A History of Silence (8 page)

After the bins, I jump on my bike and track the seagulls on their route inland to the Wingate Tip where I climb over mountains of filth. The mud is thick, unhealthily rich. The smell of disinfectant catches in the throat.

None of this is visible from the street where Dad and I looked up at the yellow flowered hillside. Somehow one place is able to keep itself a secret from the other.

Machinery grinds away compressing everything, pushing the filth further and deeper into the landscape. It is hard to believe that the gorse could prosper, that a single flower could bloom out of this foul mulch.

There are paintings—at this time unknown, of course; but also I never suspected such a past to exist—of magnificent podocarp forest rising from the place of the tip, pushing over folds and bumps in the landscape and filling the valley floor. And, besides, I had never heard of the painter, or any painter for that matter, by the name of Samuel Charles Brees, who had once stood his easel where I stand at the tip looking down at the hideous mouthy grin of some unidentifiable animal gazing up out of layers of old newsprint and men's magazines.

At 20 Stellin Street little is known about anything except spot welding, knitting, rugby, and the right time to plant cabbages and put in the tomatoes. The residue of family lore is light. Some of it sticks. But it is like learning an isolated fact, such as Moscow being the capital of Russia. One grandfather was from Pembroke Dock. Mum's real father was a farmer, but we never hear his name spoken. Dad's mother died of hydatids. Mum's mother, Maud, ‘the dreadful old bag'—I have absorbed that much—made a choice between her man, sometimes described as a leather merchant and a gardener, and her four-year-old daughter and gave Mum away. Some of it is hearsay, barely information, but a few words escape with a wipe of the mouth, something that wasn't meant to be said, and then a wave washes along the beach removing all trace of the footprints that I have been trying to wriggle my toes into.

At school when asked where I am from, I reply with the name of my street and the number on the letterbox. The teacher smiles. She adores me to pieces. I am so clever. Then I hear someone snigger, and I realise that I have given the wrong answer.

Something else was meant by the question. But thanks to Maud and the mysterious farmer and the drowned-at-sea man from Pembroke Dock and the one who died of hydatids, I have arrived into a potholed world.

But there are worlds within worlds, and the transition from one to the other can happen with remarkable ease.

From the worn carpet, we wander onto the ancient beach terraces that step down to the shoreline. A short car trip is required, but both places have the same meander and feeling of old occupancy and wear and tear.

Each beach terrace represents a separate upheaval. Years, millennia, crumble inside our shoes as we stumble and slide our way down to the water's edge.

Dad, with his fringe of bald man's hair, fumbles with his tobacco in the wind. Alone on the shingle he looks like the wind-blown stuff that catches on the thorny branches of shrubs that self-seed above the high-tide line, beneath the scooped-out eroded hillside that spooks my mother whenever she has to walk by it. They argue about this, of course. What is there to be afraid of? Dad only has to say that for her eyes to lift up to the overhanging cliff and for me to see that we will be engulfed by the hillside if we linger. He laughs and flicks his butt, then stops right at the most dangerous place to look back in the direction of the car. He's pretending he's forgotten something. Flaunting his fearlessness, while making fun of my mother's anxiety. It is hard to know which lesson to draw here—that the world is about to end, or that nothing will happen.

On the beach, he looks more alone than ever. He has spent fifteen years stuck inside train funnels with a welding torch, another twenty years getting up at the crack of dawn to walk to the Wormald factory in Naenae where he makes fire engines.

He is in his early fifties, perhaps five years younger than I am now, but already dog-tired. He has worked at physically demanding jobs since the age of twelve.

At the beach we move along the tide line like a family of mastodons, our heads bent and eyes lowered for whatever we can scavenge. We like things that are wholly themselves, and which can be taken without them losing value. Bits of pumice end up in the bathtub by the nail brush. The fish crate is turned into a useful weed bin. Cat's eyes by the tens of thousands are carried back in coal sacks and spread over the shingle drive.

On the way home we stop at the dairy and, digging in his pocket for his wallet, Dad retrieves rolls of fishing line which he dumps on the glass counter along with spare coins and old lottery tickets.

After a fruitless search of his pockets for his tobacco at a neighbour's house party he is briefly confused by the fishing line in his hand. Meanwhile, the woman with a tray of celery and cheese stands firm at the edge of the carpet, a boundary that I have been made aware of in a furious whisper—whatever I do, I must not stray across it with food in my hand.

