WHO, I WONDER, knocked down the door of the Kilbirnie flat to find six children crawling around the corpse of their mother?

Eleanor Gwendoline Jones suffered, as her father John Bibby had, a toxic death, in her case, by hydatids, a disease picked up from contact with dogs. An affectionate lick from a dog is enough to transfer the tapeworm that more commonly infects sheep. Inside the host’s stomach the tapeworm grows cysts, some the size of tennis balls, and bigger. For a time the carrier goes about her business, without suspecting anything is seriously amiss. When the cyst bursts, as can happen in a fall, the victim—in this case, my grandmother Eleanor—dies from toxic shock.

Where is her husband, the father to all these kids? A year earlier, Arthur Leonard Jones and Eleanor had separated. Since then, Arthur, described in the blue book as a wharf labourer, appears to have led an itinerant life, leaving a trail of addresses across the city. He is already well on his way to turning into the phantom who will go down in history as a ‘naval captain drowned at sea’.

Laura, Dad’s eldest sister, is partly responsible for this account. There is a scrap of a letter written by her brother Percy passing on what Laura allegedly told him: ‘Our father drowned at sea aboard the SS Ionic, a troop-carrying ship, after it was hit by a torpedo off the coast of California.’

Except, everything about that story is wrong. The Ionic was fired on, but escaped unharmed and kept sailing. The incident did not occur off the American coast but in the Mediterranean in 1915 with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force on its way to Gallipoli.

I don’t doubt that Percy accurately recorded what Laura told him. But where did she hear this story?

On the strength of that ‘history’, I will develop a strong bond with the sea. I even convince myself that I have innate navigational abilities, which are repeatedly and more successfully put to the test on land than at sea, finding headlands and coastlines among spires and hilltops.

A different line of inquiry finds Arthur in a hospital bed suffering from sciatica the day his wife is lowered into an unmarked grave in Karori Cemetery, and, later, he turns up in Auckland where he remarries and otherwise leads an obscure life.

The woman in the office at the Karori Cemetery keyed in the name Eleanor Gwendoline Jones and with a minimum of fuss printed out her whereabouts, plot 107. She showed me on a map where to find her—‘at the row beginning Smith, the unmarked grave between Eliot and Wilton’.

I must have always known that my grandmother was buried in Karori Cemetery, but I never went there or paid it any attention because, as far as I can remember, Dad never did. Perhaps the idea of a mother—that particular mother, at least—was as alien to him as a grandmother is to me. I never once heard her name spoken.

Then, in the office, I had another thought. What had happened to Dad’s ashes? I remember, after his funeral, stopping on the way to the car park to gaze back in the direction of the crematorium and finding a thin trail of smoke. Edward Llewellyn Jones. The woman keyed in his name. Her eyes trawled down the screen. She looked up, and said, ‘His ashes are in the rose garden.’ ‘On whose authority?’ I asked. She put her glasses back on and looked at the screen. ‘Mr Robert Jones,’ she said. My brother.

The rose garden is below the road opposite the cemetery’s admin office. Down there a young runner was going through her warm-down routine. I stared at the roses.

It had never occurred to me to ask about Dad’s ashes. Apparently they had been spread without ceremony, or family in attendance.

That wasn’t the case with Mum. The last third of her life was spent at two addresses—a handsome house with a full view of the harbour and a townhouse just before the bend on the road leading out of the bay. In both bedrooms she liked to lie in bed and gaze across the bay and, at night, listen to the police on shortwave radio. I wouldn’t have thought she knew much about shortwave radio. But I like the idea of her and the other old ladies along Marine Parade at a sleepless hour tuning their transistors to the static and police-speak, finding comfort in those voices, in their proximity, in the same way that a yawn from the dog in its kennel at night used to banish thoughts of ghosts hanging about in our backyard looking for a way inside the house.

My daughter and I paddled a Malibu surf kayak out to the bay with Mum’s ashes on board. I picked a spot she would have been able to see from both houses. The ashes were surprisingly heavy. I poured a stream of white grain into the sea. We paddled in. A few hours later, after lunch at my sister Pat’s house, I drove back around the bay. The tide was out a long way, a spring tide, and never have I seen so many gulls in that bay, fighting and diving over the bounty stranded on the sand bars. It was shocking to see, and extraordinary to think that, just a few days earlier, still fully bodied and alert, Mum had lain in bed gazing across this same stretch of water. Without a thought, I am certain, that a few days later seagulls would be squabbling over her ashes.

A day later the gesture felt horribly miscalculated. The sentimentality that led me to paddle her ashes out to sea, the diligent marking of the spot on the tide. What was I thinking? What was wrong with putting her ashes in a jar or burying them in a garden?

From the cemetery office I got in the car and drove deeper into this community of the dead, turning right as instructed by the pedestal with the angel to enter the older part of the cemetery.

I parked, and for the next hour explored the paths between the promised lands and laments, reunited with Jesus, at rest, joined her husband on this day, entered sleep, drowned at sea, and so on.

I found a row beginning with Smith and two unmarked graves, one with a dead tree stump resting on it, but there wasn’t an Eliot or Wilton in sight, which was disappointing because I liked the wild abandonment of those unmarked plots.

I could sniff rain on its way. It was the edge of a front that was forecast to batter the country over the coming days. I hurried back to the car and drove on until I found a path on the northern side of the hill more closely aligned with the map that the woman in the office had given me.

I quickly found the row beginning with Smith but, as before, could find neither Eliot or Wilton. I checked with the map and was certain I was on the right path. I found one unmarked grave but still no Eliot or Wilton. I walked up and down the rows of headstones. Many of the graves were overgrown, sprouting ngaio and other shrubs. I had to push away the branches and press my fingers into the letters on headstones grown over with lichen. By now it was spitting, so I started back up the hill.

Near the road two leis hung in the branches of a tree sheltering a headstone. A woman knelt on a grave with a bucket of water and a scrubbing brush. There were photographs on the headstone of a Samoan woman and a Scotsman. The kneeling woman was scrubbing their grave as though it were a doorstep. I stopped to show her my map to see if she could make sense of it. She said she had just come from visiting her husband’s grave at Makara Cemetery, now it was the turn of her parents. A shorthaired dog lay on the next grave. She said she always brought her dog and made a point of introducing herself and the dog to the deceased.

As I drove away from the cemetery I found myself hatching plans for when I find, as surely I will, my grandmother’s grave. I will have a headstone erected and inscribed. It won’t make any difference to Eleanor Gwendoline Jones. But it will push back the edges of erasure to honour a history that has never been acknowledged.

