A History of Silence (5 page)

I left the beach and retraced my way through the gardening woman's neighbourhood. The windows jarred with late afternoon light. There were more trucks and graders shuffling and reversing. Their noise and the acrid smell of silt would pursue me all the way into sleep that night. But there, in the midst of it all, I saw the small rose garden, and the woman I'd seen labouring between aftershocks to cut stems and tend the beds. It was extraordinary enough for me to make a note. But the next day, the observation seemed flat and unexceptional. The touching part was this idea of gardening as an act of devotion. But that isn't what I had written.

Still, just as the sight of one church or ruin can recall another, seeing that woman crouched before her flowerbed brought back the memory of another scratchy lawn towards the end of summer, of front windows filled with a blinding light that prevented the casual passer-by from seeing in. I was back in the street of my childhood, one not that dissimilar to the one where the woman was gardening, and filled with the same idleness.

I am trying to remember other events, sights, thoughts from that day spent in Christchurch's eastern suburbs. The street I happened to be in was called Eureka Street, almost too corny to mention but I will because it is true. My search for a house in which to locate the hairdresser's story was a kind of echo of Hodges' vision with its imaginative element. I had carried the hairdresser's story for the same reasons too—for perspective, to lend authority to that perspective, and to make what I had to say somehow truer.

I could feel my grip on the hairdresser's story beginning to slip, and when I returned to the neighbourhood the next day I found myself looking wildly around for something to replace it, some other source of authority, and seeing the postie on his bike coming from the direction of the primary school, I crossed the road to intercept him.

The woman weeding looked up, and back over her shoulder. She must have been aware of me the whole time. A couple of birds looked down from the pylons. Orange feet, black feathers. I remember the same aspect from somewhere else, jammed up with concrete. The postie shuffled nearer on his bike.

It was five or six weeks after the February earthquake and the moment he'd been thrown from his bike was still fresh. And, as I thought at the time, he will never forget it. Perhaps this is why he was happy to talk. He was quick to say this wasn't his chosen vocation. He'd downsized himself from a previous position in management—it was in some area that I didn't quite catch. We looked to be of similar age. I wonder if that was what encouraged him. He was into his second week on the job when the quake struck, and in this same street. He paused, and we both looked up the street at the tan-coloured port hills. I imagine he had told this story many times. Certainly he had lived through it a thousand times.

He recounted slowly and with care the instant in which he was thrown off his bike to land on his arse on the pavement. As he looked up, the road rolled away from him. Some sort of subterranean snake-like force beneath the bitumen undulating into the distance. Almost in the same moment the same stretch of road sank beneath filthy, greyish, swamp-smelling water. That's when he heard the pinging. He looked up to see the last of the overhead powerlines snap, and as they brushed the swamp water that had risen with such surprising ease, the air turned electric blue. I asked a few questions, then some more. He repeated what he had already told me, but I liked hearing it again. The first time it was such an extraordinary thing to hear that I had to concentrate on retaining what he said. He didn't mind me taking notes. He didn't ask why I did that. Two more birds had joined those on the pylons. The postie looked at me, with both hands on the handlebars now. But I couldn't let him go just yet. There must be more. So I asked him to describe the effect of the powerlines brushing the water and he told me again how the air turned blue. At the next pause we stared at the nearest patch of road. It was grey, intact, a rebuttal of the dissolution of the world I had just heard depicted. The postie must have had a similar thought because he repeated the bit about the road rolling away from him and the sudden and spectacular eruption of the silted swamp water. He looked up at the powerlines. Two of the birds gazed inquiringly down at us.

Across the road the woman stood up and shouted at a small boy to get away from the sewage. The postie pushed his bike half a wheel on. I couldn't think of another question. Then a white station wagon slowed down and stopped. A woman wound down the driver's window and called out a forwarding address. The postie made a note of it, and the woman drove off. I thanked him and by the time I had crossed to the gardener's side of the road I had let go of the fat man for good. He just floated away from my consciousness like a giant advertising blimp. I remember feeling curiously light and unburdened, as silly as a feather, because now I could stop my search for an address for him and for the aunt and abandon the notes I had taken down from his perspective.

One afternoon I found myself on Barbadoes Street, in the city, assessing the damage done to the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament. It was a ragged sight, and yet it retained patches of beauty. A cordon had been placed around it. So I walked up and down for different views. In the autumnal afternoon it lit up with the brave endeavour of a faded beauty. I counted twelve shipping containers placed on top of one another to provide a splint for its street-facing crumbling side to lean against, cushioned by hay bales. At the end of a crane, a platform supporting stonemasons dangled over the cathedral's dome.

