Dear Oliver Page 5

  This was a cage I grew up in, too. Its space felt very small, it pressed the breath out of your body. You could not move. At times it felt better to die — except that inside me, as inside every human, is this fiery instinct to seek a better life. Life must be better than this. It is hard to stifle this instinct, this swerve towards vitality. It is what has helped human beings create a better world.

  In my twenties, along with other people like me, I began to fight for equal rights. At the time it did not seem possible. It only seemed right. It seemed unjust to live in a world in which you were always pushed back inside a box, could never talk about a thing like love, which dignifies all human beings. But if I am honest with you, Oliver, I am not absolutely sure I believed we would achieve equal rights in my lifetime. Nevertheless, it seemed necessary to fight for these rights, as the fight itself would educate people and say one thing: We will never go away.

  None of this was obvious at the time. Looking back from the current high tide of marriage equality and legislated LGBT rights, it all seems destined to have occurred. But to live through change is to be regaled with all sorts of alternative routes, and even alternative beings. For example, for a long time I hoped desperately I would turn into the person my parents wanted: this meant I tried to model myself on a sports-loving Christian youth. I was politically conservative and a fervent monarchist.

  Then in my twenties I went to the opposite extreme, reinvented myself and became a drug-taking party animal who effectively abandoned and rejected my parents and their values. In England I changed again and became a hard-line Marxist who favoured revolution. I became a republican. Gradually this persona ebbed away into a more reclusive, thoughtful person who was somewhere between the two poles, looking both backwards at the child I had been and towards the person I was becoming.

  You are different things at different times, Oliver. This is a strange fact of being human — we are contradictory, at times complacent, at other times tormented, always presenting to the world a face behind which lie irresolution, secret passions, unsorted feelings we would rather not acknowledge, the rawness of love and the need for affirmation. Then there are physical appetites intimately linked to a search for what might prove to be an elusive happiness.

  So when I say we are all shaped by history whether we know it or not, we also have our individual response to this shaping, whether we accept it or attempt to discard it — acknowledging at the same time there can never ever be a discarding of history. The past enters you at birth and you live out its rhythms — it is just a matter of the degree to which you become conscious of it. Rebel against the past and you are just reliving it in another form. You are still fighting its potency. The past is all around you and, as I have said, inside you. It’s just you can’t see it. Getting older could be said to be the process of gaining sharper perception of the shape of the past and its power over you, just as your optical sight deteriorates and loses precision. Possibly at your age history is a blur, like the shadow of a tree against a window pane. Let me sharpen its shape for you.

  THE MOST IMPORTANT EVENT IN the life of your matrilineal family, the Northes, was the 1931 Hawke’s Bay earthquake. This is the experience that was seared into the genes, and defined us most as a family. It implied both being tested and surviving. It also implied you had looked into the core of existence and taken from it some essential lesson. Whether this is true or not, I cannot say. I can only record my own memory of how the stories of the quake were passed on.

  The 1931 earthquake was always shortened to the familiar, if ominous, name which was as much a musical note as a word — the Quake. The Quake and the War were the two musical notes of my childhood, with the Slump just behind them — all of them sonorous, grave, dark and miserable, as much reprimand as a forewarning. So when I say rather too grandly that ‘we’ experienced the quake, what I really mean is ‘they’. But in a curious way it also means ‘us’.

  I am the son of an earthquake survivor. When I experience a quake, no matter how small, I feel a sense of utter dread. It is as if all the stories of disaster, catastrophe, violence flush through my system, causing me to sweat, breathe faster, in short shallow breaths. Children of earthquake survivors are more frightened of earthquakes than the children of people who have never known them.

  This is partly because we were brought up (as you will be, too, Oliver) with stories that are so enormous in dimension as to be apocryphal, like something off a biblical tablet or the shard of an old shattered vase. Except for this: the actors in these tales of danger and survival are members of your family, some of whom are no longer alive. In these stories they are magically reborn, forever duplicating certain actions — lighting a fire on the front lawn, boiling the billy — and, as in myths and fables, there is something curiously foreshortened in these actions. There is definitely a before and an after — but there is also an interregnum of impossible actions, of heightened unreality wherein all that your eyes see and your mind takes for granted is withdrawn from you. You enter a magic realm which is, at the same time, so grindingly real you cannot escape, and the very existence in this world calls forth fundamental questions of survival like your ability to find food, water, shelter — even something as basic as being able to stand upright.

  The story of my mother walking home from school aged fourteen is like a small movie I have seen over and over again, each time passing by the same sights: the houses with collapsed verandas and toppled chimneys; the Holts’ maid sitting in the gutter with blood flowing over her face, just sitting there in shock. Getting nearer to the Napier Hospital, which was one street away from where Bessie lived, the film becomes quite frenetic — patients being wheeled in iron beds down into the Botanic Gardens. A scene of disarray. Inside a tent doctors conduct emergency operations. Smoke rises from the burning city.

