Hand Me Down World

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?