It is a shock to realise how easily the past is disposed of. The man from Pembroke Dock rises from his hospital bed a different man, a single man without responsibilities. He leaves the hospital to find a new world with different possibilities. In a sense he has risen from the dead—a ‘drowned Welsh sea captain’—to stumble up the beach to a new and more interesting place where he can start over without the inconvenience of history. He can get on his way again. He can forget Eleanor and all those kids. How many of them. Six? The wind is getting up—look how it dislodges old paper stuck to the road, peeling it off, scattering it. Nothing sticks forever. Nothing—not love, or hygiene, or appetite, not day or night, or the tide. No, wherever he looks, he finds a provisional world. I am a father can turn into I was a father. He can pretend that Eleanor and the children were a kind of misadventure. As he leaves the hospital gates to walk along Adelaide Road, how new and vital the world smells. Like everyone else in this city he knows how changeable the weather is. In minutes a fine still day in Wellington can turn into a tempest. If it comes to that he will burrow down into the wind, hold his hat low to his face and pick his way around the edge of the city. At the railway station he will buy a ticket to Auckland, and in the new city his resurrection will take full possession of itself.

On his way north, a moment arrives at Kaiwharawhara where the train enters the hillside and pitches into darkness. It is pleasant to be in the dark, even an attenuated dark. To be nowhere in particular loosens any lingering obligation to those irritating bits of responsibility. Then, as the train leaves the tunnel and an enormous light flashes in the window, he blinks, and when he looks again he finds the world changed. The harbour and its plug of sky have been left behind. There is greater latitude in the landscape. It doesn’t know him, and he doesn’t pretend to know it. And yet there is this other layer, an openness, a welcoming. He is on his way to somewhere—a place he is yet to visit but whose pull is nonetheless irresistible. His recent past can join the general debris of lived moments. There was Pembroke Dock and Swansea, places erased by the crossing of oceans, and Milton, Otago and Wellington, and marriage, and all those children, and those jobs that started and went nowhere. His own self has hardly assembled into a regular and concrete idea; he calls himself whatever the situation requires—labourer, master mariner, naval officer, clerk—and as he passes through each tunnel on his journey north he bursts from the darkness into a new landscape and future.

Sadness will inconveniently erupt now and then. On the back of a child’s cry or a child’s name shouted in a playground, the past will belch into the present. Perhaps a couple holding the hands of a child will bring competing thoughts of small faces, and of trust and treachery. Perhaps a waitress’s smile will remind him of his daughter Laura, and perhaps in a moment’s confusion he will call his new wife Eleanor.

Dad once told Pat that when he was a small boy he was visited by a man in a naval officer’s uniform. He was living in one of many homes in the lower North Island. When the man was leaving, he pressed half a crown into Dad’s hand. It was only later, much later, that Dad wondered whether the man in naval uniform was his father.

More likely that person was contracted by the Wellington Industrial School, which had taken over guardianship from the orphanage, to visit my father and report on his wellbeing. Somewhere in a departmental vault lie letters by the boxful detailing the living conditions of Dad and his siblings, charting their prospects and growth in a similar way to the pencil marks on the doorjamb at 20 Stellin Street. I suspect the man in uniform was such an employee. But in Dad’s confusion, in the absence of a father, and finding in this adult a grain of kindness in the form of the half crown, perhaps he began to believe that this stranger was not a stranger after all, and conflated two ideals—a father figure and a naval officer capable of avoiding hidden reefs. The visit turned into further evidence of the tale told of the man drowned at sea.

The fate of the Ionic was published in the New Zealand Herald in July 1917. I suspect Arthur Leonard Jones read the article and added a few details of his own, exaggerating one thing in order to achieve the other, a sinking for a drowning, and then perhaps engaged someone to write to the one child unable to verify the record for herself, Laura, who is blind. She disseminates the tale of the naval officer drowned at sea. And so, in his own letter, Percy passes on the myth: ‘I found out that our father was a member of the crew of the Ionic which was sunk in American waters…all crew and soldiers she was carrying were lost.’

In fact the Ionic lived to a ripe old age, and in 1919 Arthur Leonard Jones rises from the depths of his deception to marry Ada Perrin in Auckland.

The ‘drowned at sea’ line is an old ruse, an honourable despatch, a plausible explanation for unexplained absences. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne is tempted into an affair only after her husband is presumed drowned at sea.

Drowning was a blameless misfortune. Ships thrown off course in violent storms off unfamiliar coasts. It even contained shades of heroism. Our hero, Arthur Leonard Jones, was on his way to the war, battling high seas. The great poet has left behind an uncompleted work. The city has been struck down by a freakish act of nature. Then, the ship’s master is discovered to be a drunk. The poet’s salted arteries were already closing down before his vision was transcribed. A city discovers its old seismic history and swampy foundations. And Arthur Leonard Jones turns out to be a liar.

Following a visit to the orphanage on 117 Tinakori Road, an Evening Post reporter wrote approvingly of the conditions he found. ‘The children are domiciled until they are fit for transplanting…’ He goes on to say, correctly for some but surely not for Eleanor Gwendoline Jones’s children, ‘The State is the only kind of parent within their memory.’ And that the State, in the form of the Industrial School manager, will exercise control over the children until each one reaches the age of twenty-one.

The twins, Jack and Gladys, still babies, are placed with a woman in Todman Street, Brooklyn, in the hills above the city. Dad, Percy and Arthur are placed in the orphanage. Laura is sent to the Institute for the Blind in Parnell, Auckland.

The death of their mother must have been a terrible shock, their delivery into the hands of strangers and institutions another. A series of foster homes will gradually erode the bonds of family—although Jack and Gladys will live near one another in the Manawatu and enjoy a closer relationship than will their siblings. Arthur, the black sheep, is drafted into another life. There is that spell in prison. The blue book mentions a restraint notice from the police preventing him seeing Gladys. Why? No explanation is given.

As soon as they are ‘fit for transplanting’, that is, to be boarded out for service, each child is issued with a wardrobe the cost of which will be reduced from future earnings.

A boy’s outfit consists of:

2 pairs of boots (one best, one working)

2 caps or tweed hats

2 suits (one best, one working)

1 extra pair of saddle-tweed trousers

1 jersey

4 shirts (two best, two working)

3 under flannels

2 pairs of braces

3 pairs of socks

6 handkerchiefs (3 coloured, 3 white)

4 brushes (nail, tooth, hair, clothes)

1 comb

1 mirror (optional)

1 pair of leggings

1 oilskin

1 tweed overcoat

2 suits of pyjamas

1 suitcase

2 ties

1 belt

The girls receive a variation of the above:

Woollen singlets

2 working frocks

A workbox containing needles, thimble, pin cushion, scissors, tape, buttons, hooks, cotton and thread and darning wool.

