A History of Silence by Lloyd Jones

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.
    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