BURIED LIVES
MY mother’s brother had a farm on the pale loess clay and limestone of North Otago. It was an average farm concentrating on early lambs for the works, and even during his last years my uncle never received any startling offers for it. Its dry hills weren’t suitable for dairy conversion, and its soils didn’t favour the grapevines that became all the rage in the nearby Waitaki Valley. Yet it was sweet country when it did get rain, and quite free of gorse. The short grassed paddocks in the downs were rilled with sheep tracks: occasional outcrops of limestone were the grey of cigar ash. Almost always there was above it an unclouded eggblue sky and, although only landscape was visible, in the evenings skeins of seagulls beat their way towards the sea.
I visited a few times as a boy, but I lived there only once for fourteen months after I had a breakdown in my third year at university. My mother preferred to call it a crisis, my father told people I’d hit a rough patch, my mates probably reckoned I’d flunked out as a pothead. I had a breakdown, no matter what you chose to call it. It happened because of a relationship I had with a flatmate and his twin sister. I was getting stoned on prime West Coast shit a lot too. It sounds like a soap opera, I know, but the pain, guilt and confusion of it all finally brought me to an emotional standstill, and I could barely remember to eat, to close the door when I went to the lavatory, or attend the lectures for which I’d enrolled. I felt I lived my life on the bottom of one of those great, sea aquariums with species foreign to me passing as dim shapes soundlessly, and with their own fixed purpose, overhead.
Even in that place, however, I had a conviction that I didn’t want any formal treatment — no psychiatrists, no counsellors, no people unknown to me peering and mouthing through the thick glass of my isolation. Maybe a complete change then, my mother suggested, trying to keep anxiety from her voice, and she thought of her brother’s farm amid the quiet hills of North Otago. My father, who loved space and solitude, and had been denied both by
his career most of his life, was full of supportive agreement. The country was ideal for recovering from a rough patch, he thought, and with typical generosity he offered to buy me a secondhand car so that I could travel between home and farm whenever I liked.
Uncle Cliff and Aunt Sonia were contented people in whose home depression was an unfamiliar visitor. Sonia was the bright and vocal partner, Cliff a stubby, sunburnt man who thought the best of people. They had two daughters of effortless achievement. Evie had already qualified as a doctor when I went to live at the farm; Samantha was completing her architectural degree, and came home a few times while I was there, making me feel even more a failure in comparison, but through no intention of hers.
I was welcomed in the wooden, redroofed farmhouse and given Evie’s room, which was a chrysalis she had discarded, but still exact to the life she had led at home. Blue and yellow banded curtains, a tray of dwarf bottles of perfumes, lotions and nail polishes on the dressing table, Sellotape marks on the painted walls where her posters had been, and on the kitset bookcase her gymnastic and debating trophies — including a small greenstone plinth for best summing up at the South Island intersecondary school championships. Most of the books were from Evie’s childhood, which wasn’t all that long ago, but some, less read and more dignified, were prizes she had won at high school: The Works of Jane
Austen published by Spring
Books, History of Rome by M. Cary, and a hardcover Moby
Dick. Clothing she no longer needed remained folded in the drawers and hanging in the wardrobe, all with a faint, girlish fragrance. At various times and in flagrant abuse of her privacy I examined all of Evie’s life left behind: even the seven letters from Shane Tomlinson which were tied in a small bundle with dental floss, and hidden under a pile of notes for scholarship biology. In the sixth form she had the best legs in the world according to Shane.
Dr Evie’s room spoke of normality, cleanliness and achievement. It had no sign of the trivial sordidness of my own life, and in the months I inhabited it I felt like a Visigoth camped in a Roman villa. Even my male clothes and large footwear seemed uncouth and out of place. I masturbated seldom and with great furtiveness, aware of the disgust in the expressions of Evie’s dolls ranged behind the trophies. In a strange but powerful way I associated Samantha and Evie and their white, girlish rooms, with Rebecca, twin sister of Richard, and a good part of the reason that I was in my uncle’s house at all surrounded by a specific family folklore to which I did not belong. ‘What shall we do that’s terrible?’ Rebecca would say when we’d been drinking, or smoking shit, or just because lectures were over for the week, and by terrible she meant some excess she could laugh at.
How different she was from my cousins, yet similar in the ease with which she achieved those things she wanted.
Outside the house was completely different: I belonged there from the first. The yards lay down the slope from the farmhouse, and on the south and west sides were windbreaks of pine and macrocarpa which reached over the implement sheds, the dog cages and the disused concrete dip. The downs rose and fell beyond with paddocks worn to bare dirt at each gateway, and the sheep tracks straggling away over the short, brown pasture. Some of the lower land would be green with lucerne, or in season the low, paler foliage of turnips and chou. From the top hill paddocks you couldn’t see the red roof of the farmhouse, or any neighbouring houses, just the grassed hills tumbling towards the Waitaki and back towards the mountains. When I got the shakes, or felt the foreign shapes of the aquarium too oppressive, or Aunt Sonia’s cheerful solicitude became too contrary to my own apathy, then I would have a long run, or let out one of the dogs and walk up to the back of the farm. The dogs enjoyed the release, but they never obeyed me. It was only occasionally that I did something useful there — rescued a cast sheep perhaps, or secured a bit of fence washed out in the gully, but Uncle Cliff always thanked me, as if he had sent me there expressly himself. It was a landscape of masculine reticence, which was something of a comfort: perhaps it was the extension of my uncle’s temperament beyond himself.
During my time on the farm, Cliff never once mentioned the reason for my presence, and insisted on paying me a small wage. He told the neighbours and friends we met that I’d been kind enough to come and give him a hand for a while. We could work for hours together without words, or awkwardness; at other times he would talk of parts of his life spent crayfishing in the Chathams, and in North Island shearing gangs, before he’d bought the farm. In the winter, bulked up even more with jersey and a frayed parka, he looked almost square: as if he would reach the same height on his side as standing up. Out of the house he allowed himself a few rollyourowns each day, and there’d be a brief flame at the cigarette’s tip as he lit it. His other indulgence was mints, like great white pills, and he always had some in his pocket to share. Whenever we were close, putting in a strainer post perhaps, or bent over a recalcitrant engine, I would have the hybrid tobacco and mint smell of his breath. If I come across those scents now I’m reminded of his straightgrained goodness.
I was able to relieve Cliff of most of the tractor work while I was there. Years of hard slog were catching up on him, and his back played up on the jolting tractor. Harrowing and discing especially are repetitious, undemanding tasks, and I spent hours outwardly circling in the worked paddocks, while inwardly still circling Richard and Rebecca.