1

It felt like space walking.

It felt like a suspension of the rarest kind, and she saw herself a floaty astronaut, strung in airless dark, supernatural, abstract, buoyed on who-knows-what force to dangle heroically meaningless. There would be a silver visor reflecting everything, and she would be a shape, just a shape, in what had seemed to her always a sorrowful enterprise. Anything in slow motion, she decided, was intrinsically sorrowful. Even as a child she knew this. Even as a child she saw on television how sadly astronauts moved, smitten by world-historical symbolism and the gaze of too many invisible cameras. Their arms were heavy prongs and their heads ridiculous. Their outsized suits were cartoonish and strange. The engineered umbilicus was truly poignant. Yet they moved – she knew it – incomparably. She was seven when she began to see them in daydreams. They belonged to moments of dismay and quiet estrangement. Alone in their silent worlds. Completely alone.

Alice moved to the bedroom window and stood shivering in her pyjamas, watching the 3 a.m. world outside. From her first-floor apartment she surveyed a wedge of the street. It dozed in its own inky pool, awash with blue dark, dissolved into itself. Someone irresponsible had left a sprinkler running. There was a murmurous spray and tiny arcs of light. The street was empty, the air was brittle and clear. Beyond sight, traffic moved in a black stream along an arterial road. How terrible to live there, Alice thought, where it is never still. To see car after car, to sense the relentlessness of machines. Night-shift workers perhaps, milkmen, the sleepless, the demented.

Alice looked at the sky and sniffed at the heavens. Night seemed to swallow her. It was true, then, her ancient, girlish understanding. Grief is like space walking. It is nothing terrestrial. Laws of gravity alter, and bodies tilt and float away.

She had grown up in a city full of light.

It was not a city anyone cared for – not even a city by most estimations – but it lay on the edge of Western Australia, complacent in its remoteness, implacably there, an entire desert between it and the distant cities of the east. On promotional films it was composed of aerial shots, which showed at their centre a vast shining river, nowadays full of yacht sails and windsurfers and ferries bearing tourists. On sunlit days the river refracted light everywhere: there was never a city so bleached into a mirage of itself. Alice loved the river and its special effects. All that was solid melting into air. The material assertion – built on mining money and pastoral seizure and colonialist pride – dispersed into bone-tinted visions and a paradoxical sense of deathless impermanency. Tycoons made their homes here, and migrants from Britain and South Africa. It was a refuge for white people who wished not to remember. It was safe, everyone said. It was a good place to raise children.

The city at the edge of the desert had no monuments or community. It was pragmatic, secular, dun-coloured, dull. So for Alice the river had been a spiritual compensation. She cycled its edges, swam its jellyfish pools, she sat still, looking into its luminous distances, and found in the rippling dissolution a space of repose. When she was a teenager she learned at last to windsurf, and joined others who sped across the water in a flash of spray, bisecting small waves with decisive strokes. Catching the fickle wind, leaning her body into acrobatic balance, finding the velocity of so simple and swift a craft, made Alice feel euphoric. Sometimes she laughed as she rode the water. Sometimes the wind off the river was so strong and the air so alive she felt she was surfing into something elemental.

As an adult she rented an apartment by the river. It was not within view, but she knew it was there. A mere five-minute walk took her to its shore. At night, when she could not sleep, she was comforted by knowing that the water flowed nearby, dark with an oily blackness, silent, deep, dragging with river-tenderness a world of lost things, the silt of history and the plastic detritus of the present, night yearnings, dreams, drowned and buoyant possibilities, misty shapes that would resolve only in some future lens.

What was it Mr Sakamoto had said that day?

Everyone needs inside them an ocean or a river.

Just before sunrise there was an explosion of birdsong. Wattle-eaters and magpies claimed the world. Alice could hear them call diagonally across the sky, their sounds a crisscrossing net that fell over the morning. She had made herself a coffee and was sitting like a child, knees drawn up protectively against her chest, staring at nothing in particular. She watched her book-filled room gather yellowish light. The spines of the books were a kind of reproach – a life lived too inwardly, too much alone, too given over to perplexity and complication.

Must ring Norah, Alice thought.

