A History of Silence Read online

  On Sunday, we return to the beach to pick through the kelp thrown up by the storm that blew over during the week. The sun is out. It is a glorious day. My father’s hair is whiter than ever. My mother hugs herself. Nothing was said in the car on the way here. Nothing is said about the pregnancy. The silence of course is occupied with nothing else.

  I find a blowfish, perfectly whole in a way that other dead fish are not, as light as paper to hold, but when I look into its mouth and gullet I can find nothing there. It is completely hollow.

  One day, the concrete layer is broken into and a huge tree trunk is unearthed at the end of the street by drainage workers. A crane and an earthmover have to combine forces and loop a chain around the log to lift it out of an ancient-smelling ditch. A crowd gathers and, to judge by the silence, it is in awe of this remnant from the erased world.

  On another occasion an enormous slab of timber with the bulk of a Roman column is paraded through the streets on the back of a truck. We stop and stare as it travels by—massive, captured, like some barbarian of old paraded through Rome in chains.

  No one knows its variety. The massive slab has been stripped of identity. It has moved beyond botanical association—beyond sympathy too for that matter, or a capacity to shock—to become building material.

  After the ancient log was lowered onto the truck and taken away, the drainage workers leapt into the gaping hole and, stumbling over old roots, successfully joined the concrete pipes, and the sewerage line kicked into life again to pump its discharge out to the headlands where we like to walk at the weekend.

  Thank God the ancient log has been disposed of. There is general agreement on this matter. Roots are hell to deal with.

  Dad won’t even have certain trees on the section. The ‘show lawn’ is covered with little notches, rips and tears where it has come under attack. In the afternoon heat, on all fours, hatchet in hand, Mum hovers and tracks the rooting system of a rogue plant that she never chose to have on the property and so it will have to be chased out. She slashes with the hatchet and Dad looks on approvingly. He is ready to crack open a beer, but won’t until Mum is finished. He has been waging his own war out the back of the section. Rarely are they so close in agreement about anything. It has been drummed into me—there is no point in pulling out a weed unless you rip out all its roots as well.

  The incinerator will smoke away into evening.

  I have been born into a world of amnesia. And in the world of amnesia, language is first to go—talk of fairies and nymphs disappears the moment the shade they shelter in is destroyed forever by the rush of daylight across a forest floor as the giant trees crash to earth.

  We tell ourselves that ‘fairy’ and ‘nymph’ are English words. We have no use for them out here in the new world, and so amnesia finds justification in false pride.

  Before the MOW is able to coat the world in silence a forest must be cleared. The largest trees are scarfed to encourage them to fall in the desired direction. Starting with the largest trees of those highest on a hillside, a ‘drive’ is set up so that each one will crash and topple onto the next giant, which in turn cracks and drunkenly weaves before it too smashes down on the tree below. In this way an entire hillside falls like a stack of dominoes.

  Then the fire lighters move through the fallen logs. The mayhem of men running like hoodlums with torches is captured in an 1857 sketch made by William Strutt. The fallen logs lie in a great tangle, like a battle scene described through the ages. It is chaotic, and pitiless.

  The fires burn for days, and when the smoke clears the hills are covered in black stumps. The ground is black with soot.

  For days the valley at the end of the harbour is lost in smoke. The sun disappears and, around sunset, turns into a fireball, which for the first settlers must have felt like a portent of the end of the world. The story of the hillside has been terminated. Gorse and grass take over, and a whole new story begins.

  Smoke is the colour and texture of amnesia. Amnesia, like smoke, can only point to the condition. We are aware of a loss, not what it is that we have lost.

  It is easier to dwell on the glories of what we have achieved. And, to show improvement, as in Charles Heaphy’s 1841 watercolour of a land clearance. In the foreground, six tree stumps look like amputees but without engendering compassion. They don’t shock in the way a log pulled out of the boggy depths by drainage workers does, because look at what has been won: a lovely croquet-smooth green field. In their supine and semi-stripped state the trees even manage to look elegant, almost improved upon. It would be easy to believe that they had signed their own death warrant for the sake of the greater good.

