Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Begin Reading
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by the Author
Copyright
To my family
“Characters migrate.”
—Umberto Eco
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 didn’t 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 hadn’t been able to forget it. His large eyes in his large head stuck out further than anyone else’s—like they wanted to leave the surface of his face. They made you think of someone who can’t 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 clown’s nose. His nose was already big. He didn’t need that red lightbulb. But for reasons we couldn’t 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 clown’s nose you found yourself looking away because you never saw such sadness.
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, so we heard. We didn’t 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—parasol—and we weren’t 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 didn’t 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 minister’s old house. You couldn’t 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, 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 didn’t pay us any attention. We weren’t worthy of that. It was as if we didn’t 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 wasn’t just for the fact he was the last white man that made Pop Eye what he was to us—a 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.
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.
The first white my grandfather saw was a shipwrecked yachtsman who asked him for a compass. My grandfather didn’t know what a compass was, so he knew he didn’t have one. I picture him clasping his hands at his back and smiling. He wouldn’t want to appear dumb. The white man asked for a map. My grandfather didn’t know what he was asking for, and so pointed down at the man’s cut feet. My grandfather wondered how the sharks had missed that bait. The white man asked where he had washed up. At last my grandfather could help. He said it was an island. The white man asked if the island had a name. My grandfather replied with the word that means “island.” When the man asked directions to the nearest shop, my grandfather burst out laughing. He pointed up at a coconut tree and back over the white’s shoulder whence he had come, meaning the bloody great ocean stocked with fish. I have always liked that story.
Other than Pop Eye or Mr. Watts, and some Australian mine workers, I’d seen few other living whites. The ones I had seen were in an old film. At school we were shown the visit by the duke of something or other many years before in nineteen-hundred-and-something. The camera kept staring at the duke and saying nothing. We watched the duke eat. The duke and the other whites wore mustaches and white trousers. They even wore buttoned-up jackets. They weren’t any good at sitting on the ground either. They kept rolling over onto their elbows. We all laughed—us kids—at the whites trying to sit on the ground as they would in a chair. They were handed pig trotters in banana leaves. One man in a helmet could be seen asking for something. We didn’t know what until he was brought a piece of white cloth, which he used to wipe his mouth. We roared our heads off laughing.
Mostly, though, I was watching out for my grandfather. He was one of the skinny kids marching by in bare feet and white singlets. My grandfather was the second to top kid kneeling in a human pyramid in front of the white men in helm
ets eating pig trotters. Our class was asked to write an essay on what we had seen, but I had no idea what it was about. I didn’t understand the meaning of it so I wrote about my grandfather and the story he told of the shipwrecked white man he had found washed up like a starfish on the beach of his village, which in those days had no electricity or running water and didn’t know Moscow from rum.
WHAT I AM ABOUT TO TELL RESULTS, I think, from our ignorance of the outside world. My mum knew only what the last minister had told her in sermons and conversations. She knew her times tables and the names of some distant capitals. She had heard that man had been to the moon but was inclined not to believe such stories. She did not like boastfulness. She liked even less the thought that she might have been caught out, or made a fool of. She had never left Bougainville. On my eighth birthday I remember thinking to ask her how old she was. She quickly turned her face away from me, and for the first time in my life I realized I had embarrassed her.
Her comeback was a question of her own. “How old do you think I am?”
When I was eleven, my father flew off on a mining plane. Before that, though, he was invited to sit in a classroom and watch films about the country he was going to. There were films on pouring tea: the milk went in the cup first—though when you prepared your bowl of cornflakes the milk went in after. My mum says she and my father argued like roosters over that last one.
Sometimes when I saw her sad I knew she would be thinking back to that argument. She would look up from whatever she was doing to say, “Perhaps I should have shut up. I was too strong. What do you think, girl?” This was one of the few times she was seriously interested in my opinion and, like the question concerning her age, I always knew what to say to cheer her up.
My father was shown other films. He saw cars, trucks, planes. He saw motorways and became excited. But then there was a demonstration of a pedestrian crossing. You had to wait for a boy in a white coat to raise his sign with “sticks up!”
My father got scratchy. There were too many roads with hard edges and these kids in white coats had the power to control traffic with their stop signs. Now they argued again. My mum said it was no different here. You couldn’t just walk where you liked. There was a clip over the ear if you strayed. ’Cause, she said, it was as the Good Book says. You might know about heaven but it didn’t mean you had entry as of right.
For a while we treasured a postcard my father sent from Townsville. This is what he had to say: Up to the moment the plane entered the clouds he looked down and saw where we lived for the very first time. From out at sea the view is of a series of mountain peaks. From the air he was amazed to see our island look no bigger than a cow pat. But my mum didn’t care about that stuff. All my mum wanted to know was if where he had gone to there were pay packets.
A month later there was a second postcard. He said pay packets hung off factory rafters like breadfruit. And that settled it. We were going to join him—that’s what we were going to do, when Francis Ona and his rebels declared war on the copper mine and the company, which, in some way that I didn’t understand at the time, brought the redskin soldiers from Port Moresby to our island. According to Port Moresby we are one country. According to us we are black as the night. The soldiers looked like people leached up out of the red earth. That’s why they were known as redskins.
News of war arrives as bits of maybe and hearsay. Rumor is its mistress. Rumor, which you can choose to believe or ignore. We heard that no one could get in or out. We didn’t know what to make of that, because how could you seal off a country? What would you tie it up in or wrap around it? We didn’t know what to believe, then the redskin soldiers arrived, and we learned about the blockade.
