by Gail Jones
3
The mode of yesterday, Alice wrote, is the photographic image. It is always time-bound but out-of-time, always anachronistic. In its fidelity to moments, to split-second slices, it carries the gravity of testimony and the lightness of chance. This paradox endears us: this is its clever intercession.
The photograph of a child, laughing, pushing her sister on a swing in a scene of shared play, will carry for both, into adulthood, the bright trace of their pasts. They may not remember the moment, but it will represent them decisively, and they will see themselves thus. There was such a moment, such a scooping of space, even if now it lies encrypted in all that has happened since, in all the boisterous life that rushed afterwards to capture and engulf them.
The photograph of an astronaut pretends to exist in the future. Initially, its dazzling foreignness, its supernatural shadows, made the astronaut a figure beyond time itself. Now we know otherwise. Now this double-sized man, this cumbrous puppet, is almost antique. He is so much of his era that, no less than a uniformed Prussian soldier, or Queen Victoria, or the hippie Beatles, he is lodged so directly in past time that no amount of gadgetry unfixes him, or propels him forward.
The photograph of catastrophe halts us. Or it ought to. If there is a necessity to this technology, it is to abet troubled remembering and to drive us to other futures. Shadows infiltrate as surely as light. Do I need to describe these images? They are bleak and indelible. They are detonations. We carry them like tattoos that say ‘twentieth century’.
The photograph of someone one loves, as a child: folded time. The present is given adorable density; in the face of the beloved rests an earlier face. A boy, leaning cheekily, wearing a beret. Lanky, unpredictable, verging into the tall man who will step forward to embrace you. A girl with freckles and uncontrollable hair. Standing in full sunlight on a white sandy beach, awaiting with eyes open an adult embrace.
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.
Dear Norah,
There are days here when I truly long for your company. The studio is perfectly adequate, but I find myself alone, talking out loud, and listening to the scraps of late-night television that filter unintelligibly through the ceiling and the walls.
My writing is not going well. I think my project folly and am struck every day by the profundity of orders of experience and sensation that are unconnected to my vainglorious jottings.
Stephen is still unaccepting of my distance, and this has led him into misery and me into guilt. It was a mistake, seeing him. Today was only the second day for a long time that he has not stood outside my building – perhaps this is a sign he has given up hope, or come to his senses. I was beginning to dread each time I saw him beneath my window, but now, to be honest, I dread not seeing him, fearing he might have done harm to himself.
Recently I recalled something that I wonder if you too remember. We were quite small – I would have been nine, you would have been seven, and we were on holiday at the beach, in that rugged area near Smith’s Point. We must have wandered off together, because we came across a whale skeleton, bleached and partially intact, high up, past the watermark. It was a beautiful thing – sculptural and strange, the ribcage a kind of chamber, the dorsal bones still interlocking with fragments of cartilage, all neatly descending in size, all ivory and unblemished. We stepped inside the belly of the beast, as it were, this blasted, open, monumental space, and were happy together. We were sharing our discovery. Two little girls in floral sundresses and floppy cloth hats. Later we found Dad and with his help laboriously carried one of the backbones up the beach, up through the sand-hills, and back to our hut. I remember it sitting there, outside the hut, with our bathers and goggles, a pure thing, like a stone, a pure deep-water thing. I don’t know what became of it. Perhaps we just left it there, where it lay. Do you remember, Norah? Do you know what became of the whale bone?
Do send me news of the children. I have little to report here – I’m leading a somewhat cloistered life – partly in recoil, I think, from Stephen’s behaviour – which has disturbed me more than I care to admit – and partly to find again the quiet sequestration that will enable me to write. And tell me about yourself, and Michael, and how you are both getting on. Your letters are important to me, even though I am a poor correspondent.
My love, as always,
Alice
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, deceler
ating 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?’
‘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 omn
ipresent 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.
