A History of Silence by Lloyd Jones Page A

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