A History of Silence (15 page)

And were I to suffer a personal earthquake and be split open, I am quite certain a team of awkward blokes would scramble out of me with a pint in one hand and a balled fist in the other, and that the temptation to fight would be confused with one to sing. Another mob would split to the hills without so much as a backward glance, and a smaller constituency would make for the ridges and beneath a low sky set a course for the distant headland.

I might throw in a dash of stoicism that began with a line of sea mariners and farm labourers arriving on the far side of the world to emerge in the form of my father. The stoicism seems to have stopped with him. It wasn't passed on to his children, and in any case we would have shrugged it off like some foul and soiled garment. No, we don't waste a moment if we feel our own situation can be made better by screaming and shouting about it.

Dad, on the other hand, set off in the dark each day in the foulest weather, not especially bothered because, after all, it is July, and in July it rains. He would step off the porch and his hat brim would start to spill with the cold rain without his seeming to notice it. The one time in his life that he was unshackled from the factory and his soldering irons was when he was a gold prospector in the 1930s. It was the only part of his past I heard him talk about. For food he shot deer, and when moved by an appetite for a trout he threw a stick of gelignite into the river.

Once, when I was ten years old, he took me down to the goldfields. We stopped in a pub in the middle of nowhere. Dad talked with the barman. I must have looked away or been diverted by the pig's head on the wall and when I looked back I saw a glass jar of nuggets sitting on the bar. We drove to the goldfields, parked at the end of a road and set off over paddocks. I saw a lamb born. It was breech and Dad had to reach in with his hand and turn a few knobs before he got the lamb out. It was covered in a yucky yellow skin. We watched it get to its feet. It shook a bit. Then it opened its eyes. I have an idea it saw Dad, with a stub of a cigarette stuck to his lip, before it saw its mother. It must have wondered what sort of world it had arrived at and how the family look could vary so wildly.

We carried on across the fields, scrambled down a bush track and on the river flats came to a large sluicing pipe. Now that Dad had the scent of the place in his nostrils, he scrambled here and there. I followed after to find him looking in a concentrated way at something that on its own was nothing more than a bank or a rock pool and once, I recall, a tree. We climbed up another track and came out of the bush to a paddock scattered with stones. They turned out to be the foundations of dwellings that had burnt down or blown away in the wind. I followed him around from one lot of stones to the next until he stopped, satisfied that this was the place where he had slept for three years on the ground. In the dry grass I counted four stones set in a square. Each man had a side to himself. I asked him which side was his, and he nodded at a particular line in the grass. I didn't think to doubt him. But now that he had found the spot there wasn't much more to do than look at the ground and take in the world from that position. It was like being on a train going through Wales. Time slowed on the back of a long obligatory examination.

Some years later I was to roam a hillside that creeps down from Bendigo Station to Lake Dunstan in Central Otago in the South Island where a community of Welsh gold prospectors and their families had stuck it out for twelve years. The remnants of their stone cottages and a big sluicing operation still stand, along with a church and a school and a number of stony tracks that connect one cottage with another up and down the hillside and over a stream of good drinking water.

There was a clear sky, no wind, and although spring had only just begun it was surprisingly hot. But in winter the water pools iced over. Those Welsh miners and their families must have called upon a certain fortitude to get them through.

My father's default expression was one of vacancy. Hot tar could have been poured inside his skull and he would not have complained. His hands were covered with thick skin from handling steel. I saw him pick up gorse in his bare hands. I suppose if you empty yourself out there is nothing left to scald or hurt. I don't have his forbearance, but I do have the expression that goes with it.

On the journey through Wales I saw that expression on faces lining station platforms—a vacant look, bordering on gloom.

It was raining in Swansea too. When we stopped at the station I could barely see out the windows. Then we were leaving, thank God, and as the train came off a bridge—I think it was a bridge; there was a lovely sense of elevation and of launching away from the city—we punched out of the grey rain and came into sunshine, and, just ten minutes on from Swansea's bleak doorway, there appeared a vast estuary of wet sand and fast-moving currents. A gap opened in the coastal hills and my eyes shot to the horizon and back again to the sand flats that were rapidly moving from one state to the next with the historically minded way of tides.

Then, as though the carriage window had been struck by seagull shit, a caravan park popped up, at odds with everything seen so far, and the train headed inland, to rolling green hillsides and long hedgerows that trickled down the slopes.

A shadow like a dark pond on a distant hill moved on with the cloud.

Shadows everywhere, striding out of the valleys.

Three-quarters of me is from here. I have to keep reminding myself of that fact. Three-quarters of me turns out to be a stranger. I am the tail end of a vanished comet.

I wonder what has passed on to me—what I have unwittingly absorbed. Sideburns, wispy hair tailing off behind the ears, a susceptibility to colds and bold offerings, a taste for sweet things, a policeman's plodding look, but also an attraction to the anarchic, not so much a torching of trees but setting fire to the rubbish tip behind the house, after which we hid in a tight cluster of broom and snuggled up to its cartridges of black seeds terrified at what we'd done as the fire engines screamed their way to the blaze. A general rage—at varying targets: genocide, shabby cafe service, someone's elbow drifting into my space on an aeroplane—an irritability more or less constant, like a wavering magnetic needle. I have no idea what my father's father, the man who drowned at sea, looked like.

