‘Are you angry?’
She nods.
‘With what?’
And for the first time in weeks she actually speaks.
‘With all of you,’ she says.
‘Of course,’ I say quickly. ‘It’s entirely up to you. But you will need to eat.’
She reaches for the half-empty container of yoghurt that has sat untouched since breakfast on the arm of the dresser and with my help begins greedily shovelling spoonfuls into her mouth.
She died at home, and that morning the sun splashed against the end of her house, where she had spent so many hours sitting on the patio surrounded by plants, a cup of tea at her side, a pair of secateurs at her feet. The undertaker was over-dressed, and his ruffian offsider was also, grotesquely, in a black suit, but not quite as successfully turned out. Perhaps because of the rash on his face and the heavy black shoes, I thought of the boys’ home I used to walk past. I would stop to look across the fenced ground and wonder about those boys my own age wandering in that state savannah, unloved as any dog at the pound. As I looked at the offsider’s shoes and up to his face and back to his shoes, I wondered if he had come from there. Then I moved out of this slow tumble of thought because there were a number of practicalities to consider. Such as RIP. Mum’s face was ‘at rest’ and ‘in peace’, and I was happy for her. I would have liked to wake her, were it possible, to pass on just how peaceful she looked in death. She’d have liked to hear. She always said I was too critical.
The older undertaker spoke in that special register that they must be coached in or pick up from the movies. For the moment we the gaping living, Pat and I (Bob and Barbara were making their way back from the US and Fiji), stood around the body. Did we want Mum to be carried out of the house head first or feet first? Such a question had never been asked of me. Years ago, when Mum moved to the townhouse across the road from the beach, she’d said spiritedly that the next time she moved it would be on a stretcher. But had she said ‘head first’ or ‘feet first’? The undertaker and the apprentice directed their interest professionally to the harbour and the wheeling gulls. Head first, I decided. The undertaker breathed out, and I was assured that I had made the right decision. Then the apprentice breathed out as well, though a tad late, as I recall. The undertaker had another question. Would the deceased prefer to have her face covered or uncovered as she was carried down the outside steps? He said it was a matter of personal preference. Although, he said, the Greeks have a view on it. To which the apprentice nodded vaguely. Some prefer covered. Others uncovered. It’s up to the individual. Well, clearly it was too late to ask Mum, so I decided on her behalf—uncovered. She should have the sun on her face this one last time.
We picked up the ends of the stretcher and shuffled towards the back door and got her down the tricky bit of the steps. Now it was just a case of sliding her into the back of the van. I’m sure it was a van, not a hearse. Mum wouldn’t have cared. Or would she? It was too late for her to have an opinion.
I put down the stretcher and raised a hand in a silent command for the other two to halt for this last concession to my mother’s lifelong love of the sun. And, as I recall, the sun lined up with the neighbour’s roof and the rose heads nodding above the timber boundary fence and fell across her ancient face, which was jammed with deep lines but held only lightness—neither bitterness nor disappointment, though she had known both in her long life. She hated feeling cold. She’d made my sister Barbara promise to make sure she went to the morgue with the cashmere shawl. And as soon as Barbara flew home she drove to the morgue with Mum’s shawl. Then, as the doors closed, I did not think ‘goodbye’ in the usual sense or feel the sadness that comes with a parent moving out of one’s life—although I would feel that later. Then, it was the shock that she would never again feel the sun on her.
Christchurch. Early morning. Steam rises off the fetid Avon River. At the Bridge of Remembrance the imperial gaze of the two lions recalls the female mannequin heads I’d seen at either side of the spotter’s shed at Bottle Lake. Classical vanity on one side of town, the farcical at the other. And between these two poles the remaining bits of the city wavered.
Out at Bottle Lake, about ten kilometres north-east of the city, a large blowfly made me feel all the more aware of the ooze and smell of chemical heat, and the common end of all things.
The heavier rubble was being trucked out to Lyttelton Harbour and dumped to end up on the ocean floor near to, it occurred to me, the anchor marks of the first four ships that had carried the vision of Christchurch from one side of the world to the other.
A steady caravan of trucks dumping lighter material operated six days a week through the winter at Bottle Lake. A pile was growing by two thousand tonnes a day. Sunday afternoons, the trucks took a break, and that was the best time to visit. Without their grinding noise the silence was stunning and had physical presence, and something else that was uncomfortable to bear, like the weighty silence in a room where no one can quite bring themselves to remark on some stupendous event that has occurred.
A light easterly pushed the brush and sweep of the tide through a screen of pine trees. The trees didn’t look quite right either. It was as if they too were in on the secret, and I was reminded of those grassed areas in Europe covering up places of old atrocity. There always seemed to be a fringe of pine looking on, as this one at Bottle Lake did. Twenty years ago, the tree-planter kept turning up limbs of dolls which, I’m told, had fallen a century earlier from the careless hands of children perched on the city’s old shitter boxes which were cleared once a week by the nightwatchman and carted out to the Burwood refuse pits where Bottle Lake is now.
