Mister Pip (26 page)

GRAVESEND IS WHERE I would have ended
Great Expectations
. Gravesend. And this is where I came one cold day in late May. I walked past benches filled with silent Indian men in colorful turbans, a layer of sadness dampening their cheeks. I saw them sneak a look at me, a young woman blacker than any they had ever seen. I saw their eyes and their wonder. What is she thinking? That black girl with the darting white eyes. What does she know about this landscape?

I could tell them the landscape from
Great Expectations
is gone, that its fabled marshes lie beneath motorways and industrial estates. I could tell them that the story has new custodians. These custodians were once a bunch of black kids, who I believe still wake in the early hours to remember another time, when they drifted between an island and a blacksmith's, on the marshes in England in eighteen-hundred-and-something.

You have to work a bit harder in Dickens' old neighborhood to see what he did. The emigrant ships are ghosts. The sight of bareheaded men and women waving handkerchiefs from the decks are history, bones in some cemetery on the other side of the world.

There is a nicely paved river walk, and if you walk in the same direction taken by the old emigrant ships, it is impossible not to think about departure. Leave. Go. Get away. Make yourself new.

There is the river, pointing the way out of this muddy world. As I wandered past the mission, where emigrants were rowed ashore to say a few prayers as insurance for their sea journey into the unknown, I found myself thinking back to the last time I was alone with Mr. Watts.

I had not thought about that conversation for years. Like so many things, I probably blocked it out. I wonder now, at that moment he turned away, if Mr. Watts had made up his mind to leave the island without me. Because it seems to me, thinking about it all these years later, that what I felt was a parting, a line drawn. I have called it a line, but maybe it is better to talk about a curtain. A curtain dropped between Mr. Watts and his most adoring audience. He would move on and I would shift into that burial ground occupied by figures of the past. I would be a small speck on a large island as he sat in Mr. Masoi's boat motoring from one life to another. I knew that is what would happen, would have happened, because it had happened to me. The moment I left I never looked back.

THERE WAS THE LONG TRAIN ride back to London Bridge. I felt inexplicably downhearted. As if I had fallen backwards into myself. And I was back with mourning before that flood erased everything. I looked out the carriage window. The baby green leaves of spring growth made no impression on my glum mood. The singing conductor failed to win a smile from me.

When I left the station I had to drag myself up the steps to street level. This tiredness. Where had it come from? I knew what it was to climb steep tracks in the hills. What were a few flights of filthy steps lined with beggars and Gypsy kids whose eyes moved faster than any fish I ever saw?

I walked home wishing I had some other place to go. I climbed the stale carpet of the stairs in the boardinghouse and, opening the door to my bedsit, stood for a moment on the threshold, unable to enter.

There were the trappings of my life—the mounted photograph of Dickens, an article blown up to poster size announcing publication of
Great Expectations
in book form. There was my desk and that pile of paper known as my thesis. It had sat there all day waiting for me to get back from Gravesend with fresh material. It had sat there like Mr. Watts had once, with his secret exercise book, waiting for fragments. Well, I didn't have any fresh material. All I had lugged back with me was this heaviness, which sat deep inside, in my bones, and which had come over me quickly like bad weather.

The only thing I could think to do was to get into bed. And there I stayed.

For six days I didn't get up except to make a cup of tea, or fry an egg, or lie in the skinny bath gazing at a cracked ceiling. The days punished me with their slowness, piling up the hours on me, spreading their joylessness about the room.

I listened to the buses change down gear outside the boardinghouse. I listened to the hiss of tires on the wet road. I lay in bed listening to the woman downstairs get ready for work. I listened to her run the shower and the shrill whistle on her kettle. I waited for her footsteps on the path below my window, and as that brief contact with the world departed I shut my eyes and begged the walls to let me go back to sleep.

A doctor would have said I was suffering from depression. Everything I have read since suggests this was the case. But when you are in the grip of something like that it doesn't usefully announce itself. No. What happens is you sit in a dark, dark cave, and you wait. If you are lucky there is a pinprick of light, and if you are especially lucky that pinprick will grow larger and larger, until one day the cave appears to slip behind, and just like that you find yourself in daylight and free. This is how it happened for me.

ONE MORNING I woke and threw back the covers. I was up before the woman downstairs. I walked across to my desk. I was being urged to do something I had put aside for too long. I took the top sheet of paper from “Dickens' Orphans,” turned it over, and wrote “Everyone called him Pop Eye.”