We were surrounded by sea, and while the redskins’ gunboats patrolled the coastline their helicopters flew overhead. There was no newspaper or radio to guide our thoughts. We relied on word of mouth. The redskins were going to choke the island and the rebels into submission. That’s what we heard. “Good luck to them,” said my mum. That’s how much we cared. We had fish. We had our chickens. We had our fruits. We had what we had always had. In addition to that, a rebel supporter could add, “We had our pride.”
Then, one night, the lights went out for good. There was no more fuel for the generators. We heard the rebels had broken into the hospital in Arawa, further down the coast, and taken all the medical supplies. That news really worried our mums, and soon the littlest kids came down with malaria and there was nothing that could be done to help them. We buried them and dragged their weeping mothers away from their tiny graves.
Us kids hung around with our mums. We helped in the gardens. We stalked each other beneath trees that rise several hundred feet in the air. We played in the streams that tumble and spill down steep hillsides. We found new pools in which to look for our floating faces of mischief. We played in the sea and our black skins got blacker under the sun.
We stopped going to school after our teachers had left on the last boat for Rabaul. The last boat. That sentence made our faces droop. We’d have to walk on water to get off the island now.
Everyone was surprised that Pop Eye didn’t leave when he had the chance. Even though Mrs. Watts was a local he could have taken her. The other whites did. They took their wives and girlfriends. These were company men, of course. No one knew what Pop Eye did; he did no work as far as we could tell. He was invisible for most of the time.
Our houses sat beached in a sloppy row, all of them gaping back at the sea. Doors and windows were always left open, so it was easy to overhear the conversation of neighbors. Nobody heard the conversation of the Wattses because of the distance between our thirty or so houses and the old mission house where they lived.
Sometimes you saw Mr. Watts at one end of the beach or caught a glimpse of his back, and then you wondered where he had been and what he had been doing. And there were those strange processions. The Wattses would come into view near the classroom block. As they arrived at the first houses chickens and roosters wandered out to meet them. At the end of the row Mr. Watts towed his wife across the lumpy grass and past the pigpens to the bush line. We sat in the trees, waiting for them to pass beneath our dangling feet. We hoped he might stop for a break and a word with Mrs. Watts, because no one had seen them speaking together as man and wife. In any case, to catch Mrs. Watts’ ear you felt the language would have to be big, even enormous, scripted out in a series of lightning bolts.
It was easy to accept she was mad. Mr. Watts was more of a mystery because he’d come out of a world we didn’t really know. My mum said his tribe had forgotten him. They wouldn’t have left behind a company man.
I did not realize what a big impact the school had on my life until it closed. My sense of time was governed by the school year—when term began, when it ended, the holidays between. Now that we had been set free we had all this time on our hands. When we woke we no longer felt the brooms on our backsides or our mums shouting at us to Ged up! Ged up, you lazybones!
We still woke when the roosters did, but now we lay there, listening to the dogs open their jaws and growl in their sleep. We also listened out for the mosquito, which we feared more than the redskins or the rebels.
We learned to eavesdrop on our parents—though some things we could see for ourselves. We were used to the redskins’ helicopters buzzing in and out of the cloud around the mountain peaks. Now we saw them head out to sea in a straight line. The helicopter would reach a certain point, then turn around and come back as if it had forgotten something. Where they turned back was just a pinprick in the distance. We could not see the men thrown out. But that’s what we heard. The redskins flung the captured rebels out the open door of the helicopter, their arms and legs kicking in the air. And whenever us kids strayed into range our mums and dads would stop talking, and so we knew, didn’t we, that there was some fresh atrocity, the details we didn’t yet know about.
The weeks passed. Now we had an idea of what our time was for. It was to be spent wai
ting. We waited, and we waited for the redskin soldiers, or the rebels, whoever got here first. It was a long, long time before they came to our village. But I know exactly when they did because that’s what I had made up my mind to do—I had decided I would keep the time. It was three days before my fourteenth birthday when the redskins came into our village for the first time. Four weeks later the rebels arrived. But in the time leading up to those calamitous events, Pop Eye and his wife, Grace, came back into our lives.
GED UP, MATILDA,” MY MUM YELLED ONE morning. “You’ve got school today.” She must have enjoyed that moment. I could tell it cheered her up just to say it. As if we had slipped back into a comfortable old routine. I happened to know it was a Wednesday. My mum wouldn’t have known that. I kept a pencil under my mat. And a calendar of days on the corner post.
My mum swept her broom near my head. She shouted at a rooster that had flown in the door.
“But we have no teachers,” I said.
And with a glimmer of a smile, my mum said, “You do now. Pop Eye is going to teach you kids.”
BOUGAINVILLE IS ONE of the most fertile places on earth. Drop a seed in the soil and three months later it is a plant with shiny green leaves. Another three months and you are picking its fruit. But for a machete, we would have no land of our own. Left alone the bush would march down the steep hillsides and bury our villages in flower and vine.
This is why it was easy to forget there had ever been a school. Creepers had smothered two trees in purple and red flowers, as if to soften the blow, and by that way crept onto the school roof; they had climbed in the windows and found a way across the ceiling. Another six months and our school would have disappeared from view.
We were all ages, from seven to fifteen. I counted twenty kids, about half the original school roll. I knew of two older boys who had gone off into the mountains to join the rebels. Three other families had left on that last boat to Rabaul. I don’t know about the rest. Maybe they hadn’t heard about the school opening. Over the coming weeks a few boys would return.