A History of Silence (21 page)

Inevitably, I made my way to the square in the old heart of the city, where the stone Anglican cathedral half stood, crippled and leprotic. Pigeons flew in and out of gaping holes. The statue of one of Canterbury's founders lay on its side, like a toppled chess piece. The leaves of flora that once flourished here—titoki, mahoe, ngaio, maratara, all wetland plants—were still woven into the texture of Neil Dawson's public sculpture ‘Chalice'. Perversely, or justly, this monument to an eviscerated world had come through the carnage intact.

I stood outside the abandoned Heritage Hotel where I had stayed for a night a few weeks after the massive September 2010 earthquake. I was on the top floor, which had made me nervous. I hoped like hell I wouldn't be caught in a subsequent big quake, but consoled myself with the thought it was unlikely because the big one had already happened. Gazing up at its dead windows now, I remembered a pleasant older man in a grey felt hat who was always on hand to open the door with a welcoming smile. On that same trip, following the September earthquake, I had taken a short cut through Press Lane—now it was piled above head height with masonry and rubble. In geological time I had missed being buried alive by a whisker.

I've noticed that whenever people talk about someone they know killed in the February 2011 earthquake they begin with:
He was just on the phone. She had gone outside for a cigarette.
She didn't even need to be there. He was helping to move the organ out
of the church damaged in the September earthquake.

I moved up the street from the cathedral and stopped at a window offering breakfast for ten dollars, including hard-boiled eggs. It was the city as normal, you felt, promoted by blue skies and the faint stirrings of spring.

Transform the way you feel.
I'd seen that sign in the cracked window of an abandoned hair salon in the suburb of Avondale. In every direction, something indicating faith in the here and now could be found. Old layers of scrim were revealed behind layers of Victorian wallpaper deaf to the racket of jack hammers, while condemned buildings stood in grim lines across from one another. The relentlessness of it was brutal. The giant arms of demolition picked and pecked like cruel insects.

I stopped by a small stone church on a street corner. An engineer holding a clipboard told me it had been steadily crumbling away since the September earthquake. In its destruction it was possible to see how its once elegant form had been composed around the simple act of placing one stone on top of another, like child's play. It had been built with complete faith in its future. Now, just a stump remained.

The next day I wandered through the streets in the eastern suburbs familiar to me from my earlier visit. I noticed that more people had moved out, and that the abandoned houses appeared to lose connection with those that still had occupants. I found a sickly looking world. The neighbourhood had been cleared of silt, yet somehow these same swept streets managed to retain a memory of a mess that had been disposed of. The windows of the houses met the strong light with grudging familiarity. Roaming dogs sniffed and crapped in the overgrown grass. For all the signs of a world getting back to its feet, such as the reconnected pylons, the abandoned houses told a different story. They seemed to suffer from a collapse of will. They looked so much smaller than those that were occupied.

I took the same route as I had months earlier, pausing near the school at the end of Eureka Street where in the autumn I had stopped to listen to the postie describe that extraordinary moment when the world had turned upside down and thrown him off his bike. Now the concrete pavements and tarred streets were as calm as a windless sea.

I crossed the road that led to Bottle Lake, with its enormous mountains of silt and piled rubble, and followed the bank beside a swollen and stinking Avon River out to Pages Road, and there, jostled by graders and trucks for space on the narrow bridge, I dropped down onto Hawke Street and continued to the sea at New Brighton.

I felt a strong need to get back out to the edge of things, to walk clear of what I had just come through.

And so, at Marine Parade, I crossed to the beach and walked on the fine sand to the water's edge, and I gazed out across the deceptively calm surface of Pegasus Bay.

Just before Christmas 2011, a series of shocks with their epicentre beneath that discreet grey lid would rock the city. We would learn it was the tailing off of seismic activity. The last hurrah—the final throat clearing of an ogre sinking into the depths of the sea.

I decided to take the track through the sandhills and walk towards South New Brighton and the sheared cliffs where houses stood split and teetering. Further around those cliffs lay Sumner.

Around the time of the school visit to the cereal factory I had come down to Sumner with Mum. We stayed at the Cave Rock Hotel. I don't remember how we travelled there. I can't imagine it would have been by plane. I would remember that. It must have been by boat, in which case the
Maori
, but I have no memory of it.

For hour after hour I was left on my own to explore the beach. The weather was much hotter than I was used to. There was also a heavy surf, and I experienced for the first time the fantastic joy of being picked up by a wave and flung back at the beach like an unwanted scrap. It was a variation of throwing myself off treetops. After collecting myself from the wet sand I ran back into the waves for more. By the end of the day, the sound of the sea was inside of my ears, and my eyelids and the tops of my ears were sunburnt. It was time to head back across the road to the Cave Rock Hotel, to trudge up the carpeted stairs in my sandy feet and count along the doors to our room, where I would find Mum, as I had left her, on the bed, staring at the ceiling. I had been gone the whole day, and for all of that time we had occupied different worlds. She was in the same state I had seen her in at home—incommunicative, a bit low, as people used to say. Of course it was the past breaking down the door. The word depression was never said aloud, and not from any sense of shame. I suspect neither Mum nor Dad would have thought it worthwhile troubling the doctor for an explanation.