For several hours I wandered the edge of the mountain of debris as I used to comb the shoreline with Mum and Dad, picking up things, kicking the cruddier stuff away with the toe of my shoe. I never realised how much of a city is made up of junk.
Much of what I found had given up all allegiance to its original form, and it was near impossible to tell personal and public apart, so intertwined had they become. A golf club, a ski boot, a sales sheet with advice on how to deal with a negative response, a surprising number of old car manuals, books, lengths of timber, cracked and split, bricks, some masonry, sheet iron, and there a yellow bathtub duck—all found a collegial relationship that they never knew in their former lives. Shoes by the score but never a pair, hand-written ledgers in smart blue ink for amounts in the old currency that must have sat in an unopened drawer for the past fifty years.
And what I felt, above all, was a compression, that time itself had been compacted, and that the tip offered itself as a register of breaths taken, a whole century of breaths taken in rooms that no longer existed. By simply lifting the sodden layers you might find a breath taken a week ago, or in 1949, or 1892, when the first man in Christchurch to have read Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (an anagram of Nowhere) stopped breathing.
I came to a pile of books leaking out of the side of the debris. I opened one and found it was from the city library. I turned two or three others over with the toe of my boot as though touching a carcass. Then I saw a red cased hardback and bent down to retrieve from the muck a weathered copy of Pliny’s letters, and, as these things sometimes happen, the pages opened to where Pliny the Younger begins his letter with a description of the death of his uncle during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. One line seemed so pertinent to my own exploration that I wrote it down: ‘a letter is one thing, a history another, it is one thing to be writing to a friend, another to be writing to the public.’
The letter begins with a description of the afternoon before Pliny the Elder’s death.
Pliny, the historian, who is in his mid-fifties, has taken a stroll in the sun, enjoyed a light lunch, and retired to his study, when he is called outside to observe a strange cloud ‘bright with cinders’ rising in the sky. Curious and wanting to take a closer look, Pliny makes arrangements for a light vessel to be prepared. He is about to get on his way when word arrives from th
e wife of an old friend asking to be rescued from their villa at the foot of Vesuvius. The plan to observe a spectacle is now a rescue mission, and Pliny orders a larger vessel to be made ready for departure.
Pliny the Younger chooses to stay back, and so from this point on the written account relies on the word of others.
In another important shift, the volcanic display becomes merely a theatrical backdrop to the bigger and more urgent matter of Pliny the Elder’s death, thus combining public catastrophe with an opportunity for family myth-making.
There are a number of heroic stages. One is Pliny’s decision to remain on deck and brave the cinders and burning black rocks that shower down onto the galley. It is this casual courting of danger that the nephew is so keen to pass on. In addition to the burning sky, an out-going tide threatens to strand them before a favourable wind delivers the ship to Stabiae, the next heroic stage, where Pliny finds his friend Pomponianus in an agitated state. Pliny adopts a light spirit in an attempt to soothe his friend’s nerves. After a wash he sits down to a meal in a cheerful mood.
As the eruptions grow more intense, Pliny assures his friend that the people have already abandoned the villages that are in flames. He then retires, dropping into a ‘sonorous sleep’. During the night the entrance to his sleeping quarters fills with ash and falling stones. Before the escape route is entirely blocked by falling debris Pliny is woken by his slaves—seeing the danger he rallies the others. Pomponianus is too frightened to leave his bed, so the others, led by Pliny, debate whether to stay in the house, which is now rocking from side to side, or to flee for the open.
They decide on the latter and tie pillows to their heads for protection against ‘the storm of stones’. It is morning, but because of the freakishness of the eruption it is as dark as night.
So far the letter has concentrated on describing Pliny’s sanguine mood rather than his appearance or condition. There has been no indication of a man struggling with himself or with the fumes from the eruption, but when he arrives at the shore he lies down on sail cloth and asks for water. Two servants are required to help him to his feet, but unable to support himself Pliny the Elder immediately collapses and is abandoned.
Three days later, a rescue party returns to find the famous historian buried beneath a layer of pumice.
Pliny the Younger’s account is a letter addressed to the future. I thought of writing something in the same spirit. At the moment of retrieving the book from the tip face, I was beginning to rake over traces of a past, or at least to think of a past, however slight. I did not wish to disqualify a damp imprint left behind on a coloured tile at the Naenae Olympic Pool. Or a recitation of the names of all the dogs run over by cars arriving suddenly and catastrophically some time in the early 1960s on the road outside the house at 20 Stellin Street. But in thinking about these things I realised I knew the lineage of my dogs better than my own. The chances dogs took to uphold their own dignity in a world ruled by cars would introduce me to grieving. My job raking up the leaves spoke of another passing, as did the cool draught around my ears after a hair cut. But hair will grow back, and the leaves will go up in a puff of smoke in the incinerator, and the grass will spring back in the dead patches where the leaves have lain too long, and one dog will replace another, and each dog name will be more exotic than the last as if an echo of a faraway place will save it.
Such events are not compatible with the act of remembering. And in the concrete domain of this world nearly all the echoes I hear are of my own making.
