Hand Me Down World Read online

  HAND ME

  DOWN WORLD

  Praise for Lloyd Jones and Mister Pip

  ‘As compelling as a fairytale—beautiful, shocking and profound.’ Helen Garner

  ‘Mister Pip is a rare, original and truly beautiful novel. It reminds us that every act of reading and telling is a transformation, and that stories, even painful ones, may carry possibilities of redemption. An unforgettable novel, moving and deeply compelling.’ Gail Jones

  ‘Poetic, heartbreaking, surprising…Storytelling, imagination, courage, beauty, memories and sudden violence are the main elements of this extraordinary book.’ Isabel Allende

  ‘It reads like the effortless soar and dip of a grand piece of music, thrilling singular voices, the darker, moving chorus, the blend of the light and shade, the thread of grief urgent in every beat and the occasional faint, lingering note of hope.’ Age

  ‘Its fable-like quality is spellbinding; the depth of its insights compelling.’ Canberra Times

  ‘A riveting yarn…an engrossing tale that reminds us just how powerful a story—any story—can be.’ Good Reading

  ‘A brilliant narrative performance.’ Listener

  ‘A small masterpiece…Lloyd Jones is one of the best writers in New Zealand today. With the beautiful spare, lyrical quality that characterises his writing, Jones makes us think about the power and the magic of storytelling, the possibilities—and the dangers—of escaping to the world within.’ Dominion Post

  ‘A little Gauguin, a bit of Lord Jim, the novel’s lyricism evokes great beauty and great pain.’ Kirkus Reviews

  ‘Rarely, though, can any novel have combined charm, horror and uplift in quite such superabundance.’ Independent

  ‘Lloyd Jones brings to life the transformative power of fiction… This is a beautiful book. It is tender, multi-layered and redemptive.’ Sunday Times

  ‘This wonderful, sad book wraps complex themes—faith, race, imperialism and growing up—in a thrillingly accessible package, returning again and again to stories and the hope they can bring.’ Guardian

  ‘Mister Pip is a poignant and impressive work which can take its place alongside the classical novels of adolescence.’ Times Literary Supplement

  ‘An achingly beautiful story.’ Vancouver Sun

  Lloyd Jones was born in New Zealand in 1955. His best-known works include Mister Pip, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, The Book of Fame, winner of numerous literary awards, Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance, Biografi, Choo Woo, Paint Your Wife and The Man in the Shed. He lives in Wellington.

  LLOYD JONES

  HAND ME

  DOWN WORLD

  text publishing melbourne australia

  The paper in this book is manufactured only from wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests.

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  textpublishing.com.au

  Copyright © Lloyd Jones 2010

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by The Text Publishing Company, 2010

  Cover and page design by W. H. Chong

  Typeset in Granjon by J&M Typesetters

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Jones, Lloyd, 1955-

  Hand me down world / Lloyd Jones.

  ISBN: 9781921656682 (pbk.)

  ISBN: 9781921656972 (hbk.)

  NZ823.2

  for Anne

  Contents

  Part One: What they Said

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Part Two: Berlin

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Part Three: Defoe

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Part four: Ines

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Part Five: Abebi

  Thirty-Six

  Acknowledgments

  part one: What they said

  one

  The supervisor

  I was with her at the first hotel on the Arabian Sea. That was for two years. Then at the hotel in Tunisia for three years. At the first hotel we slept in the same room. I knew her name, but that is all. I did not know when her birthday was. I did not know how old she was. I did not know where she came from in Africa. When we spoke of home we spoke of somewhere in the past. We might be from different countries but the world we came into contained the same clutter and dazzling light. All the same traps were set for us. Later I found God, but that is a story for another day.

  If I tell you of my beginning you will know hers. I can actually remember the moment I was born. When I say this to people they look away or they smile privately. I know they are inclined not to believe. So I don’t say this often or loudly. But I will tell you now so that perhaps you will understand her better. I can tell you this. The air was cool to start with, but soon all that disappeared. The air broke up and darted away. Black faces with red eye strain dropped from a great height. My first taste of the world was a finger of another stuck inside my mouth. The first feeling is of my lips being stretched. I am being made right for the world, you see. My first sense of other is when I am picked up and examined like a roll of cloth for rips and spots. Then as time passes I am able to look back at this world I have been born into. It appears I have been born beneath a mountain of rubbish. I am forever climbing through and over that clutter, first to get to school, and later to the beauty contest at the depot, careful not to get filth on me. I win that contest and then the district and the regional. That last contest won me a place in the Four Seasons Hotel staff training program on the Arabian Sea. That is where I met her.

  There, instead of refuse, I discover an air-conditioned lobby. There are palms. These trees are different from the ones I am used to. These palms I am talking about. They look less like trees than things placed in order to please the eye. Even the sea with all its blue ease appears to lack a reason to exist other than to be pleasing to the eye. It is fun to play in. That much is clear from the European guests and those blacks who can afford it.