Perhaps the cracks and fissures are carried forward. That my mother was undone by her past I have no doubt. The clues seeped from her. In her watchfulness, her eyes measured the air, always intensely aware of the climate in a room, alert to insult. Her crippling fear of rejection.

And yet, for someone like her, a victim of prejudice, oddly, she didn't hesitate to cast a few stones of her own. Some of her intolerances were generational. Swearing was one. She couldn't abide it—never swore herself. At least I never heard her. Violence was another—it disgusted her, as officially it does me too. But I also find myself helplessly drawn to its pulses. ‘Man's inhumanity to man,' she'd say during yet another interminable documentary showing wartime bodies piled up, dumped in wagons and hauled across the barren wastes. I thought it profound the first time I heard her say this, but tedious thereafter, to the point where I'd fold my arms and feel my lips draw in, and find myself wishing for some cataclysmic event of man's inhumanity to man that would send bodies flying out of the television into the sitting room. One could always count on an ad break, a cup of tea and a biscuit.

It would also appear that she didn't like Catholics. And of course it would come to pass that I didn't like them either. I absorbed this prejudice as one might a family taste for a particular dish or a shared activity such as table tennis.

And so it seemed quite normal to be dismissive of our closest friends in the neighbourhood, the Browns, whose carpet I had been warned against spilling food on, as they trooped by our house each Sunday morning on their way to mass.

‘There they go—off to wipe the slate clean.' I'd never heard her say anything with such forceful disdain.

I wasn't sure of what she meant the first time, but tonally it sounded as though the Browns were off to commit some disgraceful act, and therefore Mum's contempt seemed reasonable, even civically responsible, and soon I was bellowing out from the window, ‘There go the Browns, off to wipe the slate clean.'

It was hardly an ecclesiastical position. We would not have known what one was, since religion was never in our sights.

But the anger rang clear—quiet, and deeply felt—not as a loud or tossed-off irritability. Now I wonder if it was the Browns' recourse to forgetting that she found so outrageously unacceptable.

My mother did not approve of vocal rage. It was undignified—and risky. Something might be revealed. And besides, it was not a free expression of self but a drowning, and as hopeless as the mad scrambling of a spider whirling around a plughole. She chose silence and withdrawal, and she brooded, and that was the air I grew up in, and breathed, a bruised air without any identifiable source.

Surprisingly for someone who had once sewn underclothing out of sack material for her children, Mum had a healthy sense of entitlement. I don't know where she got it from. Certainly not from Dad, who assumed whatever new pile of shit was dumped on him was all part of the world's curious design. Place them in a fairy tale, and Mum is on the winding path leading up to the palace, while Dad is heading off to the woodcutter's shed.

Perhaps her ideas of dignity and entitlement came from an alternative world she dreamt for herself. Dreams are not so easily contained or dispensed with. They cannot be taken away either.

Dreams are rarely considered as matters of heritage. But in my mother's case—perhaps in all—it would be a mistake to overlook dreams.

The kindling of revenge, but also of great deeds, and art, is forged in dreams.

As a child Tchaikovsky complained to his nanny about the noises in his head. They wouldn't let him alone at night. One of those ‘noises' would turn into ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy', which I first heard at primary school and then, years later, as part of an installation by Scott Eady at Te Papa Tongarewa. A tiny figure of a boxer stood on a turntable which was spun around by the tumbling motion of an agitator in an old washing machine to play the ‘Sugar Plum Fairy'. Who would have thought of bringing such disparate things together? And so successfully, as it seemed to me, partly because of the memories I happened to bring to the scene. Different phrases occurred to me. Some pertinent. Others that could have come from a washing-machine manual. ‘In the wash', and ‘solar plexus', and ‘agitator'—a vocabulary that quickly settled like compass points into familiar territory. The arbitrariness of encounter, where ‘things meet in kinship', to borrow a phrase of Robert Musil's, which I had written down years earlier and which surfaced, as if on a command from long ago, in the form of the boxer and Tchaikovsky. I thought of the shore we used to pick our way along, and what we used to find there, dismembered and discarded, and flung out from the centre of human activity. And I remembered the foul weather my father walked in, without complaint, the rain filling his shoes. In similar conditions, a boilermaker-poet by the name of Hone Tuwhare felt in his back pocket for paper and a pen and wrote about holes left in the air by rain. One of these men, I am certain, felt his heart lighten.

Kindness was my father's radical response to the world. The agitator, however, has to shake the irritability out of himself somehow. For a few minutes I concentrated on the solar plexus of the washing machine, and soon enough my thoughts drifted to Bob Fitzsimmons's famous left hook to the solar plexus of Gentleman Jim Corbett. Fitzsimmons, born in Cornwall but brought up in Timaru where his heavy arms were made on a smithy's forge, was now world champion.

Later in life, Fitzsimmons meets Jack Johnson for one more tilt at glory. By now he is an old man in boxing terms, and a bit on the light side for a heavyweight. But it is easy enough to understand what lit his candle. When does one stop dreaming? In his mind Fitzsimmons sees the fight going his way: the formidable Johnson backs up and Fitzsimmons finds room for his celebrated left hook, and relives the moment it sank into the solar plexus of Gentleman Jim Corbett all those years ago, relishing yet again the superior look sliding off Corbett's face, as if a second after the blow he too had seen the future.