A History of Silence (29 page)

Betty nee Seaward turns into Joyce Lillian Fairley. She will live in Island Bay and, later, Petone, where James Fairley had his stationery- and bookshop. Mr Fairley, who my siblings grew up calling Grandad, was, I'm told, a kind and gentle man. The 1918 electoral roll describes him as a ‘torpedo man', living at the Shelly Bay naval base with his wife Edith. My sister Pat said he took his own horse off to the Boer War and that on his return he ran a horse-and-cart milk delivery in Island Bay. She remembers his wife, Nana, had an enormous bust, and wore a dress that dropped off the edge of her like a curtain. She liked to play croquet. I imagine they led full lives, but these are the scraps that survive. All I ever knew of Mr Fairley was what was inside that mahogany box containing the past, which my mother had said was difficult to open. I understand he knew nothing of what happened at home when he was at the bookshop, when my mother was tied to a chair and thrashed for her failure to be what the bookseller's wife wanted more than anything, a quick replacement for her own dead children.

In October 1917 the Fairleys lose their daughter, Isabella Margaret, and in April the following year seven-year-old John Fergus ‘Jackie'. Later that year, the Fairleys adopt Mum, and name her Joyce Lillian.

She never liked that middle name Lillian. She would smirk whenever asked to supply it on official forms. But Mum embodied the characteristics expected of someone called Joyce. Wore dresses that Joyce would—unflattering dresses—then, after her change of fortune, she dressed more stylishly, and Joyce the bag lady was superseded by Joyce the clothes horse.

The house Mum was sent to turns out to be an old rustic timber cottage. Eden Street lies one kilometre up from Island Bay on the edge of Cook Strait. I found the Fairleys' house in a row of wooden houses below the crest of an east-facing hill one December afternoon when fog rolling off the strait had closed the airport and sat in drifts over the hills. A hammer banged away in the unseen distance. The odd car groaned up the steep part of Eden Street from the sea end.

Eight houses along from the Fairleys, the street disappears down a hill. Beyond the nearest neighbour in the other direction the road vanishes. It is an odd piece of landscape, a large sky-basking arena with bits and pieces of hilltop and hillside that sit as if suspended and apart from one another.

When my mother arrived there, Eden Street was the outer boundary of the suburbanisation that had crept up the hill from the Parade. Cattle grazed on the slopes above and on the naked hills across the valley.

I would have liked a tour of the house. I'm not shy about knocking on the door of strangers, so I mounted the steps. But through the front window I saw a woman on her bed reading a book, so I quietly retreated to the road.

The best I could do was to appreciate 88 Eden Street in relation to everything around it. I noticed those features that might have sprung memories were my mother to have stood where I did—the bullnose veranda on the villa across the road, a number of other rustic cottages of similar vintage, one lovely old place that sat on a knob of hill to the south, a very old and solid cabbage tree that shifted ever so slightly in a steady breeze that poured up the hill where the road dropped from view, and the pitch and roll of a landscape that never really settled into one thing or another.

I followed Eden Street down the steep incline, noting the number of ‘No Exit' signs, and very quickly arrived at the Parade on the flat, to a number of two-storey timber shops. Across the Parade I noticed a pedestrian lane running through the back of the houses. The moment I started along it I realised I was following my mother's route to Island Bay School. The lane came out beside a large timber house, possibly a boarding house in Mum's day. On Clyde Street I looked across to the school, where a dad, dressed like an overgrown schoolboy, and his young son raced around the concrete play area on bikes. I crossed the road to read the school's mission statement which was fixed to the fence:

We are a learning community growing children to be:

Skilled communicators

Deep thinkers

Superb managers of self

And confident about the future.

The word ‘confident' was contained within a star. These are worthy values. But if I think of them as stars of alignment in my mother's world of 1918 they begin to dim. Her launch pad into the world was altogether different.

The bastard is the godfather of the outsider.
Filius nullius
. A Nobody.

A bastard floats free of the normal constraints, but for that freedom a price is exacted—the bastard only ever occupies thresholds. In the Old Testament, the bastard is even more of an outcast: ‘He shall not enter the congregation of the Lord, and nor shall his offspring for ten generations.' In the Old Testament the concern is less moral than an anxiety about the weakening of the tribal bond. A bastard in the context of the Old Testament was the offspring of a marriage between an Israelite and non-Israelite.

In
King Lear
, Edmund explains his aloofness from society on the grounds of an ‘irregular birth':

Why bastard? Wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
With base? With baseness? Bastardy? Base, base?

