A History of Silence Read online

  The streets around the square are a spaghetti of switchbacks, right angles, gentle curves that keep on curving until a full circle is magically achieved, and dead ends that turn out not to be dead, unless you happen to be in a car. On foot, as nearly everyone was when these streets were designed, thoroughfares between the houses lead the way out. You may not know exactly where you are but once you understand that every street turns into another then you are never lost. You are simply on your way to somewhere. You may feel lost, but the feeling is temporary. The key is not to stop. Soon, everything will become clear.

  The process of concreting has a dual purpose. As it disperses, the concrete emits through secondary and unidentifiable means a tremendous silence. And with that silence comes the kind of calm that only a forested valley left alone for thousands of years knows. This silence is deceptive, fraudulent. The concrete cannot keep everything down and sealed. Certain things leak out. Secrets. Clues pointing to small botanical tragedies. The magnolia with its rust-spotted flowers. The hedge that is so bright and green and alert to your thoughts, but then smells of decay in late summer.

  It is a very quiet place that I have arrived at. Very quiet, and very still. The geraniums on the windowsill make you want to smile and forgive the quiet. Although when the silence cannot bear itself any longer the wind gets up. The leaves flutter in the air and drop into a new place. The trees do not normally rustle; the eaves under the tiled roof do not ordinarily whistle. But like a car starting up in the middle of the night, these disruptions pass and everything settles back into its astonishing silence.

  I have seen trout lie still into the current. In the same way the world passes over me. Vast amounts of sky balloon by me, and this enormous silence.

  Now and then a car passes and leaves a faint scent of petrol in the air. Perhaps next time the driver will wave.

  Of the other signs of things having passed this way there is the worn carpet in the hall that my knees know well and the draining sound and smell of old dishwater. There are the usual companionable noises: the cardiac thump of the washing machine, the bossy and maniacal telephone that makes everyone jump. Since it is never for me I remain by the washing machine porthole watching a pair of circling pyjama bottoms. A large broad-shouldered fish floats by the window. It is the slipper I was wearing when I accidentally stepped on some dog shit.

  At a neighbour’s house I smell a sort of green that I cannot locate. It smells of shade and refinement. If I close my eyes and try hard I can just about retrieve it—or the sense of it, the surprise of it. Describing it is harder. I want to use the word ‘tartan’, but I am being lazy, and suspect I am attempting to introduce a known thing rather than the original experience which, as I say, alerted me to a trace of something that wasn’t obviously present in the room. This green smelt of privilege. A Wolseley green. Deer. An antlered room. The shade I have mentioned. There was green up and down the street—on the front lawns, in the hedges and trees and even in the passing cars, and occasionally in a poor choice of clothing. But the trees especially—a gummy green that later I pick off my fingers. The green at our neighbours smelt both faraway and familiar. Or do I mean familiarly faraway? Whenever I visited the neighbours I smelt it, but only in their sitting room which was a ‘glen’ or a ‘glade’. I’d seen both words on the labels of things. A bottle, and something else, I forget what, but something quite unexpected. There was nothing like that particular green smell elsewhere in our lives. Later, on my way home from the Naenae Olympic Pool, as the heat went out of the day, I would catch the tarry grey smell released by the footpaths, and at some point I absorbed the idea that I had learnt to smell time.

  Of the other smells of note: the cigarette-ash smell of my father passing in the hall or having sat in that chair, in that place and, above all, the smell of roasted meat—the air inside the kitchen bakes and sweats with it.

  There are kitchen devices committed to the erasure of memory, such as the mincer, a beautiful and elaborate device. Pulling it apart and cleaning it of untraceable bits of animal and then sticking it back together is the highlight of doing the dishes. It clips onto the edge of the bench and grinds up the leftovers of animals that Mum turns into rissoles, very nice with a splash of tomato sauce. The world is constantly devolving and changing, and memory has to hurry to keep abreast. In the case of my parents, memory has long since given up the chase.