  We shared a room. We slept a few feet away from one another. She became like a sister to me, but I cannot tell you her middle name or her last name, or the name of the place she was born. Her father’s name was Justice. Her mother’s name was Mary. I cannot tell you anything else about where she came from. At the Four Seasons it did not matter. To show you were from somewhere was no good. You have to leave your past in order to become hotel staff. To be good staff you had to be like the palms and the sea, pleasing to the eye. We must not take up space but be there whenever a
guest needed us. At the Four Seasons we learned how to scrub the bowl, how to make a rosette out of the last square of toilet paper and to tie over the seat a paper band that declared in English that the toilet was of approved hygiene standard. We learned how to turn back a bed, and how to revive a guest who had drunk too much or nearly drowned. We learned how to sit a guest upright and thump his back with the might of Jesus when a crisp or a peanut had gone down the wrong way.

  What else? I can tell you about the new appetite that came over her like a disease of the mind. She forgot she was staff. Yes. Sometimes I thought she was under a spell. There she was, staff, and in her uniform, standing in the area reserved for guests, beneath the palms, taking up the precious shade, watching a tall white man enter the sea. She watches the sea rise all the way up his body until he disappears. The tear in the ocean smooths over. She waits. And she waits some more. She wonders if she should call the bell captain. All this time she is holding her own breath. She didn’t know that until the missing person emerges—and in a different place. He burst up through another tear in the world and all of his own making. This is the moment, she told me so, she decided she would like to learn to swim. Yes. This is the first time that idea comes to her.

  After eighteen months—I am aware I said two years. That is wrong. I remember now. It was after eighteen months we were moved to a larger hotel. This was in Tunisia. The tear in the world has just grown bigger. This hotel is also on the sea. For the first time in our lives it was possible to look in the direction of Europe. Not that there was anything to see. That didn’t matter. No. You can still find your way to a place you cannot see.

  For the first time we had money. A salary, plus tips. More money than either of us had ever earned. On our day off we would walk to the market. Once she bought a red-and-green parrot. It had belonged to an Italian engineer found dead in the rubbish alley behind the prostitutes’ bar. The engineer had taught the parrot to say over and over Benvenuto in Italia. Thanks to a parrot that is all the Italian I know. Benvenuto in Italia. Benvenuto in Italia. We had our own rooms now but I could hear that parrot through the wall. Benvenuto in Italia. All through the night. It was impossible to sleep. Another girl told her to throw a wrap over the cage. She did and it worked. The parrot was silent. After a shower, after dressing, after brushing teeth, after making her bed, then, she lifts the wrap, the parrot opens one eye, then the other, then its beak—Benvenuto in Italia.

  On our next day off I went with her to the market. We took it in turns to carry the parrot back to where she had bought it. The man pretends he’s never seen the parrot and carries on placing his merchandise over a wooden bench. She tried to give the parrot to a small boy. His eyes grew big. I thought his head would explode. He ran off. The parrot looked up through the bars, silent for once, looking so pitiful I was worried she was about to forgive it. But no. In a tea house the owner flirted with her but when she tried to gift the parrot he backed off with his hands in the air. In the street a man stopped to poke his finger through the bars. He and the parrot were getting on. But it was the same thing. They were happy to look, to admire, but no one wanted sole charge of that parrot. She began to think she would be stuck with that parrot forever.

  I took the cage off her and we boarded a bus. The passengers were waiting for the driver to return with his cigarettes. I walked down the aisle dangling the cage over the heads of the passengers. Some fell against the window and folded their arms and closed their eyes. One after another they shook their heads. Back in the market people talked to the parrot, they stuck a finger through the bars for the parrot to nibble, they cooed back at the parrot. It turned its head on its side and gave them an odd look which made everyone laugh. But no one wanted to own a parrot. She asked me if I thought there was something wrong with her. Because how was it that she was the only one who had thought to own a parrot?

  We returned to the hotel. It wasn’t quite dark. We could hear some splashing from the pool. Some children. People were sitting around the outside bars. She took the parrot from me and set off to the unvisited end of the beach. I followed because I had come this far, and the whole time I had been following, so that now, just then, I did not know what else to do with myself. Down on the sand she kicked off her sandals. She placed the cage down and dragged one of the skiffs to the water. Had she asked for my advice I would have told her not to do this thing. Now I regret not saying anything. I was tired. I was sick of sharing the problem. I wanted only for the task to be over with. As she pushed the skiff out the parrot rolled its eye up at her, to look as though it possibly understood her decision and had decided it would choose dignity over fear.

