I guessed, by the large number of graves, that it wasn’t just my family that carried secrets through life. I wanted to know them, to hear them spoken out loud and explained. When riding around and over the silent ground I felt like an explorer trying to hear murmurs from below, attempting to trace secreted words, words that might explain my father’s past. When I stopped and listened, all I could hear were occasional birds whistling from the cypresses, distant road traffic and distressing spontaneous cries from crouched grievers, living people begging the dead to engage in conversations.
When night began to fall I would return home. Our family was crammed into a timeworn, yellow painted house, set between others of similar vintage and condition, collections of chalky weatherboards with cracking paint and rusty, salt-corroded roofs. At night in bed I listened to sounds coming from darkened bedrooms. Siblings snoring, our parents’ muffled voices murmuring late into the darkness. Their speech was slower, duller than the sing-song sounds they had used to calm their children just a few hours earlier by reading bedtime stories. My mind had been busy with the joy of ‘The Faraway Tree’ characters that were full of colour and rhyme, Enid Blyton stories filled with laugher and joy, to lull me to slumber. Sleep didn’t always follow.
What did follow was often fear and terror. Anxiety fuelled by thinking of the voices that were in the ground, coming up into my home. Sounds of war and crying from my parents’ bedroom, then silence.
As a young child I learnt to absorb the many different night noises in my home. Sounds my older siblings already knew became my first, unspoken understanding of behaviour. Our corrugated iron roof creaked at night while the small rooms were filled with sighs, whines, groans and whispers. Sneaking footsteps and tapping fingers all combined to build unconscious meanings, not needing words. As bats navigate the dark with sonar, so did my bothers and sister, we shared our communal emotional life and protective language to read the temperature of our father’s internal warfare traumas.
As I grew older, family stories would sometimes flow in and out of mind, they would rattle around like ghosts on a windy night. When I was eighteen and my father was in his grave, I asked my mother why Aunt Kate had never spoken with her brother Luke. Mum took a long time to respond, she looked at me, then said, “I don’t really know but your father knew, he never told me, and now he has taken that story with him.”
We were a family fixed in a period of immense social change. My siblings and I matured into adults having mastered the ability to steer our behaviours carefully and be vigilant of our father’s reactions. We had become accomplished dancers in order to safely move around our parents. Emotional navigation was part of our survival. Although very different people we have shared a set of habits through our lives. Behaviours that one day will be taken to our graves, perhaps to rest deep in lasting peace.
