Dreams of Speaking (5 page)

‘The work. The grant. They offered me the use of a studio.'

His distress was like clothing: it enveloped him, it altered his shape.

‘Can we see each other sometimes?'

‘Of course,' said Alice. ‘Sometimes.'

‘Jesus,' he repeated.

There was nothing Alice could do to alleviate his pain. She would not return to him, even though they were now in the same city, the ‘city of romance', the city encrusted – more than the entire continent of Australia – with symbols, clichés.

‘Let me show you,' she said, changing the subject, ‘what I found in a toyshop. Like objects from the ruins of a lost civilisation.'

She unwrapped the doll and the cat and displayed them on
the table. In the light of the café they had a burnished, pre-historical glow. She touched them carefully, as if they had survived demolition or been retrieved, a humane fragment, from post-war rubble.

‘Yes,' said Stephen, relenting. ‘Yes, they're charming.'

They ordered second coffees and began to talk more freely. Outside the street was becoming crowded. A tour group flowed by, following a furled umbrella. Each tourist bore a stick-on name tag in the shape of the Eiffel Tower.

Alice and Stephen walked from the café together, passing in front of the Hôtel de Ville. Children were skating on an outdoor ice rink, moving in long, elliptical glides. They inscribed the paths of planets; they constituted a tiny orrery. There was a sparkle to things, an astronomical light. Tourists took photographs with digital cameras and mobile telephones held out before them, like pilgrim offerings.

‘I remember', said Stephen, ‘sitting on the bank of the river with a book, watching you windsurf. You were unbelievably fast. I looked away for one minute, and you were gone. It was as if you'd been snatched by an invisible force.'

‘I was,' said Alice lightly. ‘I was snatched by the wind.'

The tulips nodded in the jam jar that was their vase.

Strange, how many flowers seemed to have heads. One or two had begun drooping in a melancholy way, bent by time, as people are, and the others stayed upright, upholding their role as sentinels of desire. Alice was pleased to have been given flowers; they were delicately self-sufficient, an edification.

But she dreamed, that second night, that they burst into flames like match-heads, that they materialised as a kind of incendiary device, and began to light first her notebooks and
then the table, in a blazing explosion. The fire climbed the curtains of the studio with instant ease and then slid along the floor, liquid as a river. Paint blistered, light bulbs popped, smoke rolled along the ceiling. When the fire at last reached her bed, Alice woke up, her heart banging in her chest. Her skin was aflame in the icy air.

The telephone is our rapturous disembodiment. We breathe our selves, like lovers, into its tiny receptacle, and glide out the other end, mere voice, mere function. Wires, currents, satellites, electrical systems: these are the hardware we extend ourselves into, spaced out, underground, alive in the trembling skeins that arch across nations.

Countless conversations are happening at once. Transecting the sky, like lines of flight, like the trajectories of ancient deities borne by eagles or dragons, sentences, words, syllables, sighs – all fly into airy enunciation, becoming messages, becoming text.

The cradle, the handset, the curly extendable wire.

Voices are more lovable on the telephone. Things are said, promises exchanged, that could not bear the weight of incarnation. Voices are also more repulsive, and more distinctly other. One's mother is a monster, one's partner a stranger. Who is to know what impersonations or depersonations are possible? Or what whispered honesties? What mumbled truths?

The dark space of technology between mouths is a space of pure wind; it is a wind that snatches presences, an erosion, a loss.

Alice entered the Métro at Concorde and found in the swaying train a ragged musician playing a gypsy violin. He could have been from another century, so metonymic was his face, so Gaulish, so tough. However, he played not the classics, but
selections from the Beatles. Uninterested passengers looked away, worried in advance about the moment he would proffer his hat for coins. Then, after the Louvre station, he began playing ‘Yesterday'. A thin shabby man stood up from his seat and in European-accented English was all at once singing along. His voice was so authentically plaintive, his manner so piteous, that Alice was overcome by an absurd wish to embrace him and take his head in her lap. The lyrics of ‘Yesterday' struck Alice as banal, yet she heard herself humming.

The man was flushed, possibly drunk. He was unsteady on his feet. He rocked with the train, rocked in solitude. Passengers averted their gazes. This man was a violation of good form.

Perhaps it was the mood of the carriage – that shadowy somnolence – perhaps the sombre thin man performing his sadness in humiliation or protest, perhaps simply the adhesive quality of tunes that meet one at moments of vulnerability, all those sticky lyrics that travel around cities, like a web, like a net, like a captivating chain, but Alice found herself humming the song for the next few days.

She had never thought the words amounted to anything more than a tricksy slogan, but now considered, against modernity, the force of
yesterday
, and was stricken with obscure doubt about her project. She pounded the streets, repeating ‘Yesterday'.

Mr Sakamoto would later nominate this his favourite Beatles song.

‘It combines the simplest of rhymes', he said, ‘with the simplest anguish – a man abandoned by his lover – and constructs it all as a spectre of lost time.'

‘You're kidding,' Alice had responded.

‘Not at all. The idea, think of it, that yesterday might come
suddenly
. Time itself, split open by abandonment.'

Mr Sakamoto had smiled, as he often did upon delivering
his stern pronouncements, so that Alice was unsure whether he was joking or serious.

For now, she was wondering, rather amateurishly, about time and modernity. Wondering how to include it in what she was writing.

