Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones Read Free Book Online

sound of the river. Then she listened carefully and once more found that she was mistaken. What she heard this time was the material commotion of the city: sirens, wheels, decelerating buses, footsteps, calls, mobile phones. There was the squeal of an almost-collision and a cry of abuse. There was a plane overhead, dragging decibels in its wake. Vehicles of every kind. The snarl of a motorbike. The rumble of garbage trucks with their brute growling innards, the roll and clack-clack of a late-night skateboard. All this activity in the air, this routine distortion. All this noisy encasement and mobilised intention. Alice wanted silence. She wanted the nullity of deep space. In her bed in Paris, she experienced a twinge of homesickness. Not the longing for a place, so much, as for a space into which her self could be poured, without erasure.

    â€˜So when did it begin?’ Stephen had once asked her. ‘This unfeminine interest in machines, in motion, in electrical inventions?’
    â€˜There are no beginnings,’ Alice said cautiously. ‘Only fragments. Only stories.’
    She had kissed him at that moment. She needed his questions to prise her, to release her tight secrets. This is the gift of the lover: to permit disclosures.
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    When she was a very small child, about seven years old, Alice contracted scarlet fever and was confined to the isolation ward of the local hospital. The fear of contagion was not unlike the fear of the devil: imprecise, generalised, bent on marking out the contaminated by macabre tales, tinctures and noxious potions. Or so it seemed, in a simpler version, to a little girl with a pink woollen rabbit and a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales , who was locked in a room with two boys, both likewise infected and untouchable. Ric and James were each two years older than Alice and had already formed a bond of friendship by the time she was admitted. In the daytime they ignored her, at night she heard them whispering in the dark together. But then Ric left, after only a few days, and James was obliged to notice and befriend Alice, if only to alleviate the boredom of their implacably extended days.
    The children were allowed no physical contact. Alice’s parents and Norah visited, but they stood behind a glass partition, and waved and mouthed messages. Norah held a comic book against the glass, and her mother dangled a brown paper bag of mandarins. James’s parents and two brothers also stood in dumb-show, staying only five minutes, clearly unsure how to prolong an expression of love, based on the rigorous spectacle of mime. They too left comic books and a bag of mandarins. James and Alice decided they must have received exact instructions.
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    For hour on hour it was just the two of them. Since they were forbidden to leave their beds, they at first called to eachother across the room, exchanging stories, fears, dreams, intimate confessions. Later they begin to share each other’s bed, timing their transgression precisely – just after the morning nurse with the face mask took their temperatures and they knew no one would come for another few hours; and then between their lunch and dinner. They lay close together, talking quietly. Alice read to James from her Grimm’s Fairy Tales ; he shared with her his How Does it Work? and Great Railways of the World . In their exile the children developed a persuasive, jointly idiosyncratic world, a combination of fabulous transformations, evil characters and life enhanced by modern engineering, by rocket-ships, walkie-talkies, interplanetary transporters. James also had a repertoire of fictitious-sounding sayings – ‘Righto! We’ll blow them to billyo! Chins up, jolly good chaps!’ – which Alice enjoyed but could not understand. Their confabulations were intricate, a mesh of energies, each child competing with the other to add some new embellishment.
    Apart from his wondrous books, James also owned a small