A History of Silence (22 page)

In the same way that I had picked up Bob's boxing glove in the backyard and his scraps of paper with the shuffle of boxers' feet, I'd absorbed the story of Fitzsimmons' left hook to Corbett's solar plexus. Perhaps not to the extent of my brother, who would commission a bronze of the one-time blacksmith to stand on the corner of Stafford Street in Timaru, but, nevertheless, the powerful surges of ambition I experienced while taking in Scott Eady's installation were not at all of my own making, but released inside me by another layer occupied by phantoms. I must have been dreaming on Fitzsimmons' behalf.

I suppose I was taking a longer interest than most in the boxer spinning around on the turntable mounted on the washing machine. It had brought back such a flood of memories, taking me back to the washhouse air that was cool and latticed with dog hair and slow dog movement.

I was enjoying being back in the old washhouse when I became aware of the guard's breathy crossing and unfolding of his arms. We were making each other nervous. He wished what I wished—we both wished that the other would just go away. Then came a throat clearance designed to alert me to the fact that he was watching me—which of course I took quite personally—just in case, as I suspect he had it in mind, I might try to cause trouble. It hadn't occurred to me to cause trouble until then, but all of a sudden it did, and I felt a tremendous urge to smash Scott Eady's installation. The impulse came and went, leaving me in a heightened state, flushed with possibility. Of course I would never do such a thing, but mentally I had already—smashed the little fucker on the turntable playing the ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy' to send him skating across the museum floor. Mentally delivering a blow is not the same as executing the action. An earthquake does not have a dress rehearsal. A car crash is not technically one until it has happened. And so Scott Eady's boxer was still campishly gliding around the turntable.

To make things worse, to inflame an already overheated situation, the guard managed a few more throat clearances. The funny thing is, eventually when I looked across to acknowledge him, I did not feel myself entirely blameless. Between the guard and me passed a separate world of cinematic scenes—in my case I saw Corbett on the canvas unable to get up and the white bony figure of Fitzsimmons turning away with the abstracted air of someone unwilling to take responsibility for the spilt milk. And as the guard nodded and I nodded back, like boxers exchanging mutual respect at the end of a particularly gruelling round, I fetched back a grainy scene from a film I barely remember except for the moment in it where the composer walks into a lake to drown himself. And instead of the violent clash that I had been gearing up for, we parted with a final nod. One from me. One from him. All perfectly civil.

In darkness lies the past. I will tiptoe by her closed door. The light is at the end of the hall. It is coming through the sitting room windows. I will head for the light.

I cannot think of a fiercer repudiation of the past than the one the ageing Krapp delivers in Samuel Beckett's play
Krapp's Last
Tape
. The drawn-out silence at the beginning of the play gives no clue to the incandescent rage that erupts halfway through.

I was in an audience that waited twenty minutes for Krapp to speak. Minutes ticked by—long minutes of dream-inducing time floated through the theatre, then Krapp (played brilliantly by Michael Gambon) stood—in rancorous silence—and the heads of the audience lifted as one. Someone coughed and Gambon seemed to pause as if he had heard it, and the tension rose to an unbearable level. It would have been perfectly acceptable had someone screamed out or fainted or knifed their neighbour.

Krapp walked slowly around the desk, dragging his knuckles against its edge. Our nerves were already jarred. Then he opened a drawer. He took out a banana, and he peeled it.

Hardly anything else happens in
Krapp's Last Tape
, and so all this time later it is the banana scene that endures—which, frankly, I could have performed just as well—but not the explosive moment when, in a furious assault on the past, Krapp turned on the tape recording of his younger self. He pulled out the tape, hurled it to the floor and stomped all over his youth and its fake eloquence.

I always used to think of myself that any eloquence I might muster was almost certainly a false wind.

What I used to like, and admire, about Beckett was his austerity. What I saw was a life pared back to its essentials. The evidence was locked in his face, in that spiky hair of his, as sturdy as a cleaning brush. I assumed he led a monastic life and existed on a diet of bread and water. In portrait after portrait his face settles into a firm jaw, the hair rears away from the scalp, and the eyes are as keen as a hawk's swooping low over a paddock. That is how I saw him, and how Beckett encouraged us to. In real life I never saw anyone quite like him. But in the imaginary landscape, he loomed—in the hacked hills and their gorse patches, and on a mad dog of a road as it twisted around corners and charged into successive stages of ugliness. I imagined Beckett's grey cosmic attention drawing up miles of tarseal on its way to some hard scrabble beach, the top button done up on his jacket, his nose flinching at the faint smell of raw sewage.

