A History of Silence (20 page)

4 brushes (nail, tooth, hair, clothes)

1 comb

1 mirror (optional)

1 pair of leggings

1 oilskin

1 tweed overcoat

2 suits of pyjamas

1 suitcase

2 ties

1 belt

The girls receive a variation of the above:

Woollen singlets

2 working frocks

A workbox containing needles, thimble, pin cushion, scissors, tape, buttons, hooks, cotton and thread and darning wool.

A few other stipulations include the requirement that no girl under eighteen is to be allowed out after 8 p.m. ‘An afternoon a week would give as much liberty as is necessary.'

‘Boys at service should bear in mind that they are as much under the control of the manager as when they are living at the school.'

‘It is very important that the boys should go to church regularly, avoid companions who will lead them to mischief, keep from using foul or coarse language; never go to hotels for drink, nor idle around hotels, billiard rooms, and other places of the kind.'

Their issue of clothes is remarkably like the wardrobe recommended by the New Zealand Company to its migrating passengers. My father and his siblings have been thrown into circumstances that are not of their making. On their way through foster homes, they must, like emigrants, assess the new environment, figure out how things work, pick up new rules and language, and work out tolerances of each place—what can be said, when best to keep one's mouth shut.

Most days I cross Taranaki Street and head down to the Moore Wilson supermarket. What a surprise to find it takes me past Dad's birthplace on Jessie Street, just around the corner from the shoe factory. As soon as I found his birth certificate in the blue book I made my way to the address, to discover it is now a car yard. And the boarding house where his grandmother Mary Bibby died is in Cuba Street just around the corner from the shoe factory. I pass by that address most days as well. I've done so for years without ever appreciating the close rub of that forgotten life against my own. The old wooden boarding house where my great grandmother drew her last breath has been replaced by a noodle restaurant.

Whenever I stop to look in the front window I'm sure I give the impression of a man exploring the curry options. I suppose I have become a familiar sight to the staff and regulars. The face I know best will look up from the counter and smile. One of these days I will go through the doors and order an egg roll. I haven't yet, because that is not part of the routine. To imagine is more compelling. And while I may give the impression of a prospective diner, I am, in fact, dwelling in an upstairs curtained room, lit by a gaslight, and thinking about a fifty-four-year-old woman in bed with childhood memories of Swansea, masted ships, big seas and walks along coastal hilltops, like the one that leads out to Pencarrow, attended to by her daughters, Lucy and Eleanor.

Dr Mackie, who found her on her back on the floor ‘in a dying condition', described ‘a stout woman, looking more like sixty than fifty-four, and after hearing the history I am of the opinion that the cause of death was cerebral haemorrhaging or apoplexy'.

The building has gone; Mary Bibby has gone; the witnesses have left the premises. The world that accommodated this little exit scene has moved on. But briefly I find myself holding onto that picture before the ferociously lit interior returns me to a table of faces looking back at me. At this point I must either go inside or move on—without, I hope, the maniacal look of Kerrin, the fellow I see wandering the streets around the shoe factory, his electrified eyes also singularly concentrated on the conversation he mumbles to himself.

At this pre-dawn hour, Kerrin will have been through the bags of clothes dumped outside the Salvation Army store across the road. So I know where he is now. He's downstairs, at the bottom of the shoe factory, in the atrium waiting for Gib to open up his cafe.

I used to blame the dark for the clothes he fished out of those bags—Kerrin, with his bristling moustache and thick grey rocker's hair, would show up at Gib's in women's slacks and blouses.

On an electoral form Kerrin can tick the Maori and European boxes. Like so many of us, his heritage is a story of mongrels sniffing one another out in a backwater to create a bastard breed incapable of tracing its origins. Actually, I'm just as tempted to describe Kerrin as a wilted flower. You can see the stem, note the petals but hardly recognise the variety. Although the aggression is very familiar. And despite his outrageous getup—purple slacks and weird shoes—his intelligent brown Maori eyes transcend the more embarrassing aspects of himself.

