A History of Silence (6 page)

This is what happened to the ground bearing the foundations of the city's buildings during the earthquake. In a few minutes a history of peat and swamp flooded a landscape thought to have drained its past.

We grew up unable to see much beyond the birth of our parents. There was no big narrative to cling to, nor tales repeated from generation to generation until they acquire their own truth. The only story to come close was about my older brother Bob shooting himself in the foot after a night of rabbit shooting, an event repeatedly described as a tale of great mirth.

There might have been more to tell if more had been shared, if questions had been asked, if information had been offered and passed along at the moment it lit up in memory. But the family trait was silence. Great wreaths of it were wound around our lives and stuffed in the windows and hallway of our parents' house, and that is what was absorbed, that and, speaking for myself, a finely tuned ability to gauge the air in the room which at any moment might explode with the slam of a door. Someone had taken offence at something said—usually my mother. A seemingly innocent remark to her by someone commenting on the lousy weather had led her to say, ‘Well, don't blame me. It's not my fault.' Now cups of tea would have to be ferried in and days of penance paid in silences that would not be broken until my mother's emergence from the bedroom.

It never occurred to me to ask my father if he remembered what his mother looked like, or if he had any memory at all of his father, or how many houses he lived in as a child. He did talk about his time on the goldfields, and I knew—without knowing how or why—that he was politically active in his thirties. And years later, when someone who had known him at the Wormald factory in Naenae said he was a ‘shit stirrer', I was pleased to hear that, because it was not a side of him that I ever saw. I also heard that political meetings used to be held in our kitchen and that the Labour Party once asked Dad to stand in Hutt Central but he didn't because he could barely string two words together. Why? Nobody asked or offered a reason. It was just Dad, like the hills covered with gorse that packed in around our lives, a bit rough but capable of bloom. His ability with language improved after Bob's first wife, Ginny, a beautifully spoken part-Maori woman, gave Dad elocution lessons. By then, though, he was a man in his fifties.

I cannot hear his voice any more. I can hear my mother's, but only just, a whisper, her head held to one side, querying, suspicious that she is being got at. But Dad's voice has gone. A photograph is left to represent him. His eyes are round and motionless, like caves hollowed out by the wind. I cannot hear him speak, partly because there is always a cigarette in his mouth.

Often he is standing at the kitchen sink, staring out at the street. Mood and language moving about in their separate states. And this scene is often succeeded by another memory of him, in a bar in Kings Cross, Sydney. I am twelve or thirteen; we are on our way to Surfers, but first there is this night at the Cross to get through. And, more pressingly, there is this large thick-set American buttonholing Mum and Dad with his clean-shaven smell, his troubled eyes, and his desperation to win over my father. ‘Do you understand how many troops we have over there in Nam?' His voice rising and tearing thin at the stupendous thing that he is about to share. ‘Five hundred thousand.' My mother responds in her usual way, with disapproval, not at the information, but the intrusion, at the unwanted company. It isn't political engagement she fears, but engagement full stop. And, as well, there is the strong whisky breath of the man. She draws in her lips and looks away to lose herself in the smoke. A heavy man tucked inside a black suit smiled and sweated over a piano. The American leant forward to get my father's attention. ‘Five hundred thousand men.' He sounded amazed by his own news.

Foundations come in all forms—texture, language, heritage, entitlement. Some things are buffed to be remembered while other things fall away. One world of upheaval gradually gave way to another. I saw not so much the things that remained standing but the gaps and fissures. Like the boy in the photograph, I found myself concentrating on a portal of memory that offered, at different moments, some incidents with startling detail and others that had been cast off but lingered defiantly, as if waiting to be hauled up from the abyss where all lost things lie.

One thing became clear. The sequencing employed by the basilica stonemasons was not available to me. Not all the bits and pieces had been accounted for. Nonetheless a picture began to emerge of the world as I had found it, as it does for an immigrant setting his eyes on the distant heads for the first time, before he sails through and ticks them off as known.

TWO

THE ROAD OUTSIDE the house at 20 Stellin Street, Lower Hutt, was my first horizon. The rubbish bins at the end of the drive were the heads I routinely stumbled out to each day in search of life.

Another new arrival—a kid of my own pre-school age—comes tottering towards me. He has broken out of the house across the road. A huge woman appears at the end of his drive. An enormous woman, her hair on fire, eyes big and wide. As soon she shouts the kid starts running on his short chubby legs. He is easily overtaken and carried back across the road. It'll be another year before he shows his face again.

