Read Online Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones - Free Book Online Page A

lubricious kiss, insertions, retractions, the spill of energy. Her own participation, her own complicity. A trail of words drifted back: spiritualisation, secularisation, sexualisation. Something shifted outside, a single cloud perhaps, and sunlight began streaming through the western rose window, beginning as white, then dispersing into colours. People sitting in the pews were all of a sudden spotted: pink, blue, yellow and green. Their faces bore a sheen and they looked blessed, distinguished. It was an ordinary phenomenon that, in this heightened space and contrived luminosity, carried a sense of election, of privileged moments.
    Alice watched as people in the cathedral began to notice the special effect, and then to exclaim and raise their voices. Cameras of all shapes and sizes appeared from nowhere. Within seconds everyone sitting in the section beneath the window light seemed to be photographing, or being photographed. The stained-glass colours dispersed in a hundred white flashes, evacuated by technology, destroyed by tiny machines. A prism reversed. ‘Smile!’ Alice heard beside her, and an over-large American family of four lined up to be snapshot.
    Only later, when she was slowly walking home, feelingvaguely depressed, did Alice wonder if her face too had been coloured, if she had been a yellow or a blue, tinted as if by moonlight, or if, for a fleeting instant, she had been a rose.

    â€˜Like a cradle, gently rocking.’ Where was that line from?
    Alice was returning from a few days’ break in Chartres, having submitted to her inexplicable fascination for cathedrals. The train rocked into the night, its passengers embraced in a maternal rhythm. Alice had been drowsily watching her own ghost on the surface of the window, seized by the obscure despondency of trains, when she heard music from somewhere, possibly a transistor radio. John Lennon’s mournful voice, posthumous and unearthly, floated towards her, down the full length of the carriage:
    â€˜Instant karma’s gonna get you
    Gonna knock you right on the head
    You better get yourself together
    Pretty soon you’re gonna be dead
    What in the world you thinking of
    Laughing in the face of love
    What on earth you tryin’ to do
    It’s up to you, yeah you.’
    The man sitting opposite Alice opened his eyes and smiled. ‘“Instant Karma”,’ he said. ‘This song is called “Instant Karma”.’
    He was a Japanese man of about seventy-five. He had backward-swept grey hair and a look of sleepy composure.
    â€˜I was once in love with Yoko Ono. Her boldness. Her art. Her international life.’ He removed his glasses and rubbed hiseyes with his fists. An enormous wristwatch glinted in the dim light of the train. ‘In the sixties, of course.’
    Alice liked his smile. And the unexpected intimacy of his confession.
    â€˜In that song,’ he went on without prompting, ‘in the video of that song, Yoko Ono is brindforded.’
    Alice could not quite make out the last word. Brindforded? Ah, blindfolded.
    â€˜Blindfolded,’ she found herself repeating, as if correcting his accented pronunciation. She was momentarily aware that he might consider her rude or pedantic.
    â€˜Just so,’ he repeated. ‘Brindforded.’
    The words oscillated between them, rocking as the train rocked, catching their national inflections.
    The man smiled again. ‘Sakamoto,’ he added, with a half-bow of his body.
    Alice leaned forward and extended her hand. ‘Black, Alice Black.’
    â€˜The colour?’
    â€˜The colour.’ (Was it a colour or an absence?)
    They shook hands, meeting in the small memory room the song had opened. Then they listened together until the end:
    â€˜Well we all shine on,
    Like the moon and the stars and the sun,
    Yeah we all shine on
    On and on and on on and on …’
    Mr Sakamoto introduced himself: an independent scholar, from Nagasaki,