On the table, against the wall, lay the pages of her manuscript, a book almost completed. She had written it in feverish excitement, contracted into purpose, fierce, engaged, absorbing the whole world, and now it seemed to her like so much litter, like something dead and unconnected. Perhaps all authors come to despise the words they trail behind them. Or perhaps this feeling was another consequence of her astronautical detachment. She wanted latency, silence. The stacked pages of the manuscript glowed faintly in the dawn. She must send them, or dispose of them. Those pages, her words.

When she had finished her coffee Alice threw her cup towards the sink and heard it smash noisily against the wall. An act of casual destruction, which she will now have to clear away. Refusing to consider the mess, Alice pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, padded down the stairs, and left the apartment building, neat as a thief.

Already the paths along the river were full of cyclists and joggers, heading with moral earnestness into the new day. The joggers looked grim and determined, as joggers invariably do; the cyclists were humped in speedy condescension. Alice turned west, with the sun behind her and a salty breeze from the Indian Ocean detectable in the air. Before her the river was flush with gold; it swelled like a live thing against the stone embankment. People moving in the distance wore a pelt of shine. The trees were aflame, the sky was stretched like cellophane. Yet none of this – how keenly Alice felt it – seemed to her beautiful. Even when dolphins appeared in the little bay, a family of four, curving in and out of the water with the fluent solemnity she had always admired, Alice was unmoved. A jogger, a young man, brushed her shoulder accidentally as he pounded past. In his streaming wake floated song lines from his over-loud headphones. Something about becoming nothing. Something about wanting to be woken. She recognised the song: ‘Wake Me Up Inside’.

Alice turned back into the light wishing it would scorch her.

‘It doesn’t matter anyway,’ Norah declared.

Alice had been trying to persuade her sister to exchange names.

‘But it does matter. It does.’

In her seventh year, the year, she understood later, of one’s most radical perceptions, Alice realised that Norah was surely her own true name, and that her sister was an Alice. She deplored the fact that her name had a storybook precedent, that it sounded hard and fragile, like cold glass cracking, that it was girlish, with frills and an upstanding bow. Norah sounded like wind, like the breath of a mystery.

But her sister was stubborn and would not be persuaded. Alice pinched her, and knocked her down, and when the younger girl began to sob, stooped to comfort her, asserting her power once again.

With her wrong name she grew, as misnamed children will. Alice was the clever one, declared her parents; Norah was arty. The sisters competed in everything and were not companionable. In their humble iron and weatherboard house in the suburbs, they quarrelled and fought. Pat and Fred Black, their nice-enough parents, wondered what they had done wrong to produce such warring creatures, who scratched at each other’s faces and destroyed each other’s possessions. But in the adolescent years, when they gloomily expected an intensification of hostilities, the girls one day – miraculously – became firm friends. Alice and Norah looked into each other’s faces, and found there no mirror, but a reassuring encounter. Their violent language fell away; their animosity, sharp as acid, diluted and evaporated. It was one of those homecomings, like falling in love. It was a confirmation of the intimacies held within separate beings, waiting to be disinterred, waiting only to be recognised. The sisters began dressing alike and walked with linked arms. They kissed in the street, swapped notes and confidences. And when, at fifteen, Alice tried again to exchange names, Norah’s adamant refusal won her respect. Under a high pergola of blooming wisteria – their father’s pride and joy – they embraced and laughed.

‘So I’m stuck with it,’ said Alice. ‘No chance of a bribe?’

Norah hauled herself up, stood erect on the outdoor table, and announced in a loud voice: ‘I am Norah! For ever!’

Alice knew she would carry for the rest of her life this moment of reconciliation, this image of her sister’s broad face, haloed by a ceiling of mauve flowers, defiant in the act of possessing her own name.

Norah almost fell when she descended too quickly. Alice caught her, toppling, and they were both bruised against their parents’ ugly hard furniture. In the smattered space of blown petals they groaned, and then they laughed.

As she was clearing the mess of smashed cup, Alice cut her hand. She gashed her palm when kneeling, she steadied herself, and leaned directly onto a shard.

‘Fuck.’

The word, Mr Sakamoto said, to be reserved only for unanticipated annoyances.