  It is the end of a process that began with a makeshift plank bridging the gap between the decks of the Resolution and the primeval forest that William Hodges painted. Others follow, leaping off that plank with axes and fire.

  Were it not for the likes of the naturalist William Swainson and the surveyors William Mein Smith and Samuel Brees, who compiled a painterly record of what they saw in our neighbourhood before it actually became one, there would be no lost landscape for us to imagine, let alone lament.

  In one old painting is the riverbank where I played, but it is not as I found it. The still surface of the river holds the reflections of overhanging trees and bushes. A raupo hut occupies the near bank where, more than one hundred years later, the kid from across the street and I will sneak up on a car parked on the shingle, its windows steamed up. All we will see is a bare arse and a girl’s startled face, before the car door is kicked open and a guy stumbles out pulling at his belt and swearing his head off. We tear into the scrub, most of it crappy undergrowth, bracken and gorse and broom, growing like weeds in place of the magnificent trees of the paintings.

  Along with the original forest, the old Englishy names of the first homesteads—Algiony, Hawkshead and Herongate—thatched cottages that sat in a Garden of Eden, will disappear from collective memory. And the broad, many-fingered estuary of the river, which encouraged the first settlers to think of it as another Thames, will change its course.

  In a sketch of his own place in the Hutt Valley, which he called Hawkshead, William Swainson delights in foregrounding introduced elements. Five bunches of English flowers shiver in the newly cleared space, forget-me-nots. The massive trunks of the forest push up through the top of the canvas in the background. Down by the river, a toetoe and a cabbage tree frame two cows drinking at the water’s edge.

  Soon enough Swainson is sketching men with long axes wading into the bush. Then the fires begin, the thick, sun-obliterating effect of the smoke follows, and amnesia sets in.

  So it was easy to forget or, at least, accept grandparents and heritage as something that other people had, something that wasn’t that interesting, or enviable, like owning a particular old artefact, a Victorian brooch or fob watch, for which there is no obvious contemporary use.

  Years, decades, pass before I set eyes on Maud, my mother’s mother, in Villa Rosa, a house on Bathpool Road in Taunton, Somerset. There she is in the album laid out on a table, photographed in the very same house that I happen to be visiting.

  Mavis, a first cousin of my mother’s (unearthed just a few years before my visit) will say of Maud only that she could be ‘a hard woman’. Which isn’t quite the condemnation I had hoped to hear. I wonder if Mavis picks up on this because she repeats, in minor key, ‘She could be very tough.’

  Well, yes, I should say so, in order to make the trade that she did, a trade my mother had no say in, and one that haunted her for the rest of her life.

  As a matter of principle I grow up loathing Maud—at least the idea of her. Whenever asked about my ancestry, specifically my grandparents, I say with some relish, ‘I don’t have any.’

  I never did see Maud in all of those times we parked in her street so Mum could catch a glimpse of her. This occasion in Mavis’s house is the first time that I have locked eyes on my grandmother.

  She is not what I hoped for
. But what did I hope for? I don’t feel as though I have found another layer of me. She could be anyone. She has made no effort to smile for the camera. The eyes are flat, unyielding.

  But then, in another photograph, her face has opened up to a generous smile and the transformation is staggering. She looks almost likeable. She has blonde hair. How strange. I wasn’t expecting a grandmother with blonde hair. I check with Mavis. The photograph was taken on a visit to Taunton in 1922, eight years after my mother was born.

  Briefly, Maud lived in the Hutt, in the same building where many years later, after a changeover from residence to a drapery and clothing store, Mum is buying me my first school uniform.

  She is like a rooster in a familiar pen. Her eyes are everywhere but the task at hand. The poor woman across the counter is trying hard to get her attention. A decision has to be made. Should we go with the current measurement or carry on as we have up until now and allow for the inevitable growth?

  This is how it will be for years to come—the lack of a natural fit, a looseness of material. I continue to grow, but it is a losing battle. I am forever too small. It will be years before neck and collar feel right together.

