14
In clear light, flights over Australia showed the continent as a crimson body. You could almost believe it was skin there, mottled, veined, incised with scarification, tattooed with blue print, bulging, recessed. Cloud shadow accentuated these incarnations. Curves arose, a suggestive crevice, the flank of a ridge resting seductively, like an arm on a pillow. Other countries appeared, more inhumanly, in green or grey, and Alice had forgotten this fleshly appeal, this summoning of matters of skin, of sex, of appetite. It was good to return. To skim across the river. To sit with her legs in the sun. To hear raucous birdcall in a cobalt sky.
At the airport everyone seemed to dial on a mobile phone as soon as they left the plane. Such frail cargo. There was an urgency in saying yes, we have arrived safely from the sky; we have managed to journey from the other side of the planet. Travellers who had been in sedated suspension and dull disengagement, now spoke in loud, unnatural voices. There was a kind of pleasure in the air, a tremble of call and responsiveness. Conversations of all kinds were developing, overlapping and warm tones everywhere met with other warm tones. Alice remembered something Mr Sakamoto had once told her about Alexander Graham Bell. Alec was fascinated, Mr Sakamoto said, by the phenomena of ‘sympathetic vibration’. Playing the family piano, he discovered that by pressing the pedal that lifted the felt dampers from the piano wires, then singing into the piano, he could sound the wire that matched the pitch of his voice, the others remaining silent. He also discovered that one piano would echo a chord struck on another one nearby. This inspired Alec to try to invent an ‘electric piano’, by moving electromagnets beneath each wire. But he returned, in the end, to the simplicity of agile fingers dancing over ivory, and the press of a single foot on a shiny brass pedal. ‘He returned to the body,’ Mr Sakamoto had said firmly.
Alice was thinking of sympathetic vibration when she saw her sister in the crowd. In the history of families there exist moments of raw shock, when one exposes oneself, or sees exposure, or links in some private way to a self normally hidden. The shock was in realising that Norah had not revealed her illness, but had entered the valley of the shadow of death and suffered there, and struggled, without telling her sister. One breast had been removed, and now she was fixed into regimes of drugs and chemotherapy. When Norah met her at the airport she had been out of hospital for only three weeks. Her skull was exposed and her body blue and emaciated. Alice embraced her sister and Norah returned the embrace fiercely, as if she was drowning. They looked into each other’s faces.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Alice asked. ‘Why?’
But Norah could not answer. She turned away.
Michael, who was standing nearby, said ‘Righteo, then,’ and Alice realised she had not acknowledged her brother-in-law. They offered each other perfunctory hugs. Michael looked uneasy, abashed. He reached forward to take Alice’s case.
‘The kids are with Mum and Dad,’ Norah announced. ‘We’ll head there together. They’re all dying to see you.’
Alice linked her arm with her sister’s while Michael carried the luggage. Norah felt hot, mortal. She was so thin Alice could feel the form of her bones beneath her skin; it was as if she were holding someone breakable. Alice grasped her protectively. The airport terminal was full of people, all with trolleys or wheeled cases, rattling along, avoiding collisions. So much clattering. Alice heard the greetings on arrival, the unexpected surprises, the embraces, the questions. Then Michael’s mobile phone rang, playing the Star Wars theme. He stopped and released the luggage while he snapped open his phone and answered the call. Norah and Alice stood waiting, bound together by great, unsayable things, by the sympathetic answering of one to another, like pianos communing.
Her apartment had a musty, closed-up smell. Alice drew the curtains, opened the windows and looked around at her books, her table, the souvenirs of her travels. Items in the room asserted their claim on her: she was this, she was that, she had been to India, to Spain. She was someone who read way too many books. The television looked enormous – a bulb of glass, waiting. The radio was there, the CD player, the simple black reading lamp she had always loved. The stillness was reassuring; everything was in its place. As Alice looked at the telephone, it began suddenly to ring. It rang and rang, but she did not pick up the receiver. She realised she was expecting the answering machine to click on, but she had disconnected it, months ago. The more she waited the louder and more insistent the calls seemed to become. It may have been Haruko, she thought after a few seconds.
‘Yes?’
‘I knew you were there, hiding. Norah told me when you were coming back.’
It was Stephen. Oh no, Alice thought. Oh no.
‘I’m ringing to invite you to dinner. To meet my new girlfriend. It would mean a lot to both of us.’
Alice was exasperated and tired beyond patience. She could barely bring herself to respond.