One day, idle and nosing about in a secondhand bookshop, I happened to flick through a large book of photographs taken in the south of France. Tanned 1970s women in big hair and sunglasses. Maseratis. Umbrellas, beach balls. I turned a page to find Beckett striding up a path from the beach, a towel draped over his arm, in shorts, sunglasses, sandals. It was a shock to find him in this sunny environment. I had never thought of him as a sunbather or a wearer of sandals—and of a kind similar to the brand put out by the shoe factory back in its day. But there he was, in Cap Ferrat, as I recall, the ripe smell of summer bursting from his shadow. His long tanned legs striding out. His legs were another thing to square away. His legs were beside the point. Not part of the biography.

The problem with my past was that all the tapes, if any ever existed, had been destroyed.

One of the few stories with an unmistakably allegorical line handed on to me had to do with hard times.

Long before you came along
. Mum could always be relied on to remind me just how lucky I was to have popped up behind that cabbage leaf when I did.

Long before I came along
, Bob arrived home from school to ask Mum if he could buy his school lunch like the other kids. Apparently, buying your lunch at school was a new thing, and my brother wanted to try it. But of course there was no money for such an extravagance. Bob must have kept up his campaign because eventually Mum found a few pennies behind the couch for him. He chose a pie, a meat pie (on such details memories thrive) or was it a potato pie? But come the lunch hour he couldn't eat it, and saved it instead to bring home to share.

After telling that story, Mum would nod into empty space, while I remained suitably in awe.

I might have missed it all, but I absorbed the anecdotes—the pie story and the one about Bob shooting himself—and laughed eagerly, as if I had been there, and developed a knowing smile when once more we were reminded that one sister could not be trusted to dish herself up a fair share of Spanish cream, Mum's signature dish. Strangely, this fact has endured like some oddity stuck in the sand.

Continuing with my good fortune, I didn't have to leave school at fifteen, as my sisters did, and unlike them I had a new tennis racquet and clothes bought from shops. By the age of twelve I had flown on a plane—to Sydney, then on to Surfers Paradise, where I had my first Hawaiian steak and sat speechless with joy in the holy grail of a beer garden nursing a fruit cocktail with a floating paper umbrella.

My mother dreamt of a life for herself different from the one she had landed in. She liked Englishness, good china, manners, and would often say so if someone was well spoken, but such types rarely visited 20 Stellin Street. When they did, we sat around in a circle like newly minted disciples. The one who could talk—and very persuasively—was my brother.

He did not so much smash as talk his way out of our working-class stocks, which was to make the way a great deal easier for me. I was lucky enough to attend university—not that I intended to, but he insisted. And because of Bob's success in commercial property, Dad was able to retire from welding. Mum, who had cleaned houses to supplement the household income and sewn underpants for her kids, would fly first-class for the rest of her life, and once, memorably, in a chartered jet all around Australia. And because she could now afford to she shook the lines of depression and disappointment out of her face. For the last thirty years of her life, she took an anti-depressant pill every day. The effect was extraordinary. It seemed to strip away the protective layers to allow a different person to emerge—a far more cheerful person. It was not a mask she put on before our startled eyes but a part of her that had lain buried for so long without the means to emerge and express itself. She turned into a lovely old lady whose welcoming hug at the door and demand for a peck on her cheek suddenly felt weirdly inappropriate, even unsettling. I wasn't used to this person, and if I could I would step around her and brush aside her protests. To be met at the door by all that charm and lipstick—it was too much. It was as if someone else who was only vaguely familiar had taken up residence inside her. Whenever I indulged her it felt like we were playing at something, like grappling with a foreign language, or acting out roles in a play for which we had only some of the lines.

Just as annoying, some old habits remained. She would yell at me as I reached for a piece of fruit in the bowl. She had
just
bought those bananas. What on earth made me think I could eat one? A week later, the bananas would still be there, soft, untouched, and covered in black spots.

Such moments might have been an act of solidarity with the single mums she taught to budget, something she knew quite a bit about, even though these days she drove a late-model Jaguar to the Citizens Advice Bureau in the Hutt to give advice to desperate young women arriving on the bus.