by Gail Jones
At their bistro it was a quiet time. Most of the diners had left, and afternoon satiety and lassitude was settling in. In restaurants this was marked by an orange quality to the light and an awareness of the inert and slightly smothering atmosphere of accumulated food scents. The last customers leaned back in their chairs, smoking and finishing wine. Mr Sakamoto excused himself, left the table and approached the taller and older of the two waiters, pausing before him to offer a bow. Alice heard him speak in a low and confidential tone, his voice sounding rather like that of a counsellor. His French was accented, lucid and grammatically perfect.
The waiter tilted his head and listened, then a conversation began. Alice could not hear what they were saying, but saw the fierce interest of the other waiter, who pretended to polish glasses. At length the men shook hands and Mr Sakamoto turned and walked over to the younger waiter. Again, he bowed, then spoke politely and in a low respectful tone. Again, a conversation started, their heads inclined. At one point Alice heard what sounded like an exclamation of dismay, but mostly the talk was quiet and even in tone.
After ten minutes or so Mr Sakamoto returned to the table, and behind him the waiters moved together, and then embraced. It was an allegory of rapprochement, a simple performance, a silent victory.
‘Lovers,’ Mr Sakamoto said. ‘I guessed it from the beginning. A ridiculous minor disagreement that had grown large and monstrous. They listen to me because they see me as an inscrutable foreigner, who doesn’t understand the rules of social restraint. It enables me to say things. To intervene. So much can be achieved just by naming, and by asking the right questions. Do you love him? Is this worth it? They ask: what business is it of yours? None at all, I say. I am simply a stranger, passing through, who notices all this unnecessary unhappiness …’
Mr Sakamoto had already paid the bill, so he and Alice rose and left the bistro discreetly. They did not look back. It would have seemed intrusive, even triumphal, in the circumstances.
9
When Alice was a child she thought often about astronauts. She had seen images on television of the moon landing and the space walks, and found these endlessly fascinating. Astronauts were like another species, semihuman, given to slow-motion movement and weightless contingency. They were bluish, denatured, radically alone. She watched their bouncing movements on the moon and the pretend game of golf, the moon buggy, hurtling along, and the planting of a flag, and all these seemed to her a kind of phoney theatrics, designed to disguise the essential melancholy of their existence. The screened face Alice found especially sad: it was as if encasement in a helmet was certain erasure. It was almost scary – a visible emptiness, a shiny black cavity where the face should have been. A phantom might reside there, a technical spook. At the same time, space-walking astronauts resembled large babies. They had useless limbs and cumbrous gestures, their autonomic devices rendered them dependent, they seemed unborn, or just-born, or not quite fully made. Drifting in the dark of outer space, they were hardly believable. They bore a silvery, stroboscopic glow.
Her precocity enabled Alice to realise that the astronaut, in its many manifestations and with its contradicting attributes, somehow signified her sense of isolation. Norah was a popular girl, surrounded by chattering friends who embraced her, plaited her hair, gave her small pink gifts and trivial love notes, invited her to sleep-overs and doted on her skill at drawing ponies; but Alice was separate and remote, with only cleverness to recommend her. Other girls found her intimidating. Boys, who wished always to court her favour, also mocked her for what they secretly admired: she could kick a football through the goalposts from any angle, she could do maths in her head, she had an ambition to windsurf. In the tribal community of school, where conformity was rewarded and talent was stringently controlled, Alice was a deviation, an exceptional child. She ate her lunch alone, and read books in the library while other students ran in screaming gangs around the playground or tumbled and wrestled on the huge grass oval.
Norah’s popularity made Alice cruel, and Norah, in turn, learned to mock her sister, often to an audience. Gifted with mimicry of a range of voices and accents, Norah played out small dramas in which she retold Alice in Wonderland, implicating her sister in preposterous and humiliating situations. Alice discovered, to her dismay, that she had only one voice; she had no skill at all for dramatic improvisation. She developed a superstition that she had been given the wrong name, and that ‘Norah’, in fact, was her true definition. But no amount of persuasion or bullying caused Norah to relinquish ‘Norah’, and Alice was forced to endure the burden of pre-emptive fiction and the sting of her sister’s persistent derision.
There had been a time, during Alice’s bout of scarlet fever, when Norah had seemed both loving and concerned. Alice was then seven and Norah five, not yet a schoolgirl, not yet distinguished among her peers as an entertainer. At first Alice had been so ill she barely noticed Norah’s response, the softness of her expression, the sisterly tokens – a handmade card featuring a smiling pony. She had watched her own slender body, from the face and neck down, gradually consumed by the tiny bumps of a startling, lurid rash, which in turn stung her and grew itchy and was unendurable. In the isolation ward, which she shared with James, her ears also ached and began leaking fluid; her fever had come and gone, so that she was at times insensible, and towards the end her crimson rash began to flake and peel away, so that she might have been a girl coming apart, a girl transmogrifying, a creature of some sort from Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
For all this, the time in hospital was a revelation. Alice learned that machines have electrical lives, that there is a furtive inside to ordinary things. She learned that forces and ripples, numbers and systems, lie beneath actions and functions of every kind. And she learned, less directly, that Norah pressed her nose against the glass and was lovingly distraught at the sight of her hurt face and reddened body.