  When I ask Dad what used to cover the hillsides before the gorse I wait for him to roll his smoke, and then light it and inhale. After the smoke funnels out of his mouth he decides he had better take a look at these hills, and briefly I have the feeling that I have just pointed out a feature of the landscape that wasn’t there when he last looked, as though the hills popped up in the night. He gazes distantly, like he does at the beach. The hills. Yes. What used to cover them? He takes the smoke out of his mouth as if that might jog his memory. He looks all the harder. The hillside glows with triumphant yellowness, as though it wishes it could be even more yellow. Dad looks thoughtful—some useful information is on its way—but it turns out that he is simply mimicking someone deep in thought, or someone else’s attempt to fetch a memory or dislodge a piece of information, because it turns out he doesn’t know either.

  Then he notices the rubbish bins. His face springs to. Why haven’t I taken them in? For Christsakes. That’s my job. To put out the rubbish bins when the lid is crammed down on newspaper packages bulging with animal remains, and then bring them in again when they are pleasingly and reassuringly light and easily picked up by their jug ears and swung along one in each hand. And then the pleasant ringing sound as the lid drops cleanly and evenly over the lingering smells of putrescence and foulness.

  After the bins, I jump on my bike and track the seagulls on their route inland to the Wingate Tip where I climb over mountains of filth. The mud is thick, unhealthily rich. The smell of disinfectant catches in the throat.

  None of this is visible from the street where Dad and I looked up at the yellow flowered hillside. Somehow one place is able to keep itself a secret from the other.

  Machinery grinds away compressing everything, pushing the filth further and deeper into the landscape. It is hard to believe that the gorse could prosper, that a single flower could bloom out of this foul mulch.

  There are paintings—at this time unknown, of course; but also I never suspected such a past to exist—of magnificent podocarp forest rising from the place of the tip, pushing over folds and bumps in the landscape and filling the valley floor. And, besides, I had never heard of the painter, or any painter for that matter, by the name of Samuel Charles Brees, who had once stood his easel where I stand at the tip looking down at the hideous mouthy grin of some unidentifiable animal gazing up out of layers of old newsprint and men’s magazines.

  At 20 Stellin Street little is known about anything except spot welding, knitting, rugby, and the right time to plant cabbages and put in the tomatoes. The residue of family lore is light. Some of it sticks. But it is like learning an isolated fact, such as Moscow being the capital of Russia. One grandfather was from Pembroke Dock. Mum’s real father was a farmer, but we never hear his name spoken. Dad’s mother died of hydatids. Mum’s mother, Maud, ‘the dreadful old bag’—I have absorbed that much—made a choice between her man, sometimes described as a leather merchant and a gardener, and her four-year-old daughter and gave Mum away. Some of it is hearsay, barely information, but a few words escape with a wipe of the mouth, something that wasn’t meant to be said, and then a wave washes along the beach removing all trace of the footprints that I have been trying to wriggle my toes into.

  At school when asked where I am from, I reply with the name of my street and the number on the letterbox. The teacher smiles. She adores me to pieces. I am so clever. Then I hear someone snigger, and I realise that I have given the wrong answer.

  Something else was meant by the question. But thanks to Maud and the mysterious farmer and the drowned-at-sea man from Pembroke Dock and the one wh
o died of hydatids, I have arrived into a potholed world.

  But there are worlds within worlds, and the transition from one to the other can happen with remarkable ease.

  From the worn carpet, we wander onto the ancient beach terraces that step down to the shoreline. A short car trip is required, but both places have the same meander and feeling of old occupancy and wear and tear.

  Each beach terrace represents a separate upheaval. Years, millennia, crumble inside our shoes as we stumble and slide our way down to the water’s edge.