A few other stipulations include the requirement that no girl under eighteen is to be allowed out after 8 p.m. ‘An afternoon a week would give as much liberty as is necessary.’

‘Boys at service should bear in mind that they are as much under the control of the manager as when they are living at the school.’

‘It is very important that the boys should go to church regularly, avoid companions who will lead them to mischief, keep from using foul or coarse language; never go to hotels for drink, nor idle around hotels, billiard rooms, and other places of the kind.’

Their issue of clothes is remarkably like the wardrobe recommended by the New Zealand Company to its migrating passengers. My father and his siblings have been thrown into circumstances that are not of their making. On their way through foster homes, they must, like emigrants, assess the new environment, figure out how things work, pick up new rules and language, and work out tolerances of each place—what can be said, when best to keep one’s mouth shut.

Most days I cross Taranaki Street and head down to the Moore Wilson supermarket. What a surprise to find it takes me past Dad’s birthplace on Jessie Street, just around the corner from the shoe factory. As soon as I found his birth certificate in the blue book I made my way to the address, to discover it is now a car yard. And the boarding house where his grandmother Mary Bibby died is in Cuba Street just around the corner from the shoe factory. I pass by that address most days as well. I’ve done so for years without ever appreciating the close rub of that forgotten life against my own. The old wooden boarding house where my great grandmother drew her last breath has been replaced by a noodle restaurant.

Whenever I stop to look in the front window I’m sure I give the impression of a man exploring the curry options. I suppose I have become a familiar sight to the staff and regulars. The face I know best will look up from the counter and smile. One of these days I will go through the doors and order an egg roll. I haven’t yet, because that is not part of the routine. To imagine is more compelling. And while I may give the impression of a prospective diner, I am, in fact, dwelling in an upstairs curtained room, lit by a gaslight, and thinking about a fifty-four-year-old woman in bed with childhood memories of Swansea, masted ships, big seas and walks along coastal hilltops, like the one that leads out to Pencarrow, attended to by her daughters, Lucy and Eleanor.

Dr Mackie, who found her on her back on the floor ‘in a dying condition’, described ‘a stout woman, looking more like sixty than fifty-four, and after hearing the history I am of the opinion that the cause of death was cerebral haemorrhaging or apoplexy’.

The building has gone; Mary Bibby has gone; the witnesses have left the premises. The world that accommodated this little exit scene has moved on. But briefly I find myself holding onto that picture before the ferociously lit interior returns me to a table of faces looking back at me. At this point I must either go inside or move on—without, I hope, the maniacal look of Kerrin, the fellow I see wandering the streets around the shoe factory, his electrified eyes also singularly concentrated on the conversation he mumbles to himself.

At this pre-dawn hour, Kerrin will have been through the bags of clothes dumped outside the Salvation Army store across the road. So I know where he is now. He’s downstairs, at the bottom of the shoe factory, in the atrium waiting for Gib to open up his cafe.

I used to blame the dark for the clothes he fished out of those bags—Kerrin, with his bristling moustache and thick grey rocker’s hair, would show up at Gib’s in women’s slacks and blouses.

On an electoral form Kerrin can tick the Maori and European boxes. Like so many of us, his heritage is a story of mongrels sniffing one another out in a backwater to create a bastard breed incapable of tracing its origins. Actually, I’m just as tempted to describe Kerrin as a wilted flower. You can see the stem, note the petals but hardly recognise the variety. Although the aggression is very familiar. And despite his outrageous getup—purple slacks and weird shoes—his intelligent brown Maori eyes transcend the more embarrassing aspects of himself.

Kerrin is one of Gib’s best customers. Gib says he managed to sock a bit away while he slept rough in the hills above Wellington for five years, and so, now, as the city comes into focus and office workers file down through the street below, Kerrin is waiting for Gib to open up so he can start with the first of the ten coffees he will buy today as his rent on a table and chair in the cafe, where he appears to be working at some monstrous opus; whenever I pass the window he is bent over a pile of paper, which Gib says is some sort of musical notation or translation of Maori into English, or perhaps the other way round. For a while I didn’t get close enough to see. And then, a week ago, I did. While Kerrin was using Gib’s toilet, I turned over the top sheet on the pile, and then the next one, and then I opened the pile at the middle. Every page was written in the same cursive script—a series of joined-up R’s smoking away to the edge of the page, resuming on the next line and marching onwards. R after R after R.

I couldn’t bear to look at Kerrin after that. And as recently as yesterday morning, each of us looked the other way as we passed in the atrium. Kerrin was imitating someone with purpose, striding out in a column of office workers as they made their way down the lane to Pigeon Park, Te Aro Park as it is now called to acknowledge its pre-European status as an original p site. This is represented by a waka constructed out of clay tiles. In the rain the hold of the canoe glistens like bathroom tiles. The artwork looks like it flopped out of a failed attempt to capture and remake the past. It is astonishingly vulgar and only hollowly representative. But at least its bathroom-tiled gunwales offer a place for the drunks and assorted street people to while away the day.

Kerrin’s challenge is more existential. Each morning he wakes to the question: Who will I be today? And the answer, to some extent, will depend on the clothing fished out of the boxes left outside the Salvation Army store across the road on Ghuznee Street, a minute’s walk from Dad’s birthplace in one direction and two minutes from the place of his grandmother’s death in the other.

The smell of liquefaction is like something partially digested and thrown up. The liquefied matter has lost all connection with its original form to turn into nothing in particular. Some thought it smelt like sulphur, although I never heard it said with much conviction. People were just responding to the need to put a word to something apparently indefinable, and sulphur, it seems, was the one foul-smelling element remembered from the periodic table last studied at high school. Of course, there is a scientific explanation, but for the time being it was more satisfying to lurch about in the dark because not to know struck the right chord for an event that no one who wasn’t a geologist had been able to foresee. (One geologist had predicted a tragedy resulting from a future seismic event and was accused of scare-mongering.) For everyone else it was like being cast back to the dark ages when things happened and, without a ready explanation, were attributed to a wrathful God.

