played here; they had claimed it. It looked charmed, pure. Fred reached up high and wrested a spinal bone free. It was wing-shaped and porous-looking. The girls held one end of the shape and he the other, and with the object between them, this unburied treasure, they began the long, slow walk back, sharing the weight all together.

Within a few months of beginning university, Alice left home. It would be easier to be a university student, she told herself, away from her family. She shared a house with four others, two women and two men, and they lived in the disorganised, down-at-heal squalor that typically characterises student accommodation. Alice felt liberated, but she also felt lost. Unused to the social regimes of people her age, the turbulence
of parties and drinking sessions, the hours-long dope-smoking and the ponderousness it brought in its wake, she began to retreat to her room, turning once again inward. To be alone she spent whole days on the river, surfing in all weathers, when she should have been attending lectures. Eventually she used her scholarship money to rent an apartment on her own, a single room. It was a spell she entered, a sudden relief. She studied, had love affairs, played her own music. She came and went as she pleased, and answered to no one.

When Norah visited, Alice cooked her elaborate Indian meals and they talked together with a new and vigorous energy, as if each otherwise lived in solitary confinement. Norah was impatient to finish school and enter art college. She missed her sister. She asked her to phone more frequently. They talked deep into the night, lingering with pleasure over the restorative anecdote, the casual perception, the trailing conversation, wayward and fortuitous, that led to the genuine intersections and exchanges between them. Alice imagined their voices as silky ribbons, blown out of the window, across roads and roofs, to fly like a gauzy banner above the restless river.

Outside it was raining. The drains thundered and gurgled. The building opposite – offices, Alice supposed – had a slick and darkened appearance, more sombre now since Leo, and the police, and the leaving of flowers. The mini-memorial had disappeared, but Alice was not sure when, or by whom, it had been dismantled. One day she noticed it was no longer there.

‘There,' said Alice, pointing. ‘He was left in that doorway.'

Mr Sakamoto followed the line of her arm.

‘The students don't congregate here any more. They've found a new spot, further up the street. So I no longer see Gisele and Sylvain, Arlette and the others, except in glimpses, from a distance.'

‘They needed to move,' Mr Sakamoto said simply.

Alice wondered if she did. Every time she stepped outside she still thought: this is where Leo died. This is where a young man living in his headphones, in his own world of sound, was beaten to death in the early evening, with no one noticing. She imagined there was a kind of residue in the air, a trace of wickedness or defilement. She imagined she could smell blood.

Alice and Mr Sakamoto were sharing coffee in her studio. It was a new stage of friendship, a new form of trust. In the air sounded the soft syncopation of the rain, a sound tender and appropriate to the oblique quality of their feelings.

Mr Sakamoto looked relaxed and introspective.

‘I had a phone call today. From the past. From Clare.'

Alice could tell he had been waiting to announce this news.

‘Clare?'

‘The woman I told you about. In the bookshop. In Edinburgh.'

‘Ah, that Clare. How many years is it?'

‘Actually, I met her again only last year. I was back in Edinburgh, researching Bell. I was working in the Scottish National Library, reading, somewhat laboriously, the curious verses and philosophies of his grandfather, Alexander, and when I raised my face for a break she was standing before me. Apart from her grey hair she looked much the same – still slim and attractive, still slightly Japanese. She wore a maroon velvet jacket and a black woollen scarf, dangling loose, as if she had just come in from the cold outside. We were awkward with each other, unsure what to say. Clare sat in the seat opposite – I think she was sizing me up, wondering what she saw in me all those years ago – and then she suggested we go out for a drink. We talked about old times, our children – she has two, and four grandchildren – she spoke of the
death of her husband. I said a little about Mie, not very much, and bragged at length about Akiko and Haruko. We exchanged addresses and telephone numbers, and there was one of those wistful, hesitant moments, just as we parted. I leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek; she responded with an embrace.'

Mr Sakamoto paused.

‘That night I dreamed about Mie, and woke myself grieving. I hadn't dreamed about her for years, not since her death. It was a perplexing thing. Like being hauled backwards. This is one thing I should have learned by now: that grief never finishes … Anyway, Clare rang me early this morning. She must have phoned Haruko – one of the numbers on my card – she had given her the telephone number of my hotel.'

‘What did Clare want?'

‘It was one of those long-distance calls where the caller speaks too loudly, and cannot settle easily into conversation. In any case, she said she was about to begin travelling and wanted to meet. She said she knew I wouldn't be in Japan, but was surprised to find me so close – as it were – just across the channel. She'll be here next week.'

