by Gail Jones
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.
‘Gone,’ he told his mother at the kitchen table, his trembling hands clasped around a cup of brown tea.
When at twenty he finally left the mine, Fred seemed older than other men of his age. He had about him a reserve, a tentative stillness. He wired houses, now, climbing high into roofs, threading coloured wires into long wall cavities, drilling plugs, making connections, practising the sorcery of light. Sometimes he stood on a roof just to feel the sun on his face, the intensity of daylight and the immeasurable arc of the sky.
Fred met his wife Pat at a Firemen’s Ball. The joke was that there was not a fireman to be seen, but that other workers came every year to flirt, get drunk and kick up their heels. She was a sandy-coloured woman, with large green eyes. She wore a corsage of wilted orange rosebuds set high on her chest. They were bound with silver paper and matched the tones of her dress. Fred saw in this woman some reflective aspect of his own sense of enclosure. He spat on his fingers and smoothed his hair before he approached her. When they danced he could smell her eau de Cologne, 4711; he leaned his face against her warm curls and wanted never to leave. He proposed that night. They were married three months later. The wedding photographs show a thin dark man, standing awkwardly in his hired suit, a little aslant, and a woman in a full satin gown, looking like a movie star. She had a netted veil and imitation pearls at her throat; she seemed double the groom’s size and absolutely vertical. It would be ten years before they would have a child, then a second daughter would arrive, two years on.
They moved to the city, believing, as working-class people often did, that within the city are arcane routes of enlargement and success, that there are enhancements of fortune and exemptions of failure, that work is more easily come by, that prospects for children are better. They bought a weatherboard house in a neglected inner suburb – its poor eastern edge, near the bend of the wide river – and settled there, content, amazed each anniversary to have found one another, an electrician and a shop assistant, folded together, fitting, neat as ironed pleats, matched as a plug within an electrical socket.
The stories of their parents that come to children carry an amber glow. Alice and Norah knew of the mining accident, and the dance, and had seen photographs of their parents’ married life before they were born. Each loved the history that inhered there, in those flat parcels of time. The oldest image they had seen was one of their grandmother holding their father as a baby. She had a plait wound around her head, and clutched him against her, a chubby bright fellow, his eyes alight, switched on. It was a definitive image of maternal pride. It conveyed in gesture alone the emotional sequence that enabled Fred Black, in the future, to hold his daughters likewise, entrusted, adored, buoyed against the drear weightiness and downwards tendency of life. Both Alice and Norah appeared in such photographs, their feet kicked up out of frothy dresses. If it was yesterday represented, it was also temporal defeat and mysterious futurity.
When Alice returned from the library it was still early, but already dark. She carried her plastic shopping bags, heavy with wine, cheese, vegetables, chocolate, and saw Stephen standing once again near the shadowy doorway, waiting. Alice felt a moment of panic, but Stephen raised his hand in a policeman’s stop sign, as if by some new understanding he detected her alarm, and wished at once to calm her.
‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to tell you I’m leaving. I’m going home to Australia.’
Alice stood still, unsure. Under the streetlamp Stephen appeared gaunt and pitiable. He rubbed his gloveless hands vigorously in the cold night air.
‘It’s true. I leave Thursday.’ Then he added: ‘You can come to the airport, if you want.’
Stephen’s manner had changed. He spoke without demand. He said he wanted to apologise. His face was a white screen, as if he wore a reflecting visor.
Alice invited Stephen into her studio. In the blinking-on of the light it looked barer and messier than usual, books and papers scattered, discarded clothes on the floor.
‘Have you eaten?’ she asked.
They shared a meal, that night, of vegetables and rice, Indian style. They drank wine and ate dark chocolate studded with hazelnuts. Stephen was polite and subordinate. He hung his hands between his legs and stared at them intently.
‘I’ve decided,’ he declared at last, ‘to spend a while with my mother. I think it’s time we really got to know one another.’ He took a large swallow of wine. ‘She’s ill,’ he added. ‘I heard just three days ago. It was like being pulled back to flesh after this …’ he paused, ‘this ontological insecurity.’
Here Stephen offered what Alice thought of as his philosopher’s smile.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said softly. ‘I haven’t been myself.’ He smiled again, more wanly. ‘He never beat her, you know. He was just a useless drunk. I think that she loved him. She told me once that he played the fiddle as a young man. She met him in a pub, playing the fiddle. Something happened to his shoulder, some kind of industrial accident, and when he couldn’t play, he drank instead. Sounds soppy, I know, but that’s how it was.