My mother had what used to be called a ‘Roman nose'. I suppose she must have got it from her mother or father. It's hard to tell from the photographs of Maud. She looks like she's trying to put out the torches of a witch-hunt with a disarming smile. So the nose, to the extent it shows, is diminished. Perhaps Mum inherited it from the farmer. And what of him has passed down to me? A photograph would be useful. A photograph might tell all. Then I could peer into it until my own features might begin to arrange themselves in his, and a bit of reverse colonisation would be achieved—if I had such a photograph.

Photographs of course are not always reliable. Just as a landscape can change, so can a face. When my mother was forty, just before she had me (and came down with toxaemia
as a result
, she said), a dentist, with some authority, suggested she would be better off without her teeth, so he pulled them all out. It had been presented to her as a future saving. There would be no dentist bills. Also, false teeth were a very modern solution. I quickly became accustomed to the sight of her teeth, left to stand in a glass of water, usually a recycled Marmite jar, on a table beside her bed. When I went into her room to do my spelling before school, the teeth would be in that jar of water. Mum was learning Esperanto at the time. I suspect she probably had some success with that useless language with her teeth out—a language with no home, a bit like those teeth sitting cartoonishly in a glass.

There was a moment on the train when I looked out and imagined an intersecting view of myself and ‘the man who drowned at sea'. Our sightlines fell on the same white cottages, the same boggy weald, the sky, in flight for one and welcoming the other. Fanciful, of course, because in spite of the self-reflective substance bouncing in the window for most of the time I felt apart, as you do on a train, when the upwinds you float on are deeply individualised and the country looked out upon is confused with other landscapes.

A woman I know in the shoe factory buys a lotto ticket every week. I like to tease her about it. Play the worldly sceptic to her resilient faith in miracles. On my way through Wales I wondered what she would make of me now, on my way to a place that used to be a place in the hope of that incendiary moment of sudden illumination when origins would flare up into the present. She would be too kind to laugh as I do at her lotto-buying habit.

At least half a dozen times I felt like getting off the train—the first was outside Newport when the windows misted over. It was a shock to discover how easily the will to carry on drained from me. Then came a moment at a railway crossing—I forget where. The clouds parted and, as the bells rang, the surrounding fields came to life. I felt a powerful urge to get off. I was tired of the train. I wanted to step into the picture, find a pub and sit down at an outside table with the newspaper and a beer. I pushed my face closer to the window, and a train came from the other direction. It shook the carriage, then passed, and everything went still in that post-trauma way. The bells stopped, and the train got on its way again to Pembroke Dock.

I was a bit tired of myself, as much as of the train. I was tired of Rooney, the Man U striker scowling up at me. I picked up the newspaper. I wanted to find a bin. But then I thought I might as well take a look first, which is how I came upon a story about a farm labourer preying on hikers along the Pembroke Coast.

The man's murderous brutality brought to mind Joseph Dally, who, more than twenty years ago, kidnapped a teenage girl off a street quite near the one where I had grown up and drove her around the coast road, where as a child I had walked with Mum and Dad, counting off the bays, desperate for a biscuit. In the bay with the jagged remains of an old wharf, from where the cattle would be shipped across the harbour in the killing season, we often stopped for a biscuit, and that's where Dally buried alive his young victim. Now, I cannot walk by that shingled beach without a thought for that girl. No number of spread picnic blankets will erase the memory of the spot on that beach. And as the train blasted out of a short tunnel another memory of that very same beach came to me.

I have stolen a bottle of wine from home for a ‘picnic' with a girl who is lying on the shingle beside me. Every now and then a wave pushes up to us and drains noisily through the pebbles. The sky moves by. The inter-island ferry veers close enough for us to see the passengers lining the deck. They are looking in our direction but cannot see us. I wonder who, if anyone, saw and waved to Dally as he drove around this coast road. I never thought of the cattle stunned with their throats slit when I saw the harbour red with blood from the meatworks at Ngauranga and Petone. I never thought to make the connection.

Years ago when I met Mavis, my mother's first cousin—in other words, the niece of that old ratbag, Maud—she told me that the day she met my mother off the train in Taunton she was so nervous she would rather have had a tooth extracted.

By her own account, and Mum's, the visit was a great success. More so, I suspect for Mum. Mavis had treated her as family. And so a lost button was sewn back into the fabric.

Mavis was standing on her doorstep on Hamilton Road ready to greet me when my taxi drew up outside her house. Slim, grey. In manner very much like my mother.

Inside, Mavis poured me a dry sherry, a drink favoured by Mum until her triumphant discovery of gin-and-tonic. Mavis had the album ready, and before lunch we worked our way through Maud's side of the family—a long line of women bringing up children by themselves, husbands killed in and around wars, a mix of schoolteachers and slightly eccentric stay-at-home types who, I was pleased to hear, couldn't be bothered with work in the conventional sense. They are the ones in the photographs staring into empty paddocks.