A History of Silence (12 page)

So far the letter has concentrated on describing Pliny's sanguine mood rather than his appearance or condition. There has been no indication of a man struggling with himself or with the fumes from the eruption, but when he arrives at the shore he lies down on sail cloth and asks for water. Two servants are required to help him to his feet, but unable to support himself Pliny the Elder immediately collapses and is abandoned.

Three days later, a rescue party returns to find the famous historian buried beneath a layer of pumice.

Pliny the Younger's account is a letter addressed to the future. I thought of writing something in the same spirit. At the moment of retrieving the book from the tip face, I was beginning to rake over traces of a past, or at least to think of a past, however slight. I did not wish to disqualify a damp imprint left behind on a coloured tile at the Naenae Olympic Pool. Or a recitation of the names of all the dogs run over by cars arriving suddenly and catastrophically some time in the early 1960s on the road outside the house at 20 Stellin Street. But in thinking about these things I realised I knew the lineage of my dogs better than my own. The chances dogs took to uphold their own dignity in a world ruled by cars would introduce me to grieving. My job raking up the leaves spoke of another passing, as did the cool draught around my ears after a hair cut. But hair will grow back, and the leaves will go up in a puff of smoke in the incinerator, and the grass will spring back in the dead patches where the leaves have lain too long, and one dog will replace another, and each dog name will be more exotic than the last as if an echo of a faraway place will save it.

Such events are not compatible with the act of remembering. And in the concrete domain of this world nearly all the echoes I hear are of my own making.

The
Australasian Post
is a highlight of my visit to the barber. Especially the illustration of the pub in the outback, which is the first thing I turn to. Look at all those corks dangling from the brim of the swaggie's hat. I can see them clearly but not once do I connect them with the flies. I have to be told. In fact, as I recall, there were no flies until I was told about the job that the corks do. After that I saw flies everywhere in the picture. Just as no one ever suggested, and certainly I never dreamt as much, that beneath these foundations of hair oil and chit chat had once stood Wi Tako's house Te Mako. Or that fingers of estuarial waterways were once filled with eel traps. Wi Tako was an ally of the local chief Te Puni, whose people had helped the settlers ashore at Petone Beach. It never occurred to me that the kids I played with at school were descendants of a scene reconstructed in a painting. Emigrant ships are moored out from the beach. The castaways have made landfall at last, and local Maori are carrying them and their things to shore. I just thought everyone had come down in the last rain.

The concrete has done a grand job of covering everything up, yet the history is still there if you know what to connect to its smell.

Between sneaking up on cars parked on the river shingle we slip away to a piece of land that has no equivalent elsewhere in our lives. The smell is damp and boggy. Our ‘pre-historic' scene is an old botanical battleground which the willows won, then lost. Huge trunks have been cast out of the ground to lie every which way. Some of the unearthed ones continue to grow, as though they have not been told of their fate or have chosen to carry on in spite of it, like a chicken that continues to run on because it always has, despite the fact that its stunned head lies on the chopping block.

What we can smell is the swamp our forebears turned the forest into by cutting down the trees. In heavy rains the river flooded and proceeded to cart banks of soil out to the river mouth, and beyond, so that by the time I have come along the original sea floor lies beneath two metres of mud. The smell of the willow is the stench of an old mistake. Of course we don't know that. And even the exhilarating sight that spring of the golf course in flood, turned into a disc of silvery water and shimmering with the shadows of windbreaks and cypress trees, fails to alert me to the rash actions of the past. The willows were planted as a rearguard action to hold the world together. And the timbers sticking out of the riverbank are the remains of groynes built by settlers in an attempt to correct their mistake.

In May 2011, three months after the February earthquake, and one month before the follow-up shake in June that deflated hopes of the city's quick rebuild, I went searching for the cinders of my past. I entertained a hope that, like the flies in the
Australasian
Post
, all I had to do was identify the unacknowledged events of the past and history would flare into visibility.

I thought I would begin with a trip to Pembroke Dock in Wales, to visit the birthplace of my father's father, ‘the man who drowned at sea'.

THREE

I REMEMBER THE smell—that whiff of familiarity you get when slipping on an old shirt. In this case it was the smell of old takeaways, which I always associate with England. I barely remember the face. But I remember his eyes. They were dull, mackerel. A chirpy mouth which for some reason made me think of the
Daily Mail
. Face like a schoolboy's. I imagine he was pushing seventy. A former jockey, perhaps, unless he was sitting down. I couldn't properly tell because the cashier's window separated us and I had to stoop to deliver my request through a small mouse hole in the bottom of the partition. His mackerel eyes slowly found me. ‘Pembroke Dock,' he said. ‘You're going to a place that used to be a place.'

