A History of Silence (13 page)

Then we were going again. Wales moved by in the window. Old sky, old stone walls. Here, the rubble held together and the old was allowed to stagger on. Houses the colour of pumice tilted down the hill towards the railway tracks. Sheep. Sky. Grass. Great swathes of unoccupied space but, like the telltale bare patches of the campgrounds we used to pitch our tent on, there were signs of older occupation, of a landscape shaped and moulded, then abandoned and allowed to spring back almost to what it once was. I thought it was much like home, which is why it required such an effort to look again, to look carefully at the three men standing in a paddock, one leaning on a shovel. The three heads inclined to one another in complete agreement with what one of them has just said.

One man in particular caught my eye. I watched him slide by in the carriage window—a bit of shoulder heft, gentle face—and in a split-second my father has gone.

He is as I last saw him, in 1975, in his coffin, an angry bluish face. Not really him at all, but some poorly rendered version—a face blinking out of quartz, always perplexed—which is the version that endures in place of the jolly bloke with a glass in hand. There he lay, a man I never saw ride a bike. A man without language. A face often red with unexpressed anger. The day has ended inconveniently. Not at all how he expected. Just that morning he'd kicked the wheels on a new car and taken the cap off the radiator to sniff the water. That afternoon he lay dead on the floor of the bathroom at home.

The undertakers have been and gone, and taken Dad with them. Still, it is hard to believe that he won't walk in the door any minute. So until he does we sit grouped around Mum in the living room eating fish and chips out of the paper on the floor.

But of course Dad doesn't return, and later that evening I drive back to my student flat in the city in the new silver Mitsubishi Galant that he had been so eager to show off. Out of breath with excitement, I heard. The last word he managed to get out was ‘Joyce'. But the footsteps running up the stairs were not those of my mother, but my brother's girlfriend, Renee.

Now I'm driving the Mitsi into town. It seems to drive well. Dad's black onyx ring is on my finger. The undertakers had taken it off and given to Bob, who gave it to me, which was nice of him, thoughtful in a way I didn't properly register at the time. In the back seat are a number of Dad's socks and a suede jacket. I don't know why Mum thought to give them to me or why it had had to happen just then. I didn't like to say ‘no thanks'. The socks are a bit worn and a bit small but I will wear them through the winter until toe and heel have disintegrated. I will never wear the suede jacket, but I'll haul it from one flat to another.

A few days later I stood before his open wardrobe. A neat row of shirts seemed to be waiting for him to return, and I thought his death was probably a trick. It's what his row of shirts believed, and so I found myself suspending judgment. He will step out from behind the shirts and surprise me. And his jokey smile will emerge as it used to from the incinerator smoke while I pawed the earth around the cabbages. Meanwhile, the wardrobe stirs with his smells—cigarette ash, Old Spice, his beloved shoe nugget.

Fish is what I thought of—it must have been the rack of shirts—the herrings we used to catch and line up on the shingle like prizes, their silvery iridescence setting fast like paint, and how much I hated to rip the hook from their mouths.

The year before Dad died I was nineteen and living at home, and Lorraine's father-in-law, Gordon, rang the house. He asked if Dad was there. I told him no. ‘Well, what about Joyce?' I said, ‘Mum isn't here either.' I heard him draw a breath. He said, ‘I've got some very bad news. Lorraine is dead.'

What did I say to Gordon? I don't remember. No one had ever said a thing of such enormous gravity to me. I've got some very bad news, he said. After I put the phone down, my only thought was to tell Dad. It was late on a Friday afternoon so I knew where he would be. I got into the car Bob had lent me and drove there. The shadows had spread across the bowling green. The members were upstairs in the clubhouse bar. As I climbed the outside wooden steps I could hear the happy voices. They seemed so distant and apart from the news I brought. I stood in the door and, without anyone pointing me out or whispering in his ear, my father turned from the bar, surprised to find me. I'd never climbed those steps before. Then he dropped his eyes—he was always a stickler for club rules—annoyed to find me in jeans and bare feet.

I walked up to him and simply passed on what Gordon had said: ‘I've got some bad news. Lorraine is dead.' It remains one of those moments I would like back. So that I might do it better. I wish I could have told him in a more careful manner. I wish I had done it so much better. But I was nineteen and all that goes with being that age. On my way to the bowling club I hadn't bothered to think about
how
I would tell him. The important thing was to pass on the information, the
terrible news.
And I had done so with the same grace as passing on a fish-and-chips order.

I can imagine the terrible shock he must have felt. I don't remember what he said—I had hardly given him the chance to absorb or to feel anything. I was impatient to get him out of there. His face turned red. He became agitated, as though he couldn't find the right thing to feel or do. His hand dived into his pocket for his keys and he quickly followed me out. He insisted I leave Bob's car and drive with him. He drove, badly and erratically, graunching the gears. It was as though he had forgotten how to drive. As we took the bend at Windy Point the front wheel hit the kerb. He pulled the wheel back and crunched down a gear, then muscled it back with the same brutal disregard.

Lorraine had been out the night before, partying. She woke early with a fit and choked on her vomit.

Mum was a few hours' drive away, visiting my sister Barbara in the Wairarapa. Dad must have telephoned her. I have no idea what shape Mum's grief took. It wasn't shown, at least not to me. She turned inwards, went down deep to that place where she'd been many times before whenever the world needed to be blocked out.

We drove to Auckland in separate cars. Mum with Barbara. Dad, Barbara's husband and I in the other car. At Lorraine's house, Dad sat on a low window seat, covering his face and shaking his head. I heard him say he would gladly swap places with Lorraine. At the crematorium I sat beside him, and as the curtains closed around the coffin a sob more wretched than anything I had ever heard escaped him. Then came the dreadful mechanical sound of the coffin descending to the furnace, and Dad half stood beside me.