I wrote that sentence six months ago. Everything that follows I wrote over the intervening months. I have tried to describe the events as they happened to me and my mum on the island. I have not tried to embellish. Everyone says the same thing of Dickens. They love his characters. Well, something has changed in me. As I have grown older I have fallen out of love with his characters. They are too loud; they are grotesques. But strip away their masks and you find what their creator understood about the human soul and all its suffering and vanity. When I told my father of my mum's death he broke down and wept. That is when I learned there is a place for embellishment after all. But it belongs to life—not to literature.

I HAD DECIDED to leave England, but had one more farewell task to perform. This involved a visit to Rochester, where Dickens pinched one or two landmarks for
Great Expectations.

In Rochester you arrive at a place you know you feel obliged to like. There it is—the perfect postcard of how an English village is supposed to have looked like in eighteen-hundred-and-something. You trip over the cobbles and choke on the sentimentality. Everywhere you look Dickens is a shopkeeper, a restaurateur, a merchant in secondhand goods. You find you have the choice between Fagin's Café or eating at Mrs. Brumbles or A Taste of Two Cities.

I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip
is one of the most endearing lines in literature. This is who I am: please accept me as you find me. This is what an orphanage sends its charges out to the world with. This is what emigrants wash up on Pacific shorelines with. This is what Mr. Watts had asked the rambos to accept. But I could not accept a blimmin' fruit and veg shop named after Pip as in Pip's of Rochester.

There were another two hours to fill before I caught the train back to London, so I decided to tag on to the end of a guided tour. A woman from the Charles Dickens Center at Eastgate House led the party up the stairs of the town hall into a long room where Pip was signed over into an apprenticeship with Joe Gargery.

From the town hall there was a short walk up the hill, and at some point I realized that we were taking the same route as Pip had on his way to visit Miss Havisham. The same route which was known to me, having walked it before as a besotted reader on an island on the other side of the world.

The woman from the center pointed out a two-story manor—this was Satis House. Here I learned something new. Mr. Dickens pinched the name and stuck it on a larger and more imposing mansion next to the brewery, where he installed Miss Havisham and Estella.

After a short walk through a park, we stood across the road, staring back at the gates, the same gates where Estella first receives Pip and condescends to call him “boy.” A taxi drew up and a yuppyish young man bounced out. He gave us a quick glance. I thought he looked annoyed. The guide said Miss Havisham's house had been turned into apartments.

We watched the young man let himself in the gate and walk up the path. We watched him set his briefcase down and put a key in the door. The door opened and closed. After that we let our eyes drift. We stood there for some time drifting with our eyes and thoughts. “Well,” someone said at last.

The tour ended back at Eastgate House. I followed the others up the stairs, and there I encountered Miss Havisham in her white wedding gown. She was stuck behind glass, her back turned to us sightseers. There for all eternity. I wished she could turn, just for half an instant, to find a black woman staring at her.

The tour ended in Mr. Dickens' study. A mannequin of the author himself reclined in a leather chair, his legs sprawled before him, his hands in gentle repose. His sleepy eyelids at half-mast. We had walked in on Mr. Dickens while he was daydreaming. Behind the restraining rope, the man standing next to me heard me whisper, “I have met Mr. Dickens and this is not him.” He smiled and looked away. I did not try and convince him. But if I had, this is what I would have said.

The Mr. Dickens I had known also had a beard and a lean face and eyes that wanted to leap from his face. But my Mr. Dickens used to go about barefoot and in a buttonless shirt. Apart from special occasions, such as when he taught, and then he wore a suit.

It has occurred to me only recently that I never once saw him with a machete—his survival weapon was story. And once, a long time ago and during very difficult circumstances, my Mr. Dickens had taught every one of us kids that our voice was special, and we should remember this whenever we used it, and remember that whatever else happened to us in our lives our voice could never be taken away from us.

For a brief time I had made the mistake of forgetting that lesson.

In the worshipful silence I smiled at what else they didn't know. Pip was my story, even if I was once a girl, and my face black as the shining night. Pip is my story, and in the next day I would try where Pip had failed. I would try to return home.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Michael Heyward and Melanie Ostell of Text for the wonderful confidence and enthusiasm they showed in
Mister Pip
from the first day it arrived as a manuscript. To Melanie, for her astute editorial probing and suggestions; to Michael, for guiding the book out into the world.

And I especially want to thank my longtime publisher, Geoff Walker of Penguin Books New Zealand, and my agent, Michael Gifkins, for their unflagging efforts on my behalf and
Mister Pip
's.

A grant from Creative New Zealand helped toward the writing of this book, for which I remain extremely grateful.

About the Author

LLOYD JONES was born in New Zealand in 1955. His best-known works include
The Book of Fame,
winner of numerous literary awards,
Biografi,
a
New York Times
Notable Book,
Choo Woo, Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance,
and
Paint Your Wife
. He lives in Wellington, New Zealand.