A History of Silence (14 page)

The trader confirmed that the pike's eyes weren't its own.

‘Eyes generally disintegrate,' he said.

I didn't know that, and said so.

‘Everyone's eyes disintegrate,' he said. He used to have several boxes filled with false eyes. He had them by the hundred, in yellow and blue. ‘Whatever you fancy,' he said. Perhaps he still had a box of eyeballs lying around at the back of the shop… if I was interested?

I hate to disappoint, a trait I suspect crafted by the past, but I didn't want him searching for eyeballs which, no doubt, after much huffing and puffing I would be obliged to examine and perhaps even buy. I told him not to bother, as he suddenly remembered where in the shop he had the stash of eyes.

‘No,' I said, and it came out more emphatically than intended.

He looked a bit hurt.

‘Please,' I said. That's what I meant. Then I thought to ask what he knew about the angler E. Laver.

‘Nothing at all,' he said, but he could recommend a trip to Bowood, a lovely estate ten miles further up the road. Then he proceeded to tell me what I could expect to find there—the dark ponds, one of which the pike had come from—and after he had described the contents of the exhibition room, which I was surprised to hear includes Napoleon's death mask and a selection of his handkerchiefs, I felt no need to go.

I had to switch trains at Cardiff, and on the platform I picked up a certain register of voice that brought my father roaring back to life. At a neighbour's party he is speaking too freely, too enthusiastically. I can tell from my mother's frozen expression at the light dancing in Dad's eyes. And there it is, captured within the same frame, two different responses to rejection and abandonment. In my mother's case, a life-long fear of being judged unfavourably, and in Dad's a ready sociability that carries him from campground to campground across the North Island, an ability and willingness to make friends in situations temporary by design, in a rugby crowd, say, and certainly at the pub. With a few drinks under his belt that campground banter of his worked, up to a point.

But I have no idea of the country that sat inside my father. There were so few despatches he shared.

I remember the day I caught him at the piano. It was a new piece of furniture in the house. When I was ten or eleven there had been a change of circumstances—a stunning reversal of fortune.

A vase of flowers sat on the table, a painting on the wall, a Parisian street scene by Raoul Dufy. I have no idea how it got there. The promise of performance extended to Dad—there he sat at the piano, his face straining to hear whatever notes he heard in his head. It was such a surprise, so unorthodox, like coming upon a dog preparing to mount a bicycle and pedal off under its own steam. He didn't know I was there. If he did he would have sprung up and coughed his way out of the room. While I stood in the door, I hardly heard him produce a sound. Was the room was too well lit? The gloom favoured by day-time drunks would have suited him better, rather than this hard, unforgiving light pouring through the windows. His hands spread lightly over the piano keys but no sound came out. The piano assumed complete control, as though it had a wire around my father's throat.

I drifted away, wishing I hadn't seen what I had seen. I would rather have known that he couldn't play the piano—which would have been no surprise at all—than to see him act as if he could, like a mute who repeatedly opens his mouth in the hope that words will come out.

I snuck out the back way, kicked the dog out of its nest of filthy old blankets, and the two of us started up to the corner dairy on High Street. I was bound to run into someone I knew, hopefully someone with stolen money. I was thinking I would like something to eat, not food as such, but maybe some chocolate, or milk bottle lollies, or a coconut-ice bar or some spearmint leaves. I might even look over the iceblocks.

Then the dog saw a cat, and a woman I didn't know screamed at me from a house that was usually shut up, and I forgot Dad and the piano.

Amid the shouting and the woman's screaming I grabbed hold of the dog's bullish neck with both hands. This was the same little puppy I'd let piss over my bare stomach. Now it wanted to tear that cat apart. The woman bent down and the cat leapt into her arms. She stroked the head of her shitty cat. She called out some abuse and backed into her house and shut the door.

In the ringing silence the air smelt of cat fear and in my head were the shiny surfaces of the piano and my father's grey eyes straining for notes that he could not find, that he would never find, not then or in a thousand years.

Two big events within five minutes—the world has gone mad.

I need to reinvigorate myself, and so decide to backtrack and wander along the cutting from Taita Drive that the retarded kid used to take to get to our back fence. Half of the fence is now eaten away, and as I pass it I wonder what has happened to him as I never see him any more. He goes into that box of sudden departures never explained. This is two or three years before the pregnant girl at school is abducted by aliens. The dog is in one of its unseemly jaunty moods after the cat episode and pads alongside me. There is the lively smell of fennel and a whiff of the illegal rubbish dump. The track leads past the golf course and down to the river.

I drop onto the tee nearest the houses and wander onto the fairway to a big windbreak of soft firs. It is hard to tell one tree from the next; they have been planted so closely that the ends of their branches interlace. I leave the dog sniffing and scratching behind its ear while I climb to the top of one of the trees. I'm high enough to feel a slight breeze which was barely noticeable on the fairway. I can see all the way to the river. In the other direction are the tiled roofs of the houses. Beneath my feet, the dog gazes up at me through the shredded branches. It knows the drill. At a moment of my choosing, which I cannot predict and which has no pattern, I simply let go, and free-fall—crashing through the under-layers.