‘I’ve just got back from the airport, Stephen. Can we talk later?’
‘It’s just that we really need to make a time and place.’
Alice knew there was no shaking him.
‘Next Friday at eight. At Benito’s.’
Alice put the receiver down without saying goodbye, just as he had not said hello. She felt foolish, agreeing so readily to see him. He had caught her off guard. He would demand things, bring his pathos with him in a bundle on his back. She pulled the phone lead from the wall. Haruko, surely, would not ring this soon.
The summer weather had begun and the days were long and bright. Alice was woken by loud birds, squabbling and feeding in the bushes and trees near her apartment. Magpies called to each other with sovereign command. Wattle-eaters cackled. There were kookaburras far off, in the stand of tall salmon gums down near the river and the brash distant caw of a flock of black cockatoos. Here, at home, she could identify the birds.
Alice rose, pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, ate a small meal of fruit and headed for the river. Often she would simply walk its banks, grateful for the enlarged sky, the return of colour to the world, clean wind from the coast sweeping into her lungs. In her jet lag the world was susceptible to fractures and elisions. Sometimes time slowed, and her body remembered the northern hemisphere, its sluggish inclinations; sometimes it accelerated, so that she lost an entire hour. She had flown from Tokyo to Paris and then back to Australia. Her zigzag around the planet had left her slightly crazed, cracked in what she imagined was the globe of her self. Five days had passed since she left Tokyo and she had not heard from Haruko. Five days.
Alice lay on her sofa listening to music. Bob Dylan, The Smiths, Tom Waits, Nick Cave: all of it world-weary and moaning, sad men in dark crumpled jackets, their eyes lightly closed, tilting silver microphones into smoky half-light. She played ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ to hear the line about a dozen dead oceans, and she remembered Leo, and the allure of solitary music.
What Alice could not understand was Norah’s secrecy. Her sister had been able to write of the Iraq war and to chat about home life, but was unable to disclose her own serious news. Illness had severed them, when it should have brought her home. Perhaps she had not yet warranted or earned Norah’s trust; or perhaps the husband and family had erased those dependencies, those secrets the sisters might want to keep together. An old longing resurfaced, to have Norah’s approval. Old as the day, years ago, of the slaughtered kangaroo, when the gore of it and the muck of it and the skull-cracking violence had slanted her family’s feelings complexly against her, had weakened something simple that might have been shared between them.
In the drear space of waiting, of slow elapse, Alice was unsure of how to spend her time. She tried to read the newspapers, but found herself sickened. War, refugees. Asylum seekers in Australia held in cruel detention. She was succumbing to the havoc of her many emotional misalignments. The country felt physically the same, but otherwise depressed her. History had given them this: the wounded and dispossessed held behind razor wire, contiguous, somehow, with green tracer lights at night preceding explosions, nineteen-year-old soldiers shooting nervously in the dark, tanks, bombers, missiles, grenades. Television collapsed distance: loss and war was everywhere, filling up eyeballs all over the planet. There was no limit, it seemed, to what might be shown, what thinnest apparitions might come to haunt you, what remote event, what fucked-up invasion, might veer into assaulting, hideous proximity. On the sofa, unrelaxed, Alice felt overwhelmed. She was waiting for whatever would trigger a release. If Mr Sakamoto had been with her, she would have found something to marvel at; she would have been reminded of the other side of things, which rests beyond shadows.
Alice arrived at the restaurant a little late. In the Australian style, it was decorated with dead sticks, jutting at inorganic angles from the ceiling, and uranium-yellow walls, streaked with fake rust. Stephen was talkative and keen to impress. He introduced his girlfriend, Karen, who was pretty and quiet, and worked, she said, as a kindergarten teacher. She had long blonde hair, which she twirled in her fingertips and seemed unable to leave alone. Her distracted fidgeting kept catching Alice’s attention, sometimes mid-sentence, so that she heard herself halting in speech and becoming self-conscious, wondering how this woman had retained such childish habits. The restaurant was full and noisy, brittle with the sounds of crockery and laughter. They made small talk and Alice felt the return of jet-lagged exhaustion. She looked at her hand clutching a napkin and thought of Mr Sakamoto.
And then, at no particular moment, Stephen leaned forward, earnestly. ‘I have an announcement,’ he said. ‘I’m going to be a father.’
He took Karen’s hand and she smiled shyly. Someone dropped what sounded like a tray of cutlery. The air rang with spoons, forks, clashing knives. In the midst of this commotion, Alice disguised her surprise and congratulated them both. She leaned across the plates and gave each a kiss on the cheek.