  Bessie walks up the slight hill towards the hospital, and here she passes by what was the Nurses’ Home. Now the film gets very slow, becomes silent. The Nurses’ Home had been a three-storey Spanish Mission-style building, new and stylish. Now it is a heap of collapsed concrete. It has pancaked. Here the film ticks by frame by frame with the slow galumph of a heartbeat. Now, suddenly, it breaks into sound. The sound is of a woman screaming, but it is muffled because it comes from under the concrete. Eight night nurses are trapped under the debris, along with three office staff. Now they lie crushed. There is no machinery to lift away the concrete. The victims can only cry out to indicate where they are. And then as the hours pass and it falls into night, they cry out in agony, frustration, terror.

  This is the sound I hear thirty, forty years later. It’s obviously a sound that penetrated my mother’s childlike defences, lodged itself in her brain. It’s a sound she can never forget. And unwittingly she passed it on to me.

  There are other stories she passed on to me, too. The tea trolley, laden with the best china teacups, that sailed around the ‘drawing room’ in a dance with the piano — the only cups to survive the quake. The whole family ended up drinking out of cups that Bessie was normally never allowed to touch. How she walked up the lane two days later and came across two English immigrants who had arrived in Napier to work at the hospital on the day of the quake. They had not moved since, or eaten anything or talked to anyone; they just lay under a tree, not moving. Or the nursing sister who arrived at Bessie’s home at 4 Lawrence Road, her dress stripped away to underwear; she had torn it up to provide tourniquets for people whose limbs were broken, bleeding. She was covered in dirt and dust from the collapsed buildings. They had one bucket of water for six filthy people.

  So many stories to do with the quake, the experience of it, its surreal juxtapositions, its trauma but also its distinction — a kind of tribal identification to do with undergoing something terrible but also, more importantly, surviving it and, to a degree, transcending it. What might have happened if you had been standing there. The miracle of chance. The fixed nature of fate.

  This is in the genes, too, Oliver, a kind of survival
ism. Pragmatic, basic: how to survive a kind of apocalypse. We live in dystopian times. An age of hurricanes, natural disasters and political upheavals. Call this a gift of the ancestors — an ability to survive.

  FEBRUARY 2016

  We sat in Suzanne’s sitting room that looked out onto Oriental Bay. The splendour of the view was, in its own quiet way, an expression of power. Suzanne was there, as was Geraldine, with her second husband, a loquacious Scot called Jim, and there, on the floor, lay a soft, rounded bundle. I glanced into your face quickly and understood there was nothing of my brother there. Your face was round as a clock and everything within it seemed oracular — you were all wonder at the world. Sitting far away from me, like a chorus of mothers, sat Pauline, whom I knew, and her wife (I guess) Nicole. Nicole had a sharp triangle of a face, almost dramatically white, with a slew of black-black hair. (Later she revealed her ancestors were Irish.)

  Introductions over, we settled down like combatants around the ring, all of us looking inwards to the miracle of you.

  We immediately established the degree of our propinquity (how near or far we were related). Pauline and I were ‘first cousins at one remove’ — not second cousins at all. This recalled an ancient chime — I seem to recall that when I was a child in long-ago Wellington we cousins spent a lot of time tracing the arcane filaments of family. Or rather, the girl cousins did. This was by way of preparation for launching out on their own endeavours to enlarge the family. It was a way of peering into the future.

  Now our future lay before us: you were levering your way by jack-knifing rubbery limbs along a silk Persian rug, gazing at the pattern as you went. Your eyes were large. Jim explained how everything was a matter of wonder to you: the whirl of wood on floorboards, the colour of patterns in the rug. I suddenly remembered that sense of wonder that overcame me when I was tripping, and understood you were in a more peaceful version of this hallucinatory state. The world was wonderful to you, a 3D rippling waterfall of sensations, and you needed to put things in your mouth to taste whatever you were seeing — to taste was another way of seeing.

  We were all looking towards you, following your antics in a wondering, good-humoured way and also, on Geraldine’s part, a proprietary way: ‘Put your hand over that glass edge.’ She was more on the case than the two mothers, who were perhaps exhausted.

  I felt baffled by the insistent glaze of adoration. I wanted adult talk — I resented you.

  Later you were sitting in Pauline’s lap. We were at a dining table that echoed back to our mothers’ insistence on tablecloths and a silver place setting, and back further to our redoubtable grandmother. (Suzanne surprised me by saying she was now almost as old as her mother, Aunty Jean, when she died of lymphatic cancer. I remember as a thirty-four-year-old thinking Aunty Jean was very old. ‘Well,’ Suzanne said with elan, ‘I am very old!’) I noted she seemed relaxed with you in the house. Ebullient. She who had, for whatever reason, not had children, when she was a classic case of a woman who would have been a brilliant mother. The fact we never talked of this implied a hidden hurt.

  Pauline seemed to me to be rounded out by motherhood, albeit by proxy. I remembered her as a resentful teenager being dragged through the intense boredom of family connections. She was always called Paul, and probably, looking back, she was coping with her intense sense of difference. Now she was older and much more confidently herself. Consequently, she looked better. When we fit into our skins it’s strange how all the things that seem and look out of alignment suddenly slide together and, for the first time in our life, we look complete.

