15

The river was a field of light. It might have grown there. Wind pushed at the brassy water making furrows, rills. A kind of sigh uprose. Great and lovely possibilities seemed inherent here, and people on the shore, children especially, sensed enticing otherworldliness and festive propositions. Strange, thought Alice, how nature succumbs to abstraction. She looked from the bank to the far distance and saw ferries, sail boats, jet-skis, windsurfers, and beyond them, a ridge of cumulus, efflorescing. To watch this river was to enter into the openness of things, the space of giving in to lucid and elemental sensations.

Alice hauled her board and sail onto the water. There was always the initial shock of cold water to the skin and the slow saturation. She moved out unsteadily, discerning the depth and current, and then the wind took her. With a gust like the intake of a breath, she was swept up, fastened invisibly and carried away. Alice sped across the water. She felt spray streak up at her and the tremble of the river beneath. She felt the heave and slap of the sail and the weight pulling on her shoulders and the strain at her hips. She adjusted her feet slightly and leaned back into a cushion of air. Tilted in pure space, finding fleet passage.

What she was seeking, almost without acknowledging it, was blankness, death. She wanted to fly off into sky and altogether fade there. Her body felt more than usually heavy, and the wind had a fierceness that made her feel embattled. Better close to the shore, perhaps, where there was more shelter. Alice shifted her position and moved into a jibe, but missed her sail as it swung around, and lost her balance. She plunged into the river. Gasped, swallowed water. Felt the gravity of the river and its implicating enfolding. When her face emerged she was in a mild state of shock. There was a moment like that in Nagasaki, when time dropped away, and she had moved without knowing it. She could see a yacht heading her way and a small motor boat to the left. Keels and propellers were tearing the water. There were serrations, dangers. With great effort she righted her vessel and turned the board, and then, almost instinctually, headed back to dry land. She had seen it, known it: the invitation, out there, to stay under the water. The invitation to sink.

When she reached the shore, Alice discovered a small gash on her thigh. She must have struck something, without realising her injury, a wooden stick, a floating can. Blood joined river water in an impressive pink flow down her leg. Tomorrow, she would accidentally cut her hand. Her body was opening. She was losing integrity.

Alice’s books embraced her. Sitting at the nexus of bookshelves on three of four walls, she was aware of ordered meanings, clasped together, as if between hands. The promise of things known and described, encased there, sedate, awaiting reception in a single brain. Ghost voices of dead poets, sensible and crazy philosophies, ‘humanities’ texts each bespeaking an interpreted world. These books expressed Alice’s longing for self-completion. She felt their companionship and their economy of subtle satisfactions. She thought now that they carried, in addition, a kind of privatised mortality.

At her desk, in a shaft of lemon light, Alice was trying to compose a letter to Uncle Tadeo. Almost a week had passed since Haruko’s phone call and Alice cast about for words that would in some way honour the immensity of his grief. She failed again and again. What she wrote sounded trite or insincere. She sat at her desk surrounded by trailing sentences and crumpled paper, wishing she could speak to him directly, say something eloquent in Japanese, recite a haiku, just a few non-English words. As she was beginning yet another attempt at a letter, Norah’s face appeared at her window. She leaned forward, almost pressing her nose to the glass, and tapped with her fingers. Alice opened the front door.

‘You’ve forgotten, haven’t you? The tests. They’re today.’

She had forgotten. Norah had arranged for Alice to be tested for genetic susceptibility to breast cancer. It was time to hear the results. Norah had been much more concerned than Alice, who was caught up in the swollen world of Mr Sakamoto’s passing, and feeling, if anything, neglectful of her own health. Fatalism may have been invading her. Tedious submission. Grief takes away one’s own body, deposits it out of reckoning.

They drove together, in Norah’s car, to the clinic of genetic research. It was a building beside the hospital in which Margaret was a patient, and it occurred to Alice that they should take the opportunity to visit.

‘Not today,’ said Norah. ‘One thing at a time.’

Her voice was shaky. Her manner was oblique. Alice realised at once that Norah was afraid for her, and that she imagined the worst. She reached to touch her sister’s arm on the steering wheel, and Norah flinched with a start, as if she had been recalled from a distant place.

The same grey corridors. The same monstrous lights. Let me never be stuck in hospital, Alice prayed to the ceiling. She began for the first time to feel a little nervous. Odours assailed her, hospital-world entrapments. The specialist looked, disconcertingly, like a doctor on television. He had a square authoritative jaw and an air of calm control. He appeared very young, younger than both of them. His coat was synthetically bright and starched into a crisp neat carapace.

‘What’s this, then?’ he said, pointing to Alice’s bandaged hand.

‘An accident, that’s all. A stupid accident.’

He’s stalling, thought Alice. This is the evasion of bad news. In the pause that followed she heard the electric hum of unseen machines. The doctor straightened in his chair.

‘I have to tell you,’ he said sternly, ‘that you are not genetically related. Not at all. You are not of the same family. I assume this fact was unknown to both of you.’

Alice looked at Norah, and saw her release a sob. Whether from relief or surprise, it was difficult to tell.

