A History of Silence by Lloyd Jones Page B

sufficiently interested to find out.
    Indifference is the normal response to a campground where history is measured in rectangular outlines of dried trampled earth and perhaps a tent peg left behind, a sniff of domesticity clinging to the dead grass.
    From out of the shadows the women appear—from various parts of the camp, around corners, from under trees, stumbling along in the dark in bare feet. In daylight they would cry out at sharp stones biting their feet, but at this hour, surrounded by the sleep of hundreds, their bodies go into a giant wince, and they resume their hobble towards the shower block. Mum and I toddle after them.
    There’s a light sitting inside a cage of steel mesh—that’s interesting, perhaps the most interesting thing that I have seen in a day and a half. I stand there looking up at it, and then my wrist is grabbed and I am pulled inside the shed to join a long line among many lines.
    A toilet flushes, and immediately all talk stops and our line takes a step closer. A young woman lifts a man’s checked shirt over her head. I am amazed to see that she is naked. And because I look longer and harder than I did at the light inside the wire mesh I am aware of Mum’s interest switching to me. I feel her hand land on top of my head and turn it like something left on the table to face the wrong way.
    Older women such as my mother appear locked within bodies stretched by pregnancy and scarred by operations, but others look like they were pegged up wet overnight and have just been taken down.
    Under the showers they run a measuring glance over one another’s bodies and stand with upturned faces as jets of water blast the night off them. Soon they emerge from the ablution block with pink glowing skins, in less of a hurry now, and speaking in noticeably louder voices.
    From one municipal camp to the next we work our way across the North Island. There is always a ngaio pushing against the sides of the tent and making scary shadows with its branches, and I seem forever to be standing in lines. I long for the moment we will pack up the car and head for home. I miss the street, the backyard, the slab of concrete and the brick side of the house where for hours I am content to throw a tennis ball and catch it within inches of the leaping dog and its snapping jaws. I miss the letterbox and the smell of the clipped hedge. I long for those certainties—even the sky which has its own particularity, shaped by the long gorsy hills that swallow and blow out tremendous gusts of wind. The settled air of elsewhere simply feels wrong, and when the moment comes to pull up pegs I am never so keen to help.

    There are other journeys, of greater mystery. Blackbirds on powerlines and trees twitch through the windows of the car. Where are we going? I have not been told, but I recognise something in my mother—her silence and resolute manner, tempered by something that I don’t have the words for but years later will recognise as a helpless compulsion.
    I can see all this from the back seat where I have been placed like a bag of groceries, expected to shut up and not say a word.
    Dad is at work, making fire engines. He would be amazed to know that we are in the heart of Wellington in that rarely visited city, where ‘officially’ I have been only a few times, excluding these other occasions.
    When we get there , we park. There is no suggestion that we should get out of the car.
    From my place on the back seat I quietly shift to get the line of my mother’s sight so I can see what she sees—a row of letterboxes, hedges, fences. I know the routine. We will sit in silence, unaware of ourselves or our strange purpose until a pedestrian walking by looks in the car window and Mum, hounded by the stranger’s curiosity, makes a show of digging in her handbag for her face mirror.
    I could ask what we are doing, but I don’t. The question will not be welcome. The first time we sat