After I read Hawthorne's account of Hester Prynne's shame and the transcript of Maud's divorce in the Supreme Court I felt the world begin to close around me. This is what a greater awareness of the past achieves. It finds a place for everything. Random occurrences—‘acts of God'—are exchanged for pattern and inevitability.

Of course the earthquake struck when and where it did, and to the naked eye of course the pattern of bad luck would seem random, unless of course you knew about the old city maps indicating ancient subterranean waterways, and of course I would find myself born into a world of silence because that is precisely what the shamed bestows upon the progeny—a wilful forgetting.

The bastard civilisation rises on its own conceit as ‘self-made'. It is as singular as a plant in the desert—luminously present and ducking all questions as to how it came to be there, apparently self-seeding and self-sustaining because there is no other clue to what sprouted it.

At 88 Eden Street, the bastard is delivered to a round of new people. There is a new Mum. There is a new Mr Nash. This one is called Mr Fairley. There is a new house, a new bedroom. The windows hold a different aspect.

She is into her fifth year and already there is a growing sense of a life lived and discarded.

The concrete has still to be laid, and when the nor-wester blows, dust rises off the streets. The world is delicate, light. Look how easily it shifts from place to place.

The streets off the Parade are named after rivers—the Derwent, Clyde, Thames, Liffey, Humber. Echoes of faraway places. Echoes of wishfulness.

Memory, in its unbidden way, will bring back the life she knew under Nash's roof—of voices rising up the stairs at Manley Terrace, the sound of someone flung against the wall, Maud's cries and protests. Perhaps a rogue thought—cabbage trees, a craving for something sweet, say ice cream—then the wind in the eaves scurrying the thought, and in the blank space she hears her own name hurled against the ceiling. And she wonders how it is that a name can sound so soiled and beaten about. The guarded inquiries of the neighbours down at the front door. The more forthright voice of the constable. There was that period at Maungahuia in the Wairarapa, where the wind whistled out of sinkholes in the hills and washing flew off the line, and there was the smell of freshly made earth. Perhaps she was just old enough to appreciate that her mother was not of that world.

Of course there are no documents that record the moment of the separation of the mother and her child.

But when the quake struck on 22 February 2011 the city's inhabitants scrutinised themselves, directly, moment by moment. Time was stopped and put up on Facebook and YouTube. The ground shook, and it was recorded by closed circuit cameras, by mobiles switched to camera and whirled about in shaken hands, as well by cooler minds who calmly held up their phones to record the moment of destruction.

There is no footage of the events when my mother's world dramatically changed, or a record of what Maud said to her that last morning. Perhaps it crossed Maud's mind that this was the last time that she and her daughter would wake up under the same roof. This is the last time she will wash her child's face and lace up her boots, or sit her up to the table with a spoon.

I remember taking the dog in its aged, blind state to the vet to be put down. It lay on the vet's table, its tail flat and lifeless, one trusting eye cocked up at me, its muzzle on its paws. And there is another moment too—on the day my mother died. She is sitting in an armchair at home, frail, and every now and then doubling over with stomach pain, but rallying to smile politely up at the woman from the hospice. And just on the edge of my own hearing, so perhaps Mum didn't hear, the woman from the hospice says, ‘I think we'll give her another day.' Mum looked interested, as ever wishing to be polite. As it happened she had another ‘event' that afternoon. By evening she was hooked up to the morphine drip from which, I discovered, there is no return. Her child-like look of trust haunts me, as does the dog's, and so, now, the terrible feeling of betrayal Maud must have felt as she put out her daughter's breakfast, and later perhaps brushed her hair, and wet a fingertip to remove a crumb from her cheek is easily imagined.

People in Christchurch spoke of the plain everyday ordinariness that led up to the 22 February earthquake. Then, hours and days and months after the earth shook apart, the mind insisted on going back to when everything held together looking for a sign.

Perhaps a number of little warnings that passed my mother by at the time were later remembered.

Perhaps Maud packed a small suitcase with her things. So it is reasonable for my mother to think she is going somewhere. And then, in small bites, the new circumstances come clear. She is going somewhere. She is going to the Fairleys. And, there they are, standing at the door, smiling down from their adult heights. One tall, the other a pumpkin. The hall is strange too—a different grade of light and air from what she is used to. She follows Maud inside, perhaps to a room where she is invited to play. Time passes. She wonders where everyone is. She returns to the hall. Voices are coming from one of the rooms. She will go there. She pushes on the door, the Fairleys look up, and slowly smile. Her mother has gone.