Yet, if we care to find out, liquefaction has its own story to tell, not so much myth but a creation story nonetheless. Upheaval, displacement, the formation of the plains and swamps and peatlands, the retreat of the sea several millennia ago, the arrival of the podocarp forest and its steady erasure by pastoralists, and then a new weave in the landscape starting with the introduction of farming, followed by the all-conquering cockspur grass and grazing beasts—well, the latter were more cosmetic and scenic, unlike the brew of ancient times, of basalt and shells, and various crustaceans, and peat and swamp turning into coal, and water locked in place by impermeable layers of peat beneath a rock pan, and a network of waterways, some slow, others meandering, others as still as ponds reflecting nothing but the subterranean dark. The liquefaction that sent putrid matter bursting up across the streets of Christchurch was a postcard from these hidden zones.

Nothing had been lost after all, just hidden.

The snow and ice in the winter of 2011 had a fossilising effect on the devastation in Christchurch. The pavements around the cordon froze, and the broken city looked like it would remain that way forever.

In August, I returned and entered the red zone, one bridge down from the Bridge of Remembrance. The city streets were deserted. They’d been that way since February. Still, the effect was eerie. The buildings themselves seemed watchful. It was as if a human-like sentience inhabited them—I thought I detected in them a sort of embarrassed awareness of their condition. Here and there a weakened optimism reached out from buildings such as the blistered-looking Grand Chancellor Hotel, with its blown-out windows, and curtains flapping in the breeze. It was like seeing the chest on a corpse suddenly rise.

Inevitably, I made my way to the square in the old heart of the city, where the stone Anglican cathedral half stood, crippled and leprotic. Pigeons flew in and out of gaping holes. The statue of one of Canterbury’s founders lay on its side, like a toppled chess piece. The leaves of flora that once flourished here—titoki, mahoe, ngaio, maratara, all wetland plants—were still woven into the texture of Neil Dawson’s public sculpture ‘Chalice’. Perversely, or justly, this monument to an eviscerated world had come through the carnage intact.

I stood outside the abandoned Heritage Hotel where I had stayed for a night a few weeks after the massive September 2010 earthquake. I was on the top floor, which had made me nervous. I hoped like hell I wouldn’t be caught in a subsequent big quake, but consoled myself with the thought it was unlikely because the big one had already happened. Gazing up at its dead windows now, I remembered a pleasant older man in a grey felt hat who was always on hand to open the door with a welcoming smile. On that same trip, following the September earthquake, I had taken a short cut through Press Lane—now it was piled above head height with masonry and rubble. In geological time I had missed being buried alive by a whisker.

I’ve noticed that whenever people talk about someone they know killed in the February 2011 earthquake they begin with: He was just on the phone. She had gone outside for a cigarette. She didn’t even need to be there. He was helping to move the organ out of the church damaged in the September earthquake.

I moved up the street from the cathedral and stopped at a window offering breakfast for ten dollars, including hard-boiled eggs. It was the city as normal, you felt, promoted by blue skies and the faint stirrings of spring.

Transform the way you feel. I’d seen that sign in the cracked window of an abandoned hair salon in the suburb of Avondale. In every direction, something indicating faith in the here and now could be found. Old layers of scrim were revealed behind layers of Victorian wallpaper deaf to the racket of jack hammers, while condemned buildings stood in grim lines across from one another. The relentlessness of it was brutal. The giant arms of demolition picked and pecked like cruel insects.

I stopped by a small stone church on a street corner. An engineer holding a clipboard told me it had been steadily crumbling away since the September earthquake. In its destruction it was possible to see how its once elegant form had been composed around the simple act of placing one stone on top of another, like child’s play. It had been built with complete faith in its future. Now, just a stump remained.

The next day I wandered through the streets in the eastern suburbs familiar to me from my earlier visit. I noticed that more people had moved out, and that the abandoned houses appeared to lose connection with those that still had occupants. I found a sickly looking world. The neighbourhood had been cleared of silt, yet somehow these same swept streets managed to retain a memory of a mess that had been disposed of. The windows of the houses met the strong light with grudging familiarity. Roaming dogs sniffed and crapped in the overgrown grass. For all the signs of a world getting back to its feet, such as the reconnected pylons, the abandoned houses told a different story. They seemed to suffer from a collapse of will. They looked so much smaller than those that were occupied.

I took the same route as I had months earlier, pausing near the school at the end of Eureka Street where in the autumn I had stopped to listen to the postie describe that extraordinary moment when the world had turned upside down and thrown him off his bike. Now the concrete pavements and tarred streets were as calm as a windless sea.

I crossed the road that led to Bottle Lake, with its enormous mountains of silt and piled rubble, and followed the bank beside a swollen and stinking Avon River out to Pages Road, and there, jostled by graders and trucks for space on the narrow bridge, I dropped down onto Hawke Street and continued to the sea at New Brighton.

I felt a strong need to get back out to the edge of things, to walk clear of what I had just come through.

And so, at Marine Parade, I crossed to the beach and walked on the fine sand to the water’s edge, and I gazed out across the deceptively calm surface of Pegasus Bay.

Just before Christmas 2011, a series of shocks with their epicentre beneath that discreet grey lid would rock the city. We would learn it was the tailing off of seismic activity. The last hurrah—the final throat clearing of an ogre sinking into the depths of the sea.

I decided to take the track through the sandhills and walk towards South New Brighton and the sheared cliffs where houses stood split and teetering. Further around those cliffs lay Sumner.

Around the time of the school visit to the cereal factory I had come down to Sumner with Mum. We stayed at the Cave Rock Hotel. I don’t remember how we travelled there. I can’t imagine it would have been by plane. I would remember that. It must have been by boat, in which case the Maori, but I have no memory of it.

For hour after hour I was left on my own to explore the beach. The weather was much hotter than I was used to. There was also a heavy surf, and I experienced for the first time the fantastic joy of being picked up by a wave and flung back at the beach like an unwanted scrap. It was a variation of throwing myself off treetops. After collecting myself from the wet sand I ran back into the waves for more. By the end of the day, the sound of the sea was inside of my ears, and my eyelids and the tops of my ears were sunburnt. It was time to head back across the road to the Cave Rock Hotel, to trudge up the carpeted stairs in my sandy feet and count along the doors to our room, where I would find Mum, as I had left her, on the bed, staring at the ceiling. I had been gone the whole day, and for all of that time we had occupied different worlds. She was in the same state I had seen her in at home—incommunicative, a bit low, as people used to say. Of course it was the past breaking down the door. The word depression was never said aloud, and not from any sense of shame. I suspect neither Mum nor Dad would have thought it worthwhile troubling the doctor for an explanation.

