A History of Silence (7 page)

Apparently all three sisters are beauties. I wouldn't have thought or known it. But boyfriends call endlessly on the telephone or surprise at the door. Whenever they do Dad sinks into his rows of cabbages at the back of the house. One sister given to panic hides under her bed whenever a certain guy shows up at the door. Then my mother will yell out to Dad to come inside the house and fish this one out. I have seen him do it. He has to get down on all fours and poke around with the broomstick. The same broomstick which he broke over my brother's back one night after a mealtime turned bad. Someone had said something.

And then, one by one, they leave. Pat, followed by Barbara, who will live in Rome and work as a typist for an American novelist, until there is just me and Lorraine at home.

Postcards from Ceylon and exotically named places arrive in the letterbox. I remember one from Alexandria, kids on it about my age in bare feet and pyjamas. The road looks dusty. Hardly a drop of concrete in sight. My father picks up the postcard in his thick armour-plated hands, dropping ash over it as he studies the picture, and shakes his head. I know what he is thinking. The poor little bastards without shoes, dressed in pyjamas.

Still, there are the regular and dependable sights. The letterbox. The steady hedge. And the strange sight of the mentally retarded boy from a house around the corner in Taita Drive eating our back fence until it was not so strange any more, but routine, along with the clouds and the trees and the crapping dogs.

Then one day there is an irregularity. The ‘retard' has come to the front door. I can see his shadow through the glass at the end of the hall. This is completely and wildly out of the ordinary. I've only ever seen him eating the back fence and now, worryingly, he is at the front door. I hide behind the door at the top end of the hall and listen to Mum telling him in a firm voice to bugger off back home to his place. ‘Go on. Off you go.' She never says that when he eats the fence, which we regard as normal, rather than this traumatic event of his turning up at the front door like this.

God knows, I love the bricks that our house is made of. They are the most beautiful pattern, and warm like a dog's coat in summer, a perfect companion for me and my ball, and dependable. When the wind blows, the house is immovable. Bricks will stand by you.
Go on, blow, you bugger
. It is my father talking back at the windows. The story of the three little pigs still lies ahead of me, and when eventually I hear it, perched on a school mat, Dad's excited face will rush into my thoughts, startling me, and I will unwind myself from the floor amazed at this collision of worlds, and the teacher will twist around on her chair with the questioning look she usually saves for one of the kids who is always pissing himself.

The biggest and most influential factor in this life that I have arrived into is the Ministry of Works. I don't know that at the time, diverted as I am by the warmth of the footpaths and roads, which for all I know were here one thousand years ago. The Ministry of Works is in charge of dispensing concrete. There is another mad fool in Taita Drive—a shell-shocked ejaculator, who, like the redback spider, we have been warned to keep clear of. The Ministry of Works is more discriminatory about its flow than the shell-shocked man, who I learn is someone ‘not in charge of his memory'. I've heard him mutter something which an older kid, who lives three houses down and who seems to know everything, says is Italian for an obscenity. You never know what the shell-shocked man will spray out next. Not so with the Ministry of Works. It pours concrete with endless and astonishing capacity, and the shape of the world gradually accrues over stamped down bracken and clay.

The MOW deity is honoured in a number of ways. Stellin Street, for example, is named after a city councillor. The primary school I attend is named after a minister of works, as is the street that winds around the school, lined with little state houses that scream out for a visitor.

The lack of occupancy, the constancy of the wind, the fabulous achievements of the Ministry of Works, and silence—all form the conditions of our daily existence.

It will be years before I hear the name of Ernst Plischke. And yet his fingerprints are all over my world. Plischke, an eminent Viennese architect who spent the war years employed by the Ministry of Housing, greatly influenced our interior space. He and his Jewish wife had come to the place on the planet furthest removed from upheaval in Europe and wasted no time in telling us what we had failed to see and appreciate for ourselves. Namely, we were awash in year-round light, so why not let that light inside our houses? Like a lot of good ideas it was immediately obvious. Our houses were shifted around to face north and the windows were enlarged to let the world into our lives. For the first time it was possible to stand at the threshold of our interior and exterior existence, to occupy two places at the same time. Mum could peel the spuds and look out the window to make sure I hadn't hung myself on the rope tied to the oak on the front lawn.

Eventually I get to leave the rubbish bins behind and wander up to the dairy at the top end of the street. A year or two later, when I am seven or eight, another graduation, and I am released further afield, to the Naenae Olympic Pool with my togs and towel tucked under my arm. I follow the railway tracks up Oxford Terrace and near the Naenae shopping centre duck down a piss-stinking subway beneath the tracks and rise to Plischke's vision based on the European square, which he had designed to encourage ‘accidental encounter'.

Nowadays a Cash Converters occupies the shop where Dad bought me my first bike (second-hand, but newly painted). The picture theatre is now a medical centre and proudly displays a mural of the new community—faces from Ethiopia and Polynesia and Asia never seen or heard of in 1960, and tacked on the end is Plischke's own benign face. In the early 1960s he returned to Europe, disappointed with his ideas being watered down by interfering bureaucrats, disappointed by the lack of scale.

