Mister Pip
IT HAD STARTED WITH GRACE WRITING HER relatives’ names on the walls of the spare room. Now the writing spread to other areas. Mr. Watts and Grace put up their separate histories and ideas. They argued like roosters. They wrote place-names. Kieta. Arawa. Gravesend, the arse end from which England shat its emigrants. That’s how I would hear it described years later.
The young rambos didn’t know that Grace’s ideas were really ours—from here. I cannot remember them all. I do remember Mr. Watts complaining about her sentences sometimes forgetting to include full stops. A sentence would just break off and leave the eye to plunge into vacant space. When he raised this, Grace asked him, What would you rather do? Sit with your feet dangling off the end of a wharf or have them shoved inside stiff leather shoes?
I suspect only the more fanciful and weird lists covering the walls are the ones that have stayed with me. Some were mixed up together. The ordinary but possibly more subtle lists have drifted from memory. But these I remember.
Things that tell you where home is
Wherever memory sticks. That house window. That tree out front.
The red-necked stint, light as an aerogram, that flies the Pacific from top to bottom and back again, and always believes it will find home.
The easiness of strangers who ask, What do you know?
The noise of a bus changing gears two streets away where the road begins to climb all the way back to a moment in childhood.
The high winds that make everything windblown (paper and leaves) seem personal.
The ancient sea chart that looks like a string shopping bag containing lines to do with currents and prevailing winds.
The smell of rotten fruit.
The smell of fresh-mown grass and lawn mower oil.
The holy quiet of a man who has lived for seventy-five years on the one island and has nothing left to say.
The history of the world
Step one. You need a lot of water—from above and below. The water of heaven fills the lakes and rivers. Now add equal amounts of darkness and daylight. While there is light the sun draws the water back up to restock heaven.
Step two. Man is created out of dust. At the end of his life he returns to dust. Restocking again.
Step three. The most important ingredient of all. Take a rib bone and create a woman to keep the man company, righteous, and fed. Add a spoonful of sugar for pleasure and bitter herbs for tears. There will be plenty of both, and the rest just follows on from there.
A history of memory
I miss island laughter. White people don’t laugh in the same way. They laugh in a private, sniggering way. I have tried to teach your father to laugh properly and he is learning. But he does not practice enough.
I miss the warm sea. Every day us kids used to jump off the wharf. But never on Sundays. You know why.
I miss the color blue, and fruit bats at dusk.
I miss hearing the thud of a coconut falling.
Broken dreams
The girl next to where I grew up used to sleepwalk. It was amazing how far she would get—still fast asleep. One time she paddled a canoe out to the reef, came in, and went back to her sleeping mat. Or else you’d see her marching up the beach like she was late for church.
Once we found her in our house sitting at the table, her eyes closed, while every other part of her suggested she was waiting to be brought a cold drink. I was going to wake her, but my mum stopped me. What if she is dreaming…? Dreams are private, she said. And she is right. A dream is a story that no one else will get to hear or read.
Thanks to dreams, in the history of the galaxy the world has been reinvented more often than there are stars.
The girl in our house, though, was probably just dreaming about jumping off the wharf—and that’s okay too.
How to find your soul
If you tell your mother a lie you may do nothing more than blush, grow a bit hot under your skin. But later, at two in the morning, sitting in that dumb car you will begin to feel deceitful.
All that feeling has to go somewhere and it does. It has been stored in a vault deep in your body. Don’t ask a doctor to find it. Like your father they are next to useless on these matters.
You need to know about hell. Don’t ask your father. His geography is limited. Hell is less important to him than London or Paris. All you do is eat and shit and take photos in those places. Heaven and hell are the cities of the soul! That’s where you grow!
Your shoelaces
Your shoelaces are useless on their own. They need a shoe before they can work. A human being without God is just flesh and blood. A house without God is an empty house waiting for the devil to move in. You need to understand boundaries.
Boundaries
Braids remind us that sometimes it is hard to know where goodness ends and badness begins.
Mr. Watts and Grace had agreed to gather their worlds side by side, to stick them up on the walls of that empty room and leave it to their child to pick and choose what she wanted.
But neither would admit that there were ideas and positions of their own they wanted their daughter to inherit, and that some were opposed to one another. I knew—probably everyone did—that Mr. Watts did not believe in God. We’d known all along without him saying so. We only had to look at him whenever my mum had come to lecture us kids on the devil.
In the class he stood behind her with his chin sliding down his chest, eyes closed, arms folded, as if barring himself against all of what us kids were hearing. Now, before the campfire audience, he openly revealed himself as a godless man. But he did so from the distance of the spare room. If things turned nasty he could always claim to have become a changed man. A saved man.
There was spunk in Grace’s voice—and humor that she managed to get up on the wall. Mr. Watts worried that Sarah would hear her mother’s playful voice and that alone would make her want to believe in God. There was Grace’s persuasiveness, but also, not to believe would be to betray her mother. Mr. Watts was in a bind. What to do? His own lists looked like study notes. They weren’t fun. And they needed to promise fun if they were to compete with Grace’s entertainments on the soul and the devil.