Perhaps the cracks and fissures are carried forward. That my mother was undone by her past I have no doubt. The clues seeped from her. In her watchfulness, her eyes measured the air, always intensely aware of the climate in a room, alert to insult. Her crippling fear of rejection.

And yet, for someone like her, a victim of prejudice, oddly, she didn’t hesitate to cast a few stones of her own. Some of her intolerances were generational. Swearing was one. She couldn’t abide it—never swore herself. At least I never heard her. Violence was another—it disgusted her, as officially it does me too. But I also find myself helplessly drawn to its pulses. ‘Man’s inhumanity to man,’ she’d say during yet another interminable documentary showing wartime bodies piled up, dumped in wagons and hauled across the barren wastes. I thought it profound the first time I heard her say this, but tedious thereafter, to the point where I’d fold my arms and feel my lips draw in, and find myself wishing for some cataclysmic event of man’s inhumanity to man that would send bodies flying out of the television into the sitting room. One could always count on an ad break, a cup of tea and a biscuit.

It would also appear that she didn’t like Catholics. And of course it would come to pass that I didn’t like them either. I absorbed this prejudice as one might a family taste for a particular dish or a shared activity such as table tennis.

And so it seemed quite normal to be dismissive of our closest friends in the neighbourhood, the Browns, whose carpet I had been warned against spilling food on, as they trooped by our house each Sunday morning on their way to mass.

‘There they go—off to wipe the slate clean.’ I’d never heard her say anything with such forceful disdain.

I wasn’t sure of what she meant the first time, but tonally it sounded as though the Browns were off to commit some disgraceful act, and therefore Mum’s contempt seemed reasonable, even civically responsible, and soon I was bellowing out from the window, ‘There go the Browns, off to wipe the slate clean.’

It was hardly an ecclesiastical position. We would not have known what one was, since religion was never in our sights.

But the anger rang clear—quiet, and deeply felt—not as a loud or tossed-off irritability. Now I wonder if it was the Browns’ recourse to forgetting that she found so outrageously unacceptable.

My mother did not approve of vocal rage. It was undignified—and risky. Something might be revealed. And besides, it was not a free expression of self but a drowning, and as hopeless as the mad scrambling of a spider whirling around a plughole. She chose silence and withdrawal, and she brooded, and that was the air I grew up in, and breathed, a bruised air without any identifiable source.

Surprisingly for someone who had once sewn underclothing out of sack material for her children, Mum had a healthy sense of entitlement. I don’t know where she got it from. Certainly not from Dad, who assumed whatever new pile of shit was dumped on him was all part of the world’s curious design. Place them in a fairy tale, and Mum is on the winding path leading up to the palace, while Dad is heading off to the woodcutter’s shed.

Perhaps her ideas of dignity and entitlement came from an alternative world she dreamt for herself. Dreams are not so easily contained or dispensed with. They cannot be taken away either.

Dreams are rarely considered as matters of heritage. But in my mother’s case—perhaps in all—it would be a mistake to overlook dreams.

The kindling of revenge, but also of great deeds, and art, is forged in dreams.

As a child Tchaikovsky complained to his nanny about the noises in his head. They wouldn’t let him alone at night. One of those ‘noises’ would turn into ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’, which I first heard at primary school and then, years later, as part of an installation by Scott Eady at Te Papa Tongarewa. A tiny figure of a boxer stood on a turntable which was spun around by the tumbling motion of an agitator in an old washing machine to play the ‘Sugar Plum Fairy’. Who would have thought of bringing such disparate things together? And so successfully, as it seemed to me, partly because of the memories I happened to bring to the scene. Different phrases occurred to me. Some pertinent. Others that could have come from a washing-machine manual. ‘In the wash’, and ‘solar plexus’, and ‘agitator’—a vocabulary that quickly settled like compass points into familiar territory. The arbitrariness of encounter, where ‘things meet in kinship’, to borrow a phrase of Robert Musil’s, which I had written down years earlier and which surfaced, as if on a command from long ago, in the form of the boxer and Tchaikovsky. I thought of the shore we used to pick our way along, and what we used to find there, dismembered and discarded, and flung out from the centre of human activity. And I remembered the foul weather my father walked in, without complaint, the rain filling his shoes. In similar conditions, a boilermaker-poet by the name of Hone Tuwhare felt in his back pocket for paper and a pen and wrote about holes left in the air by rain. One of these men, I am certain, felt his heart lighten.

Kindness was my father’s radical response to the world. The agitator, however, has to shake the irritability out of himself somehow. For a few minutes I concentrated on the solar plexus of the washing machine, and soon enough my thoughts drifted to Bob Fitzsimmons’s famous left hook to the solar plexus of Gentleman Jim Corbett. Fitzsimmons, born in Cornwall but brought up in Timaru where his heavy arms were made on a smithy’s forge, was now world champion.

Later in life, Fitzsimmons meets Jack Johnson for one more tilt at glory. By now he is an old man in boxing terms, and a bit on the light side for a heavyweight. But it is easy enough to understand what lit his candle. When does one stop dreaming? In his mind Fitzsimmons sees the fight going his way: the formidable Johnson backs up and Fitzsimmons finds room for his celebrated left hook, and relives the moment it sank into the solar plexus of Gentleman Jim Corbett all those years ago, relishing yet again the superior look sliding off Corbett’s face, as if a second after the blow he too had seen the future.

In the same way that I had picked up Bob’s boxing glove in the backyard and his scraps of paper with the shuffle of boxers’ feet, I’d absorbed the story of Fitzsimmons’ left hook to Corbett’s solar plexus. Perhaps not to the extent of my brother, who would commission a bronze of the one-time blacksmith to stand on the corner of Stafford Street in Timaru, but, nevertheless, the powerful surges of ambition I experienced while taking in Scott Eady’s installation were not at all of my own making, but released inside me by another layer occupied by phantoms. I must have been dreaming on Fitzsimmons’ behalf.

I suppose I was taking a longer interest than most in the boxer spinning around on the turntable mounted on the washing machine. It had brought back such a flood of memories, taking me back to the washhouse air that was cool and latticed with dog hair and slow dog movement.

