Read Dreams of Speaking for Free Online

voice was so authentically plaintive, his manner so piteous, that Alice was overcome by an absurd wish to embrace him and take his head in her lap. The lyrics of ‘Yesterday’ struck Alice as banal, yet she heard herself humming.
    The man was flushed, possibly drunk. He was unsteady on his feet. He rocked with the train, rocked in solitude. Passengers averted their gazes. This man was a violation of good form.
    Perhaps it was the mood of the carriage – that shadowy somnolence – perhaps the sombre thin man performing his sadness in humiliation or protest, perhaps simply the adhesive quality of tunes that meet one at moments of vulnerability, all those sticky lyrics that travel around cities, like a web, like a net, like a captivating chain, but Alice found herself humming the song for the next few days.
    She had never thought the words amounted to anything more than a tricksy slogan, but now considered, against modernity, the force of yesterday , and was stricken with obscure doubt about her project. She pounded the streets, repeating ‘Yesterday’.
    Mr Sakamoto would later nominate this his favourite Beatles song.
    â€˜It combines the simplest of rhymes’, he said, ‘with the simplest anguish – a man abandoned by his lover – and constructs it all as a spectre of lost time.’
    â€˜You’re kidding,’ Alice had responded.
    â€˜Not at all. The idea, think of it, that yesterday might come suddenly . Time itself, split open by abandonment.’
    Mr Sakamoto had smiled, as he often did upon deliveringhis stern pronouncements, so that Alice was unsure whether he was joking or serious.
    For now, she was wondering, rather amateurishly, about time and modernity. Wondering how to include it in what she was writing.
    And she was haunted by the thin man singing on the train. A man as alone, she could not help thinking, as a drifting astronaut, hauled backwards through space, receding into nothingness, becoming swallowed up, eventually, by airless dark.

    Stephen appeared at the door. He held a bottle of red wine.
    â€˜Have a drink with me,’ he pleaded.
    So she let him in, and they talked, mostly in blurry reminiscences. When the wine was finished, he leaned over and kissed her, and then again, more fulsomely, so that she responded and clasped him. They undressed with haste, against the cold night air, and fell into each other’s bodies as into recovered childhood, unselfconscious, effusive, in the forgetful elation of the moment. Stephen moaned against her neck, full of sadness, full of return. He climaxed with a little cry, Alice, much louder.
    When they rolled apart, still breathing with the pace of arousal and activity, Alice said, much too soon: ‘This is the last time.’
    â€˜I know,’ Stephen said. ‘You didn’t have to say it.’
    And then they moved into the easier communion of sleep, deep, companionable, timeless sleep, pressed into each other tightly, on the single bed. At some point Alice awoke, felt Stephen against her body, and heard the micro-sounds that only a lover knows, the quakes of breath and the heaving emissions of dreams, the signals of night-life unfolding and bodily processes. Then she heard through the wall a muffledtelevision in the apartment next door. It sounded like alien communication from Mars. Exclamatory voice fragments, music, percussive notations, all commingled and garbled, unrecognisably weird. These presences swam in the room, insinuated, and stayed all night.

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    The mode of yesterday, Alice wrote , is the photographic image. It is always time-bound but out-of-time, always anachronistic. In its fidelity to moments, to split-second slices, it carries the gravity of testimony and the lightness of chance. This paradox endears us: this is its clever intercession.
    The photograph of a child, laughing, pushing her sister on a swing in a scene of shared play, will carry for both, into adulthood, the bright