A History of Silence (4 page)

And then, in a calmer moment, after I'd told the producer I would get back to him and had put the phone down, I sat stone still, struck by something unexpected and heard again, I suppose for the tenth, twentieth or hundredth time—the gun shot. The episode unfolds always in the same way. I look at the clock. And seeing it is 2 a.m. feel a bit sour. I pull on a pair of jeans and a shirt. The apartment is in the Western Addition, one of the dodgier neighbourhoods of San Francisco. I have heard that the cops don't like to come here at night. But, down on the street, there they are. A police car has driven up onto the footpath. Two cops are shining torches in the window of the Palestinian corner store. A black man is sitting on the edge of the footpath. He looks up at me. His eyes are glassy. Then I notice the red hole in the chest of his white shirt. It occurs to me that I have seen this before, and I have, perhaps a hundred or maybe even a thousand times before, to the point where it ceases to shock, and I have forgotten how to feel. The instinctive horror I felt the first time I entered the butcher shop has exhausted itself. So when the producer said of the earthquake, ‘It's just like a movie', I did know what he meant, except this time it was different.

This was a real disaster. Equally, it was plain to see that it had come out of an unacknowledged past. The old maps clearly spelt out the swamp and wetland history of the city's foundations. But that had been overlooked or perhaps was thought to have been triumphed over by advances in swamp-draining techniques, then covered up with concrete and bitumen.

Within days of the earthquake, posters advising drop off points for clothes and food and other supplies went up on walls and lampposts across Wellington.

One lunch hour I joined a long line of people at the entranceway to Pipitea Marae to drop off a couple of cartons of men's razors and toiletries that I'd been told were in short supply. The organisation and efficiency of the operation were impressive. Everyone seemed to know instinctively what to do. An older Maori woman came up to me and inquired compassionately, ‘Where are you from, dear?' A number of people escaping Christchurch, including foreign tourists, had spent the night in the marae on their way north. I think she had confused me with one of them. I was sorry to disappoint her. I was only here to help. Then she asked if she could make me a cup of tea. She too wanted to help—anyone that she could. I politely declined, and she said, ‘God bless you.'

A few days after the massive Napier earthquake in 1931 my father cycled 385 kilometres to help with the clean up. I had always known this, although like many things that I know I don't remember ever being told. It was one of those things one absorbs, like knowing the sky is filled with stars, without the need of someone pointing it out.

For several weeks I mulled over going down to Christchurch to pitch in, but then I heard about a ‘student army of ten thousand' conscripted over Facebook and felt discouraged. Ten thousand pairs of youthful hands, each with a spade to shovel up the silted streets and driveways. And there they appeared, onscreen and in newspaper photographs. They were magnificent. And I felt done out of a job.

Then I thought, I should go anyway. At the very least I could help pick up things that had been broken. Or maybe I could take a shovel down with me and join the student army, but the idea of a twenty-year-old on the end of a shovel held me back. My father, it occurred to me, had been about the same age as the students when he pedalled all the way up to Napier.

Within months of the Christchurch earthquake, the old buildings in the run-down and slightly louche but lively Cuba Street precinct around the shoe factory in Wellington were red-stickered—they had been judged unsafe to inhabit because their structural robustness fell below the required standard to survive a severe earthquake. House-buyers now avoided brick dwellings, and were anxious more than ever to know how well their prospective purchase would stand up to a Christchurch-sized quake in Wellington.

This transference of anxiety was understandable in a city repeatedly told that an earthquake of apocalyptic proportion is overdue. Since I was in primary school we have been in rehearsal. I remember in earthquake drill waiting for my imminent demise with breath held and eyes wide. I didn't want to miss any of it, especially not the signal from the teacher that my world was about to change. At a clap of his hands we dropped beneath our desks. After one minute, which always felt longer, there was another clap of the hands and we climbed back up and glanced around at one another: happy survivors.

My anxieties prompted by the quake in Christchurch were old ones from another time and place.

And as emotion swept the country between those who had first-hand experience of the event and those of us who might be described as witnesses, we found ourselves in an overlapping realm similar to the effect geologists describe as an echoing between soft and hard surfaces.

I decided to go to Christchurch five weeks after the quake.

Like William Hodges glimpsing the staggering sight of the icebergs at latitudes further south than Cook had ever sailed before, I was drawn and compelled by a sense of awe—in my case, however, for the scenes of devastation.

I had flown into Christchurch airport many times before, and usually went directly to a hotel in the city. I never bothered to look out the side window, at least not until the taxi joined the traffic on the sweep around Hagley Park, and then I would sit up and look properly at the enormous oak trees and the stately space they commanded.

This time was different. It was strangely, electrifyingly different. Within minutes of leaving the airport I saw a tank rumbling along Memorial Avenue. Its tall aerial radiated an urgency that made the houses it passed appear small and needy. And then the randomness of the violence became clear. On the approach to Hagley Park I saw trees stuck at odd angles, like arrows dropped out of the sky from an archer's bow, and a vast armada of rescue and aid-worker tents and motor campers.