Norah remembered the isolation ward as the adventure she was locked out of. She was appalled by her sister’s illness, but also unaware, as young children are, of its real physical danger. She saw Alice taken away, held apart, secured in a space of manifest suffering. Each time the family visited, Alice looked worse. Norah imagined that when she returned home she would be unrecognisable. A mixture of envy and fear governed her feelings. That her sister should be chosen like this, should be the object of such attention. That she had become coloured, damaged, that this illness might happen to her. Norah was overcome by confused and largely private feelings. She took her sister mandarins and comics, tributes from the outside world, but was ruled by a conviction that their separation was somehow permanent.
After the episode of illness, Alice grew closer to her father. She saw in him specialist knowledge and a daring trade. He carried the aura, or so she imagined, of a man who daily escaped electrocution, who dabbled in the coherent logic of currents and switches, who made machines work – washing machines, televisions, electric kettles, hot-water systems – and fixed lighting devices of every shape and form. He was a man who worked in silence, in a vault of self-enclosure, which Alice felt too that she admired and understood. When, for a time, he was employed by the Electrical Commission, climbing lampposts with a leather belt in the middle of wild storms, she heroicised him extravagantly. She saw him return, dripping wet, his face grimy and exhausted, and imagined how he had climbed in wind and rain to the top of a pole, engineered the resumption of current, looked with a challenge at the sky, and then descended, with only the modest attitude of a job well done. Pat hated her husband going out at night into storms. For her he was a lightning conductor, a man foolishly exposed, a man risking too much. After months of her anxiety, Fred left the Commission and returned to his job as an electrical contractor.
At weekends, Fred taught Alice how to kick a football. Norah was often away visiting friends, and Alice and her father entered into an easy companionship. She asked him electrical questions, which he never failed to answer, and he showed her the finer points of Australia
n Rules – marking, handballing, calculating the angle of opportunity in a shot for the goal. They watched matches together on television and he supplied the commentary, naming the players and estimating their talents, giving mini-histories of their league achievements, identifying past and future medal winners. Alice loved the way he shouted ‘Yes!’ when a goal was scored, raising his arms, flinging himself back in his chair in a physical code of approval. The action replay of each goal – from many angles and at variable speed – assured Alice of the mysterious relativity of vision. More than the fast-racing weather it proved that time was flexible, that technology ruled. Pat brought them sweet tea and chocolate biscuits, and the Saturday afternoon matches knitted together, season after season, becoming a sequence of mutuality and unspoken, everyday love. When Fred went outside to smoke, Alice followed him. She watched his large hands assemble a cigarette; she watched him lick the tissue paper and tap each end. She watched as he struck his match backwards and took his first puff. He would lean back, inhale and close his eyes.
In the patterns that families make, their fund of symmetry and asymmetry, Norah, perhaps predictably, became much closer to Pat. Alice watched her sister and mother bent at joint sewing projects – for which she had no interest at all – and heard their murmurous exchanges, which always sounded confidential and thick with special information. They cut female shapes out of cloth spread on the kitchen table, pinned them, tacked them, fashioned a garment. Each gave to sewing a focus and diligence Alice reserved only for reading novels. Perhaps these were not so dissimilar, she vaguely thought. The formless beginning, the following of line, the imagining of a body inside a shape, the final art, which one entered, fitted to oneself, made essentially one’s own. She would have liked to test her analogy on her sister and mother, but this was not possible. Pat was a practical, no-nonsense woman whose preference between her daughters was clear. She was puzzled by Alice but charmed by Norah; felt troubled by this articulate wilful girl, and at ease with the genial younger child, whom other mothers liked, who was the kind of schoolgirl star she would herself have liked to be. Once, after witnessing Alice slaughter a kangaroo, Pat felt a revulsion she was unsure she would ever overcome. It was such a manly act, so peculiar for a girl. She had watched in the rear-view mirror as Alice lifted an axe, again and again. When she wanted to hurt her daughter, she mentioned the kangaroo, made her a criminal, invoked her permanent shame.
