A History of Silence (2 page)

This is also the hour when the painting at the far end of the room is at its finest. The paint on the canvas is almost entirely blue. Some of the blue is a wash which in places cannot tell whether it is white or blue. There are dark blues that suggest shadows, and a darker fill of blue which at this hour, lit by the one hanging lamp, magically turns into a headland.

During the day there is not much to see. The colours flatten out across the three panels. But at this pre-dawn hour the blue smudge gains in clarity until a headland emerges. Then, you find yourself peering deeper and deeper past a series of headlands to a vanishing point that cannot be identified.

The picture is of Dusky Sound in Fiordland, in the southwest of New Zealand. It was painted by Gerda Leenards. So it is a real place, but in its painted representation it cannot be counted on, coming and going as it does by the hour.

The very same sound was painted by William Hodges, the artist on James Cook's second voyage of exploration. And in one picture, as if to identify and reassure the viewer that this is a painting of an actual place, Hodges has stuck a small party of Maori in the foreground. There they stand, frozen, sculptural. They offer scale and perspective to the romantic splendour of Hodges' scene. But they are also as provisional as a surveyor's peg.

The painting is a cover-up in more ways than one. An X-ray of Hodges' fanciful and probably recollected scene revealed perhaps the first ever sketches of Antarctic icebergs.

Why did Hodges paint over the icebergs? Why would he cover up with this romantic invention what he had actually seen? He has captured the iceberg in the moment, and it is totally believable. The perspective is from the ship's sloping deck. You can feel the silent proximity of the
Resolution
. The two phenomena pass by one another. The eye leads the hand and the iceberg is transplanted onto the canvas. There has been no time to think about the iceberg, no time to ponder composition or the addition of sublime effects. It is a snapshot captured with a grey and white palette.

Whereas Hodges' scene at Dusky Bay is a reconsideration of the seen and experienced. The immediate terrain has been purged of the usual rainforest clutter. Individual trees have been granted more space so that each achieves the elegant domain of an English oak in a field. The scene is up-lit, the light soft and welcoming. The finished picture is a devastating step towards easing the wilderness into pastoral familiarity.

Who doesn't warm to the smoothness of wood? Or to a doorstep hollowed over time by foot traffic? Or to snatches of conversation that make the air crackle? When was language ever that fresh? Who said what to whom for the other to say, ‘I have never heard that before'? When the wind blows and your skin is wet there is a shiver that is all of a kind, equalling us out among creatures without beds to creep home to and blankets to crawl under. I prefer the elements, and resist the newness and starchiness of the clothes that my mother would like to parcel me up in. I am happier with my socks after the elastic finally goes and they hang around my ankles. The pockets on my shorts are decently torn. The toes on my shoes, issued from the factory I live in now, have worn through. The elbows of my jersey are naked threads. The mud on my knees has dried. I am like something risen from a bog, fit finally for the world I have been born into.

My mother would like to carry out some modifications. I often catch her looking at my hair. She'd like to grab a handful and take a pair of scissors to it. But since it is unlikely she will succeed there, not with my hair, the campaign focuses on my clothing. My jersey, for example, which she resents after seeing hours of her handiwork with knitting needles go to waste. I am a disgrace. She would like to peel that woollen garment off me and throw it out. But these clothes are as close a representative of self as I will ever have. I have the same elemental connection with them as I do with Pencarrow, this finger of land that probes far out into Cook Strait.

This is as far as the lip of the mouth protrudes, the rest is open sea. And of course the natural inclination is to walk to the very edge, and to teeter where the land drops sharply away to crescent bays of shingle and the sea rushes in to make its deposits and claw back what it can.

This is Pencarrow, with half its face braving Cook Strait and its other side demurely turned to Wellington Harbour. I have no idea what the name means other than denoting ownership. Behind it is the older name of Te Rae-akiaki which speaks to where you actually are and what you can see—
the headland where
the sea dashes up
. On the other side of the harbour entrance is the other headland, the bottom lip of the fish that
eats the wind
, Te Raekaihau.

Captain James Cook tried three times to sail in through the heads, but in the end sailed across the strait instead to explore and map the coast of the South Island. The day he gave up, a nor-westerly blasted across the harbour throwing up tails of white froth, a mad kind of wind furious with everything in its way. William Hodges painted the tempest off Cape Stephens at the north-eastern tip of the South Island. The perspective puts the artist on a hilltop above the
Resolution
as it bashes its way through a gamut of towering water sprouts. But Hodges, of course, was on board, in the midst of the wild crossing. The picture is full of motion and danger. The artist has thrown the wild elements onto the canvas and then inserted the ship the way as children we place our toy boat gently down in the bath. The painting does manage to convey some of the personal insult felt when battling into a gale. I have never felt as lightly tethered to the earth as when the nor-wester is at full bombastic strength. Even my face feels rearranged—I can feel the nose bone sticking up and the wrong patch of skin where the forehead normally sits. Eyelids have to be prised open. The nose drips.

I understand—that is, I have been told by my father—that occasionally small kids are blown out to sea. I look hard at a speck in the distance.

We have been walking for hours, and it is about time I was given a biscuit. The sheep in the long windswept grass are annoyed with me. They don't look at Mum or Dad. Dad stops to grab at his hat, paws at the wind, and the sheep dart off. The seagulls don't hear a thing. They float above.

