Envy of Lies

Green army surplus paint flaking from the cottage invites me in to sit and stare through the thin wavy glass at the otherwise dreary day. The wind whistles here and there and I resign to my solitude amongst the dank, dark smells of rope and arid decay. There are no luxuries here, I don’t want for luxury as far as avarice might heed.

The green terre verte of the sombre bush, beckons and repels simultaneously so as to ensure I keep my bay. I resolve to make a cup of tea, the warmth of which I must absorb through cupped hands surrounding the mug. My feelings never far from my thoughts, and I fear life is short.

Do not speak child for you shall not be heard. The adults sternly defy the beauty of totality held within the bosom of humanity. Cold hard no-nonsense matter of fact lives beholden to the mercy of generations past, unable to clear the clouds of banal mediocrity instilled as lore.

Drinking adults as if they’re adult, and laughing like they understand. A child watches, helpless pawns unable to distinguish fear from love, anxiety from norm, all the world with all its scorn, pervading the silence within the collective assembly of hypocritical patronage.

Quietly acquiescent, a shyly smile daren’t give way to independent interpretation for fear of ridicule most assuredly assured. So silence becomes the way, meandering thoughts corralled and released without the true release of spoken freedom. So I sit in silence as thoughts swirl round my feet, kick them aside for another day To meet, if ever they air.

”shut up boy, that’s not the way, you bloody poofter, you’re in the way. Bite your tongue kid and lose your swagger, writing bloody stories, go and shoot an animal”.

i wandered off and picked a piece of paspalum grass, pulling it slowly so as not to break the stem, as the juicy part is at the bottom. Off I ventured to the back of the farm where I found solace in the bush. The bush never spoke back but sometimes it snarled. I stood at the edge feeling its mood, sometimes I wanted So much to enter but the foreboding feeling was too much for a twelve year old, and the terrifying talk allowed me not to enter.

As I sit and reflect in a little hut, and the rivulets run down the glass, I but wonder how these instances collected to become the bunch of collected moments that is me.

The adults, some wearing hats, sat and stood drinking, Red, blue and black checked long sleeved shirts tucked into long gaudy trousers bunched at the waist by a belt. Drinking and ’noising’ as the children were shunted off or into bedrooms out of sight.

It‘s scary for a child in a different house. The smell of cut macrocarpa and mahogany emanates from the timber shed out back, mingled with cigarette smoke and alcohol throughout the house. Wooden floors allowed no dampening of the din.

I tried my best to stay awake but the hours ticked by and my eye lids closed. People pinballed up the hallway to where the lavatory stunk at the rear, urine was all over the floor. The noise was louder when they left the door open and every now and then the room where I lay in terrified darkness was accidentally opened by another stagger. Sometimes it was not opened accidentally.

My grandmother was able to drive back then, The old leathery smell of the old Morris Oxford with the indicators that flicked out of the side was a sense of comfort for me. My entire silent world was encapsulated in the smells of summer, the smells of the moments I was living, the musty blankets weighing upon my little frame, the leather saddles adorning the shed and the hay, and the mixture of mud and cow manure embedded in the grip of the gum boots lining the porch, not to mention the foot odour.

As a young child, being spoken to elicited the mainstay responses,

”good thank you”, “no thank you”, “yes please”. That was about it. Children weren’t allowed to think for themselves, let alone express thoughts or emotion.

I was a young child navigating as best I could. There were savages everywhere. Drunken rowdy, card playing, beer swilling, fighting savages who by the light of day feigned normality. I was unable to articulate that many or most had probably grown up in similarly savage circumstances, only ever seeing them as they were from a child’s perspective. Grown men drinking and being merry. Joking, smoking, swearing, drinking, fighting and drinking.

we waited patiently in the car, we were sometimes checked on and reminded “just one more drink and we’ll go home”. One more and just one more. I despise that saying now. Darkness fell and sometimes snooze.

Sometimes to be woken by yelling and shouting of the highest order, and glass smashing and all this being terrifying as a child woken from slumber. It was never anybody’s fault, if so it was the other guy, Māori and pākeha alike reduced to the grovelling display of treacherous drunkenness with toothless gummy smiles beneath unintelligible glazed eyes. My if I could have spoken but I was just a kid, impaled on his thoughts which were mounting up from the heel to the heart.

When summer arrived it seemed to go on forever. We fortunately went to beaches, mainly one which was fairly deserted but we liked it that way. Here I found a sense of pride somehow. The whole family would go, even my aunts, uncles and cousins. We would spend the whole day in surf and sun. At lunch the kids were required to collect driftwood whereupon a makeshift barbecue was created and sausages cooked. I don’t remember eating anything at the beach without sand as an accompaniment. The feeling of sand between the teeth whilst turning from the wind is etched in my psyche as much as the leathery smell of my grandmothers Morris Oxford interior.

Having been recently the Great Depression and the Great War, fortunes were not great and every penny was hard earned. There were no luxuries except for the love of a nurturing mother. I never realised it at the time, but mother fed us kids, she washed our clothes, changed our bedding, sung us lullaby’s at night, her soothing voice as I drifted off surely countered the horrific nightmares that would ensue. Waking in the night to traumatic events so real, ghosts in my wardrobe and imaginary creatures who became my only true friends in my world of silence. I never thought for one moment that my imaginary friends were not real. Their names were Tanny and Punnel of which one was a human sized white mouse who dressed, walked and spoke like a human. The other one was a human. They eventually went to America and I never saw them again.

I did however see the Men in Black. Always they would come at night and stand at the end of my bed. Two male like figures with no faces, impeccably dressed in black suits and black bowler hats. They never spoke words but they certainly said something. These guys appeared on numerous occasions and scared the living daylights out of me. If I called for my parents they would disappear right at the last minute. They had an ominous presence but also in a strange kind of way it felt like they were protecting me, from what I was unaware.