  In the night the wind blew up. I stayed in bed. But I can say what happened next because she told me. She also woke to the waves slapping on the beach but dozed off again without a thought for the parrot. The second time she woke it was still early. No one was up when she walked across the hotel grounds. She found the skiff hauled up on the beach. The cage was gone. Further up the beach she found the damp corpse of the parrot on top of the smouldering palm leaves. The groundsman was raking the sand. When she asked him about the cage he looked away. She thought she was going to hear a lie. Instead he told her to follow him. They go to the shed. He pulls back the beaded curtain. On the bench she sees the thin bars of the cage. The cage itself no longer exists. The bars have been cut off. She picks up one—holds it by its wooden handle, presses the sharpened point into the soft fleshy part of her hand. Well, she took the sticking knife as payment for the cage. That’s the story about the knife.

  She told me once that as soon as you know you are smart you just keep getting smarter. For me it hasn’t happened yet. That’s not to say it won’t. When the Bible speaks of eternity I see one long line of surprises. It’s not to say that that particular surprise won’t come my way. I’m just saying I’m still waiting. But she got there first when she was promoted to staff supervisor. Now it was her turn to tell the new recruits that they smelt as fresh as daisies. You should see her now. The way she moved through the hotel. She would change the fruit bowl in reception without waiting to be asked. She says ‘Have a nice day’, as she has been taught, at the rear of the heavy white people waddling across the lobby for the pool. When a guest thanks her for picking up a towel from the floor she will smile and say ‘You’re welcome’, and when told she sounds just like an American she will smile out of respect. The tourists replace one another. The world must be made of tourists. How is it I wasn’t born a tourist? After four years in the hotel I could become a tourist because I know what to take pleasure in and what to complain about.

  White people never look so white as when they wade into the sea under a midday sun. The women wade then sit down as they would getting into a bath. The men plunge and then they swim angrily. The women are picking up their towels from the sand as their men are still bashing their way out to sea. Then the men stop as if wherever they were hoping to get to has unexpectedly arrived. So they stop and they lie there with their faces turned up to the sky. When a wave passes under them they rise like food scraps, then the wave puts them down again. I used to wonder if these waves were employed by the hotel. I wondered if they too along with the palms had been through a hotel training course. ‘Look how gently the sea puts them down,’ she said. Look—and I did. ‘See,’ she said. ‘There is nothing to be afraid of.’

  One of the floating men was called Jermayne. He happened to catch her watching the white people at play in the sea. Not this time, but another time. I wasn’t there. But this is what she told me. I hadn’t set eyes on him yet so this is what she said about Jermayne. He was a black man. Yes, he had the same skin as her and me but he hadn’t grown up in that skin. That much was easy to see. He had a way about him.

  I remember asking her once—this would have been back at the other hotel on the Arabian Sea. We’d been lying there on our beds making lists of things to wish for, and I said, ‘What about love?’ Everyone needs loving. That too is in the Bible if you know
where to look. I said, ‘Don’t you want to lie down with a man?’ She burst out laughing. Now, under the palms in the hotel ground, I asked her the question again. This time she looked away from me. She focused—as if there were so many ways of answering that question she couldn’t decide on just one.

  But with this man I can see she is interested. When I see her with him I stop whatever I’m doing to watch. She starts playing with her hair. Now she produces a smile I have never seen before. When I reported back to her what I had seen she said I had been blinded by wishfulness on her behalf. She said Jermayne had offered to teach her to swim. ‘Well, that’s good,’ I said. ‘That way you are bound to drown.’ See how negative I sound. I don’t know why that is. Why did I decide I didn’t like Jermayne? Maybe instead of being smart I have developed some other kind of knowing.

  Maybe it was his confidence. Maybe it was his unlived-in blackness. Maybe I just didn’t like him. Does there have to be a reason? Then—I will say this here, just place it down for the time being. I thought I saw him. No. What do I mean by ‘thought’? I did. I saw him with a woman. They were crossing the lobby in a hurry. But after that I didn’t see her again. I decided she must have been another guest, entering the lift when he did, because the next day it was just Jermayne in the breakfast room.

  When I saw them together, my friend and him, there were two Jermaynes. One is with her—that one she can see. But at the same time there is another Jermayne. This one is standing close by looking on and smiling to himself like he knows her thoughts before she does. He saw her reluctance to get in the pool whenever guests were using it. He read her like an open book. He had to insist—she laughed him off, pretending she didn’t want to get wet after all. It was the same at the pool bar. Before Jermayne she had never had a drink with a hotel guest. Never ever—no, no, no, and the barman knew it, the stars knew it, the night knew it, the palms stood stunned in the background, and the little droplets splattering the poolside reminded everyone of the silence and the rules. She said Jermayne made it feel all right. Then it began to feel more and more right. She was no drinker. He had to explain what an outrigger was—the boat and the drink, and after that cocktail she said her thoughts drifted off to the parrot and its night out on the skiff and didn’t drift back until Jermayne started to talk about his upbringing. An American father, a German mother. He grew up in Hamburg but now lived in Berlin. He had his own business, something with computers.