In grade six, students were asked to announce to the class what profession or occupation they wished to pursue as adults. Among the girls there were large populations of would-be hairdressers and air hostesses, a sprinkling of nurses, teachers and movie stars. Alice said in a loud voice that she wanted to be an astronaut and a windsurfer. A hoot went up amongst the boys, and the girls giggled in chorus. The teacher, a woman in her fifties with a sour, tired face, told her that she was ‘unrealistic’ and Alice knew immediately that her confession would fuel a new round of mockery. By afternoon Norah had heard the story from her classmates and she left an ugly drawing of a puffy astronaut in Alice’s school bag. It bore the caption ‘Wonderland Martian finally returns home’. Alice staunchly refused to cry. But she hated her sister for marking so explicitly her sense of outlandish estrangement, her habitual pomposity, her inability to fit. She hated the way others worked to determine and constrain her, and her sister’s collaboration in discipline and control.
In her fifteenth year, Alice re-met Norah. They liked each other. More than that, each at last acknowledged the specificity of the other, their unequivocal, even strident, and separate characters. Although they looked nothing alike – Alice was fair and blue-eyed, Norah dark, like her father – they asserted a kind of interior affinity, a sisterly wisdom. It invigorated each, this at-last communion. That first summer of sisterhood they spent long days at the beach, swimming in the ocean, lying on their bellies on the sand, discussing novels, body-surfing waves, floating face up, eyes closed, somewhere between Australia and Africa. It occurred to Alice later, as an adult, that all families have these enclosed and radiant periods, these nests of delight almost too easily achieved to be acknowledged, that come on holidays, or weekends, or summers by the beach, and that, however fleeting or tenuous or finally unstable, form the nostalgia of redeeming memory. There were no happy families, all alike, or unhappy families, tragically distinctive, but blendings of each, patched compositions. So it was between siblings, who moved in and out of contact, and parents and children, who shared immense histories, in which nothing was irrelevant, but learn and relearn, and then relearn again, how to get on in the demanding present.
Among the forms of her newly discovered devotion, Norah accompanied Alice to her windsurfing lessons. The sails were heavy and Alice failed again and again. No exertion seemed strong enough to stabilise the board. The instructor recommended daily push-ups and back-strengthening exercises. Five months later, when Alice was finally able to catch the wind, to move across the river like a skimming bird, Norah applauded. As Alice flew for the first time into the crimson glow of late afternoon, she heard her sister on the shore, shouting and cheering, as a boy might at a football match. Infinity opened before her. The great snake of the river wrinkled beneath her board; she felt the thrill of velocity and the pleasure of riding between elements, sliding in a rare, lonesome, space. Sky seemed to be everywhere. It slanted around her. Yet it was not astronautical; it was all direction and speed. It was the body almost naked, lashed by spray and tutored by wind. When she surfed, motion accelerated, as it does in a movie, and when she fell into the water, there was the shock of overall sensation and a struggle to stay afloat and gain control.
Once she had learned to windsurf, Alice grew more confident. It was as if, in achieving this skill, she had confirmed the plausibility of ‘unrealistic’ ambition and the heady expansiveness of day-to-day things. She inhabited her own body with strength and an intimation of its pleasures. She walked with a stride. She argued with her teachers. She could also win an arm-wrestle with almost any boy at school, and only later understood that this was a kind of sexual engagement.
When Alice gained entrance to university, on a government scholarship, her parents were clearly both pleased and alarmed. University learning sounded to each of them essentially unnecessary, an excess, or a trifle. Fred surveyed with mistrust Alice’s handbook of units, and asked her dismissive and prickly questions. In some way, she realised, he felt betrayed. He would have liked her to be a shop assistant, married to a footballer. He worried that she would no longer speak to him, that he would seem a bore, an old man, a superannuated worker. Alice watched his large hands flick through the university guide, pausing indiscriminately, as he read aloud a title or a unit description.
‘Electrical engineering; here’s one I could do.’
Behind his reading glasses his eyes looked rheumy and smudged, his face abraded. He had developed a habit of running his fingers through his thinning hair. It was true, he was growing old. There is always a memorable moment when one’s parents first appear truly old; for Alice it was here, as Fred expressed his undignified resentment in the movements of his hands, the tone of his voice, the way he flung the handbook before him when he had finished with it, in the way, most of all, he appeared collapsed, threatened, by so small a text and so weighty a symbol.
Fred remembered at this time – for no particular reason – the day Alice and Norah had found the whale skeleton. They had been gone for hours, and he and Pat were frantic with worry. He had searched up and down the beach for their towels, fearing both were drowned. Then, when he had returned to report to Pat another failure to find them, there they were, running up the sand hill, flushed with excitement and rosy with sunburn. They wore identical yellow sundresses, which Pat had sewn, and were a picture of unreasonable, girlish excitement. He had spoken harshly, shouting at them, shouting out all of his accumulated anxiety. And when he had finished shouting, they told him of the skeleton. They were each so pleased with their discovery, so sure it was extr
aordinary, that they seemed not to comprehend their parents’ anger, or to admit it. Alice persuaded Fred to return with them, to retrieve a bone.
‘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.