‘I’ll have a family, Al. I’ll make a real go of it.’
He spoke in an overloud voice to defeat the noises from the kitchen. Stephen had not called her Al since they were at university together. Alice looked across at Karen, who was staring at her plate, and felt a flood of tenderness for them both.
‘You’ll make a wonderful father, Stephen. And I’m sure you, Karen, will be a wonderful mother. With all your experience with children.’
It was a simple gesture of goodwill, but it was what the couple had waited for. Both, for some reason, wanted her approval. Alice wondered what Stephen had told Karen of their relationship. What authority he had given her. She proposed a toast, ‘To new families’. They echoed the words, ‘To new families’, holding their smudged half-empty wine-glasses towards her. Stephen smiled widely. Alice could not recall, for years, seeing him so happy.
It was perhaps a kind of residual possessiveness, perhaps a kind of sexual nostalgia, but Alice remembered his face on a pillow, long ago, laughing, his head resting in the crook of his arm. She was relieved at his news, truly relieved, and saw in that moment of announcement the glimpse of a man who was self-possessed and newly open to joy. What women learn of men in bed is more than they can imagine. Their modes of assertion and retreat, their forms of pride and shame, their capacity for pleasure, longing, for the sweet wing-spread of desire. What they might say, what story … Alice roused from her passivity and thought: this is a true celebration. And as she drove home, carefully, along the highway lined with sodium vapour lights and signs in neon, lights which extinguished the stars, which mapped the city in flagrant stripes against the soft curve of the river, she felt too, more than anything, a kind of emancipation.
Because Stephen had asked her to, Alice visited his mother, Margaret, in hospital. She had no wish to enter a hospital. Not now, preoccupied with Mr Sakamoto, connected sympathetically in the time of his dying, and the waiting, and the sad wish that it would soon be all over. But maybe, she thought perversely, she could visit Mr Sakamoto by visiting Margaret. Not as a substitution, but as a kind of veneration, a tribute to the expectation of loss.
The oncology ward was for some reason painted grey. Hospitals demanded the surrender of even the barest forms of indulgence. Alice made her way through halls and along labyrinthine corridors that echoed with unseen footfall and the intimation of sharp metal instruments. There were huge lights above, like monster eyes, and the floors were polished to a high, treacherous shine. Alice felt she was sliding, as nurses sometimes appear to do. As one might in a dream. She wondered if this was where Norah had stayed, in this very place. If she had been diagnosed here. Had her operation here. Rested alone, hemmed in by high grey walls. Suffered anguish. Solitude. Alice was ashamed of how little she knew. She must ask Norah. She must recover the lost story. Perhaps she was not here, after all, for Mr Sakamoto, but in expiation for her unintended neglect of her sister. She did not know Stephen’s mother well: they had met only a few times, when mother and son had briefly reconciled during his time at university.
Margaret shared her room with three elderly ladies, all in conditions of dire ill health. She was reading when Alice entered, and looked up from her book, holding her place in the text with her index finger. She smiled.
‘Hello, stranger,’ she said, turning the corner of her page. ‘Stephen phoned to say he’d seen you and that you were coming in. But I really didn’t expect you to visit so soon.’
Stephen should have warned her: his mother was almost unrecognisable. She too was a stranger.
Margaret’s face was caved and her skin was semi-transparent, so that the veins were apparent, the contours, the inner face. Filaments of hair flew up from the top of her skull. Alice leaned forward to kiss her and found that her cheek felt like paper. Margaret had a tube inserted in her arm and another leading somewhere under the sheet. Behind her rested a box, blinking with an electrostatic glow. She shifted position and patted the bed, indicating that Alice should sit.
‘Here, now,’ she said.
Here, now. For Alice the words were both overloaded and hypothetical. Here, now. Nuance and eternity – everything intersected in these places of despair. Words were mutating, volatile with new meanings. She sat on the edge of the bed, wondering what she would say.
‘How about it, eh?’ Margaret said. ‘Stephen and Karen.’
‘They’re a lovely couple. And Stephen seems so happy.’
‘I intend to stay around to meet my grandchild.’
‘Good for you,’ said Alice.
They talked of everything but her illness. They talked mostly of times past, and Alice explained why she had not stayed with Stephen. Margaret began to reminisce.
