Free A History of Silence by Lloyd Jones

growth?
    This is how it will be for years to come—the lack of a natural fit, a looseness of material. I continue to grow, but it is a losing battle. I am forever too small. It will be years before neck and collar feel right together.
    Perhaps my mother is experiencing something of the same in the drapery store. For when Maud lived here she sent for Mum, the little girl whom she had given up eight or nine years earlier, and my mother re-entered Maud’s world. By this time Maud had had two more children, boys, Eric and Ken. No one knows why Maud sent for Mum, or what she had in mind. Or, for that matter, what my mother made of this re-entry. No one thought to ask. And, of course, Mum didn’t say. But whatever the reason she came to live with Maud, it didn’t work out, and for a second time my mother was given the flick. I believe she was fourteen or fifteen years old when this happened.
    I wonder if this is what has my mother so preoccupied—squaring up this memory with the stacks of new-smelling school uniforms. As she opens her purse to pay she is still looking into that old space. But I know that the walls of a room do not remember a thing; they are the most hopeless of witnesses, infuriatingly discreet, dedicated as much to accommodating the new as they are to forgetting.
    My mother’s tragedy is that she cannot forget.
    There is a photograph of Mum sitting in the sand dunes on Petone Beach, a little east of where William Swainson had once sat sketching the settlers’ first thatched cottages nestled up to Te Puni’s pat Pito-one, which is now called Petone. Just back from the sand dunes today is the Settlers Museum. The prow of a sailing ship bursts out of its side. On the east side of the building, which faces the gorse-covered hills, is a stained-glass illustration of a settler carrying an axe on his shoulder, his wife, with a baby in her arms, and a boy who wades ahead of his parents into the bush, his eyes bulging with uncertainty at the adventure that lies ahead.
    In the photograph, my mother, who must be in her mid-twenties, looks very thin and a bit troubled by the bundle at her side.
    When my eldest sister, Pat, was born Mum must have hoped that Maud had softened a bit, that she might finally show some interest in her, and so, unannounced, she turns up at Maud’s door to show off the baby—Maud’s grandchild, her first, as it happens. Mum is kept waiting outside on the porch rocking the bundle in her arms until Maud returns to the door with a ten-shilling note in her hand and an instruction for Mum never to show her face again.
    Then, some years later, when Lorraine’s epilepsy is diagnosed and the doctor asks Mum if there is a family history, there is only one way to find out. This time Mum telephones Maud to ask the question that the doctor has asked of her.
    â€˜But,’ says Maud, ‘I have no daughter.’

    Now, many years later, towards the end of her long life, my mother lies on a hospital bed staring dimly at the ceiling of the stroke ward in the Hutt Hospital.
    I am required to help her fill out a form for the occupational therapist. To the absurd question, ‘What is your life’s ambition?’, my ninety-year-old-mother suddenly rallies. Her eyes find mine. She is clear and unequivocal. Her ambition is to outlive Maud, who died in her ninety-fourth year.
    Over the coming months, as she is whittled away by a series of strokes, and it becomes clear she won’t achieve her ‘life’s ambition’, we cram four birthdays—her ninety-first, ninety-second, ninety-third and fourth into the space of a few months.
    She has to hold onto the rails of her chair as she draws in a mighty breath and leans forward and, with surprising gusto for a ninety-one-two-three-four-year-old, blows out the candles on the cake.

    More than fifty years earlier she had given birth to me in this same hospital, but on a different floor, in a different