Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones Read Free Book Online Page B

small rectangular frames, black as death. The cash register slid open, sighed and retreated.
    In the dark Alice walked quickly, thinking once more of Stephen. She was thinking of the ways in which desire converts to torment, and of the little boy with a bicycle and a hollow heart and a deep bafflement about life, who looked into the distance and saw his father standing on a whale. She was thinking too, thinking again, about the whale-space within which she and Norah had stood. It was like being in a body made of wind; it was englobed, but unbounded; it was strewnwith light. They had laughed together. The day had been sunny and bright. Their enmity had dropped away and they had felt the blessedness of standing in bones.
    Untechnical things. A woman’s sadness. A boy’s revelation. Two sisters compelled by nothing more than what the ocean had cast up and left behind.

    Of all the day-to-day systems that categorise and contain, the most remorseless and omnipresent is the commercial bar code. Too much raw data circulates among us. There is a maddening variety to the products of our age. So in 1952, two graduate students from the Drexel Institute, in Philadelphia, USA, invented the bar code. It had the beauty of a hieroglyph and the forensic power of a Holmes, and it ordered everlastingly the consumerist chaos. As products swept across red scanners, there was the triumphal electronic ping of a new world order. A new language of capital. A new abacus of money-making. Logical scrutability. The black column of thin lines and minuscule numbers allowed no mystification. The tally of objects was a staunch and irrepressible thing.
    Unsurprisingly, the first product to be given a bar code was chewing gum: consumption with no real purpose, repetition with no end. Anti-food. Mere product. Chewable America.

    Snow fell lightly, in the barest of flurries. In arabesques, in spirals, in small winding motions. The sky was paper white. Alice opened her mouth and caught snowflakes on her tongue as they passed. There was this insubstantiality to the natural things in the world, of which snow was exemplary. There were sparrows, bare trees. A starkness to things urban. Europeanwinter was so unlike an Australian winter. Here greyness pervaded and a low-ceilinged sky. Stone buildings consolidated the monotonal chill.
    As she wrote each day about the objects of modern life, those things wired, lit, automatic and swift, Alice began also to be overcome by memory and dream. Anomalous thoughts occured unbidden, flashes of her past, incursions of primitive intuition. It was not that she wished not to care about such things, it was that, in this context, they were so unexpected. She felt riven, dissipated. In the fretted light of small cafés Alice could be seen scribbling away, a cup of coffee before her, trying to render the world in prose, trying to unlock with words the complicated insides of things, coiled and secret as any radio, flung long ago against authority in the isolation ward of a hospital.
    Alice had begun thinking about her father. He had grown up in another age, before television, before astronauts, and had been apprenticed at the age of twelve to an electrician. He was a serious boy, very quiet and respectful, with a mass of black hair, black eyes and olive skin, so that throughout his life he would be variously mistaken as Italian, Aboriginal, Arabic or just plain foreign. His name suited him: Frederick Black . It was the name of a man solid and self-assured.
    Fred lived in a mining town and from the age of sixteen was employed underground. In the gold mines electricians were necessarily esteemed; the world of perpetual dark, treacherous, base, needed labour that enabled men to conquer the earth. There was the heaving of dirt, the creation of tunnels and the blasting-away of rock, but there was also illumination, strings of yellow bulbs and lamps on hard hats. There were electric-powered machines that assisted muscles and saved