A History of Silence (11 page)

The next day there is a photograph in the newspaper of a spectacular dying sun taken by
Voyager
on a journey to the outer reaches of the universe, in effect, to capture old news.

It is a snapshot of our own sun three to four billion years from now. A sun just like the one that provides our daily existence has imploded into vapour.

I bring the newspaper to the hospital. I show up to her door with one of my better smiles, one with firm and honest intentions. She is pleased to see me. The doctor has still to make his round. So I sit down on the edge of her bed with the newspaper open to the relevant section. I hold up the photograph of the dying sun. She leans forward, interested, and we go from there. And I continue to circle, ludicrously alluding to the solar system, imploding suns and so forth, until finally I have to say it. ‘You're on your last legs, Mum.' It is like telling a child some horrible truth about the world. She looks up at me, concentrating on what I have just said. She seems interested, then annoyed. She turns her head away from me. But the insistent light in the window is no better. When she turns back, I am surprised to find her looking so cross.

‘Are you angry?'

She nods.

‘With what?'

And for the first time in weeks she actually speaks.

‘With all of you,' she says.

‘Of course,' I say quickly. ‘It's entirely up to you. But you will need to eat.'

She reaches for the half-empty container of yoghurt that has sat untouched since breakfast on the arm of the dresser and with my help begins greedily shovelling spoonfuls into her mouth.

She died at home, and that morning the sun splashed against the end of her house, where she had spent so many hours sitting on the patio surrounded by plants, a cup of tea at her side, a pair of secateurs at her feet. The undertaker was over-dressed, and his ruffian offsider was also, grotesquely, in a black suit, but not quite as successfully turned out. Perhaps because of the rash on his face and the heavy black shoes, I thought of the boys' home I used to walk past. I would stop to look across the fenced ground and wonder about those boys my own age wandering in that state savannah, unloved as any dog at the pound. As I looked at the offsider's shoes and up to his face and back to his shoes, I wondered if he had come from there. Then I moved out of this slow tumble of thought because there were a number of practicalities to consider. Such as RIP. Mum's face was ‘at rest' and ‘in peace', and I was happy for her. I would have liked to wake her, were it possible, to pass on just how peaceful she looked in death. She'd have liked to hear. She always said I was too critical.

The older undertaker spoke in that special register that they must be coached in or pick up from the movies. For the moment we the gaping living, Pat and I (Bob and Barbara were making their way back from the US and Fiji), stood around the body. Did we want Mum to be carried out of the house head first or feet first? Such a question had never been asked of me. Years ago, when Mum moved to the townhouse across the road from the beach, she'd said spiritedly that the next time she moved it would be on a stretcher. But had she said ‘head first' or ‘feet first'? The undertaker and the apprentice directed their interest professionally to the harbour and the wheeling gulls. Head first, I decided. The undertaker breathed out, and I was assured that I had made the right decision. Then the apprentice breathed out as well, though a tad late, as I recall. The undertaker had another question. Would the deceased prefer to have her face covered or uncovered as she was carried down the outside steps? He said it was a matter of personal preference. Although, he said, the Greeks have a view on it. To which the apprentice nodded vaguely. Some prefer covered. Others uncovered. It's up to the individual. Well, clearly it was too late to ask Mum, so I decided on her behalf—uncovered. She should have the sun on her face this one last time.

We picked up the ends of the stretcher and shuffled towards the back door and got her down the tricky bit of the steps. Now it was just a case of sliding her into the back of the van. I'm sure it was a van, not a hearse. Mum wouldn't have cared. Or would she? It was too late for her to have an opinion.

I put down the stretcher and raised a hand in a silent command for the other two to halt for this last concession to my mother's lifelong love of the sun. And, as I recall, the sun lined up with the neighbour's roof and the rose heads nodding above the timber boundary fence and fell across her ancient face, which was jammed with deep lines but held only lightness—neither bitterness nor disappointment, though she had known both in her long life. She hated feeling cold. She'd made my sister Barbara promise to make sure she went to the morgue with the cashmere shawl. And as soon as Barbara flew home she drove to the morgue with Mum's shawl. Then, as the doors closed, I did not think ‘goodbye' in the usual sense or feel the sadness that comes with a parent moving out of one's life—although I would feel that later. Then, it was the shock that she would never again feel the sun on her.

Christchurch. Early morning. Steam rises off the fetid Avon River. At the Bridge of Remembrance the imperial gaze of the two lions recalls the female mannequin heads I'd seen at either side of the spotter's shed at Bottle Lake. Classical vanity on one side of town, the farcical at the other. And between these two poles the remaining bits of the city wavered.

Out at Bottle Lake, about ten kilometres north-east of the city, a large blowfly made me feel all the more aware of the ooze and smell of chemical heat, and the common end of all things.

