A History of Silence

  With the critical unwavering eye of the self-portraitist I saw myself back on the couch at the shoe factory, staring at the television. I thought about Mum, although not so much the person or even her face, but the word itself. Spared of any helpful context it sort of cartwheeled across mental space I had cleared with the observation of the tree in the carriage window.

  I thought about Wales; one of the managers of the operation at Bottle Lake had a Welsh name, and when I asked him about it he confirmed that his father had played rugby for Wales. We had driven to a different part of the dump, to a grey desert where silt from the liquefaction had been trucked and abandoned in vast quantities, which created a landscape like no other—grey, sinister, casting deep shadows. We sat in the car surrounded by a vomited up subterranean past, and spoke of places in Wales neither one of us had been. I mentioned Pembroke Dock. I even used the word ‘grandfather’.

  ‘And, do you feel yourself to be Welsh?’

  Twice I have been asked that question. The first time was at a rugby match. I was startled to be asked. I was fourteen years old, and after the Welsh Dragons’ demolition of Wellington at Athletic Park, I slipped into the Welsh supporters’ end of the stand, drawn by their colourful scarves and singing. I must have given an answer that pleased because I arrived home draped in scarves and covered in pins and badges. Looking back, I think this is how each new Dalai Lama must feel. One moment he is playing with his toys and in the next looking up at a courtly circle of inquiring faces. It was the strangest thing, but it really was as though I had been found. For a moment I was Welsh.

  The second time I was asked, I replied, ‘I might feel Welsh if I knew what it feels to be Welsh.’ Silence. My interlocutor, a man older than myself, adjusted his face as if to accommodate some sudden movement of mine. But I hadn’t moved awkwardly or evasively. I had spoken confidently and, I thought, with some humour. I probably felt pleased with myself on account of this repartee, which is quite uncharacteristic of me, perhaps even a bit Welsh. But the man, who might have been a High Court judge or a fisherman in a previous life, continued to regard me in silence as though I was a curiosity, a piece in the museum, familiarly in other words but, at the same time, as someone who had fallen so far away from his source that he didn’t know as much for himself.

  And now I was on my way to Pembroke Dock. Beautiful coastline, the cashier back at the station told me, popular with hikers. But I wasn’t going there for either of those things. I was going there precisely because of what it used to be but no longer is.

  The gappy shadows that had hung about over Wiltshire all morning shifted, and Trowbridge where I’d spent the night was overtaken by fields which never really got started before turning into something else, which then lost heart in its own endeavour and reverted to fields. Now and then a canal boat appeared stuck in a narrow stretch of dark water, and in comparison I felt as though I was definitely on my way to somewhere.

  I was saving my eyes for Wales. So while there remained this bit of England to get through I shut them. I must have dozed off. When I woke it was raining. The golf bore and his mates had got off somewhere, and the little girl had won the war over the bag of crisps. We were stopped at a station. I sat up and looked out. I was in Newport, Wales.

  Then we were going again. Wales moved by in the window. Old sky, old stone walls. Here, the rubble held together and the old was allowed to stagger on. Houses the colour of pumice tilted down the hill towards the railway tracks. Sheep. Sky. Grass. Great swathes of unoccupied space but, like the telltale bare patches of the campgrounds we used to pitch our tent on, there were signs of older occupation, of a landscape shaped and moulded, then abandoned and allowed to spring back almost to what it once was. I thought it was much like home, which is why it required such an effort to look again, to look carefully at the three men standing in a paddock, one leaning on a shovel. The three heads inclined to one another in complete agreement with what one of them has just said.

  One man in particular caught my eye. I watched him slide by in the carriage window—a bit of shoulder heft, gentle face—and in a split-second my father has gone.

  He is as I last saw him, in 1975, in his coffin, an angry bluish face. Not really him at all, but some poorly rendered version—a face blinking out of quartz, always perplexed—which is the version that endures in place of the jolly bloke with a glass in hand. There he lay, a man I never saw ride a bike. A man without language. A face often red with unexpressed anger. The day has ended inconveniently. Not at all how he expected. Just that morning he’d kicked the wheels on a new car and taken the cap off the radiator to sniff the water. That afternoon he lay dead on the floor of the bathroom at home.