I was enjoying being back in the old washhouse when I became aware of the guard’s breathy crossing and unfolding of his arms. We were making each other nervous. He wished what I wished—we both wished that the other would just go away. Then came a throat clearance designed to alert me to the fact that he was watching me—which of course I took quite personally—just in case, as I suspect he had it in mind, I might try to cause trouble. It hadn’t occurred to me to cause trouble until then, but all of a sudden it did, and I felt a tremendous urge to smash Scott Eady’s installation. The impulse came and went, leaving me in a heightened state, flushed with possibility. Of course I would never do such a thing, but mentally I had already—smashed the little fucker on the turntable playing the ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ to send him skating across the museum floor. Mentally delivering a blow is not the same as executing the action. An earthquake does not have a dress rehearsal. A car crash is not technically one until it has happened. And so Scott Eady’s boxer was still campishly gliding around the turntable.

To make things worse, to inflame an already overheated situation, the guard managed a few more throat clearances. The funny thing is, eventually when I looked across to acknowledge him, I did not feel myself entirely blameless. Between the guard and me passed a separate world of cinematic scenes—in my case I saw Corbett on the canvas unable to get up and the white bony figure of Fitzsimmons turning away with the abstracted air of someone unwilling to take responsibility for the spilt milk. And as the guard nodded and I nodded back, like boxers exchanging mutual respect at the end of a particularly gruelling round, I fetched back a grainy scene from a film I barely remember except for the moment in it where the composer walks into a lake to drown himself. And instead of the violent clash that I had been gearing up for, we parted with a final nod. One from me. One from him. All perfectly civil.

In darkness lies the past. I will tiptoe by her closed door. The light is at the end of the hall. It is coming through the sitting room windows. I will head for the light.

I cannot think of a fiercer repudiation of the past than the one the ageing Krapp delivers in Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape. The drawn-out silence at the beginning of the play gives no clue to the incandescent rage that erupts halfway through.

I was in an audience that waited twenty minutes for Krapp to speak. Minutes ticked by—long minutes of dream-inducing time floated through the theatre, then Krapp (played brilliantly by Michael Gambon) stood—in rancorous silence—and the heads of the audience lifted as one. Someone coughed and Gambon seemed to pause as if he had heard it, and the tension rose to an unbearable level. It would have been perfectly acceptable had someone screamed out or fainted or knifed their neighbour.

Krapp walked slowly around the desk, dragging his knuckles against its edge. Our nerves were already jarred. Then he opened a drawer. He took out a banana, and he peeled it.

Hardly anything else happens in Krapp’s Last Tape, and so all this time later it is the banana scene that endures—which, frankly, I could have performed just as well—but not the explosive moment when, in a furious assault on the past, Krapp turned on the tape recording of his younger self. He pulled out the tape, hurled it to the floor and stomped all over his youth and its fake eloquence.

I always used to think of myself that any eloquence I might muster was almost certainly a false wind.

What I used to like, and admire, about Beckett was his austerity. What I saw was a life pared back to its essentials. The evidence was locked in his face, in that spiky hair of his, as sturdy as a cleaning brush. I assumed he led a monastic life and existed on a diet of bread and water. In portrait after portrait his face settles into a firm jaw, the hair rears away from the scalp, and the eyes are as keen as a hawk’s swooping low over a paddock. That is how I saw him, and how Beckett encouraged us to. In real life I never saw anyone quite like him. But in the imaginary landscape, he loomed—in the hacked hills and their gorse patches, and on a mad dog of a road as it twisted around corners and charged into successive stages of ugliness. I imagined Beckett’s grey cosmic attention drawing up miles of tarseal on its way to some hard scrabble beach, the top button done up on his jacket, his nose flinching at the faint smell of raw sewage.

One day, idle and nosing about in a secondhand bookshop, I happened to flick through a large book of photographs taken in the south of France. Tanned 1970s women in big hair and sunglasses. Maseratis. Umbrellas, beach balls. I turned a page to find Beckett striding up a path from the beach, a towel draped over his arm, in shorts, sunglasses, sandals. It was a shock to find him in this sunny environment. I had never thought of him as a sunbather or a wearer of sandals—and of a kind similar to the brand put out by the shoe factory back in its day. But there he was, in Cap Ferrat, as I recall, the ripe smell of summer bursting from his shadow. His long tanned legs striding out. His legs were another thing to square away. His legs were beside the point. Not part of the biography.

The problem with my past was that all the tapes, if any ever existed, had been destroyed.

One of the few stories with an unmistakably allegorical line handed on to me had to do with hard times.

Long before you came along. Mum could always be relied on to remind me just how lucky I was to have popped up behind that cabbage leaf when I did.

Long before I came along, Bob arrived home from school to ask Mum if he could buy his school lunch like the other kids. Apparently, buying your lunch at school was a new thing, and my brother wanted to try it. But of course there was no money for such an extravagance. Bob must have kept up his campaign because eventually Mum found a few pennies behind the couch for him. He chose a pie, a meat pie (on such details memories thrive) or was it a potato pie? But come the lunch hour he couldn’t eat it, and saved it instead to bring home to share.

After telling that story, Mum would nod into empty space, while I remained suitably in awe.

I might have missed it all, but I absorbed the anecdotes—the pie story and the one about Bob shooting himself—and laughed eagerly, as if I had been there, and developed a knowing smile when once more we were reminded that one sister could not be trusted to dish herself up a fair share of Spanish cream, Mum’s signature dish. Strangely, this fact has endured like some oddity stuck in the sand.

Continuing with my good fortune, I didn’t have to leave school at fifteen, as my sisters did, and unlike them I had a new tennis racquet and clothes bought from shops. By the age of twelve I had flown on a plane—to Sydney, then on to Surfers Paradise, where I had my first Hawaiian steak and sat speechless with joy in the holy grail of a beer garden nursing a fruit cocktail with a floating paper umbrella.

My mother dreamt of a life for herself different from the one she had landed in. She liked Englishness, good china, manners, and would often say so if someone was well spoken, but such types rarely visited 20 Stellin Street. When they did, we sat around in a circle like newly minted disciples. The one who could talk—and very persuasively—was my brother.

He did not so much smash as talk his way out of our working-class stocks, which was to make the way a great deal easier for me. I was lucky enough to attend university—not that I intended to, but he insisted. And because of Bob’s success in commercial property, Dad was able to retire from welding. Mum, who had cleaned houses to supplement the household income and sewn underpants for her kids, would fly first-class for the rest of her life, and once, memorably, in a chartered jet all around Australia. And because she could now afford to she shook the lines of depression and disappointment out of her face. For the last thirty years of her life, she took an anti-depressant pill every day. The effect was extraordinary. It seemed to strip away the protective layers to allow a different person to emerge—a far more cheerful person. It was not a mask she put on before our startled eyes but a part of her that had lain buried for so long without the means to emerge and express itself. She turned into a lovely old lady whose welcoming hug at the door and demand for a peck on her cheek suddenly felt weirdly inappropriate, even unsettling. I wasn’t used to this person, and if I could I would step around her and brush aside her protests. To be met at the door by all that charm and lipstick—it was too much. It was as if someone else who was only vaguely familiar had taken up residence inside her. Whenever I indulged her it felt like we were playing at something, like grappling with a foreign language, or acting out roles in a play for which we had only some of the lines.