The carpet is new, but the far bigger thing at stake is embarrassment—specifically, my mother's. She would rather avoid speaking to people than risk feeling embarrassed or inadequate. She would rather stay in the house than go out and risk judgment in the eyes of others. Sometimes I wonder why that is.

Down on the beach, she is completely at home and unguarded. I watch her pick her way through the kelp and driftwood and wonder if it is just parties she doesn't go in for—whatever the reason is. But I was right the first time. She is afraid—afraid of what others might think of her, and it never once occurs to me that this fear of hers has a history.

We are castaways at the beach, but also in the car. We drive for hours in order to live in a tent, in a place where there are others just like us living in tents, shitting in the same toilet, standing under the same shower heads.

As I am still young enough to go into the women's with Mum, at an early hour I am pulled from my warm sleeping bag and set down in the wet grass outside the tent.

Where are we? I have no idea. The sky, the trees and the banks of grass are familiar and at the same time different, but different in such slight ways from those at home that I am not sufficiently interested to find out.

Indifference is the normal response to a campground where history is measured in rectangular outlines of dried trampled earth and perhaps a tent peg left behind, a sniff of domesticity clinging to the dead grass.

From out of the shadows the women appear—from various parts of the camp, around corners, from under trees, stumbling along in the dark in bare feet. In daylight they would cry out at sharp stones biting their feet, but at this hour, surrounded by the sleep of hundreds, their bodies go into a giant wince, and they resume their hobble towards the shower block. Mum and I toddle after them.

There's a light sitting inside a cage of steel mesh—that's interesting, perhaps the most interesting thing that I have seen in a day and a half. I stand there looking up at it, and then my wrist is grabbed and I am pulled inside the shed to join a long line among many lines.

A toilet flushes, and immediately all talk stops and our line takes a step closer. A young woman lifts a man's checked shirt over her head. I am amazed to see that she is naked. And because I look longer and harder than I did at the light inside the wire mesh I am aware of Mum's interest switching to me. I feel her hand land on top of my head and turn it like something left on the table to face the wrong way.

Older women such as my mother appear locked within bodies stretched by pregnancy and scarred by operations, but others look like they were pegged up wet overnight and have just been taken down.

Under the showers they run a measuring glance over one another's bodies and stand with upturned faces as jets of water blast the night off them. Soon they emerge from the ablution block with pink glowing skins, in less of a hurry now, and speaking in noticeably louder voices.

From one municipal camp to the next we work our way across the North Island. There is always a ngaio pushing against the sides of the tent and making scary shadows with its branches, and I seem forever to be standing in lines. I long for the moment we will pack up the car and head for home. I miss the street, the backyard, the slab of concrete and the brick side of the house where for hours I am content to throw a tennis ball and catch it within inches of the leaping dog and its snapping jaws. I miss the letterbox and the smell of the clipped hedge. I long for those certainties—even the sky which has its own particularity, shaped by the long gorsy hills that swallow and blow out tremendous gusts of wind. The settled air of elsewhere simply feels wrong, and when the moment comes to pull up pegs I am never so keen to help.

There are other journeys, of greater mystery. Blackbirds on powerlines and trees twitch through the windows of the car. Where are we going? I have not been told, but I recognise something in my mother—her silence and resolute manner, tempered by something that I don't have the words for but years later will recognise as a helpless compulsion.

I can see all this from the back seat where I have been placed like a bag of groceries, expected to shut up and not say a word.

Dad is at work, making fire engines. He would be amazed to know that we are in the heart of Wellington in that rarely visited city, where ‘officially' I have been only a few times, excluding these other occasions.

When we get
there
, we park. There is no suggestion that we should get out of the car.

From my place on the back seat I quietly shift to get the line of my mother's sight so I can see what she sees—a row of letterboxes, hedges, fences. I know the routine. We will sit in silence, unaware of ourselves or our strange purpose until a pedestrian walking by looks in the car window and Mum, hounded by the stranger's curiosity, makes a show of digging in her handbag for her face mirror.

I could ask what we are doing, but I don't. The question will not be welcome. The first time we sat there I could feel it in my bones. And, in any case, were I in any doubt, later, on the way home she says in a calculatedly casual voice that there is no reason for me to mention this little excursion to Dad.