  She was at ease, though tired, with you balanced plump on her lap. You were gnawing on a bread roll while we ate a chicken (stuffed, another echo of our grandmother from a time when food was parsed out to last longer and go further). The vegetables — corn, potatoes, beans, peas, beetroot — all came from Suzanne and her husband Peter’s vegetable garden, another echo of the past, when every family had a large vegetable plot.

  Your slobbery bread roll suddenly fell from your grasp. Holding you, Pauline felt for it with her feet and picked it up. This happened again. It rolled under my chair. I picked it up, feeling its soft saliva snail-wet repulsion.

  At this point your soft gaze turned to me. I understood I was just part of the never-ending waterfall of impressions, but it was the first time your gaze had actually come to focus on me. I smiled at you, or sent you an improbable beam of love. And in return your face melted into a smile, too, and for one second we were held there in paradise.

  SO HOW DOES A FAMILY WORK? Willa Cather, in praising Katherine Mansfield’s stories, noted the strangely ambiguous territory of love and resentment that is part and parcel of being in a family. Even in a happy family ‘every individual in that household (even the children) is clinging passionately to his individual soul, is in terror of losing it in the general family flavor. As in most families, the mere struggle to have anything of one’s own, to be one’s self at all, creates an element of strain which keeps everybody almost at the breaking-point.’

  Cather goes on: ‘One realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbor’s household, and, underneath, another — secret and passionate and intense — which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him. One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.’4

  This seems to me a very acute analysis of both the pleasure of being in a family (companionate, warm) and the terror of being in a family — that you will be submerged, obliterated, swamped, the secret part of yourself threatened and struggling for survival.

  It is accepted that the earliest emotional patterns within families, between mothers and children and fathers and children, imprint themselves with a rebarbative ferocity that echoes forward in a person’s life. I had read in Alan Downs’ The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World that ‘the most important issue in a gay man’s life was not “coming out”, but coming to terms with the invalidating past’.5 According to Downs, a father of a gay son can sense a son’s erotic interest in him very early on. This leads to rejection, a seemingly inexplicable wall of ice behind which the human recedes.

  The child, often no more than three or four, feels only a confused fracturing of the wholeness of his soul. He becomes aware of himself as something so loathsome he must face rejection from someone who, until that moment, he had blindly loved. The mother, sensing the rejection, tries to placate this icy fume of rage and dislike. She spreads her body out protectively, covering the boy in the mantle of her love. The child, however, has been wounded for life. So a father in his disdain almost murders the son he has bred — and may indeed still love, albeit in a confused amalgam of repulsion and fear and something still dormant and powerful: pride and wonder.

  ‘They fuck you up your mum and dad’. There is a cruel truth to Philip Larkin’s bleak line.

  I seem like a bad fairy at a christening, I know. Why do I want to parade my own sores before you? What does it matter to you that I had a father who rejected me — and who in turn I angrily rejected? You have no father — not one who is present on a daily basis in that intrusive zone of interrogation and surveillance known as family. You are lucky in a way to have two mothers. The evidence suggests that children blessed with two mothers who love you grow into well-rounded humans. In the end there is only love. That is, love is the nourishing element for a child, as well as guidance and limits.

  But why am I talking about such large issues here when your presence is precise, individual — to a degree, unique? I suppose because parenting holds the key to the future, or one of the ke
ys.

  Martha Nussbaum, the philosopher, talks of mother and child as two ‘imperfect beings’. She talks of the subtle interplay of the ‘ambivalence of love’.6 This just about sums it up. I reflect on my own understanding of my mother and how this has changed throughout my life. As a child, and for a long time, I thought she was the most brilliant guiding star in my firmament. Everything she said I believed. I was credulous, empathetic and, understanding nothing of the world, took everything she said at face value. Bit by bit, through subtle emphases, significant silences, tearful moments of pathos, I understood she resented my father. Without any question I took her side and saw him through her judgmental, disillusioned gaze.

  Was my father so bad? I do not know. It was not a question I asked myself until my father was facing death and we silently took steps towards one another. Be honest. It was I who took the steps. Chastened by my long alienation, I retraced my path back to him. Helping him in the very last moments of his life was made bitter-sweet by his disbelief that I was there to help him. But I was there.

  My father, Gordon, died in 1987. Soon after, my brother Russell was dying of HIV-AIDS. Bess had a severe nervous breakdown. There can have been few more brutal ways for her to be outed as the mother of a homosexual son. Her breakdown was a human response to a conflict she could not endure. Now she was fractured, adrift, as if she had wandered so far away from her past, let alone her present, that she had lost the ability to find a path back. She returned to the child she had been after the earthquake — fractured, dislocated, friable and hysterical. Hysteria was a part of her personality I had never diagnosed as a child. Her stories to me were truth; I did not understand them as laments, wish fulfilment, self-justifications so extreme they amounted to lies.

  Now I saw a truth that had escaped me all my life. I pitied her as a human in excruciating pain. But our relationship changed forever. It was as if, from now on, there would be two ‘me’s in relation to her. One was an artful ambassador always referring back to my deferential position as a child. This child was a believer, an affirmer, a listener. But behind this child was an adult who listened in a different way, understanding he might at a certain point have to deliver help, assist — actually take over her life and reshape it so she could continue to function.