A short way on the traffic slowed; the road was ripped and torn, and through the open window I could smell the liquefied earth. Holes, subsidence everywhere. Rubble of every kind and so many surprising sights—the not quite right and at the same time not wholly inappropriate sight of the sky pouring in through the shattered roof of a church. Roads sagged and fell away into fissures and cracks. At the intersection of streets leading into the CBD, young faces belonging to Territorials turned away inquisitive motorists or those who had perhaps forgotten that the old route was no longer possible. And then the buildings, bits fallen off, windows broken, slippages. That world was more frail than anyone could have guessed, to the point where after several trips, it began to look fake, to feel as though everyone had been living in a theatre set.

As the partially destroyed buildings began to come down, the empty sites began to add up, and the edges of the city's erasure spread. Out at Bottle Lake, a substitute city—of rubble—grew. Mountains of the city's debris were being compressed down by graders that sat like toys on top of the heap of piled redundancy.

And then, like Hodges, I found myself seeking to overlay what I had seen with a story I'd heard.

The hairdresser was in her twenties. Her hair was red, I think, with a raccoon stripe of green. As she circled me with the clippers I had the impression of a small animal.
Snip. Snip
. She continued. Her aunt—
snip, snip
—had broken her leg a few weeks before the earthquake. And, she said, her leg was still in plaster when the quake lowered the corner of the house where the bathroom and toilet were situated. So,
snip, snip,
she could no longer use the loo. She said her aunt's husband had cut a hole in the bottom of a beach chair and positioned it over a hole he dug in the backyard.

I was onto my third or fourth trip to the city, and I no longer paid attention to the world outside the taxi side window.

The driver kept looking in his rear mirror for me to instruct him. I waved him on past the Daily Donut with half its front fallen away and an oblong of sky where the door had flown out, past a massage parlour that was a pile of rubble with a flickering light next to a handwritten sign:
Yes, we are still open
. We moved on towards the spreading sky in the east to the suburbs badly affected by liquefaction—a likely address I thought to locate the hairdresser's aunt's story.

The taxi driver pulled over by a line of grungy shops. It seemed as good a place as any.

I got out and began to walk, without any real sense of direction, except to take care where raw sewage ran across driveways. The same sights were repeated—abandonment, absences of every kind. Even in streets that did not appear to be badly damaged, new indignities had been invented. People had dug up their lawn to shit or if they had the stomach for it they shat into plastic bags which could be sealed with a twist and dumped in the shiny green human waste disposal units dotted along the streets.

I didn't have a map with me, but much of the place I recognised from what I had seen on television—the silted footpaths, the slurry grey filth in the driveways, the hard-bitten lawns, the grim occupancy of council flats and state houses. Amazingly, the flowers kept growing despite all that had happened. A large Polynesian woman knelt on a lawn yakking into a mobile and pulling weeds with her free hand. Weeding seemed such an odd thing to do. I wanted to call out hello, to engage her, and say something. I wasn't sure what, but I was thinking, ‘This is what people used to do.' Now it seemed to be completely beside the point. The neighbouring houses were empty, and they shook as generators in the street roared to clear drains of sludge and diggers and graders dug and clawed at the road.

I carried on, looking for an address to place the hairdresser's story. I walked in circles for several hours and eventually found myself at the waterfront, at New Brighton, and there on the esplanade I came upon an abandoned couch. An elderly woman had sat down on it to rest. A small dog sat by her feet. I studied this scene from the sandhills above the road until through the alchemy of imagination it turned into something else in my notebook. This account finds me dropping down from the sandhills and crossing the road to sit on the couch next to an enormously fat man. I decided to change the husband of the hairdresser's aunt into a neighbour, an extremely obese fellow whose past as a thin man has been erased and overtaken by layers of flesh. In a city pole-axed by the quake a makeshift toilet will be regarded as a bouquet. At the hour of need the fat man will leave his house next door to the Polynesian woman I had seen weeding, and haul himself, huffing and puffing, into the army-patrolled area of New Brighton to steal a beach chair and then fashion it into a toilet for the hairdresser's aunt.

I still have notes to that effect. In this account his conscience finds him a few days later wishing to make a reparation. The fat man rises every now and then from the couch to look up and down the street for the old woman with the dog from whom he stole or borrowed the beach chair for a makeshift dunny.
He
sat down heavily. His breath was drawn up from a pit of broken timbers.
His eyes followed his breath into his lungs. After a fourth or fifth breath
his eyes began to move and notice things. I leant closer to hear the man
speak. For he spoke in a whisper as though he was unused to being heard.
When he stopped speaking he sat with his feet splayed and a hand on each
thigh, with an inviolable sense of occupancy, like a hen sitting on its eggs.