‘He coulda beena contenda,’ Stephen added, in a Bronx-sounding accent. ‘He coulda beena contenda in the fiddlin’ game.’
‘You’re drunk,’ said Alice.
‘No, just thinking about them. About her. How she managed living with him, and alone. She was thirty-four when she left. That day she wore a blue dress with a print of tiny white flowers. I have a glossy image, like one from an advertisement, of her dress rippling around her knees as she strides out the door. It’s just an image, of course; I didn’t see her leave. But it has stayed with me, vividly, all these years … We never really know our parents, do we?’
Alice dreamed that night that she saw her mother standing on a whale. Pat waved and looked happy. Her hair blew in a bronze flag. The sun was shining. Somewhere, far off, there was the faint sound of a fiddle.
&n
bsp; In the morning Alice considered her seizure of Stephen’s tale – unconscious as it was – and could make little sense of it all. In what happens between people, she reflected, there are these transmigrations, these episodes of smudged experience, in which the containers of memory and story become weak and permeable. Images leak like smoke. Emotions. Chance utterances. Rudimentary threads of being float outwards, and reattach. Fibres of some counterlife, that which we make through others, join like the ganglia of an unlocatable, interstitial intelligence. We confederate. We are many. We carry others’ stories. As she stood beneath the shower with her eyes closed, the dream was still unravelling. There was the ocean, or a river. There was shuddery wind. There was a sound like the roar of a fire, then her smiling mother disappeared. Alice opened her eyes, overcome by sexual longing. She watched rivulets of water slide over her breasts. She admired her own body and wanted it held. That she was so taken by this moment – ‘pulled back to flesh,’ Stephen had said – struck her as both surprising and oddly reasonable.
4
The night Stephen flew out, Alice accompanied him to Charles de Gaulle Airport. They sat together on the train, his bulky luggage shivering between them, finding little to say. Dark rain spattered the glass, sliding horizontally across the window. Mysterious signatures of neon flashed and departed. Hot pinks. Toxic greens. Pathological yellows. It was as if, outside the train, the world had converted to a system of electrical communication, wrought by arrangements of light answering light, in gaudy display. Alice imagined people with transmitters affixed to their heads, like miners’ helmets, beaming statements, questions, existential cries, their faces lacquered with bright responses.
Stephen was both distracted and preoccupied.
‘I’m resigned,’ he said. ‘I was only staying in Europe to see you, and ya broka ma heart.’ The accent was execrable. Stephen knew it.
He pulled his overcoat more tightly closed and rewound his scarf. ‘At least it will be warm,’ he said absent-mindedly.
Alice put her arm around him, but he shrugged her off. It was like being underwater, this dismal parting. Stephen spoke like one who had forgotten the purpose of words. He was remote, agitated, no doubt waiting for a sign, some kind of message or promise of reconnection. The atmosphere was moist and heavy, the light a subaqueous beige. The faces of the passengers to the airport were bleached and closed, like deep-sea creatures. Alice had noticed this before, this aquarium quality of public transport, the peculiar air, the dulling effects of suspension. There was a fatigue in such spaces, a quality of spiritual surrender. Someone might die here and go unnoticed. There might be a silent atrocity. A casual act of abuse.
When they reached the platform at the station Stephen wanted immediately to part.
‘Let’s leave it here,’ he said abruptly.
He took Alice’s hand and kissed her fingertips. Then he turned with his heavy luggage and did not pause or look back. Alice watched him step onto the escalator, like a man sucked upwards, a man who had entered a sinister wartime movie, something by Orson Welles, or Kubrick, perhaps, and disappear into the vast steel cavern of the terminal. She was left there, by herself, as if she was the spurned one. Totalitarian announcements from a loudspeaker commanded her attention. Crowds pushed past her, heading in the opposite direction. Alice looked at the lime-green electronic clock and the list of lit stations. Then she walked to the other side of the platform and boarded the train back to Paris. She had not even told him her dream, or said goodbye.
The history of mechanised hearts, wrote Mr Sakamoto, is a melancholy history. The heart is an organ not easily governed at the best of times. William Harvey, who was born in Kent, England in 1578 and studied at the universities of Cambridge and Padua, conducted enough dissections of human and animal corpses to refute the commonplace idea that food was converted into blood by the liver. He suggested instead – somewhat scandalously at the time – that blood was pumped from the heart throughout the body and then returned and recirculated. Harvey stood back from his gory investigative procedures, covered with the controversial stuff-of-life that had once passed inside a human heart, and knew for certain the function of valves and veins, and that his esteemed mentor, Hieronymus Fabricius, was wrong in supposing that arteries were the origin of the pulse. His theory was published in 1628.
