A History of Silence (10 page)

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.