  The undertakers have been and gone, and taken Dad with them. Still, it is hard to believe that he won’t walk in the door any minute. So until he does we sit grouped around Mum in the living room eating fish and chips out of the paper on the floor.

  But of course Dad doesn’t return, and later that evening I drive back to my student flat in the city in the new silver Mitsubishi Galant that he had been so eager to show off. Out of breath with excitement, I heard. The last word he managed to get out was ‘Joyce’. But the footsteps running up the stairs were not those of my mother, but my brother’s girlfriend, Renee.

  Now I’m driving the Mitsi into town. It seems to drive well. Dad’s black onyx ring is on my finger. The undertakers had taken it off and given to Bob, who gave it to me, which was nice of him, thoughtful in a way I didn’t properly register at the time. In the back seat are a number of Dad’s socks and a suede jacket. I don’t know why Mum thought to give them to me or why it had had to happen just then. I didn’t like to say ‘no thanks’. The socks are a bit worn and a bit small but I will wear them through the winter until toe and heel have disintegrated. I will never wear the suede jacket, but I’ll haul it from one flat to another.

  A few days later I stood before his open wardrobe. A neat row of shirts seemed to be waiting for him to return, and I thought his death was probably a trick. It’s what his row of shirts believed, and so I found myself suspending judgment. He will step out from behind the shirts and surprise me. And his jokey smile will emerge as it used to from the incinerator smoke while I pawed the earth around the cabbages. Meanwhile, the wardrobe stirs with his smells—cigarette ash, Old Spice, his beloved shoe nugget.

  Fish is what I thought of—it must have been the rack of shirts—the herrings we used to catch and line up on the shingle like prizes, their silvery iridescence setting fast like paint, and how much I hated to rip the hook from their mouths.

  The year before Dad died I was nineteen and living at home, and Lorraine’s father-in-law, Gordon, rang the house. He asked if Dad was there. I told him no. ‘Well, what about Joyce?’ I said, ‘Mum isn’t here either.’ I heard him draw a breath. He said, ‘I’ve got some very bad news. Lorraine is dead.’

  What did I say to Gordon? I don’t remember. No one had ever said a thing of such enormous gravity to me. I’ve got some very bad news, he said. After I put the phone down, my only thought was to tell Dad. It was late on a Friday afternoon so I knew where he would be. I got into the car Bob had lent me and drove there. The shadows had spread across the bowling green. The members were upstairs in the clubhouse bar. As I climbed the outside wooden steps I could hear the happy voices. They seemed so distant and apart from the news I brought. I stood in the door and, without anyone pointing me out or whispering in his ear, my father turned from the bar, surprised to find me. I’d never climbed those steps before. Then he dropped his eyes—he was always a stickler for club rules—annoyed to find me in jeans and bare feet.

  I walked up to him and simply passed on what Gordon had said: ‘I’ve got some bad news. Lorraine is dead.’ It remains one of those moments I would like back. So that I might do it better. I wish I could have told him in a more careful manner. I wish I had done it so much better. But I was nineteen and all that goes with being that age. On my way to the bowling club I had
n’t bothered to think about how I would tell him. The important thing was to pass on the information, the terrible news. And I had done so with the same grace as passing on a fish-and-chips order.

  I can imagine the terrible shock he must have felt. I don’t remember what he said—I had hardly given him the chance to absorb or to feel anything. I was impatient to get him out of there. His face turned red. He became agitated, as though he couldn’t find the right thing to feel or do. His hand dived into his pocket for his keys and he quickly followed me out. He insisted I leave Bob’s car and drive with him. He drove, badly and erratically, graunching the gears. It was as though he had forgotten how to drive. As we took the bend at Windy Point the front wheel hit the kerb. He pulled the wheel back and crunched down a gear, then muscled it back with the same brutal disregard.

  Lorraine had been out the night before, partying. She woke early with a fit and choked on her vomit.

  Mum was a few hours’ drive away, visiting my sister Barbara in the Wairarapa. Dad must have telephoned her. I have no idea what shape Mum’s grief took. It wasn’t shown, at least not to me. She turned inwards, went down deep to that place where she’d been many times before whenever the world needed to be blocked out.