At first my eye is drawn to those things that like me are a bit dumb, perhaps a bit vulnerable and witless, such as the dogs that lie on the road. Grudgingly they get up to let a car pass, then walk in a tight little circle before lying down again. For the moment the road marks the boundary of the known world.

I find myself waiting—endlessly—for something to happen.

Then I hear it. A screeching of brakes, followed by a terrible wailing. I wait—fighting back the mounting dread. Then I get out of bed, run down the hall and open the door in time to see a man carefully lift a sack over the hedge.

The last dog was run over as well, and its predecessor. But I know the solution. We will quickly buy a new dog, and give it the old dog's kennel and flea-ridden blanket and carry on as we were.

The first dog my parents bought for me was a little terrier the size of a handbag. I put it down my shirt and popped its head out over the top button so it could see the world approach. It was so excited, its little body shook and I felt the warm dribble of its piddle. It licked my face, it was so grateful to me for letting it piss over my belly.

One by one, my dogs are run over. There's hardly any traffic, and that is the problem. The event of a car isn't taken seriously, so the stupid tail-wagging fools stand up and glare at the approaching grille. In the World of the Dog the road belongs to them, a principle that they understand but nobody else does.

In 1960, I am aged five. It is a long wait until a car passes by. So from time to time I think to check on the deteriorating condition of the hedgehog. It was run over a few days earlier. There was more of it then. A black gummed thing. After a day it was half the size it had been. It was as though the air had gone out of it. Then it flattened out. Soon most of it was gone, licked up by tyres. The smell went too. There was a day of rain, and when I looked again the hedgehog was a light stain on the road.

Since then I don't like to look at it. In fact, I make a point not to look. At some stage in its slow evisceration I have become churlish. The state of the hedgehog has provoked in me feelings of disgust. So, if I don't look, it will be as if it isn't there. And, as I'd rather not feel the way I do when I look, then I won't.

In the course of making such choices I am slowly making me. But what are those choices based on? I could have found a stick and, while the hedgehog was still a moveable spiky ball, shifted the carcass into the gutter. But I didn't. I chose to look the other way, and that decision was perfectly in keeping with the climate of forgetting that will slowly infiltrate me.

In the long grass beneath the washing line I find an old boxing-glove. God knows how it got there. I look up at the sky. The leather's as hard as a sheep's turd at the end of summer. I have to push to get my hand inside, and I can feel it resisting me. Its last memory is of Bob's hand which is what it has moulded itself to, but in the end I win it over with my persistence, and then after I've done up the laces it begins to adjust until it feels as though it has only ever known my hand. The glove has a history—a violent, merciless one. I don't care about that. I'm just chuffed that it fits my hand. There is that initial awkwardness, but it soon passes. And I am left with the surprising and delightful feeling that room has been made for me.

My bedroom at 20 Stellin Street used to belong to my brother, but I cannot find a trace of him in there. He is seventeen years older than I am and has long left home. It's also hard to believe in what I have been told about Grandad, the bookseller, dying in there. I remember the hedgehog, and its slow fade from the road, and stare harder at the walls, at the ancient pinholes made from tacks and at the light patches where things used to hang.

When did I first become aware of my siblings? I suppose one day I looked up from my preoccupation with the carpet and there they were—legs, hurrying feet, their names, Pat, Bob, Barbara, Lorraine, and measurements dated and scored into the doorjamb of the washhouse.

On my way to bed each night I look up at a photograph taken of Pat, Bob and Barbara in a city street. They are young, as I have never seen them, and dressed in clothes that look to be from another era. The youngest in the photograph, Barbara, doesn't look much older than my five-year-old self. Lorraine has still to arrive in the world. I'm waiting in line behind her. What were they doing that day, and why was the photograph taken? There is another photo on the wall—of my brother peeping over two boxing gloves held like paws.

He doesn't live with us now. I have no idea where he lives. He shows up for the Sunday roast then drives off, and is gone for the week.

But look at what he leaves around the telephone. Bits of notepaper with phone numbers scrawled on them and envelopes covered with sketches of boxers' feet set to different angles of attack and defence. The sketches are stranger now in recollection because of their disembodied effect—the laced boots, the beginnings of shins, and then the legs peter out. But I came to expect them and would look for them when he left because they were as predictable as dogs crapping on the lawns up and down the street.