The Australasian Post is a highlight of my visit to the barber. Especially the illustration of the pub in the outback, which is the first thing I turn to. Look at all those corks dangling from the brim of the swaggie’s hat. I can see them clearly but not once do I connect them with the flies. I have to be told. In fact, as I recall, there were no flies until I was told about the job that the corks do. After that I saw flies everywhere in the picture. Just as no one ever suggested, and certainly I never dreamt as much, that beneath these foundations of hair oil and chit chat had once stood Wi Tako’s house Te Mako. Or that fingers of estuarial waterways were once filled with eel traps. Wi Tako was an ally of the local chief Te Puni, whose people had helped the settlers ashore at Petone Beach. It never occurred to me that the kids I played with at school were descendants of a scene reconstructed in a painting. Emigrant ships are moored out from the beach. The castaways have made landfall at last, and local Maori are carrying them and their things to shore. I just thought everyone had come down in the last rain.
The concrete has done a grand job of covering everything up, yet the history is still there if you know what to connect to its smell.
Between sneaking up on cars parked on the river shingle we slip away to a piece of land that has no equivalent elsewhere in our lives. The smell is damp and boggy. Our ‘pre-historic’ scene is an old botanical battleground which the willows won, then lost. Huge trunks have been cast out of the ground to lie every which way. Some of the unearthed ones continue to grow, as though they have not been told of their fate or have chosen to carry on in spite of it, like a chicken that continues to run on because it always has, despite the fact that its stunned head lies on the chopping block.
What we can smell is the swamp our forebears turned the forest into by cutting down the trees. In heavy rains the river flooded and proceeded to cart banks of soil out to the river mouth, and beyond, so that by the time I have come along the original sea floor lies beneath two metres of mud. The smell of the willow is the stench of an old mistake. Of course we don’t know that. And even the exhilarating sight that spring of the golf course in flood, turned into a disc of silvery water and shimmering with the shadows of windbreaks and cypress trees, fails to alert me to the rash actions of the past. The willows were planted as a rearguard action to hold the world together. And the timbers sticking out of the riverbank are the remains of groynes built by settlers in an attempt to correct their mistake.
In May 2011, three months after the February earthquake, and one month before the follow-up shake in June that deflated hopes of the city’s quick rebuild, I went searching for the cinders of my past. I entertained a hope that, like the flies in the Australasian Post, all I had to do was identify the unacknowledged events of the past and history would flare into visibility.
I thought I would begin with a trip to Pembroke Dock in Wales, to visit the birthplace of my father’s father, ‘the man who drowned at sea’.
THREE
I REMEMBER THE smell—that whiff of familiarity you get when slipping on an old shirt. In this case it was the smell of old takeaways, which I always associate with England. I barely remember the face. But I remember his eyes. They were dull, mackerel. A chirpy mouth which for some reason made me think of the Daily Mail. Face like a schoolboy’s. I imagine he was pushing seventy. A former jockey, perhaps, unless he was sitting down. I couldn’t properly tell because the cashier’s window separated us and I had to stoop to deliver my request through a small mouse hole in the bottom of the partition. His mackerel eyes slowly found me. ‘Pembroke Dock,’ he said. ‘You’re going to a place that used to be a place.’
I wished for something equally witty to say back. There was a pause from the other side of the grill, as if he, too, expected it. But instead of words came a jumble of images. I saw again the face of the young TV reporter and the lurch of the camera so that the wall of a building turned into a longer view of road, which, in the railway station on the other side of the world, threw me off balance, and when I looked down I could see the whiskered mouth of the cashier through the hole in the corner of the grill. But I had nothing to give back, nothing useful to say.
On the train, I was hostage to a solitary voice holding court at my end of the carriage. An overweight young man stood in the aisle hovering over his mates: one a short wiry figure who sat ramrod upright like a corporal silently absorbing a sergeant’s hectoring, the other a tall lugubrious fellow who kept escaping to the view in the window.
Golf courses were mentioned, too many pubs to remember.
Surely there are better things to recall, but all this time later after the names of the courses and pubs have melted away, along with the sullen victimised expressions of his prospective golfing mates, pitifully, it is the embarrassing pride I felt at hearing ‘New Zealand’ come up in the monologue. It came as the fat man mentioned the earnings of Tiger Woods’ caddy, and I thought, what a strange connection to make with a country that had just suffered a major earthquake.
Surely this event was the one on everyone’s mind? But no, it was not. What was on the mind of the little girl in front of me was the unopened bag of crisps in her mother’s hands. What preoccupied the mates of the golf bore was how they might dodge the proposed holiday.
I looked out the window—paddocks, trees, the backs of water-stained houses. Down at my feet was another England. A newspaper with the print of someone’s heel. Rooney’s grimace as he turns from the goal mouth with his fist held high. I opened a book, but I couldn’t make sense of the words. I found myself drifting back to a different world. I saw the night-lit streets of Christchurch and rescue workers in bright-coloured vests. I gazed out at the world sliding by the carriage window. I was on my way to a place that used to be a place. I looked out the window, and for a moment or two it was possible to identify a tree before it swept by, and then my thoughts returned to the landscape of upheaval.