A year later he was dead.

Dad's surviving siblings came to the funeral. That is, the ones who had remained in touch in the years after they left the orphanage. But where was Arthur? In Canada, someone said. In jail, someone else thought. Or maybe he was dead, as I tend to think, although no one said so. What about Laura? I didn't hear her mentioned. Jack was there, hard to miss Jack, no teeth, gummy smile, his eyes glinting with mischief. Jack's twin Gladys came. So did Percy. He was a taller version of Dad, amiable features, reserved. He wore a grey vest beneath his suit. I thought he looked like a man from another century. Or a solicitor. Although by reputation I only knew him as a drinker at the Kiwi pub in Auckland. While briefly attending Auckland University I would pass the Kiwi, and slow down and think, maybe I should go in and say hello to Uncle Percy. But the idea of an uncle, like a grandparent, seemed a bit far-fetched, and besides, what would we say to each other? Percy died a year after Dad, and his son Alan sprinkled his ashes over the Alexander Raceway. Years later I stopped outside a pub at Bulls to see Jack. I had driven up to Auckland to pick up Jo, my newly-wed, who had flown in from the States the day before. We were driving down through the island and I was eager to show the country off to her. At Bulls I had the idea that we should stop in and see Jack. Jo had never met anyone from my family.

Dad's funeral was the last I had seen of Jack. He had since retired and now spent most of his time at the pub where in return for clearing the glasses he drew free beers. I looked around for his face. I couldn't see anyone who looked like Jack. I asked at the bar and an old shuffling fellow with his back turned was pointed out to me. I walked past the pool table and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned slowly—it was Jack, more dazed than I remembered. He looked up at me without any recognition. I had to mention Dad, and then his eyes lit up. He didn't have his teeth in that day, and I couldn't understand a word he said. He wasn't drunk. But without teeth and after a few beers Jack was incomprehensible.

Jo, however, held up her end brilliantly. She seemed to enter into actual conversation. Jack was beaming and my wife was smiling in her American way. I thought she was pretending to understand Jack, but later she told me that half the trick was to get onto the same wavelength, something she had remembered from studying Spanish.

From a child's point of view, Jack was easy to like. He was excitable, always on the brink of laughter. The world was best sampled with a beer at your elbow.

In the general exhibition called ‘Jack' I have a crinkled photograph taken at the Pyramids. In the foreground a group of cheerful faces peer out from under lemon squeezer hats. One of them is Jack—at least, I think it is. I can't be absolutely sure. I have a sneaking suspicion I may have requisitioned the photo from someone else's album and inserted Jack. But he did serve in Egypt, and on his return he was given a serviceman's farm. I have a very distant memory as a child visiting a farm. It is a fiercely hot summer's day, there are horses, a bare hilltop on a northwest lie. The farm, I recall, was a few hours' drive north of Stellin Street. I wonder if it was Jack's farm. One other scrap of memory insists Jack had a butcher shop, but it went broke. Too generous for his own good; always giving away meat. Gregarious in that way that Mum disapproved of in Dad. Jack insisted on stopping at every pub up the line after Dad's funeral. A beer for every year of Dad's life. I think that was the idea. But I wonder how much they knew of each other's lives.

On my way back into the old centre of town in Trowbridge I had found myself in a dingier world of cold shadows, cooking fat smells, and young sullen parents pushing prams ahead of themselves like figures from an accursed race. I wanted the sunshine back and so took a street in the direction of the green and golden Wiltshire countryside I'd seen from the window of my room.

In a quiet street across the road from the old church, I stopped to look at a stuffed pike on display outside the window of a secondhand dealer. What actually caught my eye was the inscription:
Caught by E. Laver 1909, wt 21lbs.
The year—1909—rather than the pike, or the pike and then the year.

I've always relied on 1909, the year of Dad's birth, as a way of securing the past, which, at that particular moment, in the best possible spirit of discovery, happened to include the champion pike.

I was aware of someone watching me from the sunny church wall. A moment later the shop proprietor pushed off the wall and ambled across the road to join me. I looked up with a nod, and he replied with the same. Setting his hands on his hips, he stared at the pike.

For some time we stared at the pike together. I was on the brink of telling him that in the same year as my father was pulled from his mother's womb the pike was dragged up from the deep ponds of Bowater, when the proprietor piped up. For years, he said, the pike had been on display in the tackle shop around the corner. Then, after the shop ran into financial difficulties, he had offered to take the pike off its hands.

‘It is a big pike,' I said, and then wondered if I was right—by pike standards—since I knew nothing about them. The man said he had once seen an eighty-year-old pike. He held out his hands, and calculated the one on display to have been around thirty years old when caught. He imparted this information in an amiable manner, and then he said, ‘Four hundred quid.'

The shock of the price sat between us. It jarred the air. Impossible not to notice, and perhaps the proprietor did, because a moment later, from behind his hand, in a more humble tone, he said, ‘A bit less, if cash is involved.'

As I felt no need to comment or commit, we went on staring at the pike.

‘It really is an attractive specimen,' said the trader.

Yes, I thought, but what would I do with it? I like to travel light, and the next day I would not be setting off to Pembroke Dock with a twenty-one-pound pike in the overhead luggage rack just because it happened to share a birthday with my father.

As the air between us turned mercantile the trader shifted beside me. There wasn't yet a froth of desperation, but I could feel it on its way as he searched inside himself for more pike knowledge.

Pike have a flat mouth. In this specimen the teeth were sharp and evenly spaced. But its eyes, I noticed, weren't right. More like a possum's or a rabbit's than a fish's, I thought, or for that matter, like the hazel-coloured eye of an owl.