I wished for something equally witty to say back. There was a pause from the other side of the grill, as if he, too, expected it. But instead of words came a jumble of images. I saw again the face of the young TV reporter and the lurch of the camera so that the wall of a building turned into a longer view of road, which, in the railway station on the other side of the world, threw me off balance, and when I looked down I could see the whiskered mouth of the cashier through the hole in the corner of the grill. But I had nothing to give back, nothing useful to say.

On the train, I was hostage to a solitary voice holding court at my end of the carriage. An overweight young man stood in the aisle hovering over his mates: one a short wiry figure who sat ramrod upright like a corporal silently absorbing a sergeant's hectoring, the other a tall lugubrious fellow who kept escaping to the view in the window. Golf courses were mentioned, too many pubs to remember.

Surely there are better things to recall, but all this time later after the names of the courses and pubs have melted away, along with the sullen victimised expressions of his prospective golfing mates, pitifully, it is the embarrassing pride I felt at hearing ‘New Zealand' come up in the monologue. It came as the fat man mentioned the earnings of Tiger Woods' caddy, and I thought, what a strange connection to make with a country that had just suffered a major earthquake.

Surely this event was the one on everyone's mind? But no, it was not. What was on the mind of the little girl in front of me was the unopened bag of crisps in her mother's hands. What preoccupied the mates of the golf bore was how they might dodge the proposed holiday.

I looked out the window—paddocks, trees, the backs of water-stained houses. Down at my feet was another England. A newspaper with the print of someone's heel. Rooney's grimace as he turns from the goal mouth with his fist held high. I opened a book, but I couldn't make sense of the words. I found myself drifting back to a different world. I saw the night-lit streets of Christchurch and rescue workers in bright-coloured vests. I gazed out at the world sliding by the carriage window. I was on my way to a place that used to be a place. I looked out the window, and for a moment or two it was possible to identify a tree before it swept by, and then my thoughts returned to the landscape of upheaval.

With the critical unwavering eye of the self-portraitist I saw myself back on the couch at the shoe factory, staring at the television. I thought about Mum, although not so much the person or even her face, but the word itself. Spared of any helpful context it sort of cartwheeled across mental space I had cleared with the observation of the tree in the carriage window.

I thought about Wales; one of the managers of the operation at Bottle Lake had a Welsh name, and when I asked him about it he confirmed that his father had played rugby for Wales. We had driven to a different part of the dump, to a grey desert where silt from the liquefaction had been trucked and abandoned in vast quantities, which created a landscape like no other—grey, sinister, casting deep shadows. We sat in the car surrounded by a vomited up subterranean past, and spoke of places in Wales neither one of us had been. I mentioned Pembroke Dock. I even used the word ‘grandfather'.

‘And, do you feel yourself to be Welsh?'

Twice I have been asked that question. The first time was at a rugby match. I was startled to be asked. I was fourteen years old, and after the Welsh Dragons' demolition of Wellington at Athletic Park, I slipped into the Welsh supporters' end of the stand, drawn by their colourful scarves and singing. I must have given an answer that pleased because I arrived home draped in scarves and covered in pins and badges. Looking back, I think this is how each new Dalai Lama must feel. One moment he is playing with his toys and in the next looking up at a courtly circle of inquiring faces. It was the strangest thing, but it really was as though I had been found. For a moment I was Welsh.

The second time I was asked, I replied, ‘I might feel Welsh if I knew what it feels to be Welsh.' Silence. My interlocutor, a man older than myself, adjusted his face as if to accommodate some sudden movement of mine. But I hadn't moved awkwardly or evasively. I had spoken confidently and, I thought, with some humour. I probably felt pleased with myself on account of this repartee, which is quite uncharacteristic of me, perhaps even a bit Welsh. But the man, who might have been a High Court judge or a fisherman in a previous life, continued to regard me in silence as though I was a curiosity, a piece in the museum, familiarly in other words but, at the same time, as someone who had fallen so far away from his source that he didn't know as much for himself.

And now I was on my way to Pembroke Dock. Beautiful coastline, the cashier back at the station told me, popular with hikers. But I wasn't going there for either of those things. I was going there precisely because of what it used to be but no longer is.

The gappy shadows that had hung about over Wiltshire all morning shifted, and Trowbridge where I'd spent the night was overtaken by fields which never really got started before turning into something else, which then lost heart in its own endeavour and reverted to fields. Now and then a canal boat appeared stuck in a narrow stretch of dark water, and in comparison I felt as though I was definitely on my way to somewhere.

I was saving my eyes for Wales. So while there remained this bit of England to get through I shut them. I must have dozed off. When I woke it was raining. The golf bore and his mates had got off somewhere, and the little girl had won the war over the bag of crisps. We were stopped at a station. I sat up and looked out. I was in Newport, Wales.