  We drove to Auckland in separate cars. Mum with Barbara. Dad, Barbara’s husband and I in the other car. At Lorraine’s house, Dad sat on a low window seat, covering his face and shaking his head. I heard him say he would gladly swap places with Lorraine. At the crematorium I sat beside him, and as the curtains closed around the coffin a sob more wretched than anything I had ever heard escaped him. Then came the dreadful mechanical sound of the coffin descending to the furnace, and Dad half stood beside me.

  A year later he was dead.

  Dad’s surviving siblings came to the funeral. That is, the ones who had remained in touch in the years after they left the orphanage. But where was Arthur? In Canada, someone said. In jail, someone else thought. Or maybe he was dead, as I tend to think, although no one said so. What about Laura? I didn’t hear her mentioned. Jack was there, hard to miss Jack, no teeth, gummy smile, his eyes glinting with mischief. Jack’s twin Gladys came. So did Percy. He was a taller version of Dad, amiable features, reserved. He wore a grey vest beneath his suit. I thought he looked like a man from another century. Or a solicitor. Although by reputation I only knew him as a drinker at the Kiwi pub in Auckland. While briefly attending Auckland University I would pass the Kiwi, and slow down and think, maybe I should go in and say hello to Uncle Percy. But the idea of an uncle, like a grandparent, seemed a bit far-fetched, and besides, what would we say to each other? Percy died a year after Dad, and his son Alan sprinkled his ashes over the Alexander Raceway. Years later I stopped outside a pub at Bulls to see Jack. I had driven up to Auckland to pick up Jo, my newly-wed, who had flown in from the States the day before. We were driving down through the island and I was eager to show the country off to her. At Bulls I had the idea that we should stop in and see Jack. Jo had never met anyone from my family.

  Dad’s funeral was the last I had seen of Jack. He had since retired and now spent most of his time at the pub where in return for clearing the glasses he drew free beers. I looked around for his face. I couldn’t see anyone who looked like Jack. I asked at the bar and an old shuffling fellow with his back turned was pointed out to me. I walked past the pool table and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned slowly—it was Jack, more dazed than I remembered. He looked up at me without any recognition. I had to mention Dad, and then his eyes lit up. He didn’t have his teeth in that day, and I couldn’t understand a word he said. He wasn’t drunk. But without teeth and after a few beers Jack was incomprehensible.

  Jo, however, held up her end brilliantly. She seemed to enter into actual conversation. Jack was beaming and my wife was smiling in her American way. I thought she was pretending to understand Jack, but later she told me that half the trick was to get onto the same wavelength, something she had remembered from studying Spanish.

  From a child’s point of view, Jack was easy to like. He was excitable, always on the brink of laughter. The world was best sampled with a beer at your elbow.

  In the general exhibition called ‘Jack’ I have a crinkled photograph taken at the Pyramids. In the foreground a group of cheerful faces peer out from under lemon squeezer hats. One of them is Jack—at least, I think it is. I can’t be absolutely sure. I have a sneaking suspicion I may have requisitioned the photo from someone else’s album and inserted Jack. But he did serve in Egypt, and on his return he was given a serviceman’s farm. I have a very distant memory as a child visiting a farm. It is a fiercely hot summer’s day, there are horses, a bare hilltop on a northwest lie. The farm, I recall, was a few hours’ drive north of Stellin Street. I wonder if it was Jack’s farm. One other scrap of memory insists Jack had a butcher shop, but it went broke. Too generous for his own good; always giving away meat. Gregarious in that way that Mum disapproved of in Dad. Jack insisted on stopping at every pub up the line after Dad’s funeral. A beer for every year of Dad’s life. I think that was the idea. But I wonder how much they knew of each other’s lives.

  On my way back into the old centre of town in Trowbridge I had found myself in a dingier world of cold shadows, cooking fat smells, and young sullen parents pushing prams ahead of themselves like figures from an accursed race. I wanted the sunshine back and so took a street in the direction of the green and golden Wiltshire countryside I’d seen from the window of my room.

