A History of Silence Read Online Free Page B

faces belonging to Territorials turned away inquisitive motorists or those who had perhaps forgotten that the old route was no longer possible. And then the buildings, bits fallen off, windows broken, slippages. That world was more frail than anyone could have guessed, to the point where after several trips, it began to look fake, to feel as though everyone had been living in a theatre set.
    As the partially destroyed buildings began to come down, the empty sites began to add up, and the edges of the city’s erasure spread. Out at Bottle Lake, a substitute city—of rubble—grew. Mountains of the city’s debris were being compressed down by graders that sat like toys on top of the heap of piled redundancy.
    And then, like Hodges, I found myself seeking to overlay what I had seen with a story I’d heard.
    The hairdresser was in her twenties. Her hair was red, I think, with a raccoon stripe of green. As she circled me with the clippers I had the impression of a small animal. Snip. Snip . She continued. Her aunt— snip, snip —had broken her leg a few weeks before the earthquake. And, she said, her leg was still in plaster when the quake lowered the corner of the house where the bathroom and toilet were situated. So, snip, snip, she could no longer use the loo. She said her aunt’s husband had cut a hole in the bottom of a beach chair and positioned it over a hole he dug in the backyard.
    I was onto my third or fourth trip to the city, and I no longer paid attention to the world outside the taxi side window.
    The driver kept looking in his rear mirror for me to instruct him. I waved him on past the Daily Donut with half its front fallen away and an oblong of sky where the door had flown out, past a massage parlour that was a pile of rubble with a flickering light next to a handwritten sign: Yes, we are still open . We moved on towards the spreading sky in the east to the suburbs badly affected by liquefaction—a likely address I thought to locate the hairdresser’s aunt’s story.
    The taxi driver pulled over by a line of grungy shops. It seemed as good a place as any.
    I got out and began to walk, without any real sense of direction, except to take care where raw sewage ran across driveways. The same sights were repeated—abandonment, absences of every kind. Even in streets that did not appear to be badly damaged, new indignities had been invented. People had dug up their lawn to shit or if they had the stomach for it they shat into plastic bags which could be sealed with a twist and dumped in the shiny green human waste disposal units dotted along the streets.
    I didn’t have a map with me, but much of the place I recognised from what I had seen on television—the silted footpaths, the slurry grey filth in the driveways, the hard-bitten lawns, the grim occupancy of council flats and state houses. Amazingly, the flowers kept growing despite all that had happened. A large Polynesian woman knelt on a lawn yakking into a mobile and pulling weeds with her free hand. Weeding seemed such an odd thing to do. I wanted to call out hello, to engage her, and say something. I wasn’t sure what, but I was thinking, ‘This is what people used to do.’ Now it seemed to be completely beside the point. The neighbouring houses were empty, and they shook as generators in the street roared to clear drains of sludge and diggers and graders dug and clawed at the road.
    I carried on, looking for an address to place the hairdresser’s story. I walked in circles for several hours and eventually found myself at the waterfront, at New Brighton, and there on the esplanade I came upon an abandoned couch. An elderly woman had sat down on it to rest. A small dog sat by her feet. I studied this scene from the sandhills above the road until through the alchemy of imagination it turned into something else in my notebook. This account finds me dropping down from the sandhills and crossing the