Alice pressed the wound closed, but blood dripped onto the floor, amazingly bright. She became efficient in this ordinary crisis, scooping the fragments of shattered cup, wiping away the blood, binding her hand – the right – with a nearby teatowel. Exhaustion swept over her. This was all too difficult. Even her own small world had begun offering wounds.

It was full light now, and morning, but Alice decided to return to sleep. Nursing her wrapped hand, she lay back on the couch and closed her eyes, falling immediately into a dream: something lurid, tormenting, which she will later forget. When she woke, an hour later, aroused by throbbing and blood from her hand soaking into her pants at the crotch, she was overcome irrelevantly by the recollection of a childhood event.

 

She was ten years old and had been travelling with her family in the country, heading for the south coast. She and Norah were squabbling in the back of the car; their exasperated parents kept turning their heads to scold. They were driving through karri forest and Alice remembered the straight high trees, the shafts of filtered blue light, the sense of magical transportation as shadows and brightness flitted by. She had leaned her cheek against the icy clear glass of the window and thought how wonderful it was that someone had invented cars, how wonderful to slide like this, past whole forests, through tunnels of trees. But then her father braked suddenly, they were all flung forward, and in the same instant she heard an abrupt and hollow-sounding collision. The car had hit a kangaroo, which had bounded across its path. Fred pulled to the side of the road, his hands trembling on the steering wheel, his face ashen with shock. He wound down the window and looked back to see what he had done. The kangaroo was large and grey, fallen onto its shank, unable to move. It looked intact and unharmed, but blood was seeping in a shiny pool from somewhere beneath it. The head was cocked. The eyes were glazed and accusatory.

‘Do something,’ said Pat. Her voice was nervous, taut.

It was remarkable, Alice thought afterwards, how there are actors and watchers.

Fred and Alice together left the car and walked back up the road to inspect the kangaroo. As it saw them approach, it became helplessly agitated; its paws began to shake and it kicked with one leg. Alice saw that her father was close to tears, but she felt she must, since she was the clever one, act in a sensible way.

‘We have to do it, Dad. We have to put it out of its misery.’

These words had arrived with glossy facility from television or cinema. Alice was surprised at how easily she knew what to say, and how simple it was to announce an execution. She will wonder, later on, what channels open in mouths that speed into everyday life these lines of screen-written dialogue. Her own voice sounded synthesised, produced by a machine. Power sounded like this. Decisiveness. Authority.

Fred and Alice decided they would hit the kangaroo’s head with the back of a small axe they carried in the car. When they returned to the car, Pat and Norah had both begun to cry.

‘We have to do it,’ Alice repeated. ‘We have to put it out of its misery.’

Her father leaned into the boot, and retrieved the axe. He stood poised for a moment, and looked like a storybook woodchopper, but for his white and stricken face and his unsteady hands. He would never act, she knew. Without speaking Alice took the axe from her father. She strode off, up the road, intent on action. She was animated, purposeful. Behind her the car was ticking as it cooled. A sour smell of burned rubber lingered on the road.

The grey kangaroo kicked again in a vain effort to escape, surprisingly lively, given its loss of blood. Fred dragged it by the tail onto the grassy verge, leaving on the bitumen a slick smear of red. Alice considered its silence. Perhaps these animals were mute. Perhaps its injuries had sealed it prematurely in a deathly quiet. She realised she was grateful it had not cried out, or whimpered, or made some endearing pet-like sound. Alice did not look at the face. She brought the blunt end of the axe down upon its head, once, twice, and then a third time, before the skull smashed and the animal at last quivered, and was still. The face lay to one side, averted, as if in private sorrow. Alice felt the sweat on her hands, knew her own tough heartbeat, heard the amplified hush that was death, ringing through the forest.

Her father stood beside her, softly weeping. He looked mottled and old, and had a tremulous, vulnerable aspect. He took the axe from Alice’s hands, wiped it on the grass, first this side, then that, with what seemed to her an unfeasibly slow motion, and then they walked side by side, back to the car, saying not a word. Alice’s mother and sister were wiping their tears, each with a fist of crumpled tissues. There was such distress in that small, metallic space. The way cars heat up with emotion, their mysterious responsiveness.

As Alice slid into her seat, Norah hissed, ‘Murderer!’ Alice fell back into herself, wondering whether life was always going to be like this, full of sudden and irreversible things, full of an anguish contained in the small events within families, in bloody accidents, in difficult moments, that force one member of the family to act, and then to feel ashamed. And not just momentarily, but for ever and ever.