Alice was waiting, not sure what Mr Sakamoto wanted her to say. They both listened to the rain, which seemed to be easing. Rain is also unmodern, Alice was thinking, so messy, importunate.

‘I was going to ask,' he went on, ‘if you'd have dinner with us. It would make it easier, I think. Less potentially romantic …'

‘Ah, so you're scared of her?'

‘Yes. Well, no. I just don't want her to get the wrong idea …'

Mr Sakomoto smiled. He looked younger, not dressed in his suit and tie.

Alice was pleased he had asked for her protection. It was as if they were old friends, as if what lay between them was known, secure. The compact of familiarity, its reassurance.

‘I'd be delighted,' Alice responded.

Their talk drifted to topics of books and literature. Mr Sakamoto said that reading had saved his life. Not mathematics. Not money. Not travel. Reading. At a time, he said, when he felt blasted by images, words had anchored him, secured him, stopped his free-falling plunge into nowhere.

Alice bent her head. Mr Sakamoto's voice was calm and serious. Outside the rain had ceased. The world was shining wet. They would step out together, walk the paved, puddled region along the river, then part, each to their own projects, each back to the silent production of words.

Alice realised that she and her mother had never spoken. They had talked, of course, traded pragmatic conversation and even pleasurable repartee, but there was no occasion on which they had sat down, woman to woman, and encountered each other in the full density of their fraught relationship. Pat was ashamed of Alice, but Alice was not sure why. There was a fissure, a chasm, that neither could cross. What Alice knew of her mother she had learned from her grandmother, Vera, and from conjecture based on the slightly brown snaps in the family photograph album. Pat had suffered four miscarriages before Alice arrived. There had been this protracted and repeated emptying out, this negative awareness of the body, this expectation of disaster. Vera said that at first Pat had been depressed, but by the fourth pregnancy was in a state of numb resignation. She said nothing of Alice's birth, or any subsequent rejoicing. Perhaps, Alice reasoned, Pat was by then less interested in babies,
cautious and pessimistic. In photographs of Alice's babyhood she was depicted, disproportionately, in her father's arms; Pat was the photographer, it seemed. Or she had given over the child, set up a substitute parent, so that any new loss would not destroy her.

Before her marriage Pat worked in a pharmacy store. She had left school at fifteen to support her widowed mother, and found a position almost immediately at Drakes, in Burt Street. Vera insisted she had tried to persuade her daughter to stay at school – ‘a real bright spark, real brainy, your mum, could've done anything'. But Pat was worried about her mother's inadequate pension and determined to help. She had two younger brothers, Harry and Ted, and both stayed on and completed their schooling.

Work in the pharmacy suited her. There was the vaguely glamorous aspect to selling cosmetics, which Pat, for whom cinema was a pre-eminent pleasure, adored, and she also learned the rudiments of organic chemistry from her employer, Mr Drake. So she was able to try lipstick samples – she settled on ‘Sunset Rose', her life-long choice – but also to study, in an
ad hoc
way, the world of chemical combinations and medicinal advice. She was proud of her work; she felt her knowledge a genuine achievement. Miners' wives invariably wanted something for coughs, something to counter the wretched dissolution of their husbands' lungs, but even Pat knew that there were conditions a simple prescription could not alleviate. She watched distraught women leave, clutching their brown paper bags. The new drills in the mine were popularly called ‘widow makers': they sent tiny blades and splinters of quartz straight into the throat. The unions were agitating; there had never been so much illness.

By the time Pat met Fred she was desperate for romance.
Hollywood had given her an expectation of dramatic interventions and the irresistible swerving of life into the arms of a strong man. She dreamed of slippery satin dresses and kisses accompanied by music. At the Firemen's Ball Fred was notable for his quiet self-composure. He was not nervously searching the room for a partner, nor did he seem lonely or lacking in confidence. He was also tall, dark and handsome. She heard a man's voice address him with affection as Blackie. When he walked towards her and asked her to dance, she had already decided: yes, he's the one.

They both wanted children. But trying became a series of tragic disappointments and after ten years it seemed almost impossible. Pat gazed at other women's children and went home to weep. Then there were two babies, in just two years. Alice and Norah were both feisty girls, who fought from the beginning, even as infants. Pat laboured over making them matching frilly outfits and dainty accessories, as if this would somehow guarantee a likeness or accord, but the girls shamed her by their shouting matches and bad behaviour. Alice was mostly to blame, being the oldest. Alice shattered Pat's image of herself as the mother of pretty, presentable daughters. Alice was wayward and wilful. She pinched Norah at every opportunity and even wanted to take her name.