‘I don’t regret leaving my marriage, but it was hard on Stephen. I should have taken him with me, but I felt a nothing, a nonentity. I felt completely inadequate. Living with Bill had worn me out. When he was drunk Stephen and I would haul him onto the couch, then we’d sit in silence at the kitchen table, drinking cups of tea. We never really knew how to console each other. When Bill started at the whale yards it all became harder. When he touched me I felt contaminated. I could smell the stink of blood and guts on his skin. I hated the thought of all that butchering. All day, cutting up an animal, knee-deep in flesh. I remember thinking: I married a fiddler, a handsome man dancing a jig, and now he spends his days in a slaughterhouse and carries death into the home. For months I thought about it, then one day I just left. I wrote to Stephen often, but he never replied. Only now, only recently, we’ve really started to talk. Started to know one another. I think he’s scared that I’m going to die, but I’m a tough old biddy, I tell him. I’ll go on for ever. And now Karen. And the baby … I always thought it would be you. That you’d be the one.’
When Alice left, she felt that it had been a good visit. Margaret had been pleased to see her and they had talked frankly, and with trust. They had found under the monster lights and the medical machines a few clear honest words.
‘Come again,’ Margaret said.
A sliding nurse had come to take her blood pressure and Alice was being sent out the door. She looked back at Margaret, palely loitering, but was again thinking about Norah, her bony body, her diminishment, her teetering-near-death.
In the days that followed, the waiting days, Alice spent time with her family. Fred had aged in her absence, but Pat looked just the same. Her father walked with a kind of shuffle, his maroon slippers scraping unevenly at the carpet, and seemed rather bent, at an angle to the world. They sat on the couch together, watching video-taped football matches, and Pat entered and left, bringing tea and biscuits on a tray. It was their usual ritual. It was the pattern into which she and her parents fitted so that they knew how to be together. Alice and her mother washed and dried dishes, standing side by side. She raked leaves in their garden and helped Pat with the crossword puzzle in the newspaper. She carried bags of shopping. She arranged a vase of yellow roses they had chosen together from a roadside stall. Casual, quiet actions were their cohesion, their love.
At Norah’s house, Alice played with her niece and nephew, lying on the floor among a scattering of plastic toys. They climbed on her body and treated her as furniture. It was wholly delightful. Helen and David had grown quickly and were little individuals now, each particular in their habits and tastes, and each competing for her attention. She had brought them Japanese sweets, spongy gelatinous flower shapes, coated in sugar. She watched as they stuffed their mouths and cheeks. Norah disapproved, and tried to regulate their gobbling. The children threw their arms around Alice’s neck, cheeky, mischievous, dragging her again into play, spraying her with sugar.
When the children were in kindergarten, the sisters talked. Norah unfolded the story of her illness. The tests, the results, the eventual surgery. She was philosophical. She had found, she said, a truer self, one tucked inside what she had thought she was. It was a self uncompromising and wide awake. She had started painting again.
‘I’ve returned from somewhere,’ she said.
Alice looked at her sister with admiration. Then she told of her life, her travels, her impossible book. Norah was inquisitive about Japan.
‘I was there for less than a week; I feel completely ignorant,’ Alice confessed. She mentioned Mr Sakamoto, but was secretive about him – not sure what she might say that would preserve him alive and disallow the past tense, or fatalism, or some unthinking wording away of his tenuous presence. Norah sensed his importance.
‘Tell me,’ she said.
‘Later,’ Alice replied. ‘Later I’ll tell you about Mr Sakamoto.’
‘Well then, tell me about one special thing that you saw.’
Alice hesitated. She did not want to speak of the museum. Of her fall into the bomb’s crater. She sifted images.
‘On my last day in Nagasaki, just before I caught the train, in fact, I walked up the steep slope behind my hotel to see the temple of Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy. I had packed in the night and hardly slept; I was just filling in time before I went to the train station. It was first built as a Zen temple, sometime in the seventeenth century, but had of course been destroyed, along with countless artworks inside it, by the atomic bomb. In 1979, the temple was rebuilt, dedicated to the souls of the war dead, and to the victims of the bomb.’
Alice heard her own calm voice, sounding like an historian. Norah nodded.
‘The form is very unusual. There’s a massive tortoise, a holy tortoise, about thirty feet high, and you enter the temple by walking under the tortoise’s neck. Into its body, as it were. Then above the tortoise, riding on its back, is Kannon, a woman in long flowing robes, very poised, very noble. She has a headdress and a halo of multiple spokes, like a star. She’s about eighty feet high.’
‘This is the memorial?’