The heart-pump identification did not change the minds of anyone but physicians. The rest of the world continued to attribute capacities and functions, generally bizarre and mostly wide-ranging. Half-truths and one-and-a-half-truths, garbled theories and romantic miscalculations – all contributed to swell the heart to abnormal size, pumped up by symbolism. By the nineteenth century, scientists began again to attend to its physical properties: two British physiologists, having recorded, with modest purpose, the electrical currents of a frog’s heart, decided immodestly to apply this technology to humans. The electrocardiogram, as it was named in 1887, recorded the heart’s phases, beats and delays. It noted atrial stimulation and ventricular depolarisation. It monitored, let us be frank, inner secrets. Tamed by electricity, it was only a matter of time before pacemakers, batteries and artificial hearts together intervened to heal and control. But this paradox persists: although the heart has succumbed to exposure and regulation, to electromechanical jiggery-pokery, it continues stubbornly to accrete nonmaterial accessories. Deforming meanings enlarge and empower it. It pounds on, as it were, at 100,000 beats a day, 100,000 lub Dub, lub Dub, lub Dub, lub Dub, but it is still a site of the greatest obscurity. Lost or found, sometimes torn or broken, sometimes wholly unknowable.
William Harvey, bless his soul, had the faith of the lover. He saw the chestnut-haired Elizabeth Browne, daughter of one of the Queen’s physicians, reading a book beneath a shady tree. Light fell on the side of her face and across the open pages of her book. He felt his heart leap within him, stir, and strike more boldly. When they married it was still thus. He was overexcited. His heart was crazy – boom-boom – struck by love.
With Stephen gone, Alice was calmer and better able to work. She spent her days inward-turned, reading and writing. The weather gradually became warmer, and with it her antipodean self seemed to revive: she took long walks across bridges and along the banks of the river; she visited and left churches, a tourist, merely; she eavesdropped on conversations and sat alone in blustery parks reading flapping English newspapers. She was entering a state of dematerialisation. The rowdy city that had first seemed so pressurising and insistent, now withdrew, faded, as if she too were faded and had no solid body to press upon. There was static in the air, a kind of quivering charge. Radio waves, microwaves, the Big Bang resounding. Alice felt she had been parachuted in, but not quite landed, so that she hung above the earth, an inflated dome shadowing her, recording and surveying with cunning intent. Below, the world of children, lapdogs, men having arguments, roller skaters, wanderers and lovers on Pont Neuf, continued with its own intrinsic purpose and animation. Camus had said in his Carnets that the lives of others appear always, from the outside, to have a completion our own dismally lacks. Only when we understand this as a projection – that other lives, too, are unclosed and contingent – do we approach maturity. Alice felt immature. She felt that she was a spy in the cold.
One day Alice fell asleep during an afternoon organ concert at Notre-Dame, and woke from the remnants of an erotic dream, spliced and impersonal as pornography. The friction of thighs, a lubricious kiss, insertions, retractions, the spill of energy. Her own participation, her own complicity. A trail of words drifted back: spiritualisation, secularisation, sexualisation. Something shifted outside, a single cloud perhaps, and sunlight began streaming through the western rose window, beginning as white, then dispersing into colours. People sitting in the pews were all of a sudden spotted: pink, blue, yellow and green. Their faces bore a sheen and they looked blessed, distinguished. It was an ordinary phenomenon that, in this heightened space and contrived luminosity, carried a sense of election, of privileged moments.
/> Alice watched as people in the cathedral began to notice the special effect, and then to exclaim and raise their voices. Cameras of all shapes and sizes appeared from nowhere. Within seconds everyone sitting in the section beneath the window light seemed to be photographing, or being photographed. The stained-glass colours dispersed in a hundred white flashes, evacuated by technology, destroyed by tiny machines. A prism reversed. ‘Smile!’ Alice heard beside her, and an over-large American family of four lined up to be snapshot.
Only later, when she was slowly walking home, feeling vaguely depressed, did Alice wonder if her face too had been coloured, if she had been a yellow or a blue, tinted as if by moonlight, or if, for a fleeting instant, she had been a rose.
‘Like a cradle, gently rocking.’ Where was that line from?
Alice was returning from a few days’ break in Chartres, having submitted to her inexplicable fascination for cathedrals. The train rocked into the night, its passengers embraced in a maternal rhythm. Alice had been drowsily watching her own ghost on the surface of the window, seized by the obscure despondency of trains, when she heard music from somewhere, possibly a transistor radio. John Lennon’s mournful voice, posthumous and unearthly, floated towards her, down the full length of the carriage:
