A History of Silence Read online

  But I have no idea of the country that sat inside my father. There were so few despatches he shared.

  I remember the day I caught him at the piano. It was a new piece of furniture in the house. When I was ten or eleven there had been a change of circumstances—a stunning reversal of fortune.

  A vase of flowers sat on the table, a painting on the wall, a Parisian street scene by Raoul Dufy. I have no idea how it got there. The promise of performance extended to Dad—there he sat at the piano, his face straining to hear whatever notes he heard in his head. It was such a surprise, so unorthodox, like coming upon a dog preparing to mount a bicycle and pedal off under its own steam. He didn’t know I was there. If he did he would have sprung up and coughed his way out of the room. While I stood in the door, I hardly heard him produce a sound. Was the room was too well lit? The gloom favoured by day-time drunks would have suited him better, rather than this hard, unforgiving light pouring through the windows. His hands spread lightly over the piano keys but no sound came out. The piano assumed complete control, as though it had a wire around my father’s throat.

  I drifted away, wishing I hadn’t seen what I had seen. I would rather have known that he couldn’t play the piano—which would have been no surprise at all—than to see him act as if he could, like a mute who repeatedly opens his mouth in the hope that words will come out.

  I snuck out the back way, kicked the dog out of its nest of filthy old blankets, and the two of us started up to the corner dairy on High Street. I was bound to run into someone I knew, hopefully someone with stolen money. I was thinking I would like something to eat, not food as such, but maybe some chocolate, or milk bottle lollies, or a coconut-ice bar or some spearmint leaves. I might even look over the iceblocks.

  Then the dog saw a cat, and a woman I didn’t know screamed at me from a house that was usually shut up, and I forgot Dad and the piano.

  Amid the shouting and the woman’s screaming I grabbed hold of the dog’s bullish neck with both hands. This was the same little puppy I’d let piss over my bare stomach. Now it wanted to tear that cat apart. The woman bent down and the cat leapt into her arms. She stroked the head of her shitty cat. She called out some abuse and backed into her house and shut the door.

  In the ringing silence the air smelt of cat fear and in my head were the shiny surfaces of the piano and my father’s grey eyes straining for notes that he could not find, that he would never find, not then or in a thousand years.

  Two big events within five minutes—the world has gone mad.

  I need to reinvigorate myself, and so decide to backtrack and wander along the cutting from Taita Drive that the retarded kid used to take to get to our back fence. Half of the fence is now eaten away, and as I pass it I wonder what has happened to him as I never see him any more. He goes into that box of sudden departures never explained. This is two or three years before the pregnant girl at school is abducted by aliens. The dog is in one of its unseemly jaunty moods after the cat episode and pads alongside me. There is the lively smell of fennel and a whiff of the illegal rubbish dump. The track leads past the golf course and down to the river.

  I drop onto the tee nearest the houses and wander onto the fairway to a big windbreak of soft firs. It is hard to tell one tree from the next; they have been planted so closely that the ends of their branches interlace. I leave the dog sniffing and scratching behind its ear while I climb to the top of one of the trees. I’m high enough to feel a slight breeze which was barely noticeable on the fairway. I can see all the way to the river. In the other direction are the tiled roofs of the houses. Beneath my feet, the dog gazes up at me through the shredded branches. It knows the drill. At a moment of my choosing, which I cannot predict and which has no pattern, I simply let go, and free-fall—crashing through the under-layers.

  I feel as though I have returned to the full dominion of self, and fear like some internal wind fills me out. But I know I will be caught by a lower branch. The fear is fleeting, and the not knowing is illusory.

  My father, as a boy, was not so lucky.

  The extremely rare event of a car pulling into his street is a sign that his time was up. He must go inside and pack his bag. A stranger is on his way to take him to another house where more strangers will line up in the hall by the front door and stare at him with ragged smiles.

  He will be shown to a new bed in a new room. There will be new procedures to learn, a new family to work his way inside, to understand, and then one day he will hear a car pull into the drive and look up to see a stranger get out and stretch and find him with a look that my father instantly knows is for him, not the dog, or the woman standing sheepishly by the door. Inside he goes to pack his bag. On the porch a hand drops onto his shoulder, in another awkward farewell.

  When I am ten years old, for reasons baffling to me, my father gets in the car and drives off to the Epuni Boys’ Home and returns with a boy a year older than me carrying a battered suitcase.

  The idea, as it is put to me, is to give me company since my brother and sisters have moved out long ago. But I never asked for company, and besides I have all the friends I need; plus there’s the dog, the silly bugger, bewitched by his tail, driven wild by it, turning in circles until he finally gets a hold of it in his jaws and won’t let go and crabs across the lawn with his arse in his mouth. What could be more diverting than that? And then there’s Rex the salamander, and the launching of myself out of treetops.

  I imagine the kid came to live with us because of another conversation that I was never privy to, as well as a shared desire to give an unloved orphan a better childhood than perhaps either Mum or Dad had enjoyed.

  My sister Lorraine and her baby, Nicole, are still living in the caravan in the Hutt Park campground, so the new kid is given her old bedroom. It’s just across the hall from the toilet, but the boy from the home still manages to wet the bed every other night. No matter how many times he washes and bathes he still stinks of piss. He also steals from my friend’s mother’s handbag (but then so does her son, who many years later will wind up in Long Bay jail in Sydney for car conversion). Still, it’s embarrassing. And at a screening of The Sound of Music the embarrassment reaches new excruciating heights when, in his strange husky voice brimming with indignation at the failure of von Trapp to finish the Lord’s Prayer in the usual way, the kid from the home bellows out for the whole picture theatre to hear, ‘He forgot to say “Amen!”’

  How did he know that? On the way home I try not to look at him. The way he sits is irritating. He is pissing me off even more than he usually does. He is perched on the edge of the back seat, leaning forward; his freckly face, which I don’t like, is raised and tilted back to an unnecessary degree, and his bottom jaw is unhinged and his mouth hangs open.

  In his room there are two beds. The one that he has taken is pushed against the wall behind the door, so that on opening the door the room appears empty, a joy to find, but then I get a whiff of that old piss smell and when I look around the corner there he is, there he still was, looking sorrowful, like a dog that knows that you know it has farted.

  I couldn’t wait for him to leave. Nine months after unpacking his pyjamas in Lorraine’s old bedroom he is returned to Epuni Boys’ Home.

  For a number of days I kept his bedroom door closed. Eventually I opened it, and the window, and it was like he was never there.

  Stephen was his name.

  I like to think that had everything been explained differently, had I known something of my father’s childhood, I would have shown more patience, more tolerance. But I never guessed the reasons behind what seemed an inexplicable thing to do—bring a strange kid in to the house and then pretend that it was all perfectly normal.

  It was raining again and the carriage windows fogged up, and Wales disappeared from view. I was left with the solitary smell of the train. I closed my eyes and thought back to the shiny new piece of furniture in the house and, following the tentative notes down the hall, my shock to find Dad
sitting in a trance at the piano, his thick welder’s fingers resting on the keys.

  Wales didn’t speak to me. Or perhaps it did and I couldn’t hear it properly, unfamiliar with its fluted notes, unable to tell the subdued from that which barely seemed to exist. Wales. It smiled weakly in the way of relatives who have fallen out of touch and know they are supposed to recognise each other but aren’t certain any longer of who it is they are speaking to.

  The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once collated the photographs of his siblings and cousins and with the help of a photographer friend overlaid them to produce ‘a family look’. In Wales I did see a kind of sloped shoulder and catch a round-at-the-shoulder look, an evasiveness that wished to see everything but did not wish to be observed in turn. I saw myself, in other words.

  There was something else, too, that seemed to reflect me inside out. The moment, however, I try and single it out or fillet it into parts that can be described or named such as nose, cheekbone, or eyes, the observation falls apart. I can’t be more precise. Except to point out the uncanny feeling of familiarity I felt in a place that I had never visited. That is what it was like in Wales. A slow leaching between myself and that which I observed, until I too could have been shuffled into a pack of locals, a la Wittgenstein, without polluting the ‘representative look’.

  Such a possibility does not excite me; it means some less than desirable things claiming membership within my personal constituency and cultural memory—a shabbiness and a decent proportion of sour shadow, the gruffness of station masters, the crappy food and malfunctioning toilets (often mysteriously locked), the unionised operation of the food cart, the filthy-arsed sheep I saw through the train window that spoke of a certain sloppiness. The song and dance and pissy-eyedness of the place also goes into the mix.

  And were I to suffer a personal earthquake and be split open, I am quite certain a team of awkward blokes would scramble out of me with a pint in one hand and a balled fist in the other, and that the temptation to fight would be confused with one to sing. Another mob would split to the hills without so much as a backward glance, and a smaller constituency would make for the ridges and beneath a low sky set a course for the distant headland.

  I might throw in a dash of stoicism that began with a line of sea mariners and farm labourers arriving on the far side of the world to emerge in the form of my father. The stoicism seems to have stopped with him. It wasn’t passed on to his children, and in any case we would have shrugged it off like some foul and soiled garment. No, we don’t waste a moment if we feel our own situation can be made better by screaming and shouting about it.

  Dad, on the other hand, set off in the dark each day in the foulest weather, not especially bothered because, after all, it is July, and in July it rains. He would step off the porch and his hat brim would start to spill with the cold rain without his seeming to notice it. The one time in his life that he was unshackled from the factory and his soldering irons was when he was a gold prospector in the 1930s. It was the only part of his past I heard him talk about. For food he shot deer, and when moved by an appetite for a trout he threw a stick of gelignite into the river.

  Once, when I was ten years old, he took me down to the goldfields. We stopped in a pub in the middle of nowhere. Dad talked with the barman. I must have looked away or been diverted by the pig’s head on the wall and when I looked back I saw a glass jar of nuggets sitting on the bar. We drove to the goldfields, parked at the end of a road and set off over paddocks. I saw a lamb born. It was breech and Dad had to reach in with his hand and turn a few knobs before he got the lamb out. It was covered in a yucky yellow skin. We watched it get to its feet. It shook a bit. Then it opened its eyes. I have an idea it saw Dad, with a stub of a cigarette stuck to his lip, before it saw its mother. It must have wondered what sort of world it had arrived at and how the family look could vary so wildly.

  We carried on across the fields, scrambled down a bush track and on the river flats came to a large sluicing pipe. Now that Dad had the scent of the place in his nostrils, he scrambled here and there. I followed after to find him looking in a concentrated way at something that on its own was nothing more than a bank or a rock pool and once, I recall, a tree. We climbed up another track and came out of the bush to a paddock scattered with stones. They turned out to be the foundations of dwellings that had burnt down or blown away in the wind. I followed him around from one lot of stones to the next until he stopped, satisfied that this was the place where he had slept for three years on the ground. In the dry grass I counted four stones set in a square. Each man had a side to himself. I asked him which side was his, and he nodded at a particular line in the grass. I didn’t think to doubt him. But now that he had found the spot there wasn’t much more to do than look at the ground and take in the world from that position. It was like being on a train going through Wales. Time slowed on the back of a long obligatory examination.

  Some years later I was to roam a hillside that creeps down from Bendigo Station to Lake Dunstan in Central Otago in the South Island where a community of Welsh gold prospectors and their families had stuck it out for twelve years. The remnants of their stone cottages and a big sluicing operation still stand, along with a church and a school and a number of stony tracks that connect one cottage with another up and down the hillside and over a stream of good drinking water.

  There was a clear sky, no wind, and although spring had only just begun it was surprisingly hot. But in winter the water pools iced over. Those Welsh miners and their families must have called upon a certain fortitude to get them through.

  My father’s default expression was one of vacancy. Hot tar could have been poured inside his skull and he would not have complained. His hands were covered with thick skin from handling steel. I saw him pick up gorse in his bare hands. I suppose if you empty yourself out there is nothing left to scald or hurt. I don’t have his forbearance, but I do have the expression that goes with it.

  On the journey through Wales I saw that expression on faces lining station platforms—a vacant look, bordering on gloom.

  It was raining in Swansea too. When we stopped at the station I could barely see out the windows. Then we were leaving, thank God, and as the train came off a bridge—I think it was a bridge; there was a lovely sense of elevation and of launching away from the city—we punched out of the grey rain and came into sunshine, and, just ten minutes on from Swansea’s bleak doorway, there appeared a vast estuary of wet sand and fast-moving currents. A gap opened in the coastal hills and my eyes shot to the horizon and back again to the sand flats that were rapidly moving from one state to the next with the historically minded way of tides.

  Then, as though the carriage window had been struck by seagull shit, a caravan park popped up, at odds with everything seen so far, and the train headed inland, to rolling green hillsides and long hedgerows that trickled down the slopes.

  A shadow like a dark pond on a distant hill moved on with the cloud.

  Shadows everywhere, striding out of the valleys.

  Three-quarters of me is from here. I have to keep reminding myself of that fact. Three-quarters of me turns out to be a stranger. I am the tail end of a vanished comet.

  I wonder what has passed on to me—what I have unwittingly absorbed. Sideburns, wispy hair tailing off behind the ears, a susceptibility to colds and bold offerings, a taste for sweet things, a policeman’s plodding look, but also an attraction to the anarchic, not so much a torching of trees but setting fire to the rubbish tip behind the house, after which we hid in a tight cluster of broom and snuggled up to its cartridges of black seeds terrified at what we’d done as the fire engines screamed their way to the blaze. A general rage—at varying targets: genocide, shabby cafe service, someone’s elbow drifting into my space on an aeroplane—an irritability more or less constant, like a wavering magnetic needle. I have no idea what my father’s father, the man who drowned at sea, looked like.

  My mother had what used to be called a ‘
Roman nose’. I suppose she must have got it from her mother or father. It’s hard to tell from the photographs of Maud. She looks like she’s trying to put out the torches of a witch-hunt with a disarming smile. So the nose, to the extent it shows, is diminished. Perhaps Mum inherited it from the farmer. And what of him has passed down to me? A photograph would be useful. A photograph might tell all. Then I could peer into it until my own features might begin to arrange themselves in his, and a bit of reverse colonisation would be achieved—if I had such a photograph.

  Photographs of course are not always reliable. Just as a landscape can change, so can a face. When my mother was forty, just before she had me (and came down with toxaemia as a result, she said), a dentist, with some authority, suggested she would be better off without her teeth, so he pulled them all out. It had been presented to her as a future saving. There would be no dentist bills. Also, false teeth were a very modern solution. I quickly became accustomed to the sight of her teeth, left to stand in a glass of water, usually a recycled Marmite jar, on a table beside her bed. When I went into her room to do my spelling before school, the teeth would be in that jar of water. Mum was learning Esperanto at the time. I suspect she probably had some success with that useless language with her teeth out—a language with no home, a bit like those teeth sitting cartoonishly in a glass.

  There was a moment on the train when I looked out and imagined an intersecting view of myself and ‘the man who drowned at sea’. Our sightlines fell on the same white cottages, the same boggy weald, the sky, in flight for one and welcoming the other. Fanciful, of course, because in spite of the self-reflective substance bouncing in the window for most of the time I felt apart, as you do on a train, when the upwinds you float on are deeply individualised and the country looked out upon is confused with other landscapes.