And she was haunted by the thin man singing on the train. A man as alone, she could not help thinking, as a drifting astronaut, hauled backwards through space, receding into nothingness, becoming swallowed up, eventually, by airless dark.

Stephen appeared at the door. He held a bottle of red wine.

‘Have a drink with me,' he pleaded.

So she let him in, and they talked, mostly in blurry reminiscences. When the wine was finished, he leaned over and kissed her, and then again, more fulsomely, so that she responded and clasped him. They undressed with haste, against the cold night air, and fell into each other's bodies as into recovered childhood, unselfconscious, effusive, in the forgetful elation of the moment. Stephen moaned against her neck, full of sadness, full of return. He climaxed with a little cry, Alice, much louder.

When they rolled apart, still breathing with the pace of arousal and activity, Alice said, much too soon: ‘This is the last time.'

‘I know,' Stephen said. ‘You didn't have to say it.'

And then they moved into the easier communion of sleep, deep, companionable, timeless sleep, pressed into each other tightly, on the single bed. At some point Alice awoke, felt Stephen against her body, and heard the micro-sounds that only a lover knows, the quakes of breath and the heaving emissions of dreams, the signals of night-life unfolding and bodily processes. Then she heard through the wall a muffled
television in the apartment next door. It sounded like alien communication from Mars. Exclamatory voice fragments, music, percussive notations, all commingled and garbled, unrecognisably weird. These presences swam in the room, insinuated, and stayed all night.

Stephen once showed Alice a remarkable photograph. It was an image of his father – an official picture of some kind – standing on a whale. When he was a child, he said, his father had worked at the whaling station, slicing into the huge beasts with the blades of giants.

‘I hated my father,' said Stephen blankly. ‘He was a drunkard, and stank of beer, and would pass out in the kitchen on the linoleum floor. My mother and I would drag him across the diamond shapes – red and black diamonds, I can never forget them – to the living room to heave him onto the sofa. He seemed filthy. Despicable. He dribbled onto his shirt.

‘We never got on. My father found my bookishness incomprehensible, but bragged about me to his mates. Egghead, he called me. I was embarrassed, but I was also desperate for his
approval. I remember smiling pathetically as I recited the entire periodic table of elements to a group of blokes sitting around in a pub. There was a round of applause, and I bowed, like a concert pianist. My father clapped loudest, and I was proud, and appalled. When he was working at the whaling station, he always stank of blood and raw meat. My mother endured for a while, then suddenly, like that, she just up and left. Just disappeared, leaving me with her sister's address and a brief note of apology. So I was left alone with this dreadful man to whom I had nothing to say. One day, for some reason, I rode my bike out to see him at the whaling station. I had never been there before. The stench hit you from almost a mile away – it was disgusting – viscera, slime, boiled-down flesh. When I approached, I saw the carcass of a whale in mid-slaughter. There were sluice trails for the blood and great saws carving the flesh. Everything looked wet, internal. It seemed to me then the most compelling sight – such a creature, so huge, so complex in its dismemberment. There was a man standing on the very top of the whale, waving. It was my father. I immediately waved back. For some reason I felt a great surge of love. My father, atop a whale. Like a myth. Like a god. After he was killed in the accident one of his workmates gave me this photograph. It brings back that moment. The only moment in my life I can ever remember loving him.'

Alice was thinking of Stephen's story as she walked home with her groceries. He had taken to waiting outside her apartment building, seeking to meet her at all times of the day and night. She had imagined their lovemaking was a tender goodbye, but it had unhinged him, somewhat, so that he seemed always to be waiting below the window, without purpose, desultory,
standing in the freezing air with his hands in his pockets, shuffling from foot to foot.

‘This is harassment,' Alice said, when he pinned her against the wall outside her doorway.

‘I just want to talk,' Stephen responded.

‘You don't. You want more.'

‘Yes, I want more.'

‘Leave me alone, Stephen.'

She wondered if she sounded mean. With his face so close, she could tell that he was drinking early in the day. His eyes were red-rimmed. He seemed aged and dishevelled.

‘Fuck you.'

‘Please,' Alice said quietly. ‘I don't want to have to fear you.'

At this, Stephen backed away. He looked down at his feet. His hands were shaking. ‘Jesus,' he said.

Alice watched him turn, walk past the school and around the corner. She unlocked her door, then quickly locked it from the inside, her heart pounding as if she had just embraced a lover. Outside an ambulance sped past, pulling its Doppler effect siren behind it. A reminder of how things separated: object and sound.

In the middle of the night she heard it again – the sound of the river. Then she listened carefully and once more found that she was mistaken. What she heard this time was the material commotion of the city: sirens, wheels, decelerating buses, footsteps, calls, mobile phones. There was the squeal of an almost-collision and a cry of abuse. There was a plane overhead, dragging decibels in its wake. Vehicles of every kind. The snarl of a motorbike. The rumble of garbage trucks with their brute growling innards, the roll and clack-clack of a late-night skateboard. All this activity in the air, this routine distortion. All this noisy encasement and mobilised intention. Alice wanted silence. She wanted the nullity of deep space. In her bed in Paris, she experienced a twinge of homesickness. Not the longing for a place, so much, as for a space into which her self could be poured, without erasure.

‘So when did it begin?' Stephen had once asked her. ‘This unfeminine interest in machines, in motion, in electrical inventions?'