  Perhaps my mother is experiencing something of the same in the drapery store. For when Maud lived here she sent for Mum, the little girl whom she had given up eight or nine years earlier, and my mother re-entered Maud’s world. By this time Maud had had two more children, boys, Eric and Ken. No one knows why Maud sent for Mum, or what she had in mind. Or, for that matter, what my mother made of this re-entry. No one thought to ask. And, of course, Mum didn’t say. But whatever the reason she came to live with Maud, it didn’t work out, and for a second time my mother was given the flick. I believe she was fourteen or fifteen years old when this happened.

  I wonder if this is what has my mother so preoccupied—squaring up this memory with the stacks of new-smelling school uniforms. As she opens her purse to pay she is still looking into that old space. But I know that the walls of a room do not remember a thing; they are the most hopeless of witnesses, infuriatingly discreet, dedicated as much to accommodating the new as they are to forgetting.

  My mother’s tragedy is that she cannot forget.

  There is a photograph of Mum sitting in the sand dunes on Petone Beach, a little east of where William Swainson had once sat sketching the settlers’ first thatched cottages nestled up to Te Puni’s p at Pito-one, which is now called Petone. Just back from the sand dunes today is the Settlers Museum. The prow of a sailing ship bursts out of its side. On the east side of the building, which faces the gorse-covered hills, is a stained-glass illustration of a settler carrying an axe on his shoulder, his wife, with a baby in her arms, and a boy who wades ahead of his parents into the bush, his eyes bulging with uncertainty at the adventure that lies ahead.

  In the photograph, my mother, who must be in her mid-twenties, looks very thin and a bit troubled by the bundle at her side.

  When my eldest sister, Pat, was born Mum must have hoped that Maud had softened a bit, that she might finally show some interest in her, and so, unannounced, she turns up at Maud’s door to show off the baby—Maud’s grandchild, her first, as it happens. Mum is kept waiting outside on the porch rocking the bundle in her arms until Maud returns to the door with a ten-shilling note in her hand and an instruction for Mum never to show her face again.

  Then, some years later, when Lorraine’s epilepsy is diagnosed and the doctor asks Mum if there is a family history, there is only one way to find out. This time Mum telephones Maud to ask the question that the doctor has asked of her.

  ‘But,’ says Maud, ‘I have no daughter.’

  Now, many years later, towards the end of her long life, my mother lies on a hospital bed staring dimly at the ceiling of the stroke ward in the Hutt Hospital.

  I am required to help her fill out a form for the occupational therapist. To the absurd question, ‘What is your life’s ambition?’, my ninety-year-old-mother suddenly rallies. Her eyes find mine. She is clear and unequivocal. Her ambition is to outlive Maud, who died in her ninety-fourth year.

  Over the coming months, as she is whittled away by a series of strokes, and it becomes clear she won’t achieve her ‘life’s ambition’, we cram four birthdays—her ninety-first, ninety-second, ninety-third and fourth into the space of a few months.

  She has to hold onto the rails of her chair as she draws in a mighty breath and leans forward and, with surprising gusto for a ninety-one-two-three-four-year-old, blows out the candles on the cake.

  More than fifty years earlier she had given birth to me in this same hospital, but on a different floor, in a different ward, where the first joyful cries of life are heard every waking moment. The floor she is on now has the sly and silent air of process and procedure.

  In the dark she seems unaware that I am sitting in the armchair in the corner of her room. She raises her hand from the bed to hold it above her and looks at it as if it is not part of her but something that in a bored moment she has found interesting. Eventually her hand flops back to her side, and her head turns to the pale light in the window.

  Dawn. There will be another day after all.

  I used to wonder if she ever wondered, How strange to think I will soon be leaving this. Especially at night when the prospect of the end acquires its theatrical side.

  For several weeks she has hovered in that twilight world, dumbly feeling her way along corridors that the dying are left to figure for themselves without information or guidance, bumbling along in a fog of morphine.

  Half blind, she sniggered at the window. She fetched up the name of an old neighbour. And when I looked, a lumpy cloud was passing.

  It is too late to ask her about Maud. It is too late to ask searching questions or to expect her to answer honestly of herself. It is too late for her to shed light on the past. On the other hand, the earthquake is still some years off and so I have still to arrive at the point where the past, in particular my own foundations, holds any interest. Maud, who knew so much, died many years earlier, unlamented as far as I am concerned, and now Mum is about to follow her.

