A History of Silence (18 page)

In Kaitangata the Bibbys hold two lives within themselves. A third, if childhood is included as country already passed through. On the far side of the world there are new transactions. Layers of observation and memory shift back and forth, between the old and the new, between the place left and the place arrived at, until a sharper impression rises from the broth—this hill is a bit like that one, this bit of Kaitangata is a bit like that bit of Swansea, and if not, then reshaping things until the ingredients of memory disappear into the place of settlement.

But I also wonder if ancestral silence is a form of stage fright.

At primary school, some poor tremulous kid was always being hauled off the mat and stood in front of the rest of us to present a news item. I remember one boy pissing himself. On another occasion, a girl burst into tears. Pissing yourself or bursting into tears didn't seem at all unreasonable. I lived in fear of the teacher's eye beckoning me up into that exposed place in front of the class.

I was in a similar situation to my forebears arriving at a small unknowable place on the other side of the world. What could those faces peering back see in me that I couldn't see for myself? For one thing I didn't trust the sound of my voice. I was unsure where it came from, even less certain that it was truly representative of me.

Then arrived the moment of crisis. My mind turned blank. What did I have to say? I didn't have anything to say. I'd lost the will to speak. Shame rose, like sap, inside me. In the eyes of my classmates I sensed a cruel excitement.

To make things worse I was trying to rid myself of a speech defect. I struggled with my
th
's. I suspect it had come about after trying to sound like someone else, possibly one of the voices on television I heard through my bedroom door. I used to blame the Irish comedian Dave Allen. But I realise now that he spoke of ‘tings' rather than ‘fings'. The point remains, however; at 20 Stellin Street the groove of speech was very lightly indented. The dominant voices were the ones on the television ringing through the house. I imagine that is how I came temporarily to lose the
th
sound. Someone like Steptoe bellowing through my bedroom door with his rag-and-bone voice. It seemed to happen without my being aware of it. I found myself talking about
fings
and
foughts
. And even when I realised what had happened I couldn't shake the habit. I'd mislaid the
th
and now I had to make a conscious effort to join up this crucial frontispiece with my things and thoughts. In amazingly quick time I had shed something and the absence of it now revealed me differently to the world, in a way that I didn't especially care for.

I don't want to say
fing
or
fought
so I have to pause and dig around for the
th
sound and attach it to the word before the sentence can safely leave my mouth. A hesitancy creeps into my speech and with it a kind of delayed cognitive response. Instead of leaping fearlessly from subject to subject I have become timid, afraid I will say
fing
. I have turned into a stammerer, without the actual stammer, and in place of speech there arrives instead a sort of closed breath.

In London, I saw a man turn himself inside out as he hunted for words to deliver to an audience that had turned up to hear a free ‘talk'. It began promisingly: a young woman representing the gallery welcomed the artist Martin Creed, and a man with no arse at all, in a fire engine top framed by a dark vest, leapt on stage, and the audience—twenty-nine of us, as I recall—clapped politely. I had never seen a man who wasn't already dead with so little colour in his face. His head seemed to be abnormally large. It wasn't helped by that hair of his—more like foam—which, of its own initiative, as it seemed, had acquired dramatic personality of its own. So that both the hair and Martin Creed approached the microphone. Then arrived a moment of crisis that was very familiar. Whatever he had intended to say had gone clean out of his head. His mouth closed, and he walked quickly away from the microphone. The eyes of the audience stalked him to the corner of the stage where he stood with his back to us, presumably to collect himself and make a fresh start. After a few minutes of exhilarating silence, he returned to the microphone to make a fresh start. When eventually he spoke it was slow, agonising, but beautiful too, the way the words seemed to catch—some Scots can do that, sound like their words are drawing through a pit of gravel. He said, ‘Someone once told me, that if you don't know what to do, it's best not to do anything.' We laughed—some of us uproariously, as though a horse had just burst out from a barn door and run through a line of washing. We wanted to encourage him, and for the first time Creed smiled. He began to nod, and his attention settled more broadly.

‘Did you pay to come today?'

We shook our heads.

‘Aye,' he said. ‘That's good.'

Another silence rolled out, and I detected a shift in the mood of the audience, a hardening of consumer entitlement. A man down the front sitting in a row by himself crossed his arms in an aggressive manner. This was answered by Creed dropping a hand onto his hip and raising his eyes to the ceiling and slowly shaking his head. Then, the change that came over him made the audience sit up. He strode across the stage and bent to pick up a guitar which I had not known was there until, worryingly, it was in his hands. He set the capo on a high fret and strumming away he sang, ‘I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it.' Until Creed's ‘talk', it had never occurred to me that the presentation of self was a performance and, therefore, every bit as unreliable as the surfaces of a city or a painting, or, for that matter, family history. One observation of Creed's has stayed with me. It came after he explained how the talk had come about; he said he had quite liked being asked, and then there was the newly published book that had catalogued all his work to date that needed to be publicised. ‘Aye, the book.' Its mention seemed to depress Creed because he paused. Then he said, ‘It's a bit like looking at your shit in a toilet bowl. It's not very nice but sometimes you just have to do it.'