  Dad, with his fringe of bald man’s hair, fumbles with his tobacco in the wind. Alone on the shingle he looks like the wind-blown stuff that catches on the thorny branches of shrubs that self-seed above the high-tide line, beneath the scooped-out eroded hillside that spooks my mother whenever she has to walk by it. They argue about this, of course. What is there to be afraid of? Dad only has to say that for her eyes to lift up to the overhanging cliff and for me to see that we will be engulfed by the hillside if we linger. He laughs and flicks his butt, then stops right at the most dangerous place to look back in the direction of the car. He’s pretending he’s forgotten something. Flaunting his fearlessness, while making fun of my mother’s anxiety. It is hard to know which lesson to draw here—that the world is about to end, or that nothing will happen.

  On the beach, he looks more alone than ever. He has spent fifteen years stuck inside train funnels with a welding torch, another twenty years getting up at the crack of dawn to walk to the Wormald factory in Naenae where he makes fire engines.

  He is in his early fifties, perhaps five years younger than I am now, but already dog-tired. He has worked at physically demanding jobs since the age of twelve.

  At the beach we move along the tide line like a family of mastodons, our heads bent and eyes lowered for whatever we can scavenge. We like things that are wholly themselves, and which can be taken without them losing value. Bits of pumice end up in the bathtub by the nail brush. The fish crate is turned into a useful weed bin. Cat’s eyes by the tens of thousands are carried back in coal sacks and spread over the shingle drive.

  On the way home we stop at the dairy and, digging in his pocket for his wallet, Dad retrieves rolls of fishing line which he dumps on the glass counter along with spare coins and old lottery tickets.

  After a fruitless search of his pockets for his tobacco at a neighbour’s house party he is briefly confused by the fishing line in his hand. Meanwhile, the woman with a tray of celery and cheese stands firm at the edge of the carpet, a boundary that I have been made aware of in a furious whisper—whatever I do, I must not stray across it with food in my hand.

  The carpet is new, but the far bigger thing at stake is embarrassment—specifically, my mother’s. She would rather avoid speaking to people than risk feeling embarrassed or inadequate. She would rather stay in the house than go out and risk judgment in the eyes of others. Sometimes I wonder why that is.

  Down on the beach, she is completely at home and unguarded. I watch her pick her way through the kelp and driftwood and wonder if it is just parties she doesn’t go in for—whatever the reason is. But I was right the first time. She is afraid—afraid of what others might think of her, and it never once occurs to me that this fear of hers has a history.

  We are castaways at the beach, but also in the car. We drive for hours in order to live in a tent, in a place where there are others just like us living in tents, shitting in the same toilet, standing under the same shower heads.

  As I am still young enough to go into the women’s with Mum, at an early hour I am pulled from my warm sleeping bag and set down in the wet grass outside the tent.

  Where are we? I have no idea. The sky, the trees and the banks of grass are familiar and at the same time different, but different in such slight ways from those at home that I am not sufficiently interested to find out.

  Indifference is the normal response to a campground where history is measured in rectangular outlines of dried trampled earth and perhaps a tent peg left behind, a sniff of domesticity clinging to the dead grass.

  From out of the shadows the women appear—from various parts of the camp, around corners, from under trees, stumbling along in the dark in bare feet. In daylight they would cry out at sharp stones biting their feet, but at this hour, surrounded by the sleep of hundreds, their bodies go into a giant wince, and they resume their hobble towards the shower block. Mum and I toddle after them.

  There’s a light sitting inside a cage of steel mesh—that’s interesting, perhaps the most interesting thing that I have seen in a day and a half. I stand there looking up at it, and then my wrist is grabbed and I am pulled inside the shed to join a long line among many lines.

  A toilet flushes, and immediately all talk stops and our line takes a step closer. A young woman lifts a man’s checked shirt over her head. I am amazed to see that she is naked. And because I look longer and harder than I did at the light inside the wire mesh I am aware of Mum’s interest switching to me. I feel her hand land on top of my head and turn it like something left on the table to face the wrong way.

  Older women such as my mother appear locked within bodies stretched by pregnancy and scarred by operations, but others look like they were pegged up wet overnight and have just been taken down.