Kerrin is one of Gib's best customers. Gib says he managed to sock a bit away while he slept rough in the hills above Wellington for five years, and so, now, as the city comes into focus and office workers file down through the street below, Kerrin is waiting for Gib to open up so he can start with the first of the ten coffees he will buy today as his rent on a table and chair in the cafe, where he appears to be working at some monstrous opus; whenever I pass the window he is bent over a pile of paper, which Gib says is some sort of musical notation or translation of Maori into English, or perhaps the other way round. For a while I didn't get close enough to see. And then, a week ago, I did. While Kerrin was using Gib's toilet, I turned over the top sheet on the pile, and then the next one, and then I opened the pile at the middle. Every page was written in the same cursive script—a series of joined-up R's smoking away to the edge of the page, resuming on the next line and marching onwards. R after R after R.

I couldn't bear to look at Kerrin after that. And as recently as yesterday morning, each of us looked the other way as we passed in the atrium. Kerrin was imitating someone with purpose, striding out in a column of office workers as they made their way down the lane to Pigeon Park, Te Aro Park as it is now called to acknowledge its pre-European status as an original p
site. This is represented by a waka constructed out of clay tiles. In the rain the hold of the canoe glistens like bathroom tiles. The artwork looks like it flopped out of a failed attempt to capture and remake the past. It is astonishingly vulgar and only hollowly representative. But at least its bathroom-tiled gunwales offer a place for the drunks and assorted street people to while away the day.

Kerrin's challenge is more existential. Each morning he wakes to the question: Who will I be today? And the answer, to some extent, will depend on the clothing fished out of the boxes left outside the Salvation Army store across the road on Ghuznee Street, a minute's walk from Dad's birthplace in one direction and two minutes from the place of his grandmother's death in the other.

The smell of liquefaction is like something partially digested and thrown up. The liquefied matter has lost all connection with its original form to turn into nothing in particular. Some thought it smelt like sulphur, although I never heard it said with much conviction. People were just responding to the need to put a word to something apparently indefinable, and sulphur, it seems, was the one foul-smelling element remembered from the periodic table last studied at high school. Of course, there is a scientific explanation, but for the time being it was more satisfying to lurch about in the dark because not to know struck the right chord for an event that no one who wasn't a geologist had been able to foresee. (One geologist had predicted a tragedy resulting from a future seismic event and was accused of scare-mongering.) For everyone else it was like being cast back to the dark ages when things happened and, without a ready explanation, were attributed to a wrathful God.

Yet, if we care to find out, liquefaction has its own story to tell, not so much myth but a creation story nonetheless. Upheaval, displacement, the formation of the plains and swamps and peatlands, the retreat of the sea several millennia ago, the arrival of the podocarp forest and its steady erasure by pastoralists, and then a new weave in the landscape starting with the introduction of farming, followed by the all-conquering cockspur grass and grazing beasts—well, the latter were more cosmetic and scenic, unlike the brew of ancient times, of basalt and shells, and various crustaceans, and peat and swamp turning into coal, and water locked in place by impermeable layers of peat beneath a rock pan, and a network of waterways, some slow, others meandering, others as still as ponds reflecting nothing but the subterranean dark. The liquefaction that sent putrid matter bursting up across the streets of Christchurch was a postcard from these hidden zones.

Nothing had been lost after all, just hidden.

The snow and ice in the winter of 2011 had a fossilising effect on the devastation in Christchurch. The pavements around the cordon froze, and the broken city looked like it would remain that way forever.

In August, I returned and entered the red zone, one bridge down from the Bridge of Remembrance. The city streets were deserted. They'd been that way since February. Still, the effect was eerie. The buildings themselves seemed watchful. It was as if a human-like sentience inhabited them—I thought I detected in them a sort of embarrassed awareness of their condition. Here and there a weakened optimism reached out from buildings such as the blistered-looking Grand Chancellor Hotel, with its blown-out windows, and curtains flapping in the breeze. It was like seeing the chest on a corpse suddenly rise.