‘There must be a mistake,’ Alice said calmly.

‘No mistake,’ the doctor answered. ‘Alice Black, yes? You are in no way related to Norah Black. Nor to Pat Black, who was tested earlier. Norah is the biological daughter of Pat Black; you are not. You’re in the clear, by the way.’

Alice rose quickly, upsetting her chair, which fell behind her onto grey carpet with a heavy thud. She was flustered uprighting it and felt the young doctor watching her. She wanted to be away. Away from hospitals. Away from this smug, unconcerned man, who enlaced his hands and seemed, inappropriately, about to crack his knuckles.

‘I’m sorry we’ve wasted your time,’ Alice said. She placed her arm around Norah’s quaking shoulder and led her from the room. The appointment had lasted less than two minutes.

Alice drove home. Norah wiped her tears and sat quietly, looking straight ahead.

‘We’re still sisters,’ Norah said.

‘Of course we are,’ Alice responded. But she felt a windy space begin to open inside her, another blasted hollow, another inestimable loss. Snatched by wind. Alice drove with grim determination and utmost care. She leaned forward, clutching at the steering wheel like a child at an iron railing. Her bandaged hand made it difficult to steer. When they arrived at the apartment, Norah slid into the driver’s seat.

‘I have to pick up the kids,’ she said. ‘But we’ll talk later. Promise.’

Norah looked terrible. Strain had reversed her condition, dragged her backwards to the land of the ill. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her hands unsteady on the wheel.

‘Later,’ she repeated.

After all the tries and failures, the message was plain.

Dear Uncle Tadeo,

Hiroshi loved you like a son, and I know you loved him like a father. I am thinking of you daily in this time of deep loss.

Alice.

She sat back in her chair. Uncle Tadeo would understand the brevity, the suspicion of words. Alice remembered his touch on her hair the first time she met him. How uncomplicated it was, how unbroken. She attached to the note a copy of a photograph she had taken of Mr Sakamoto, standing outside their favourite bistro. His tie was a little askew. His expression was relaxed. He held his hands in his pockets and faced the camera with an easy, equitable gaze. He did not look at all like a man who had a few months to live. He looked solid, enduring and charmed by life. A quality of mirth played at the corners of his mouth.

She lay in the empty dark, listening to the wind lift the curtains. She had left all the windows open, to attract currents of cooling breeze. There was a gentle hum of traffic and reticulated sprinkler systems. Somewhere, up the road, a party was going on, late into the night. Muffled tones of flirtation, horseplay, mockery, laughter, travelled in an erratic, discontinuous stream, the sounds of other people’s lives, other companionships, arousals, conversations. In the mixed-up turmoil of grief and revelation, Alice seemed now to have stopped sleeping altogether. Night-life welcomed her, the rise of the moon, the shift of the stars, the voice of the wind that carried with it – pure vehicle – so many other voices.

 

When in the morning Alice confronted her parents, it did not go well. She felt as if she had assaulted them.

Fred sat on the velveteen couch, his hands on his knees. He was trying to give up smoking and was agitated and distracted. Pat was in the kitchen, making a pot of tea. Alice heard the water boiling, the setting of tea cups on a tray, the pouring of water into the teapot. When Pat entered she looked pleasantly expectant.

‘So, what’s the news, then? What’s the big secret?’

She put down the tray and began pouring black tea. There was a plate of oatmeal biscuits, a bowl of sugar and a milk jug with a frilled lip that Alice had been fond of since her childhood. Three teaspoons, nesting. She noticed these things vividly, with the force of hallucination. Objects were reclaiming her, wreathing associations, summoning histories. Objects were dividing her by their capture and their wistful implications.

‘Why didn’t you tell me that I was adopted?’

Pat looked up. Her face stiffened and blanched. Fred said, ‘I think I need a ciggie for this,’ and rose and left the room to find his tobacco and cigarette papers. Alice and Pat were obliged to wait in shared silence until he returned. Pat gave precise attention to the cups of tea, and shifted the biscuits clockwise, adjusting their circular pattern.

‘Christ, you could’ve warned us,’ said Fred, re-entering the room.

‘I only just discovered.’

‘Even so.’

Fred opened his tobacco pouch on his lap and extracted a few brown threads. Pat and Alice watched in silence as he rolled a cigarette with his thumb and index finger, licked the paper and patted each end on the back of his liver-spotted hand.

‘Go on.’

‘That’s all. I just want to know why I wasn’t told.’

Pat was blowing on her tea.

‘Fred and I tried for so long,’ she said. ‘After ten years we still wanted a child, so we decided to adopt. I picked you out,’ said Pat quietly, ‘because you were crying. The agency took us to see four babies, all lined up, in cots tied with ribbons. We had planned to get a boy, but there you were. Crying your heart out. When I picked you up from the cot you almost immediately settled and I felt so proud of myself, so like a mother. That was that. Then, a few months later, I fell pregnant with Norah, and Fred and I assumed that the pregnancy would go the way of all the others. But then Norah came, so we had two daughters …’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Alice insisted. She could hear herself sounding plaintive, like a querulous child.