Just as annoying, some old habits remained. She would yell at me as I reached for a piece of fruit in the bowl. She had just bought those bananas. What on earth made me think I could eat one? A week later, the bananas would still be there, soft, untouched, and covered in black spots.

Such moments might have been an act of solidarity with the single mums she taught to budget, something she knew quite a bit about, even though these days she drove a late-model Jaguar to the Citizens Advice Bureau in the Hutt to give advice to desperate young women arriving on the bus.

I am made aware of how the world is built from what lies near to hand. A musical instrument can be made by stringing sheep gut between two goat horns. And fate can intervene in surprising ways. Whoever would have thought of giving a flying ram to a nymph in order for her to rescue her children from a murderous father? Or to cast a spell over guard dogs and to steal their bark? And I know how theft can be a kind of comic correction to the world order, such as when stolen cattle are made to walk backwards to throw off their pursuers. Although, in the account of the myth I prefer, brushes are tied to the tails of the cattle bringing up the rear to erase all trace of their passing. I also understand that vengeance knows no restraint. Rulers are turned into ravens, their children into twittering birds, and betrayers into stone.

I know all about Hermes because ‘for the sake of my education’ Mum has taken out a subscription to Knowledge magazine, which now regularly turns up in the letterbox at 20 Stellin Street.

I’ve also read that Hermes, the interpreter of dreams and messenger of the gods, bestowed on the witness Aesop the gift of fable.

As it happens, I have a real-life magician in my life capable of spinning gold out of air.

Each Sunday, Bob comes home for the roast.

He parks his fabulously expensive sports car in the drive by the rubbish bins, which attracts the neighbourhood kids and dogs. He is often too excited to eat. Instead he paces up and down the small kitchen recounting adventures to do with his salesmen who sell advertising space to tradesmen in something called The Bride Book.

My brother brings into that tiny kitchen a life brimming with wild and outrageous stories. He is often at the heart of them. For diversion there is the map of the world pinned to the wall. My father keeps his head down and tucks solitarily into his meat and potatoes. It’s almost as if he can’t hear. On the other hand, he will sometimes remember me and before his mouth closes down on a forkful of meat call out across the table, ‘Capital of China?’

Bob’s stories have a touch of Robin Hood about them. Mum might smile, or catch herself to turn the smile into a look of official disapproval. Perhaps it is because the world that my brother brings to our attention has such different rules. As far as I can tell, there aren’t any. It’s a world in which Henry Fielding’s foundling bastard Tom Jones would flourish. In many ways, Tom Jones belongs in our family tree, along with Hermes. And here, too, a lesson was to be absorbed as completely as I had absorbed the pie story and less honourably Mum’s anti-Catholicism. You could be anyone and achieve anything. Secondly, ‘work’ was a loose and imaginative word. Our father had flogged himself half to death for nothing. From now on things would be different. My brother had found a way.

It was the 1960s, and huge tracts of the planet we are familiar with today—South America, to choose but one continent—did not register in any other way than on the map. In the world beyond the rubbish bins a young couple fell in love, got engaged, bought a section, and got cracking with building a house. Ideally the last nail was banged in as she dropped her first kid.

As corny as it sounds now, The Bride Book spoke of happier times ahead. Not so much for the couples. The business model behind The Bride Book didn’t really give a toss about them. No—happier times for the tradesmen, and the enormous business opportunities associated with a couple’s decision to get hitched, usually after the first fumbling in the back seat of a car parked down by the river.

A plumber or an electrician or a marriage celebrant, tilers and specialists in linoleum and lights and fittings—none of them could afford to miss out. Hermes could not have done better to come up with The Bride Book to exploit the standard fairy tale so irresistible from the beginning of time. The wonderful irony is that its creator came from a family riven with illegitimacy and abandonment.

The world beyond the rubbish bins, I understand, is a pantomime. Someone is always pretending to be someone they’re not. The men who work for Bob have nicknames like ‘Twelve Foot’. Like all extremely tall men, Twelve Foot came through the door with a bowed head and stayed like that after he sat down at the dinner table to tuck into Mum’s roast. Mr Moses was another pseudonym I heard, entirely appropriate for someone offering the Promised Land to a dazzled builder caught halfway up a ladder. And Rick, of course, who my mother objected to because, she said, he was good-looking. She also objected to his teeth, which, as far as I could see, were perfect. The smile and its flashing white teeth went into overdrive whenever he entered the kitchen. Mum would look away grimly. And Rick was canny enough to know to address Mum as Mrs Jones, never Joyce.

In the late 1960s Bob handed on The Bride Book to Lorraine’s husband Michael, who continued to run it from its Hutt offices on the street behind the riverbank.

After school I would pop in there to stuff calendars covered in trade ads into tubes.

Through the open office door I listened to Michael rehearse a new salesman. And it was like catching up with a story first heard around the Sunday roast years earlier. ‘Now, I will be Mr Brown. You be Mr Green.’

The trainee salesman would leave the office to compose himself as Mr Green. He barely noticed the kid in the corner stuffing tubes. But I noticed him, and a whole swag of other Mr Greens in their badly ironed white shirts and skinny black ties, each one with a face like a Mormon’s, young, spotty, lips mumbling the lines that would take him out to the world as Mr Green. He took a deep breath and disappeared around the office door. ‘Hello Mr Brown. I’m Mr Green…’ followed a few moments later by howls of laughter.

‘From Rags to Riches.’ I was nine or ten when I saw that headline. I remember the thrill of seeing Lorraine, then just a few years out of living in a caravan in the Hutt Park campground, photographed by the newspaper—there she was, in the paper, holding a model of a commercial building in Andrews Avenue, which on completion would become the tallest building in the Hutt, and owned by my brother.

Bob had become a millionaire, once upon a time a thing unimaginable to the inhabitants at 20 Stellin Street. But, at a deeper level, nothing much else was to change. The history that went untold was still manifestly present—in Dad’s struggle to make himself understood, in Mum’s neurosis.