One night, at a very late hour, he crept into the room and applied bleach wherever the word devil appeared on the walls. Soon the word devil began to change to a light brown color. Mr. Watts was encouraged. The offending word looked like it might even fade away.
A few days after that he found Grace had run masking tape down the wall to separate the names of his favorite make-believe characters from those of her family. When we heard that, one or two of Grace’s older relatives quietly applauded. The others made do with an approving nod.
We knew who we wanted to win the battle for the spare room, my mum especially. And when it came to laughs it was no contest at all. Here’s a footnote that Grace added to her thoughts on broken dreams:
A dog with the shakes is a sign. Sometimes a dog will get up and look around like it has been bitten on the bum by a flea. It is really looking for where its dream ran off to. Sometimes it will just lie down again and rest its snout on its paws and wait for it to return.
When they heard these little stories the rambos laughed and the whites of their shiny teeth showed up in the light from the fire. The donors of these fragments and anecdotes were left to smile to themselves in the shadows. One of them was my mum. In fact, much of what Mr. Watts said Grace wrote over the walls of the spare room was my mum’s vision of the world, and much of it us kids had heard when she turned up to class to rattle our skulls.
On the fifth night Mr. Watts introduced to the wall a scrap we’d heard in class about Pip versus the devil. Again, only us kids knew the history of this debate. Now we heard what happened as it was thrashed out in the spare room.
Mr. Watts challenged Grace to describe the devil. As he announced this around the campfire I felt the breath of my mum on my neck, even though she stood some distance away. This was one of the times when I felt Mr. Watts was p
ersonally addressing her. He was about to thread their old classroom debate into his account of the battle for the spare room. And she was ready.
I was worried about what would happen if Mr. Watts used the occasion to get back at her. I was afraid that her unshakable faith would single her out from the rest of us. She would defend God and the devil even if it meant breaking the rules set by Mr. Watts. And I knew what would happen if she opened her mouth too quickly—all that would come out would be anger.
“So,” began Mr. Watts, “how might we recognize this creature? Does he have horns? Does he produce a business card? Does he have a lipless mouth? And no eyebrows? Do his eyes have a wanton quality?”
By putting up these questions Mr. Watts was creating a devil before our eyes. And, as quickly as he had produced an image in our heads, he set about dismantling it with the same explanation we’d heard my mum give us kids. “We know the devil because we know ourselves. And how do we know God? We know God because we know ourselves.”
My mum must have liked hearing that.
To those boys in the audience who knew what it was to butcher a redskin one day and carry a wounded brother over the mountains the next, it must have come as a relief to hear their blood wasn’t all that bad. Those boys sitting around the fire were catching up to what us kids had already heard in class. The stalemate between Mr. Watts and my mum. The preparedness of Mr. Watts to believe in one made-up character (Pip) but not another (the devil). The conviction of my mum that the devil was more real than Pip. If pushed, she might have admitted that the illustrated versions of the devil—including her encounter with that witch from her childhood who turned herself into an ugly carnivorous bird—were just showbiz.
This wasn’t Mr. Watts’ story we were hearing at all. It wasn’t his or Grace’s story. It was a made-up story to which we’d all contributed. Mr. Watts was shining our experience of the world back at us. We had no mirrors. These things and anything else that might have said something about who we were and what we believed had been thrown onto the bonfire. I have come to think that Mr. Watts was giving back something of ourselves in the shape of a story.
ON THE SIXTH night, Mr. Watts told a tale, his own I believe, that established the place of the nonbeliever. I don’t know if he gave it a title, but I will. I will call it “The Mayfly Story.” If you were my mum you might have felt you were listening to an admission from a heathen that everything he had said or believed was wrong. I have come to think of it as his gift to her.
The Mayfly Story
Some neighborhoods carry their history in their name. Wishbone Street is one of those. In this street lived a black woman, known to everyone as Mrs. Sutton, who measured her wealth in the number of dreams she had. Her know-it-all white husband, who was really only a woodwork teacher, which would have been okay but he was a bad woodwork teacher, said her wealth was worth nothing. With what can you buy a dream? How many dreams is an ice cream or a steak worth? He laughed and made fun of her.
Dreams are nervy things—all it takes is for one stern word to be spoken in their direction and they shrivel up and die. This is what happened. She had looked up at a critical moment in her telling to see her useless husband pick some sawdust out of his forearm hair. Now Mrs. Sutton tried writing the dream down on paper. As an extra precaution she wrapped the dream around a small stone she carried in her pocket.
Usually after cross words she would take herself off to a quiet place and wait for the shattered dream to return. Not this time. As she left the house her husband did not even look up. It was later, when she failed to return after dark, that he started to worry.
He waited for her to call because that is what he thought she would do. She would telephone from some lonely phone box somewhere in the night and ask him to come and drive her home. He waited and waited for that call. He waited until he could wait no longer and rushed out to look for her.
Someone spoke of seeing her walk in the direction of the river. Which now seems likely. Why? Because several days after her disappearance a slip of paper washed up on the banks and caught in the branches of an uprooted tree. Enough of the handwriting was legible. It seems Mrs. Sutton had dreamed she was a mayfly. Her husband, once a nonbeliever, was the only one to take the claim seriously. In fact, the once stupid husband was the only one to link the dream to his missing wife.