  In a quiet street across the road from the old church, I stopped to look at a stuffed pike on display outside the window of a secondhand dealer. What actually caught my eye was the inscription: Caught by E. Laver 1909, wt 21lbs. The year—1909—rather than the pike, or the pike and then the year.

  I’ve always relied on 1909, the year of Dad’s birth, as a way of securing the past, which, at that particular moment, in the best possible spirit of discovery, happened to include the champion pike.

  I was aware of someone watching me from the sunny church wall. A moment later the shop proprietor pushed off the wall and ambled across the road to join me. I looked up with a nod, and he replied with the same. Setting his hands on his hips, he stared at the pike.

  For some time we stared at the pike together. I was on the brink of telling him that in the same year as my father was pulled from his mother’s womb the pike was dragged up from the deep ponds of Bowater, when the proprietor piped up. For years, he said, the pike had been on display in the tackle shop around the corner. Then, after the shop ran into financial difficulties, he had offered to take the pike off its hands.

  ‘It is a big pike,’ I said, and then wondered if I was right—by pike standards—since I knew nothing about them. The man said he had once seen an eighty-year-old pike. He held out his hands, and calculated the one on display to have been around thirty years old when caught. He imparted this information in an amiable manner, and then he said, ‘Four hundred quid.’

  The shock of the price sat between us. It jarred the air. Impossible not to notice, and perhaps the proprietor did, because a moment later, from behind his hand, in a more humble tone, he said, ‘A bit less, if cash is involved.’

  As I felt no need to comment or commit, we went on staring at the pike.

  ‘It really is an attractive specimen,’ said the trader.

  Yes, I thought, but what would I do with it? I like to travel light, and the next day I would not be setting off to Pembroke Dock with a twenty-one-pound pike in the overhead luggage rack just because it happened to share a birthday with my father.

  As the air between us turned mercantile the trader shifted beside me. There wasn’t yet a froth of desperation, but I could feel it on its way as he searched inside himself for more pike knowledge.

  Pike have a flat mouth. In this specimen the teeth were sharp and evenly spaced. But its eyes, I noticed, weren’t right. More like a possum’s or a rabbit’s than a fish’s, I thought, or for that matter, like the hazel-coloured eye of an
owl.

  The trader confirmed that the pike’s eyes weren’t its own.

  ‘Eyes generally disintegrate,’ he said.

  I didn’t know that, and said so.

  ‘Everyone’s eyes disintegrate,’ he said. He used to have several boxes filled with false eyes. He had them by the hundred, in yellow and blue. ‘Whatever you fancy,’ he said. Perhaps he still had a box of eyeballs lying around at the back of the shop… if I was interested?

  I hate to disappoint, a trait I suspect crafted by the past, but I didn’t want him searching for eyeballs which, no doubt, after much huffing and puffing I would be obliged to examine and perhaps even buy. I told him not to bother, as he suddenly remembered where in the shop he had the stash of eyes.

  ‘No,’ I said, and it came out more emphatically than intended.

  He looked a bit hurt.

  ‘Please,’ I said. That’s what I meant. Then I thought to ask what he knew about the angler E. Laver.

  ‘Nothing at all,’ he said, but he could recommend a trip to Bowood, a lovely estate ten miles further up the road. Then he proceeded to tell me what I could expect to find there—the dark ponds, one of which the pike had come from—and after he had described the contents of the exhibition room, which I was surprised to hear includes Napoleon’s death mask and a selection of his handkerchiefs, I felt no need to go.

  I had to switch trains at Cardiff, and on the platform I picked up a certain register of voice that brought my father roaring back to life. At a neighbour’s party he is speaking too freely, too enthusiastically. I can tell from my mother’s frozen expression at the light dancing in Dad’s eyes. And there it is, captured within the same frame, two different responses to rejection and abandonment. In my mother’s case, a life-long fear of being judged unfavourably, and in Dad’s a ready sociability that carries him from campground to campground across the North Island, an ability and willingness to make friends in situations temporary by design, in a rugby crowd, say, and certainly at the pub. With a few drinks under his belt that campground banter of his worked, up to a point.