  I read to her, fragments from Chatwin’s In Patagonia. I doubt she understood any of it, least of all that I was attempting to read life back into her. Sometimes she managed a show of concentration, as though listening—but then reading too felt wrong to me, or ill-chosen, absurd in a way, to use one’s last days to concentrate on a writer’s journey through communities of exiles in the wilds of a place she might not have known actually existed.

  On the other hand, being read to returned some dignity to her—she was engaged, it seemed—and this was better than the crash bang of the breakfast trolleys and the patronising cheer of the nurses. This seemed to be the official approach: keep everything bubbling along to the end with a light humour.

  When the doctor, a solid and charming older Indian man, arrived on his morning round, my mother’s eyes lit up. She was almost girlish in her flirting.

  Out of her earshot the doctor asked me, ‘Has anyone told your mother that she is dying?’

  The need to point this out to her hadn’t occurred to me. Surely she knew. How could she not?

  The doctor gave me a searching look. The warm regard of a moment ago disappeared. He took off his glasses and wearily examined them.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘Should I tell her?’

  He looked up, found his smile, nodded, and after a friendly pat of my shoulder he continued on his round with a brood of junior doctors in their new white coats.

  Her grey hair has fallen carelessly across her face. I smile, and she smiles back. She was about to say something. So I delay my ‘news’ and wait, even though it is months since she managed a sentence. She was last heard from when invited to state her life ambition.

  Her eyes look up expectantly, and I realise I have got it wrong. She doesn’t want to speak. She is expecting to hear something said. She turns her head on the pillow. She tilts her eyes to the door. She must have seen
me talking to the doctor. So I bend over her and in the same bullying manner I have seen the nurses use, sinking her into shadow, I say, ‘I thought I would get a cup of tea. Would you like one?’

  The light returns to her eyes and she replies with a nod, and I burst out of there.

  Outside her room, fake cheer rebounds along the walls—splashy paintings by school children. There is the rush of a female visitor’s footsteps for the lifts, followed by the loud exuberance of a newly arrived visitor, a large, glowing fellow, his arms filled with flowers and crackling cellophane. That is what the flowers are—a replacement for words and the need to say what cannot be said. Others camp around the bed of a wizened family member. Some perch on the bed-end, numb with boredom. A hand reaches across a skeleton for the bowl with the fat bananas. Behind an open door a number of orderlies in green smocks have their feet up, eating out of chippie bags and laughing in gulps at an episode of The Simpsons.

  I carry two styrofoam cups back to my mother’s room, horribly aware of the length of the corridor, which shines with disinfectant and the sound of my own footsteps.

  It is a moment before she is aware of me standing in the doorway. The old head turns on the pillow and smiles. I put down one cup, and hold the other to her mouth. She manages a sip, and shudders. I wonder if it is too hot. But that isn’t it. I have forgotten she doesn’t take sugar. What was I thinking?

  I hurry out to make a fresh cup. By the time I return she is asleep, so I leave the tea on the cabinet by her bed and tiptoe away to the lifts.

  The next day there is a photograph in the newspaper of a spectacular dying sun taken by Voyager on a journey to the outer reaches of the universe, in effect, to capture old news.

  It is a snapshot of our own sun three to four billion years from now. A sun just like the one that provides our daily existence has imploded into vapour.

  I bring the newspaper to the hospital. I show up to her door with one of my better smiles, one with firm and honest intentions. She is pleased to see me. The doctor has still to make his round. So I sit down on the edge of her bed with the newspaper open to the relevant section. I hold up the photograph of the dying sun. She leans forward, interested, and we go from there. And I continue to circle, ludicrously alluding to the solar system, imploding suns and so forth, until finally I have to say it. ‘You’re on your last legs, Mum.’ It is like telling a child some horrible truth about the world. She looks up at me, concentrating on what I have just said. She seems interested, then annoyed. She turns her head away from me. But the insistent light in the window is no better. When she turns back, I am surprised to find her looking so cross.