Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones Read Free Book Online

the same space came to exist between Mr. Watts and my mum. And I knew I would have to choose between the two.
    T HE REDSKINS’ VISIT AFFECTED US IN DIFFERENT ways. Some of us were seen hiding food in the jungle. Others made escape plans. They thought about where to escape, and considered what they would do there. My mum’s response was to reach for our family history and pass on to me all that she knew.
    Sea gods and turtles passed in and out of a long list of people I had never heard of. The names went in one ear and out the other. There were so many. At last she reached the end, or I thought she had. There was a pause. I looked across in the dark and saw the whites of her teeth.
    â€œPop Eye,” she said, “is the offspring of a shining cuckoo.”
    I knew about the shining cuckoo. At a certain time of the year we saw them leave our skies. They were headed for the nests of strangers to the south. There they find a nest and boot out the eggs of the host bird and lay their own eggs before flying off. The chick of the shining cuckoo never meets its mother.
    In the dark I heard my mum click her teeth. She thought she had Mr. Watts summed up. She could not see what us kids had come to see: a kind man. She only saw a white man. And white men had stolen her husband and my father. White men were to blame for the mine, and the blockade. A white man had given us the name of our island. White men had given me my name. By now it was also clear that the white world had forgotten us.
    J UST BEFORE CHRISTMAS, TWO MORE BABIES died of malaria. We buried them and marked their graves with white shells and stones carried up from the beach. All night we listened to the mothers wailing.
    Their grief turned our thoughts back to a conflict few of us kids properly understood. We knew about the river pollution, and the terrible effect of the copper tailings after heavy rain. Fishermen spoke of a reddish stain that pushed out far beyond the reef into open sea. You only had to hate that to hate the mine. And there were other issues that took me years to grasp: the pitiful amount paid to the lessees by the mining company; and the
wontok
system of the redskins, who had arrived on our island in large numbers to work for the company, and who used their position to advance their own kind, elbowing the locals out of jobs.
    In our village there were those who supported the rebels—my mum included. Though I suspect her support was nourished by the thought of my father in Townsville living what she called a “fat life.” Everyone else just wished the fighting would go away, and for the white man to come back and reopen the mine. These people missed buying things. They missed having money to buy those things. Biscuits, rice, tinned fish, tinned beef, sugar. We were back to eating what our grandparents had—sweet potatoes, fish, chicken, mango, guava, cassava, nuts, and mud crab.
    The men wanted beer. Some men brewed jungle juice and got drunk. We’d hear their drunken carry-on through the night. Their wild behavior was so loud, we were afraid they would be heard by the redskins. In the dark I heard my mum condemn them to hell for their foul language. Jungle juice turned them crazy. They sounded like men who wouldn’t care if the world ended tomorrow, and they shocked the night with their ranting.
    But this night we heard a different voice, a voice of reason. The wild drunken cries fell away to a single calm voice. I recognized it. It belonged to Mabel’s dad; this quiet man with a flat nose and calm, listening eyes. Whenever he saw Mabel he tugged on one of her pigtails and laughed. A happy man. He must also have had some power because in the dead of night we heard him talk to the drunks. He did not raise his voice, so we did not hear what was said, but we heard its calm flow and soon, to our amazement, we heard one of the drunks begin to sob. Just like that. Mabel’s dad had talked a raving drunk man down into