And he did more than that. At the library, where he’d gone to read up on his wife’s transformation, Mr. Sutton learned that a mayfly will live up to three years in the mud at the bottom of a river.
For the next week he took himself off along the banks of the river, looking for a trace of his wife. He was a sad figure. We must imagine a man looking down at the water for the mud at the bottom. He supposed his wife would reappear when she thought the time was right. So he went back to the library to find out more on the life cycle of the mayfly.
He was not encouraged by what he read. On the day of its death the mayfly will rise from the river and turn itself into a winged insect. By then, the lazy bugger males have flown to the shade of the trees on the bank. As the females hover above the river they are rushed by the males. Once impregnated, the mayfly females fly upstream and bomb the surface of the river with eggs. As soon as that job is done they fall exhausted into the water. And there the frogs know what to look for.
It is hard to say which stage in the life cycle enraged Mr. Sutton the most. The waiting males or the greedy frogs.
A boy cycling home by the river saw Mr. Sutton wading up the river, his head bowed in concentration. He was trying to see through the water to where he supposed his wife had buried herself with several million other larvae. Poor Mr. Sutton. He was shouting and carrying on as he attempted to hit the frogs with the many stones he carried in his pockets.
We loved that story. I don’t know where Mr. Watts fished it up from. Maybe he made it up on the spot. We all laughed. The rambos hooted. They especially liked the bit about Mr. Sutton trying to hit the frogs. Everyone was laughing so hard they didn’t see Mr. Watts seek out my mum with a smile.
ON THE SIXTH night we also learned that Sarah, the future occupant of the spare room, had succumbed to disease. Meningitis. As he told us this Mr. Watts’ voice ran dry. For the first time as he stared into the fire the mask of Pip almost fell away. We were in no doubt here; we weren’t hearing invention.
After Mr. Watts composed himself he told us how he and Mrs. Watts buried their child. For a long time the two of them stood clinging to one another over the small plot of piled dirt. Mr. Watts said they stayed like that until after night fell, and they had no more tears, and their tongues were idle because there were no words. No one, he said, has yet invented words for a moment like that.
“Grief,” he said, and he shook his head back at the night.
He described Mrs. Watts’ descent into depression. We heard how she could not get out of bed in the morning. She would not speak. Desperate for a remedy, Mr. Watts looked to the example of the hermit crab. How many times in its life does a hermit crab change its house? Three, four times? Mr. Watts thought that might be the answer. A new house, new windows with a different view. But what if her misery migrated with her? No. Mr. Watts decided the only way to mend his beloved Grace was for her to reinvent herself.
For the first time, we heard Mr. Watts ask a question of the audience. “I wonder, does anyone here know who the Queen of Sheba was?” He looked around our firelit faces. I was standing with my mum. I could hear her shallow breaths increase. I could feel her agitation rise, until every door in her was flapping open. She just had to speak up. And without raising her hand, which was how us kids had been instructed, she blurted, “It is in the Bible.”
When he heard her voice Mr. Watts knew exactly how far to turn his head. I have an idea he always knew where my mum was in the audience. He smiled at his old adversary.
As he had in the classroom, he gestured for her to continue. By now other faces were looking our way. One of the rambos stood up and came forward, parting
the audience with his machete so he could see who the voice belonged to. Now that she had the attention of everyone my mum suffered an uncharacteristic crisis of confidence. Her head dropped. Her voice wasn’t as strong as before, and she addressed the ground rather than the faces looking her way.
“The Queen of Sheba was a very wise black woman who sought out Solomon to see if she could match his legendary wisdom with her own.” That’s what she said. She and Mr. Watts stared at one another, and it was Mr. Watts who chose to end it the way that he did.
He looked around the rest of his audience and began to recite from the King James Bible. “‘She communed with him of all that was in her heart…and there was nothing hid.’”
SOME PEOPLE CAN LOOK TO THE TIDE AS A guide to the passing of the hour. Others look at a budding fruit and automatically know the month. On the edge of the silvery ocean, a pale thread of moon whispered to me: a new moon was on its way.
I had been patiently counting the days down to the two events—our departure, yes, but more important, that moment when Mr. Watts would choose to let my mum in on the plan to leave the island.
I was certain Mr. Watts hadn’t spoken to my mum about it yet. She would have said something. There would have been some sign she knew, some lift in her mood. She would want to break the news to me.
I reminded myself what Mr. Watts had said about speaking to my mum. He wanted that job for himself. And that was fine. I just wished he would get on with it, because my mum deserved more time to prepare herself than what Mr. Watts clearly meant to give her.
I must have felt emboldened by what Mr. Watts had to say about the Queen of Sheba, the bit about her communing of all that was in her heart, because as the audience broke up I followed Mr. Watts into the shadows. I wanted to speak to him alone, so I trod lightly, careful not to disturb the earth or Mr. Watts. We were almost at the schoolhouse before he stopped and looked behind him.