‘Yes, essentially. Inside, the remains of many bomb victims rest under an altar. There’s a tombstone in the shape of a huge metal helmet, under which lie the belongings of soldiers, collected in the Pacific region. And there’s a cracked globe tombstone, covering A-bomb victims. In a separate room, outside, are articles found and collected at various battlegrounds. Some have names on them. Canteens. A pair of glasses. If visitors feel entitled, they may claim an item.’
Alice sees again in her memory these small battered things, abandoned in death. Poignant traces. Remains. The detritus, after all, of unmentionable acts and evil prosecutions.
‘When I arrived,’ continued Alice, ‘it was quite early in the morning. I was the only visitor. I wandered around alone, my footsteps echoing, not really sure what I was looking at. A terribly scarred woman, who must have been about ninety years old, appeared from nowhere to act as a guide. She spoke almost no English, but had a handful of nouns, which she simply listed. In any case, I felt I could understand her. She was very humped and bent, about half my height, but she had a great forcefulness to her, a kind of moral insistence. She would say: “Helmet, tomb, Pacific, dead.” It was very affecting, this loss of conjunctions, this reduction of language. Skeletal translation, I guess. Making do …’
Alice paused. The woman had taken her hand. It was a kind of body-memory, now, the warm, dry sensation of fingers between hers, the clasp of a survivor. Hibakushai.
‘Two other things,’ Alice said. ‘The old woman took me outside, unlocked a gate, and then a door, and led me underground, down high steps, right under the temple. Suspended inside the statue of Kannon is a Foucault’s pendulum.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a pendulum that demonstrates the rotation of the earth. A perpetual motion device. A heavy ball, swaying at the end of a long rope. The idea, I think, is that it represents prayers for perpetual peace, just as the earth perpetually moves.’
‘Ah,’ said Norah.
‘Perhaps every visitor is shown the pendulum. Perhaps there are real guided tours, with large groups of people and someone giving details and speaking with authority. But I felt pleased to be taken alone underground, to hold hands with this old woman, to hear her spare list of nouns.’
‘The other thing?’
‘The other thing is a bell. It tolls every day at 11.02 a.m., the time of the detonation. I was on the train by then. But I was still thinking about the temple. I followed the minute hand on my watch, and at 11.02, on the train, I tried to imagine the bell sounding …’
Alice wandered around her apartment, unloosened from things. The clock-face kept staring at her. She tried to revise the manuscript of her book on poetics and modernity, but everywhere, on every page, she met Mr Sakamoto. There are texts, she thought, even one’s own, full of surprising and unexpected personifications. Texts that summon known faces to fit unknown stories. Novels that split open to reveal one’s family. Tales that appear exotic, but drive one home. Recognitions. Returns. Ineluctable associations. Finally she gave up.
She decided to watch old movies on video. From the store Alice brought home Kurosawa’s Ran and Wellman’s Beau Geste. Ran she put to one side, for another time. She brewed coffee, made toast, and settled to watch Beau Geste, and entered with an atavistic sense of relief the black-and-white realm of the three brothers, kitted out gloriously for desert treks and struggles, all good-looking, staunch, bent on heroic sandy death. The Viking funeral scene was very short, and included a pretty young girl as a witness. Mr Sakamoto had never mentioned the presence of the girl. Alice watched until the end. It was maudlin, silly and harsh with racism. Yet she felt brimful of feelings that must have been real: feelings of huge, baffled grief and eroded meaning.
The phone rang in the night. Haruko.
‘He’s gone,’ she said simply.
There was a long silence.
‘Akiko was with him, at the bedside, but Uncle Tadeo and I were at home, having our dinner.’
Another silence.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Alice. ‘I’m thinking of you all.’
Alice opened a bottle of cabernet sauvignon and toasted Mr Sakamoto. She drank in large gulps from a fashionably oversized glass. She did not cry. She stared at the night through the window of her apartment. It looked empty, starless.
When at last she slept she dreamed that Mr Sakamoto was a kamishibai man. In a library somewhere he opened a small stage with drawstring curtains, clapped the hyoshigi, and showed pictures of his life. He had three daughters, Akiko, Haruko and the Bamboo Princess. They all looked alike, and had long black hair trailing down their backs. Uncle Tadeo was there, sitting in the audience with Alice. There was no sound at all. Mr Sakamoto had no voice. Just a sequence of images, almost like silent movies, almost like fairy tales, in which characters appear in emanations of smoky sheen, and then, like moon dwellers, suddenly disappear.