Lloyd Jones - Mister Pip

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Mister

Pip

OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

Swimming to Australia

Biografi

This House Has Three Walls

Choo Woo

The Book of Fame

Here at the End of the World We Learn to DancePaint Your Wife

Mister

Pip

L l o y d J o n e s

T h e D i a l P r e s s

mister pip

First Published by The Text Publishing Company, Australia, 2006

A Dial Press Book / August 2007

Published by The Dial Press

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved

Copyright 2006 by Lloyd Jones

Book design by Virginia Norey The Dial Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jones, Lloyd, 1955

Mister Pip / Lloyd Jones.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-440-33716-4

1. Books and readingFiction. 2. StorytellingFiction. 3. Bougainville Island (Papua New Guinea)Fiction. I. Title.

PR9639.3.J644M57 2007

823'.914dc22

2007005224

www.dialpress.com

To my family

Characters migrate.

Umberto Eco

Mister

Pip

EVERYONE CALLED HIM POP EYE. EVEN IN

those days, when I was a skinny thirteen-year-old, I thought he probably knew about his nickname but didnt care. His eyes were too interested in what lay up ahead to notice us barefoot kids.

He looked like someone who had seen or known great suffering and hadnt been able to forget it. His large eyes in his large head stuck out further than anyone elseslike they wanted to leave the surface of his face. They made you think of someone who cant get out of the house quickly enough.

Pop Eye wore the same white linen suit every day. His trousers snagged on his bony knees in the sloppy heat.

Some days he wore a clowns nose. His nose was already big. He didnt need that red lightbulb. But for reasons we couldnt think of he wore the red nose on certain days

which may have meant something to him. We never saw him smile. And on those days he wore the clowns nose you found yourself looking away because you never saw such sadness.

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Lloyd Jones

He pulled a piece of rope attached to a trolley on which Mrs. Pop Eye stood. She looked like an ice queen. Nearly every woman on our island had crinkled hair, but Grace had straightened hers. She wore it piled up, and in the absence of a crown her hair did the trick. She looked so proud, as if she had no idea of her own bare feet. You saw her huge bum and worried about the toilet seat. You thought of her mother and birth and that stuff.

At two-thirty in the afternoon the parrots sat in the shade of the trees and looked down at a human shadow one-third longer than any seen before. There were only the two of them, Mr. and Mrs. Pop Eye, yet it felt like a procession.

The younger kids saw an opportunity and so fell in behind. Our parents looked away. They would rather stare at a colony of ants moving over a rotting pawpaw. Some stood by with their idle machetes, waiting for the spectacle to pass. For the younger kids the sight consisted only of a white man towing a black woman. They saw what the parrots saw, and what the dogs saw while sitting on their scrawny arses snapping their jaws at a passing mosquito.

Us older kids sensed a bigger story. Sometimes we caught a snatch of conversation. Mrs. Watts was as mad as a goose.

Mr. Watts was doing penance for an old crime. Or maybe it was the result of a bet. The sight represented a bit of uncertainty in our world, which in every other way knew only sameness.

Mrs. Pop Eye held a blue parasol to shade herself from the sun. It was the only parasol in the whole of the island, Mister Pip

3

so we heard. We didnt ask after all the black umbrellas we saw, let alone the question: what was the difference between these black umbrellas and the parasol? And not because we cared if we looked dumb, but because if you went too far with a question like that one, it could turn a rare thing into a commonplace thing. We loved that word

parasoland we werent about to lose it just because of some dumb-arse question. Also, we knew, whoever asked that question would get a hiding, and serve them bloody right too.

They didnt have any kids. Or if they did they were grown up and living somewhere else, maybe in America, or Australia or Great Britain. They had names. She was Grace and black like us. He was Tom Christian Watts and white as the whites of your eyes, only sicker.

There are some English names on the headstones in the church graveyard. The doctor on the other side of the island had a full Anglo-Saxon name even though he was black like the rest of us. So, although we knew him as Pop Eye we used to say Mr. Watts because it was the only name like it left in our district.

They lived alone in the ministers old house. You couldnt see it from the road. It used to be surrounded by grass, according to my mum. But after the minister died the authorities forgot about the mission and the lawn mower rusted. Soon the bush grew up around the house, and by the time I was born Mr. and Mrs. Pop Eye had sunk out of view of the world. The only times we saw them was when Pop Eye, looking like a tired old nag circling the well, 4

Lloyd Jones

pulled his wife along in the trolley. The trolley had bamboo rails. Mrs. Pop Eye rested her hands on these.

To be a show-off you need an audience. But Mrs. Pop Eye didnt pay us any attention. We werent worthy of that.

It was as if we didnt exist. Not that we cared. Mr. Watts interested us more.

Because Pop Eye was the only white for miles around, little kids stared at him until their ice blocks melted over their black hands. Older kids sucked in their breath and knocked on his door to ask to do their school project on him. When the door opened some just froze and stared. I knew an older girl who was invited in; not everyone was.

She said there were books everywhere. She asked him to talk about his life. She sat in a chair next to a glass of water he had poured for her, pencil in hand, notebook open. He said: My dear, there has been a great deal of it. I expect more of the same. She wrote this down. She showed her teacher, who praised her initiative. She even brought it over to our house to show me and my mum, which is how I know about it.

It wasnt just for the fact he was the last white man that made Pop Eye what he was to usa source of mystery mainly, but also confirmation of something else we held to be true.

We had grown up believing white to be the color of all the important things, like ice cream, aspirin, ribbon, the moon, the stars. White stars and a full moon were more important when my grandfather grew up than they are now that we have generators.

Mister Pip

5

When our ancestors saw the first white they thought they were looking at ghosts or maybe some people who had just fallen into bad luck. Dogs sat on their tails and opened their jaws to await the spectacle. The dogs thought they were in for a treat. Maybe these white people could jump backwards or somersault over trees. Maybe they had some spare food. Dogs always hope for that.