In my own case, it was in an outsider’s feel for the margins, and a contempt for anyone who might think themselves part of the establishment, while, paradoxically, not necessarily condemning the idea of the establishment. One can still admire the crystal without feeling a need to own it. Pretension was the offending character trait.

It never occurred to me that my heritage also included a rich lineage of jesters and fools and risk-takers who could be depended upon to say aloud what everyone else thought but could not bring themselves to say.

But it also came with a recklessness. Words could lead you anywhere. It was just a matter of trusting them completely.

There was a time when I pursued my wife’s family lore all the way to the Ukraine. It didn’t seem such a crazy idea to seek out the source of a physical similarity between my eldest son and his great-grandfather. I did sometimes wonder if Jo’s grandfather really had been a violinist to the Czar, but there was his portrait in such proximity to our own lives, overseeing the scamper and hijinks of kids running up and down the hall, returning my own gaze with equanimity, as though he guessed my doubts and wished to reassure me that, yes, everything I’d heard was true.

This was big history, desirable history—and it happened in places that I wanted to visit. One year I travelled to Moldova, well outside the ‘family map’, and, being short of leads, I found myself inventing one. I said whatever needed to be said to persuade the Moldovan Embassy in Moscow to give me a visa, which is how I came to find myself sitting in a hotel room in Kishinev with a map open on my knees and a cross marked on Zura, a tiny village on the banks of the Dniester which tumbles down from the top of Russia to the Black Sea.

I liked the sound of Zura. It was so out of the way and unreachable that the only legitimate excuse to visit was to invent a family history that included Zura. I’d told the consul that my wife’s ancestor had floated down the Dniester until he reached Zura. And when did this happen? I could offer only approximate dates.

It seems preposterous now, but I remember calmly describing this piece of family history with the sangfroid of a salesman for The Bride Book or, for that matter, Arthur Leonard Jones inventing his drowned-at-sea story.

Otherwise Zura was a world that I would never have found. And, with some justification, grandfather Arthur Leonard Jones might claim that with the drowned-at-sea story he would never have found his third wife and, for all I know, happiness.

My interpreter was an out-of-work schoolteacher in Kishinev. Her boyfriend, an agricultural inspector, happened to know Zura; he drove there a few times a month. His tiny car was a familiar sight to the soldiers at the roadblocks at each bridge, and so we were waved through. There was a war on. Or one had just finished. A few weeks earlier we’d have been in Moldova. Now the border had moved and we were driving through Western Dniester. Eventually we came to Zura, a small village of unsealed roads. Across the river was Romania.

Without the thread of make-believe, I would never have met the old Jewish man. A crowd gathered around the cherry tree where I sat with the mayor and the interpreter and the agricultural inspector while we waited for the old man to turn up to shed light on my wife’s ancestors.

He duly arrived with a small briefcase much like the one Dad used to carry his sandwiches and tobacco in to the factory where he made fire engines.

Short, thin, weak-kneed, dressed for the occasion in a threadbare suit and a frayed shirt collar. Bits of newspaper flopped out the sides of his cracked shoes. His eyes were large and still, and never once blinked. His face was sparsely covered in grey stubble.

A chair was found for him. He was treated with much respect, which he took in his stride, or, as it later occurred to me, dismissed as too little and too late. He shook his head at the offer of a drink from a jug of cold red wine. His eyes tended to weep, and he kept dabbing at them with an old rag.

The air was cool out of the sun and where we sat under the tree was in partial shadow. I picked at the cherries and spat the stones onto the ground as I had seen the mayor do.

The old man set his briefcase on the table. Inside it were news clippings from the war. As they were written in Russian I handed them to the interpreter. A small crowd stood behind us. The interpreter put on her glasses. I could hear the river tinkling between the small houses. A car slowed down for a look, then drove on.

As the interpreter began to read the old man came to life. Every now and then he nodded at something she said, and when she ended he announced grandly that after he was drafted into the Soviet Army he had fought on every front. I remembered the evenings in front of the telly, the carts piled with bodies and the landscapes stitched with barbed wire, and, heard again Mum’s lament about man’s inhumanity to man.

His voice was surprisingly emphatic, like Mum’s at the end of her life when she seemed briefly to recover her voice, but not her control, so that her words came out in different registers, surprising too like an unexpected burp, and I remember thinking at the time that it was as though she was emptying the bilges of all the lives she had lived, one moment sounding like a little girl, harsh and guttural in the next, and then a scolding sound that was emphatic, such as her reprimand when I had reached for a banana; the old man in Zura sounded the same way as he stabbed the air with his finger and listed all the fronts he had fought on.

The crowd listened and nodded silently like a cast of extras, but now he was repeating himself and they waited patiently for something new. I endeavoured to look like I was listening hard before becoming distracted by the old man’s whiskers, noting again how distinct and sparse they were.

In the Soviet Army the old man had had countless brushes with death—his body was covered with shrapnel wounds—but being drafted undoubtedly saved his life. At the end of the war he made his way back to Zura to discover he had fought in a losing war after all. The Romanians had thrown every last Jew into the river, including all the members of his family.

The old man leant towards the interpreter and in a hoarse voice muttered at length. ‘Yes,’ she said. And, looking around for me, she added, ‘He is the last one left.’

No one spoke while the old man closed his briefcase and stood to leave. No one moved as he made his way out the gate. The interpreter took hold of my arm. ‘Any relative of your wife,’ she said, ‘almost certainly drowned in the river.’

I had taken to travel at quite a young age, thinking that if I moved through the world with my mouth, ears and eyes open, something would catch. And it did, fleetingly. The world flooded in through the windows of buses and trains across America and Europe. And at odd times a picture of Dad would slide into view—of him at the kitchen sink, gazing out through the window to the street with his ship-rail stare. And always it was a disappointing place to arrive back to, one that I had fled from because it seemed to locate me, as well as define me. And I didn’t wish for either.

But that winter, as I wandered through zones of dereliction in Christchurch, I was being nudged quietly homewards on currents I was hardly aware of.

The air in the city was thin, it almost hurt to breathe, and a week-old snow stuck around. I found myself outside the basilica staring through the barrier at the autumnal bronze leaves of a hornbeam tree. I was told the leaves would hold on until the spring growth began to come through. The tenacity of the hornbeam stood in stark contrast to everything crumbling around it. It would hang on until it didn’t need to. Things, it seems, had first to set, then unravel, for the new growth to begin. In this way old information had a way of becoming new information.