Alice’s hand was being stitched by a competent doctor. She had been embarrassed to admit that it was a domestic mishap.

‘Quite a gash,’ said the doctor in an admiring tone, pleased no doubt to be relieved of flu cases and colicky infants, faced instead with a serious rupture of flesh.

Her palm was cross-stitched in a way that recalled B-movies.

‘A monster,’ she said.

‘Pardon?’ the doctor asked, not wanting a reply.

He bound the wound with white gauze and gave his handiwork a pat.

‘There,’ he said conclusively.

Alice tucked her hand under her armpit, as children used to do after a caning. She walked outside into the summery air, looked up at the cloudless sky, saw an aeroplane climb across the blue in a high lyrical curve, and remembered once again that she must ring Norah.

They had loved each other, and then diverged, dragging their lives behind them in entirely separate directions. Norah went to art school and met there a student architect, Michael, by whom she became pregnant within four months of their meeting. They moved in together and their child, David, was born much too early. In those precarious first months, Michael and Norah transformed into a haggard, obsessive couple, strained with new love, tired beyond measure, desperately preoccupied with their ailing baby. Alice had visited them often, but felt excluded. Michael looked at her suspiciously; Norah struggled to make conversation. When Alice held her nephew she felt a momentary pang of terror: the fragility of the infant – which seemed to her crimson, insensate and perpetually wailing – was awful to contemplate. She realised maternal tenderness was an overweening obligation, some contract that, having been entered into, could not be broken. Norah had twin violet rings beneath her eyes and had never before seemed so unhappy. Michael had begun smoking, much to Norah’s disgust, and blew furious threads of foul air about the house in a wretched rebellion against his own feelings of entrapment.

When a year later a second child, Helen, arrived, Alice worried that her sister might capsize entirely, and become so removed from her, so indentured to baby-land, and Michael, and the vague abductions of self that seemed part of early maternity, that they would be permanently and irretrievably estranged. But this time it was different. Helen was a fat, happy baby, bent on conjuring harmony. She slept, she sucked and, at the right moment, she smiled. Norah grew confident and enjoyed her mothering, recovering the backchat to her sister’s teasing, dispensing wit and intelligence, seizing for herself small acts of emancipation. The difference too was in Alice’s presence at the birth. Because Michael had been ill with pneumonia, Norah called on Alice to attend, and she had performed not so much the role of support, as that of witness. For most of the labour, Norah seemed barely aware of her presence, massively sealed in her own irresistible upheaval, and Alice had simply squeezed her hand and supplied encouraging platitudes. Nothing prepared Alice for her niece’s advent. She came as from a mouth, like a kind of fleshly word. There was Norah’s stiff agony, the red lips releasing, and then this completed and precious new being. She was lustrous with fluid and shiny with life. Norah lifted herself on her elbow and was caught in the rapture of the moment. The sisters clasped each other and were unceremoniously elated.

So this would be their pattern. They would zigzag in and out of closeness and distance, retreating, converging, retreating and converging. For every faraway time, or loss, there would be a return, there would be propinquity.

When the placenta arrived, Alice was shocked to see this meaty remnant of life, delivered in a second birthing, in hideous imitation. Somehow she had not imagined this stage beforehand. Norah seemed not to notice. She held her daughter, wrapped like a pupa, close to her face. When Alice turned to look, they were a world of just two.

Cycling was difficult, against the wind, now that Alice could not use her right hand. She rode slightly upright, tensely pedalling. It was a fine, light morning, which would later subside into a dense narcotic heat. As she turned the corner, swinging in a semicircle, she saw that Norah was in the garden, waiting for her arrival. She wore loose Indian pants and a funky shirt Alice had not seen before. They waved simultaneously, Alice sending up her wounded hand like a flag of surrender. Norah’s hair, she noticed, showed no signs of growing back; she still looked newly vulnerable and pitifully thin. Something in the appearance of her skull’s definite shape filled Alice with tenderness. The blank bone of her sister’s cranium. This obscene exposure.

The children were at kindergarten, and Norah was in high spirits.

‘What’s this?’ she asked, pointing to the bandage.