Stone by stone the basilica was being dismantled in order to be put back together again. Each stone was painted with a number and laid with care onto pallets spread over the ground at the back of the building.

In its retelling, the basilica would hold true. Presumably in time it would be as good as new, and it would be impossible to know what it had been through. It would give the sunny impression of being outside history.

While I stood at the cordon, people came and went. Cars pulled up. People jumped out with cameras. A woman threw breadcrumbs over the barrier for the pigeons who had made homes in the hay bales. I was aware of the activity, but more interested in the numbered stones, their carefully preserved sequence of place and belonging.

On repeat visits to Christchurch that winter, I always seemed to end up in Barbadoes Street. It was as though an undertow brought me back each time.

I kept thinking about those numbered stones, until some purpose began to take shape. I began to wonder if I might retrace and recover something of my own past, and reassemble it in the manner of the basilica. It was a matter of looking to see if any of the original building blocks remained, and where I might find them.

I looked at the blocks on the pallet and then at the holes they had been shaken out of. My thoughts shifted in their own surprising way, and for the first time in a long while I found myself thinking about the epilepsy of my youngest sister, Lorraine.

Her fits were shocking to witness—even the seventh and eighth time. The thrashing over the kitchen floor, the foaming at the mouth. The first time, I hid behind the washhouse door listening to her heels banging against the lino.

As with the first trip to the butcher's, I was not mentally prepared. I was five or six years old, and the noise from the other side of the door was terrifying. The high whine of her voice was like a needle stuck on a vinyl record.

At last it stopped, and I peered around the door to find my sister sitting up, Mum crouched beside her. A ring of foam is around her mouth. She has a faraway look. She is not quite back from wherever she has been. I can tell by her eyes that she has no idea that she is dribbling. She would be horrified to know. She is still drifting back into herself. It is a strange thing to witness, like seeing a flower unfurl on a time-release camera. I don't think my mother is aware that I am there.

The fits tend to happen first thing in the morning. And because Lorraine has to set off for work at an early hour, I am usually still in bed when there is a knock on the door—the hour, of course, gives it away—and I hear the polite voice of a stranger.

She's had another fit, this time at the railway station, and in the open door my sister's head droops against the man's coated shoulder.

After a cup of tea and some breakfast, my sister slowly pieces herself back together. She buttons up her coat and stands on the porch ready to begin all over again the journey to her job at a photograph-processing lab in the city.

A graph of seismic activity looks remarkably like a scan of the human brain when it experiences an epileptic fit. The steady cursive waves suddenly spike.

We never knew when it would strike. Something inhabiting her—an evil spirit as it was thought of in the dark ages—decides when it will erupt. My sister is buttering her toast. Mum is looking at her in a certain way, as though this exercise in control and normality is as much an abnormality, knowing that other defining moment is always there waiting to shake her apart.

The photograph on my desk in the shoe factory is of a country road near Christchurch ripped apart on 4 September 2010 along the Darfield fault line.

The tree in the photograph appears to be completely unmoved by the event. It retains with its single-mindedness a sovereign sense of occupancy in a world torn apart.

The photographer's main interest, however, is in a small boy crouched by the violent crack in the road. It looks like a flesh wound made by a cutlass. The boy peers into the pits of the earth, while hanging onto his mother's skirt. A young woman with the pained look of a teacher burst in on a classroom of trouble has rolled the front wheel of her bike to the edge of the abyss. I have an idea she is a teacher—the way she leans over her handlebars looking for something that she already knows. The same cannot be said of the boy. He has just grasped the startling reality of a world rolled on, and paper thin.

It astonishes me that none of my siblings, myself included, ever asked the kind of questions that would open up our parents' past. But nothing much was offered to us.

In a beguiling way, however, nothing was actually something. It was an absence that encouraged an over-respect for our present circumstances and what we made of them. To remember went against the grain of progress, an attitude more commonly associated with pioneering forebears who juggled impulses to destroy with a need to create.

Christchurch sat on similar foundations. It too had grown out of a deliberate forgetting of what it sat on. Swamp. Peat. Trapped water. River gravels. And before the experts emerged to remind everyone that the top of the spire on the Anglican cathedral in the square had fallen three times to previous earthquakes, the idea that the city squatted over an area with a lively seismic history had been conveniently forgotten.

But water has a memory. This was one of the more devastating lessons from the earthquake, and was graphically illustrated on a YouTube clip. A man shovels a pile of more or less solid soil into a wheelbarrow. He picks up the handles and begins to wheel it over a bouncy cobbled drive, and within twenty seconds the grey sludge has turned to liquid.