The space has since become even smaller, turned meaner. Graffiti has made its inevitable weary way here. The tower clock that had once seemed so majestic wants badly for majesty. A slap of white paint covers the building blocks. It does the job, which is all the Ministry of Works ever set out to do, and at the same time it infantilises and diminishes anyone older than nine.

The streets around the square are a spaghetti of switchbacks, right angles, gentle curves that keep on curving until a full circle is magically achieved, and dead ends that turn out not to be dead, unless you happen to be in a car. On foot, as nearly everyone was when these streets were designed, thoroughfares between the houses lead the way out. You may not know exactly where you are but once you understand that every street turns into another then you are never lost. You are simply on your way to somewhere. You may feel lost, but the feeling is temporary. The key is not to stop. Soon, everything will become clear.

The process of concreting has a dual purpose. As it disperses, the concrete emits through secondary and unidentifiable means a tremendous silence. And with that silence comes the kind of calm that only a forested valley left alone for thousands of years knows. This silence is deceptive, fraudulent. The concrete cannot keep everything down and sealed. Certain things leak out. Secrets. Clues pointing to small botanical tragedies. The magnolia with its rust-spotted flowers. The hedge that is so bright and green and alert to your thoughts, but then smells of decay in late summer.

It is a very quiet place that I have arrived at. Very quiet, and very still. The geraniums on the windowsill make you want to smile and forgive the quiet. Although when the silence cannot bear itself any longer the wind gets up. The leaves flutter in the air and drop into a new place. The trees do not normally rustle; the eaves under the tiled roof do not ordinarily whistle. But like a car starting up in the middle of the night, these disruptions pass and everything settles back into its astonishing silence.

I have seen trout lie still into the current. In the same way the world passes over me. Vast amounts of sky balloon by me, and this enormous silence.

Now and then a car passes and leaves a faint scent of petrol in the air. Perhaps next time the driver will wave.

Of the other signs of things having passed this way there is the worn carpet in the hall that my knees know well and the draining sound and smell of old dishwater. There are the usual companionable noises: the cardiac thump of the washing machine, the bossy and maniacal telephone that makes everyone jump. Since it is never for me I remain by the washing machine porthole watching a pair of circling pyjama bottoms. A large broad-shouldered fish floats by the window. It is the slipper I was wearing when I accidentally stepped on some dog shit.

At a neighbour's house I smell a sort of green that I cannot locate. It smells of shade and refinement. If I close my eyes and try hard I can just about retrieve it—or the sense of it, the surprise of it. Describing it is harder. I want to use the word ‘tartan', but I am being lazy, and suspect I am attempting to introduce a known thing rather than the original experience which, as I say, alerted me to a trace of something that wasn't obviously present in the room. This green smelt of privilege. A Wolseley green. Deer. An antlered room. The shade I have mentioned. There was green up and down the street—on the front lawns, in the hedges and trees and even in the passing cars, and occasionally in a poor choice of clothing. But the trees especially—a gummy green that later I pick off my fingers. The green at our neighbours smelt both faraway and familiar. Or do I mean familiarly faraway? Whenever I visited the neighbours I smelt it, but only in their sitting room which was a ‘glen' or a ‘glade'. I'd seen both words on the labels of things. A bottle, and something else, I forget what, but something quite unexpected. There was nothing like that particular green smell elsewhere in our lives. Later, on my way home from the Naenae Olympic Pool, as the heat went out of the day, I would catch the tarry grey smell released by the footpaths, and at some point I absorbed the idea that I had learnt to smell time.

Of the other smells of note: the cigarette-ash smell of my father passing in the hall or having sat in
that
chair, in
that
place and, above all, the smell of roasted meat—the air inside the kitchen bakes and sweats with it.

There are kitchen devices committed to the erasure of memory, such as the mincer, a beautiful and elaborate device. Pulling it apart and cleaning it of untraceable bits of animal and then sticking it back together is the highlight of doing the dishes. It clips onto the edge of the bench and grinds up the leftovers of animals that Mum turns into rissoles, very nice with a splash of tomato sauce. The world is constantly devolving and changing, and memory has to hurry to keep abreast. In the case of my parents, memory has long since given up the chase.

When I ask Dad what used to cover the hillsides before the gorse I wait for him to roll his smoke, and then light it and inhale. After the smoke funnels out of his mouth he decides he had better take a look at these hills, and briefly I have the feeling that I have just pointed out a feature of the landscape that wasn't there when he last looked, as though the hills popped up in the night. He gazes distantly, like he does at the beach. The hills. Yes. What used to cover them? He takes the smoke out of his mouth as if that might jog his memory. He looks all the harder. The hillside glows with triumphant yellowness, as though it wishes it could be even more yellow. Dad looks thoughtful—some useful information is on its way—but it turns out that he is simply mimicking someone deep in thought, or someone else's attempt to fetch a memory or dislodge a piece of information, because it turns out he doesn't know either.

Then he notices the rubbish bins. His face springs to. Why haven't I taken them in?
For Christsakes
. That's my job. To put out the rubbish bins when the lid is crammed down on newspaper packages bulging with animal remains, and then bring them in again when they are pleasingly and reassuringly light and easily picked up by their jug ears and swung along one in each hand. And then the pleasant ringing sound as the lid drops cleanly and evenly over the lingering smells of putrescence and foulness.