Mister Pip (19 page)

To Mr. Watts' suggestion they paint the walls of the spare room white, Grace scribbled
a history of white on the island where I was born.

And now, to the startled ears of all us kids, we began to hear all the fragments that our mums and uncles and aunts had brought along to Mr. Watts' class. Our thoughts on the color white. Our thoughts on the color blue. Mr. Watts was assembling his story out of the experience of our lives, the same things we had heard shared with our class. But Mr. Watts introduced new information as well, such as Grace's thoughts on the color brown.

There were no brown ice-blocks until the cola one was invented, and then it came and went like a comet. When they were all gone Grace asked the man in the shop why and he said because no one wanted them. She said, “We do.” He said, “You kids don't bloody count. Now bugger off.”

Around the fire, the rambos slapped each other and hooted with laughter, and a lone dog, some way off, took up the call.

I began another tricky translation—Mr. Watts' thoughts on the color white. Miss Ryan once told him she used white chewing gum to steady a white tooth she had knocked on a water fountain before a date with the airline pilot who she remembered smelling of black shoe polish!

Mr. Watts paused, looking at me. He seemed very pleased with himself. It was obvious that he expected his audience would be charmed once I passed this on. But what the blimmin' heck was black shoe polish?

“Otherwise,” Mr. Watts continued, “everyone in those days smelled of white soap.”

I caught the eyes of Celia and Victoria. I saw I wasn't alone in what I felt. We were beginning to feel nervous for Mr. Watts. He wasn't making any sense. I found my thoughts escaping to
Great Expectations,
to Joe Gargery and the nonsense that had flowed out of him.

I remembered listening to Mr. Watts read and hearing words that on their own I understood, but once they were turned into sentences made no sense at all. When we asked for the meaning of Joe's observations Mr. Watts replied that we didn't need to know. If the blacksmith didn't make sense,
that
was the point. While that might be true, I was worried that Mr. Watts had now gotten his characters mixed up, that somehow he had slipped out of Pip and into Joe Gargery's skin. My translation failed to move the audience in the way Mr. Watts' self-satisfied smile hoped for. Instead, he found himself looking at an audience of dogfaces still waiting for the promised bone.

He recovered and spoke about a neighbor of Miss Ryan's who used to row flying-boat people ashore in the islands. The neighbor was holding a paintbrush dipped in white paint when he was found dead of a heart attack by the half-painted letterbox. Too much white sugar, we heard. Or was it salt?

So he was back onto the color white.

The whitest white, he said, is the inside of a toilet bowl. Whiteness is next to cleanliness. Cleanliness is next to godliness.

White, he said, used to be exclusively the color of airline pilots and air hostesses. As a child you first learned about the white countries.

Bread is white; so is foam, fat, and milk.

White is the color of elastic that keeps everything up and in its rightful place. White is the color of ambulances, voting papers, and the coats of parking attendants.

“Above all,” he said, “white is a feeling.”

I had fallen into Mr. Watts' rhythm and translated that statement without hesitation.

A fleeting thought can come and go with its license to surprise. Words written or spoken aloud have to be explained. When I passed on Mr. Watts' opinion about “white being a feeling,” I swear the entire island fell quiet. We all had long suspected this but didn't know for sure. Now we were about to hear.

We waited and waited, and while we waited Mr. Watts stood rigid, his eyes sloping away from us. At first, filled with regret, I thought, for letting that door open. But then I saw him nod to himself, and in as frank and honest a voice as I ever heard him use, he said, “This is true. We feel white around black people.”

It made everyone uncomfortable to hear this, and yet I suspect we wanted to hear more, but that's when Daniel piped up.

“We feel the same,” he said. “We feel black around white people.” And that snapped the tension. People laughed, and one of the rambos got up and made a drunk's walk over to high-five with Daniel. Daniel beamed. He knew he'd said something but wasn't sure what.

I
T 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 personally 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.