  Under the showers they run a measuring glance over one another’s bodies and stand with upturned faces as jets of water blast the night off them. Soon they emerge from the ablution block with pink glowing skins, in less of a hurry now, and speaking in noticeably louder voices.

  From one municipal camp to the next we work our way across the North Island. There is always a ngaio pushing against the sides of the tent and making scary shadows with its branches, and I seem forever to be standing in lines. I long for the moment we will pack up the car and head for home. I miss the street, the backyard, the slab of concrete and the brick side of the house where for hours I am content to throw a tennis ball and catch it within inches of the leaping dog and its snapping jaws. I miss the letterbox and the smell of the clipped hedge. I long for those certainties—even the sky which has its own particularity, shaped by the long gorsy hills that swallow and blow out tremendous gusts of wind. The settled air of elsewhere simply feels wrong, and when the moment comes to pull up pegs I am never so keen to help.

  There are other journeys, of greater mystery. Blackbirds on powerlines and trees twitch through the windows of the car. Where are we going? I have not been told, but I recognise something in my mother—her silence and resolute manner, tempered by something that I don’t have the words for but years later will recognise as a helpless compulsion.

  I can see all this from the back seat where I have been placed like a bag of groceries, expected to shut up and not say a word.

  Dad is at work, making fire engines. He would be amazed to know that we are in the heart of Wellington in that rarely visited city, where ‘officially’ I have been only a few times, excluding these other occasions.

  When we get there, we park. There is no suggestion that we should get out of the car.

  From my place on the back seat I quietly shift to get the line of my mother’s sight so I can see what she sees—a row of letterboxes, hedges, fences. I know the routine. We will sit in silence, unaware of ourselves or our strange purpose until a pedestrian walking by looks in the car window and Mum, hounded by the stranger’s curiosity, makes a show of digging in her handbag for her face mirror.

  I could ask what we are doing, but I don’t. The question will not be welcome. The first time we sat there I could feel it in my bones. And, in any case, were I in any doubt, later, on the way home she says in a calculatedly casual voice that there is no reason for me to mention this little excursion to Dad.

  The front door of a house opens. The quick shadow of someone dropping down a short flight of steps causes Mum’s head to snap to. The person comes into view, but it is the wrong person, the wrong gate, wrong house.

  Released from that tension we sit
back, Mum’s limp hands go back to the steering wheel, and we wait.

  So, for what feels like hours, and perhaps is, we sit in the car and we wait for my mother to catch a glimpse of her mother, Maud, the woman who gave her away.

  Out of the vanished or vanishing world of my childhood, figures come and go.

  A girl, aged twelve, pregnant, her jersey pulled tightly over the hump in her stomach, is the most astonishing sight I have ever seen on the playing fields of Hutt Intermediate. At the sound of the school bell she remains there looking down at herself. The shadows of the other kids flee across the green fields. In her solitary world the girl continues to look at herself. She pats the ends of her jersey. She runs her hand down over her belly and when she looks up her face is filled with wonder.

  Then one day she is gone. The grass where she stood is green and bristling. No one asks after her. No one says where she has gone. Instead, to the teacher’s furious strumming on the ukulele, we bellow out a calypso song.

  But how did that happen? A girl of twelve? No one asks, no one knows, no one thinks to ask. I wouldn’t say that no one cares, but, like all the dogs that have been run over in the street outside our house and then forgotten, the pregnant girl has gone, and that is all there is to it.

  Then, one night, on the other side of my bedroom door, the terrifying music of a television drama has waned, and in its place I hear tears and shouting, followed by the stampede of feet down the hall. The front door slams, and the house shakes. Car doors, one after the other, crack open and shut. A moment later, the car bursts off into the night.

  I won’t see my sister again for a while. Lorraine has gone to live with her boyfriend in a caravan. She has just turned seventeen and is pregnant.

  Her bedroom used to be the one opposite the bathroom. When I poke my nose in there it still smells of her hairbrush.