A History of Silence

by Lloyd Jones

  It astonishes me that none of my siblings, myself included, ever asked the kind of questions that would open up our parents’ past. But nothing much was offered to us.

  In a beguiling way, however, nothing was actually something. It was an absence that encouraged an over-respect for our present circumstances and what we made of them. To remember went against the grain of progress, an attitude more commonly associated with pioneering forebears who juggled impulses to destroy with a need to create.

  Christchurch sat on similar foundations. It too had grown out of a deliberate forgetting of what it sat on. Swamp. Peat. Trapped water. River gravels. And before the experts emerged to remind everyone that the top of the spire on the Anglican cathedral in the square had fallen three times to previous earthquakes, the idea that the city squatted over an area with a lively seismic history had been conveniently forgotten.

  But water has a memory. This was one of the more devastating lessons from the earthquake, and was graphically illustrated on a YouTube clip. A man shovels a pile of more or less solid soil into a wheelbarrow. He picks up the handles and begins to wheel it over a bouncy cobbled drive, and within twenty seconds the grey sludge has turned to liquid.

  This is what happened to the ground bearing the foundations of the city’s buildings during the earthquake. In a few minutes a history of peat and swamp flooded a landscape thought to have drained its past.

  We grew up unable to see much beyond the birth of our parents. There was no big narrative to cling to, nor tales repeated from generation to generation until they acquire their own truth. The only story to come close was about my older brother Bob shooting himself in the foot after a night of rabbit shooting, an event repeatedly described as a tale of great mirth.

  There might have been more to tell if more had been shared, if questions had been asked, if information had been offered and passed along at the moment it lit up in memory. But the family trait was silence. Great wreaths of it were wound around our lives and stuffed in the windows and hallway of our parents’ house, and that is what was absorbed, that and, speaking for myself, a finely tuned ability to gauge the air in the room which at any moment might explode with the slam of a door. Someone had taken offence at something said—usually my mother. A seemingly innocent remark to her by someone commenting on the lousy weather had led her to say, ‘Well, don’t blame me. It’s not my fault.’ Now cups of tea would have to be ferried in and days of penance paid in silences that would not be broken until my mother’s emergence from the bedroom.

  It never occurred to me to ask my father if he remembered what his mother looked like, or if he had any memory at all of his father, or how many houses he lived in as a child. He did talk about his time on the goldfields, and I knew—without knowing how or why—that he was politically active in his thirties. And years later, when someone who had known him at the Wormald factory in Naenae said he was a ‘shit stirrer’, I was pleased to hear that, because it was not a side of him that I ever saw. I also heard that political meetings used to be held in our kitchen and that the Labour Party once asked Dad to stand in Hutt Central but he didn’t because he could barely string two words together. Why? Nobody asked or offered a reason. It was just Dad, like the hills covered with gorse that packed in around our lives, a bit rough but capable of bloom. His ability with language improved after Bob’s first wife, Ginny, a beautifully spoken part-Maori woman, gave Dad elocution lessons. By then, though, he was a man in his fifties.

  I cannot hear his voice any more. I can hear my mother’s, but only just, a whisper, her head held to one side, querying, suspicious that she is being got at. But Dad’s voice has gone. A photograph is left to represent him. His eyes are round and motionless, like caves hollowed out by the wind. I cannot hear him speak, partly because there is always a cigarette in his mouth.

  Often he is standing at the kitchen sink, staring out at the street. Mood and language moving about in their separate states. And this scene is often succeeded by another memory of him, in a bar in Kings Cross, Sydney. I am twelve or thirteen; we are on our way to Surfers, but first there is this night at the Cross to get through. And, more pressingly, there is this large thick-set American buttonholing Mum and Dad with his clean-shaven smell, his troubled eyes, and his desperation to win over my father. ‘Do you understand how many troops we have over there in Nam?’ His voice rising and tearing thin at the stupendous thing that he is about to share. ‘Five hundred thousand.’ My mother responds in her usual way, with disapproval, not at the information, but the intrusion, at the unwanted company. It isn’t political engagement she fears, but engagement full stop. And, as well, there is the strong whisky breath of the man. She draws in her lips and looks away to lose herself in the smoke. A heavy man tucked inside a black suit smiled and sweated over a piano. The American leant forward to get my father’s attention. ‘Five hundred thousand men.’ He sounded amazed by his own news.

  Foundations come in all forms—texture, language, heritage, entitlement. Some things are buffed to be remembered while other things fall away. One world of upheaval gradually gave way to another. I saw not so much the things that remained standing but the gaps and fissures. Like the boy in the photograph, I found myself concentrating on a portal of memory that offered, at different moments, some incidents with startling detail and others that had been cast off but lingered defiantly, as if waiting to be hauled up from the abyss where all lost things lie.

  One thing became clear. The sequencing employed by the basilica stonemasons was not available to me. Not all the bits and pieces had been accounted for. Nonetheless a picture began to emerge of the world as I had found it, as it does for an immigrant setting his eyes on the distant heads for the first time, before he sails through and ticks them off as known.