‘Stupid,’ Alice replied. ‘A stupid accident.’

‘I should be so lucky,’ Norah said, and kissed her sister on both cheeks, in the French manner they enjoyed, and turned to lead her inside.

Now that her chemotherapy was ended, Norah seemed sprightly, rejuvenated, like a prisoner on reprieve. She set before Alice a pot of tea and a plate of scones.

‘Quite the little housewife.’

‘No way. I’ve started painting again. I’ll show you later.’

Alice was abashed by Norah’s easy affirmation.

‘I still can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘I still can’t believe that no one told me you were ill. I would have returned. I would have come back immediately. Why didn’t Michael ring? Or Mum, or Dad?’

‘I’ve told you already. Drop it, Alice. Besides, telephones are such mendacious things …’

Norah was slicing the scones in two, coating each half extravagantly with strawberry jam and cream. ‘You only live once,’ she said lightly. Her appetite had returned.

‘My doctor says,’ she added more gravely, ‘that you should get checked. It’s unusual, so young, and after two babies. It runs in families, apparently. Sisters and mothers, he said. I’ll make an appointment at the clinic. We’ll go together.’

They consumed the scones messily, like schoolgirls, like their naughty past selves. The tea was sweet and comforting. Norah chatted about her children. David could now count, Helen was an artist, like her mother. There were daubed livid images and colourful tantrums.

After a lapse in conversation Alice found herself asking: ‘Do you remember, when we were small, that time our car hit a kangaroo?’

There was a pause between them. Norah took a sip of tea and raised her blue skull. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You were brutal. I hated you.’

‘I was only …’ Alice hesitated, ‘putting it out of its misery.’ She heard her old words recur, like an emphatic exculpation.

‘Perhaps,’ Norah conceded. ‘I looked out through the back window and saw your arm rise, and rise again. Dad just stood there. Your energy at killing frightened me. I saw the streak of blood on the road and was sick at the sight of it. When you returned to the car you seemed so changed.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Alice said pointlessly.

She did not know what she was apologising for. She sat before her sister, her sister who was bald with her own suffering and entirely without self-pity, who bore the indefensible treachery of her own body with poise and good humour, who baked scones, who was generous and adored her children, feeling like a culprit of some sort. Feeling guilty. So much lay between siblings, so much obstinate history. So much overlapped in inexpressible ways.

Norah leaned forward. ‘So when are you going to tell me about Mr Sakamoto?’

The Invention of cellophane

A Monsieur Jacques E. Brandenberger, a Swiss man with a hefty nose, a large moustache and an imperious mien, was one day seated in a restaurant when a customer at the next table spilled wine on the tablecloth. Being both a textile engineer and a man of daring ingenuity, he conceived at that moment the invention of a flexible, transparent and waterproof material, which might protect tablecloths ever after from the clumsiness of diners. He began by applying liquid viscose to cloth, but found it too stiff and impractical a solution. By 1908, however, he had invented a machine for making transparent sheets and cellophane was born! The same Jacques E. Brandenberger, who had witnessed the inspirational spilling of wine, developed a flexible film and two years later had also invented the visor component of gas masks that, in the largesse of war, bought him his ultimate fortune.

This was in one of the first e-mails Mr Sakamoto sent. His style was florid and archaic, his disposition melodramatic. His written English was accomplished, a tribute, he once claimed, to the private tutor his father indulgently hired – a man from Manchester, a Mr O’Toole, who arrived in Japan with frayed cuffs and a class-traitorish regard for high-flown expressions and old-fashioned syntax.

‘Another time,’ Alice said to Norah. ‘I’ll tell you another time. Would you like to know, instead, about Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone?’

The white heat blasted her as she rode. She moved her body steadily, driving herself into the glare. Norah had been fulsome, open, and Alice had been secretive. She was not intentionally so; there was a kind of block to her feelings, an abysmal suppression, and a superstition, perhaps, that she should not recover this man too soon by formulations of words. Against the waste of death, no language availed. No words, easy as breath, routinely available, slipped forth to settle her insurgent feelings. She must wait. She must know. She must know exactly what to say.

Alice bent her head like a penitent beneath the assaulting sun. Her legs were robotic. She barely looked where she was going.