The heavier rubble was being trucked out to Lyttelton Harbour and dumped to end up on the ocean floor near to, it occurred to me, the anchor marks of the first four ships that had carried the vision of Christchurch from one side of the world to the other.

A steady caravan of trucks dumping lighter material operated six days a week through the winter at Bottle Lake. A pile was growing by two thousand tonnes a day. Sunday afternoons, the trucks took a break, and that was the best time to visit. Without their grinding noise the silence was stunning and had physical presence, and something else that was uncomfortable to bear, like the weighty silence in a room where no one can quite bring themselves to remark on some stupendous event that has occurred.

A light easterly pushed the brush and sweep of the tide through a screen of pine trees. The trees didn't look quite right either. It was as if they too were in on the secret, and I was reminded of those grassed areas in Europe covering up places of old atrocity. There always seemed to be a fringe of pine looking on, as this one at Bottle Lake did. Twenty years ago, the tree-planter kept turning up limbs of dolls which, I'm told, had fallen a century earlier from the careless hands of children perched on the city's old shitter boxes which were cleared once a week by the nightwatchman and carted out to the Burwood refuse pits where Bottle Lake is now.

For several hours I wandered the edge of the mountain of debris as I used to comb the shoreline with Mum and Dad, picking up things, kicking the cruddier stuff away with the toe of my shoe. I never realised how much of a city is made up of junk.

Much of what I found had given up all allegiance to its original form, and it was near impossible to tell personal and public apart, so intertwined had they become. A golf club, a ski boot, a sales sheet with advice on how to deal with a negative response, a surprising number of old car manuals, books, lengths of timber, cracked and split, bricks, some masonry, sheet iron, and there a yellow bathtub duck—all found a collegial relationship that they never knew in their former lives. Shoes by the score but never a pair, hand-written ledgers in smart blue ink for amounts in the old currency that must have sat in an unopened drawer for the past fifty years.

And what I felt, above all, was a compression, that time itself had been compacted, and that the tip offered itself as a register of breaths taken, a whole century of breaths taken in rooms that no longer existed. By simply lifting the sodden layers you might find a breath taken a week ago, or in 1949, or 1892, when the first man in Christchurch to have read Samuel Butler's
Erewhon
(an anagram of Nowhere) stopped breathing.

I came to a pile of books leaking out of the side of the debris. I opened one and found it was from the city library. I turned two or three others over with the toe of my boot as though touching a carcass. Then I saw a red cased hardback and bent down to retrieve from the muck a weathered copy of Pliny's letters, and, as these things sometimes happen, the pages opened to where Pliny the Younger begins his letter with a description of the death of his uncle during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. One line seemed so pertinent to my own exploration that I wrote it down: ‘a letter is one thing, a history another, it is one thing to be writing to a friend, another to be writing to the public.'

The letter begins with a description of the afternoon before Pliny the Elder's death.

Pliny, the historian, who is in his mid-fifties, has taken a stroll in the sun, enjoyed a light lunch, and retired to his study, when he is called outside to observe a strange cloud ‘bright with cinders' rising in the sky. Curious and wanting to take a closer look, Pliny makes arrangements for a light vessel to be prepared. He is about to get on his way when word arrives from the wife of an old friend asking to be rescued from their villa at the foot of Vesuvius. The plan to observe a spectacle is now a rescue mission, and Pliny orders a larger vessel to be made ready for departure.

Pliny the Younger chooses to stay back, and so from this point on the written account relies on the word of others.

In another important shift, the volcanic display becomes merely a theatrical backdrop to the bigger and more urgent matter of Pliny the Elder's death, thus combining public catastrophe with an opportunity for family myth-making.

There are a number of heroic stages. One is Pliny's decision to remain on deck and brave the cinders and burning black rocks that shower down onto the galley. It is this casual courting of danger that the nephew is so keen to pass on. In addition to the burning sky, an out-going tide threatens to strand them before a favourable wind delivers the ship to Stabiae, the next heroic stage, where Pliny finds his friend Pomponianus in an agitated state. Pliny adopts a light spirit in an attempt to soothe his friend's nerves. After a wash he sits down to a meal in a cheerful mood.

As the eruptions grow more intense, Pliny assures his friend that the people have already abandoned the villages that are in flames. He then retires, dropping into a ‘sonorous sleep'. During the night the entrance to his sleeping quarters fills with ash and falling stones. Before the escape route is entirely blocked by falling debris Pliny is woken by his slaves—seeing the danger he rallies the others. Pomponianus is too frightened to leave his bed, so the others, led by Pliny, debate whether to stay in the house, which is now rocking from side to side, or to flee for the open.

They decide on the latter and tie pillows to their heads for protection against ‘the storm of stones'. It is morning, but because of the freakishness of the eruption it is as dark as night.