‘We planned to,’ said Fred. ‘But the time never seemed right. Because you and Norah didn’t get along, we both knew it would make things much harder. And then, when you became close, we thought we’d wreck the peace if we told you. And it didn’t seem to matter so much. When you loved each other.’

‘We always loved each other.’

‘Funny ways of showing it.’

Fred was puffing at his cigarette. Pat didn’t usually allow smoking in the house, but seemed prepared, on this occasion, to overlook it.

‘Maybe we thought you’d guess,’ Pat added. ‘And ask us.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘No.’

Alice could see that her parents were somehow hurt. Fred was looking away; plucking a fragment of tobacco from his tongue. Pat was blowing on her tea again, her eyes downcast. Alice tried to set things right.

‘It doesn’t change my love for you both,’ she said, sounding unconvincing.

‘But we should’ve told you,’ Fred conceded. ‘You were bound to find out, sooner or later.’

Estrangement settled upon them. They drank tea in a taut and unfamiliar distance, so that Alice felt she had been crass with the directness of her question. She wanted to know the name of the adoption agency, but couldn’t ask now, not yet, anyway. She wanted to say: ‘And what do you know of the birth mother? What was she like? What was her name? What name did she give me?’

In a way she did not quite understand, Alice resented this soap-operatic turn in her life, as though her growing up had been a delusion, or a lie, as though this new orphaned self had arrived to make her feel less sure, less authentic, somehow, an impostor daughter.

 

The room that contained them bore traces of all their lives. Alice raised her teacup and looked ahead. On the mantel-piece were portrait photographs and images of special moments. Pat and Fred’s wedding, Alice pushing Norah on a swing, Norah dressed for a formal dance, Alice receiving an award at school, her right hand clasping a rolled certificate. Here were habits and stories, the referential system of personal signs, the shadows of times past. Certain objects replenished memory or pushed it into beige dusty corners. Ornaments of particular ugliness held sweet associations. The immediacy of these things, these family things, these ordinary things knotted into the crisscross of four disparate souls, seized Alice with a force she was not prepared for. A web of connective tissue somehow linked what she saw. She looked across at Pat, caught her quick gaze, and found herself smiling.

Alice decided to ring Haruko. It was night time – 8 p.m. – an hour behind the time in Japan. The phone rang and rang, four times, six times, then an answering machine switched itself on. The voice was Mr Sakamoto’s. He said something brief in Japanese, and the instructive beep sounded. Alice put down the receiver. Almost immediately she wanted to hear his voice again. Alice dialled the number once more and listened to the same message. Mr Sakamoto’s voice fell towards her, recalled his presence, disturbed her with its deep and intrinsic familiarity. The beep sounded, and again Alice replaced the receiver. Then she dialled a third time, not really knowing what she was doing, but strung out, now, wishing to follow the thin thread of his remnant presence, his faint verbal ghost. So much inhered in the brief, untranslated words. In the voice beyond extinction, in this nocturnal recursion. A telephone in Japan. The handset still in its cradle. On the third beep, Alice began to talk.

‘Ah, Mr Sakamoto, I have so much to tell you, so much to say. The night is abysmally dark and seems endless without you. What love was it we shared, that played itself out in conversations? What did we know of each other? What understandings? I visited Nagasaki, but was not able to see you. In the museum I thought I saw a glimpse of your childhood; I thought I saw a boy in silhouette, his feet flying up behind him, running down the hill near his home into the site of catastrophe. You were fast and determined. You flew like the wind. I don’t know what you saw, but I felt some sympathetic vibration, like the pianos you told me about, a vibration that I took to be the sound we had established between us …

‘And later, back in Australia, I found again that tonal register with my sister and my family and thought again of Bell, and of your work, and of your long and sweet dedication … How you described things. Your stories. Your collection of inventors …

‘It’s lonely without you. I feel I’m floating in space. There is suffocation here. And a dark visor across my eyes. Your carved Spanish astronaut has nothing on me; he’s too solid, too visible. I seem to have lost my bearings, with grief for your passing. I seem to have lost certain knowledge of my precious family. They are kind and patient; they know something is wrong; something inside me is missing. To be lost is to be invisible, to have no voice. Uncle Tadeo touched my hair and seemed to understand. Haruko was there, and Akiko, already mourning. I sense how they miss you and join them in sorrow. We are blasted by your leaving. Blown open. Apart. We are full of unspoken words, we, your family. Noise seems everywhere to occur, but none of it is your voice. Rest well, Mr Sakamoto, dear Mr Sakamoto. Rest preserved in that telephone, preserved a little longer, stretching syllables, sentences, across the planet, greeting me in Japanese, in your sure, gentle tone …’

Alice and Norah were lying with their heads beneath a fig tree. Their legs stretched out into the sunshine. The large leaves shifted sideways in the slight breeze, altering the shade, opening up jagged spaces of light, opening, closing. The sisters had feasted on figs and now were lying on their backs, talking.

‘Tell me about Mr Sakamoto,’ Norah said.

And in the quietest of voices, Alice began.