”Harden up boy, what are ya, man or mouse?. Bloody little poofter, who do you think you are?”. So it was important to just smile and listen to “ oh hasn’t he got tall”, “how are you lad?”. “How old are you now lad?”. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”.

You daren’ t answer the last question for no matter what you replied, it would be met with mocking laughter. So silence ensued as the order of the day.

My whole world consisted of a ten mile radius basically, and to me that was fine. I could see the edges of my world in the ranges by the sky. I had my solace within and could escape to the bush to be free in a sense that I came to understand as just being the bush and I. The bush talks to me, but sometimes not. Sometimes the silence would become too much for average human comfort levels so I would have to talk out loud or violently shake my head from side to side to dispel the cacophony. Then to look at a fantail flitting about so close, not following any particular path but on a mission all the same.

The trickling waterfall over the river rocks provided me with a comfort I wasn’t aware of, I kept returning there and so it became my base. My home away from home where I could still be silent yet my thoughts were heard. In this river I found two stones from the gizzards of Moa, not at the same time but Moa stones all the same. Their polished beauty and little scars defining a time gone by.

It was common for lots of houses, particularly in the country, to be painted in army green of the day. We had splendid army surplus stores, and green paint they certainly had a surplus of, left over from World War Two. As children we also hankered for the army jackets and the highly coveted ‘over the shoulder’ thick canvass army bags. The jackets were hideous to wear, short so the wind froze your waist and horridly itchy to the skin. However we wore them anyway, elevating ourselves to the rank of soldiers with our hand made wooden guns. I was never happy with my wooden guns as they were just not authentic enough.

Life is death and death is life on the farm. It was my duty to chop the roosters heads off, place the body in hot water so as to remove the plumage through painstaking plucking by hand, gut them and of course chase younger siblings with the claw feet whilst pulling on the tendons so as to make appear still alive. Sticking the pig was Uncles job but I still had to help build the fire under the cast iron bathtub in the paddock and warm it full of water in which we would place the pig in order to remove the bristly hair.

The simplicity of life I was ok with but there were dark moments and then there were very dark moments. Torn to shreds by tormenting thoughts, never being able to escape for escapes sake, and so it was. Charting a way through the milieu known as life, thinking it was all ahead of me but really it was here now, nothing much would change. I enjoyed the art of Colin McCahon and the writings of Janet Frame. They resonated in a sense that bestowed the enormity of everything the 1950’s New Zealand, Aotearoa had to offer. The golden years, yes they really were The golden years of innocence but alas the golden years of hindrance also. In my heart and entire being there is a yearning for the innocent summer days, the long hot summers that somehow fed the beauty of life at its fullest but also its worst. The smell of jonquils and violets as I walked my Aunty’s path gave me memories of which to grasp forever. The smell as we entered the house, that effervescent smoke ingrained wood from the daily coal range use. The warmth was always there even when the fire was not lit.

Music was to be found in the noises of farm machinery operating in the paddocks near and far. The cerulean blue skies with the constant distant drone of a single engined aircraft. A Cesna perhaps, but to me a Tiger Moth. Yet the foreboding sense of anxiety and insecurity riddled my being so as to never allow the full beauty to comprehend itself upon me, whisked away like the thief in The night absconding down the darkened alleyway.

So it was and so it is, life creeping over the top and enveloping like a tidal wave about to break and shatter any fanciful ideals of eternal beauty so deserved by all. To despair is to fail, so picking over the slim pickings of shattered innocence, one grasps the shards of sunbeams still piercing through the shallow din of modern mediocrity. Dreaming and day dreaming, and resigning to never again grasping the long lost days of such magnificent dynamics lost to the vast sea of time. Time does not discern, today is forever yet today is so far away. A distant past but a yearning memory of love and wanting to relive and reshape the meandering path.

So here we are, sitting alone, staring out the olden glass to a sullen sky so moody I only wish to be absorbed and folded up into the sinkhole of the ether and released to the forever being truly free.

Nothing changes, seeking change without forces change within one may think, but nothing really changes is what I have learnt. My act of pushing people away seeks to reassure my belief they are not needed. The weeds of life must be laid down and never be allowed to grow again. Trample the needless weeds so the flowers may flourish. Grow the flowers my children, never let the seeds of mediocrity sprout in your garden. Keep the garden fresh and water the lovely flowers so they may never die.

When I saw the lies being bandied about, when I was forced to lie myself and made to look ridiculous for telling the truth, I realised what a farce it all was. How could he say it wasn’t when I knew in fact it was?. Retreat again, find a retreat, build another hut. More barriers that would never be torn down even though I sought to see the light yearning to display its rays through the cracked facade of decaying untruth. Rotten boards and rusting iron betraying the secrets buried deep within.

In due course the muddled, befuddled, twisted realities became unfurled as the galleon lost its sails in the vicious storm and headed steadfast towards the rocks only to shatter into a thousand splinters. Then the explosion. Like the powder keg tempted for so long by the furnace next door. Finally a spark that cannot be dampened by the impending storm, makes its way into the fuselage and explodes with a ferocity without exception. Pent up anger, frustration, helplessness and yearning all combined to create the cacophony of noise unable to be rescinded through the norms of banality.

So it was and so it may be, to seek the solace of the warmth of the sun, the melody of the music and the smells of the flowers. To hear the roar of the ocean to belittle myself and be aware that the ferocity is not mine to yield.

The moss is wet upon the step,

rivulets of rain take me again

to the farmhouse green

of army surplus it seems.

Haunting bush with

tranquility

and stillness of life

and purity.