I feel as though I have returned to the full dominion of self, and fear like some internal wind fills me out. But I know I will be caught by a lower branch. The fear is fleeting, and the not knowing is illusory.

My father, as a boy, was not so lucky.

The extremely rare event of a car pulling into his street is a sign that his time was up. He must go inside and pack his bag. A stranger is on his way to take him to another house where more strangers will line up in the hall by the front door and stare at him with ragged smiles.

He will be shown to a new bed in a new room. There will be new procedures to learn, a new family to work his way inside, to understand, and then one day he will hear a car pull into the drive and look up to see a stranger get out and stretch and find him with a look that my father instantly knows is for him, not the dog, or the woman standing sheepishly by the door. Inside he goes to pack his bag. On the porch a hand drops onto his shoulder, in another awkward farewell.

When I am ten years old, for reasons baffling to me, my father gets in the car and drives off to the Epuni Boys' Home and returns with a boy a year older than me carrying a battered suitcase.

The idea, as it is put to me, is to give me company since my brother and sisters have moved out long ago. But I never asked for company, and besides I have all the friends I need; plus there's the dog, the silly bugger, bewitched by his tail, driven wild by it, turning in circles until he finally gets a hold of it in his jaws and won't let go and crabs across the lawn with his arse in his mouth. What could be more diverting than that? And then there's Rex the salamander, and the launching of myself out of treetops.

I imagine the kid came to live with us because of another conversation that I was never privy to, as well as a shared desire to give an unloved orphan a better childhood than perhaps either Mum or Dad had enjoyed.

My sister Lorraine and her baby, Nicole, are still living in the caravan in the Hutt Park campground, so the new kid is given her old bedroom. It's just across the hall from the toilet, but the boy from the home still manages to wet the bed every other night. No matter how many times he washes and bathes he still stinks of piss. He also steals from my friend's mother's handbag (but then so does her son, who many years later will wind up in Long Bay jail in Sydney for car conversion). Still, it's embarrassing. And at a screening of
The Sound of Music
the embarrassment reaches new excruciating heights when, in his strange husky voice brimming with indignation at the failure of von Trapp to finish the Lord's Prayer in the usual way, the kid from the home bellows out for the whole picture theatre to hear, ‘He forgot to say “Amen!”'

How did he know that? On the way home I try not to look at him. The way he sits is irritating. He is pissing me off even more than he usually does. He is perched on the edge of the back seat, leaning forward; his freckly face, which I don't like, is raised and tilted back to an unnecessary degree, and his bottom jaw is unhinged and his mouth hangs open.

In his room there are two beds. The one that he has taken is pushed against the wall behind the door, so that on opening the door the room appears empty, a joy to find, but then I get a whiff of that old piss smell and when I look around the corner there he is, there he still was, looking sorrowful, like a dog that knows that you know it has farted.

I couldn't wait for him to leave. Nine months after unpacking his pyjamas in Lorraine's old bedroom he is returned to Epuni Boys' Home.

For a number of days I kept his bedroom door closed. Eventually I opened it, and the window, and it was like he was never there.

Stephen was his name.

I like to think that had everything been explained differently, had I known something of my father's childhood, I would have shown more patience, more tolerance. But I never guessed the reasons behind what seemed an inexplicable thing to do—bring a strange kid in to the house and then pretend that it was all perfectly normal.

It was raining again and the carriage windows fogged up, and Wales disappeared from view. I was left with the solitary smell of the train. I closed my eyes and thought back to the shiny new piece of furniture in the house and, following the tentative notes down the hall, my shock to find Dad sitting in a trance at the piano, his thick welder's fingers resting on the keys.

Wales didn't speak to me. Or perhaps it did and I couldn't hear it properly, unfamiliar with its fluted notes, unable to tell the subdued from that which barely seemed to exist. Wales. It smiled weakly in the way of relatives who have fallen out of touch and know they are supposed to recognise each other but aren't certain any longer of who it is they are speaking to.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once collated the photographs of his siblings and cousins and with the help of a photographer friend overlaid them to produce ‘a family look'. In Wales I did see a kind of sloped shoulder and catch a round-at-the-shoulder look, an evasiveness that wished to see everything but did not wish to be observed in turn. I saw myself, in other words.

There was something else, too, that seemed to reflect me inside out. The moment, however, I try and single it out or fillet it into parts that can be described or named such as nose, cheekbone, or eyes, the observation falls apart. I can't be more precise. Except to point out the uncanny feeling of familiarity I felt in a place that I had never visited. That is what it was like in Wales. A slow leaching between myself and that which I observed, until I too could have been shuffled into a pack of locals,
a la
Wittgenstein, without polluting the ‘representative look'.

Such a possibility does not excite me; it means some less than desirable things claiming membership within my personal constituency and cultural memory—a shabbiness and a decent proportion of sour shadow, the gruffness of station masters, the crappy food and malfunctioning toilets (often mysteriously locked), the unionised operation of the food cart, the filthy-arsed sheep I saw through the train window that spoke of a certain sloppiness. The song and dance and pissy-eyedness of the place also goes into the mix.