  TWO

  THE ROAD OUTSIDE the house at 20 Stellin Street, Lower Hutt, was my first horizon. The rubbish bins at the end of the drive were the heads I routinely stumbled out to each day in search of life.

  Another new arrival—a kid of my own pre-school age—comes tottering towards me. He has broken out of the house across the road. A huge woman appears at the end of his drive. An enormous woman, her hair on fire, eyes big and wide. As soon she shouts the kid starts running on his short chubby legs. He is easily overtaken and carried back across the road. It’ll be another year before he shows his face again.

  At first my eye is drawn to those things that like me are a bit dumb, perhaps a bit vulnerable and witless, such as the dogs that lie on the road. Grudgingly they get up to let a car pass, then walk in a tight little circle before lying down again. For the moment the road marks the boundary of the known world.

  I find myself waiting—endlessly—for something to happen.

  Then I hear it. A screeching of brakes, followed by a terrible wailing. I wait—fighting back the mounting dread. Then I get out of bed, run down the hall and open the door in time to see a man carefully lift a sack over the hedge.

  The last dog was run over as well, and its predecessor. But I know the solution. We will quickly buy a new dog, and give it the old dog’s kennel and flea-ridden blanket and carry on as we were.

  The first dog my parents bought for me was a little terrier the size of a handbag. I put it down my shirt and popped its head out over the top button so it could see the world approach. It was so excited, its little body shook and I felt the warm dribble of its piddle. It licked my face, it was so grateful to me for letting it piss over my belly.

  One by one, my dogs are run over. There’s hardly any traffic, and that is the problem. The event of a car isn’t taken seriously, so the stupid tail-wagging fools stand up and glare at the approaching grille. In the World of the Dog the road belongs to them, a principle that they understand but nobody else does.

  In 1960, I am aged five. It is a long wait until a car passes by. So from time to time I think to check on the deteriorating condition of the hedgehog. It was run over a few days earlier. There was more of it then. A black gummed thi
ng. After a day it was half the size it had been. It was as though the air had gone out of it. Then it flattened out. Soon most of it was gone, licked up by tyres. The smell went too. There was a day of rain, and when I looked again the hedgehog was a light stain on the road.

  Since then I don’t like to look at it. In fact, I make a point not to look. At some stage in its slow evisceration I have become churlish. The state of the hedgehog has provoked in me feelings of disgust. So, if I don’t look, it will be as if it isn’t there. And, as I’d rather not feel the way I do when I look, then I won’t.

  In the course of making such choices I am slowly making me. But what are those choices based on? I could have found a stick and, while the hedgehog was still a moveable spiky ball, shifted the carcass into the gutter. But I didn’t. I chose to look the other way, and that decision was perfectly in keeping with the climate of forgetting that will slowly infiltrate me.

  In the long grass beneath the washing line I find an old boxing-glove. God knows how it got there. I look up at the sky. The leather’s as hard as a sheep’s turd at the end of summer. I have to push to get my hand inside, and I can feel it resisting me. Its last memory is of Bob’s hand which is what it has moulded itself to, but in the end I win it over with my persistence, and then after I’ve done up the laces it begins to adjust until it feels as though it has only ever known my hand. The glove has a history—a violent, merciless one. I don’t care about that. I’m just chuffed that it fits my hand. There is that initial awkwardness, but it soon passes. And I am left with the surprising and delightful feeling that room has been made for me.

  My bedroom at 20 Stellin Street used to belong to my brother, but I cannot find a trace of him in there. He is seventeen years older than I am and has long left home. It’s also hard to believe in what I have been told about Grandad, the bookseller, dying in there. I remember the hedgehog, and its slow fade from the road, and stare harder at the walls, at the ancient pinholes made from tacks and at the light patches where things used to hang.

  When did I first become aware of my siblings? I suppose one day I looked up from my preoccupation with the carpet and there they were—legs, hurrying feet, their names, Pat, Bob, Barbara, Lorraine, and measurements dated and scored into the doorjamb of the washhouse.

  On my way to bed each night I look up at a photograph taken of Pat, Bob and Barbara in a city street. They are young, as I have never seen them, and dressed in clothes that look to be from another era. The youngest in the photograph, Barbara, doesn’t look much older than my five-year-old self. Lorraine has still to arrive in the world. I’m waiting in line behind her. What were they doing that day, and why was the photograph taken? There is another photo on the wall—of my brother peeping over two boxing gloves held like paws.

  He doesn’t live with us now. I have no idea where he lives. He shows up for the Sunday roast then drives off, and is gone for the week.

  But look at what he leaves around the telephone. Bits of notepaper with phone numbers scrawled on them and envelopes covered with sketches of boxers’ feet set to different angles of attack and defence. The sketches are stranger now in recollection because of their disembodied effect—the laced boots, the beginnings of shins, and then the legs peter out. But I came to expect them and would look for them when he left because they were as predictable as dogs crapping on the lawns up and down the street.

  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 t
ime 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.