FOUR

WHO, I WONDER, knocked down the door of the Kilbirnie flat to find six children crawling around the corpse of their mother?

Eleanor Gwendoline Jones suffered, as her father John Bibby had, a toxic death, in her case, by hydatids, a disease picked up from contact with dogs. An affectionate lick from a dog is enough to transfer the tapeworm that more commonly infects sheep. Inside the host's stomach the tapeworm grows cysts, some the size of tennis balls, and bigger. For a time the carrier goes about her business, without suspecting anything is seriously amiss. When the cyst bursts, as can happen in a fall, the victim—in this case, my grandmother Eleanor—dies from toxic shock.

Where is her husband, the father to all these kids? A year earlier, Arthur Leonard Jones and Eleanor had separated. Since then, Arthur, described in the blue book as a wharf labourer, appears to have led an itinerant life, leaving a trail of addresses across the city. He is already well on his way to turning into the phantom who will go down in history as a ‘naval captain drowned at sea'.

Laura, Dad's eldest sister, is partly responsible for this account. There is a scrap of a letter written by her brother Percy passing on what Laura allegedly told him: ‘Our father drowned at sea aboard the SS
Ionic
, a troop-carrying ship, after it was hit by a torpedo off the coast of California.'

Except, everything about that story is wrong. The
Ionic
was fired on, but escaped unharmed and kept sailing. The incident did not occur off the American coast but in the Mediterranean in 1915 with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force on its way to Gallipoli.

I don't doubt that Percy accurately recorded what Laura told him. But where did she hear this story?

On the strength of that ‘history', I will develop a strong bond with the sea. I even convince myself that I have innate navigational abilities, which are repeatedly and more successfully put to the test on land than at sea, finding headlands and coastlines among spires and hilltops.

A different line of inquiry finds Arthur in a hospital bed suffering from sciatica the day his wife is lowered into an unmarked grave in Karori Cemetery, and, later, he turns up in Auckland where he remarries and otherwise leads an obscure life.

The woman in the office at the Karori Cemetery keyed in the name Eleanor Gwendoline Jones and with a minimum of fuss printed out her whereabouts,
plot 107.
She showed me on a map where to find her—‘at the row beginning Smith, the unmarked grave between Eliot and Wilton'.

I must have always known that my grandmother was buried in Karori Cemetery, but I never went there or paid it any attention because, as far as I can remember, Dad never did. Perhaps the idea of a mother—that particular mother, at least—was as alien to him as a grandmother is to me. I never once heard her name spoken.

Then, in the office, I had another thought. What had happened to Dad's ashes? I remember, after his funeral, stopping on the way to the car park to gaze back in the direction of the crematorium and finding a thin trail of smoke. Edward Llewellyn Jones. The woman keyed in his name. Her eyes trawled down the screen. She looked up, and said, ‘His ashes are in the rose garden.' ‘On whose authority?' I asked. She put her glasses back on and looked at the screen. ‘Mr Robert Jones,' she said. My brother.

The rose garden is below the road opposite the cemetery's admin office. Down there a young runner was going through her warm-down routine. I stared at the roses.

It had never occurred to me to ask about Dad's ashes. Apparently they had been spread without ceremony, or family in attendance.

That wasn't the case with Mum. The last third of her life was spent at two addresses—a handsome house with a full view of the harbour and a townhouse just before the bend on the road leading out of the bay. In both bedrooms she liked to lie in bed and gaze across the bay and, at night, listen to the police on shortwave radio. I wouldn't have thought she knew much about shortwave radio. But I like the idea of her and the other old ladies along Marine Parade at a sleepless hour tuning their transistors to the static and police-speak, finding comfort in those voices, in their proximity, in the same way that a yawn from the dog in its kennel at night used to banish thoughts of ghosts hanging about in our backyard looking for a way inside the house.

My daughter and I paddled a Malibu surf kayak out to the bay with Mum's ashes on board. I picked a spot she would have been able to see from both houses. The ashes were surprisingly heavy. I poured a stream of white grain into the sea. We paddled in. A few hours later, after lunch at my sister Pat's house, I drove back around the bay. The tide was out a long way, a spring tide, and never have I seen so many gulls in that bay, fighting and diving over the bounty stranded on the sand bars. It was shocking to see, and extraordinary to think that, just a few days earlier, still fully bodied and alert, Mum had lain in bed gazing across this same stretch of water. Without a thought, I am certain, that a few days later seagulls would be squabbling over her ashes.

A day later the gesture felt horribly miscalculated. The sentimentality that led me to paddle her ashes out to sea, the diligent marking of the spot on the tide. What was I thinking? What was wrong with putting her ashes in a jar or burying them in a garden?

From the cemetery office I got in the car and drove deeper into this community of the dead, turning right as instructed by the pedestal with the angel to enter the older part of the cemetery.

I parked, and for the next hour explored the paths between the promised lands and laments,
reunited with Jesus
,
at rest
,
joined
her husband on this day
,
entered sleep
,
drowned at sea
, and so on.

I found a row beginning with Smith and two unmarked graves, one with a dead tree stump resting on it, but there wasn't an Eliot or Wilton in sight, which was disappointing because I liked the wild abandonment of those unmarked plots.