All afternoon we walk along this headland in a happy elevated state. It is exhilarating and at times I feel as though some sort of recognition is passing between place and body, one that runs much deeper than the mere act of walking or watching the wind rip through the tall grass.

As the years move on, the walks are repeated, and each time I feel as though I am walking into something, slipping ever deeper inside of the skin of something that I cannot name, a cloaking sensation without the cloak itself.

And at such times, I would have said I felt like I was being guided, but without a guide I could point to.

It turns out that someone painted this landscape too, which is no surprise. But where I found it is—in the display window of a bookshop in Hastings, in England. This was seven or eight years ago. I was in a street, hurrying along somewhere—my marriage had failed and I was infatuated with a young woman and madly in pursuit of something I had shed long ago—when I happened to glance in the shop window. Facing out from a large book of paintings in the display were the crescent bays piled high with shingle and driftwood, and the chipped coastal hills that I had walked along the tops of under racing clouds, just like the ones in the picture, on one of those exhausting days when the only way forward is to stick your head down and burrow into the wind.

I leant closer to the window to look for the name of the artist and was amazed to discover that the painting was not of Pencarrow but of Pembroke Dock in Wales—the birthplace of my grandfather on my father's side, a figure of lore, as I only ever heard him spoken of as ‘the Welsh naval captain who drowned at sea'.

Depending on her mood, sometimes my mother will bring out a small mahogany box that contains the past. It is shiny enough to catch every reflection in the room but my own.

There is a trick to opening that box which I will never get the hang of. It turns out that there are boxes within boxes, secret compartments that are tricky to get at.

Inside one of its drawers are some medals from the Boer War and a fob watch that belong to someone called Grandad. This person called Grandad is a bookseller.

I was once shown his photograph, or, more accurately, I remember seeing a photograph of someone called Grandad, a stranger who in fact is not my grandfather or father to my mother.

My mother's father is a farmer, a figure even harder to believe in than this other one called Grandad, since he is hardly ever mentioned. Perhaps just the one time, but it sticks.

There are other, bigger mysteries, such as the absence of photographs of my parents as children.

The scar on my mother's nose is another one of those things that is hard to explain. She is unsure how it got there; someone threw something at her or else she was thrown against something.

Sometimes I notice the scar. Most of the time I don't. But when I do, it holds my attention. It is a scar from a particular moment, an accident or perhaps a mischief belonging to a world that has completely vanished. It is a curiosity in the manner of a fossil.

My mother has no idea what her father looked like. She never met him. She remembers her mother, Maud. In fact she spies on her, obsessively, although she rarely speaks of her.

In 1914, the year that Maud as a ‘fallen woman' arrived in Wellington to give birth to my mother, my father was in the care of the city's orphanage on Tinakori Road. He and his siblings were found milling around the body of their mother Eleanor Gwendoline (death by hydatids) in a flat in Kilbirnie. There are six of them: Percy, twins Gladys and Jack, Arthur and nine-year-old Laura, who is blind from—it is believed—‘a sand storm at Lyall Bay' beneath the headland that eats the wind, and Lew, my father, who is one and a half.

While Maud is waiting to give birth to my mother, Laura is sent north to the Jubilee Institute for the Blind in Parnell, Auckland, where she is taught to recover the lost world by making shapes of people out of plasticine. After partially recovering her sight, she is placed in service on a farm in Te Puke. A year later she is sent for by an aunt in Melbourne, and Laura is never seen or heard of again. Arthur will do three years' hard labour for breaking and entering. Gladys will file a restraint order against him visiting her. Arthur will disappear off to Canada, also never to be seen or heard of again. My grandmother is buried in an unmarked grave in Wellington's Karori Cemetery, and forgotten. And Arthur Leonard Jones, the father of this mess, my grandfather, born in Pembroke Dock, Wales, will ‘drown at sea'.

I know just a bit more than that about the physical world I was born into, but it also has its mythic layers. The land was originally fished up from the sea. Our street abuts Taita, the ‘log jam' in a gullet of land that spills out into Wellington Harbour in the shape of a fish mouth. The shoe factory, fifteen kilometres away in the heart of the city, is located in the roof of the mouth. The motorway connecting past and present lives, suburb and city, is the spine of the fish on whose back I swam into the world.

There are other creation myths to consider. As the last of a litter of five kids, rather than being told about the indecency of my mother's late-in-life pregnancy, I am informed that I was found under a cabbage leaf.

It is the weekend, probably Sunday, because Dad is in the garden in his gardening boots and white singlet. I am also there, kneeling in the rich composted soil on the trail of myth, lifting up one fallen cabbage leaf, then another, a partially rotten one, to see if another kid happens to be lying there. I am fairly confident of finding someone because on the coast whenever I lift a rock I can always count on an indignant crab scuttling away from the sudden blast of daylight or a slimy fish wriggling deeper into the mud. Disappointingly, there is no one under this cabbage leaf, or that one. I look up to check with Dad. Through the thick smoke from the incinerator I catch the smile on his jokey bald head. Beyond his sunburnt shoulder, framed in the sitting-room window, is the watchful figure of my mother. Just then I feel as though I have stumbled on something, or glimpsed something for which at that particular moment there are no words like ‘cabbage leaf' or ‘rock pool'. It lasts only a few seconds. Then my father begins to laugh. He shakes his head at me. By the time I turn back the watchful shadow has gone. The window is just a window, transparent, catching nothing but the passing clouds.