Mister Pip (3 page)

One of the younger kids, Mabel, put up her hand to ask a question. At first we thought Mr. Watts hadn't seen her because he carried on over the top of Mabel's waving hand. “I welcome questions. I won't always be able to answer them. Remember that,” he said. “Also, when you raise your hand to ask me something, would you be so kind as to give your name.”

He nodded in Mabel's direction. She mustn't have taken in what Mr. Watts had just said, because she started to ask her question until Mr. Watts stopped her mid-sentence with a raised eyebrow, which, for the first time in twenty-four hours, reminded us of his nickname.

“Mabel, Mr. Watts,” she said.

“Good. I'm very pleased to meet you, Mabel. That is a pretty name,” he said.

Mabel shone. She wriggled in her desk. Then she spoke.

“When can we say we know Mr. Dickens?”

Mr. Watts brought two fingers up to his chin. We watched him think for a moment.

“That is a very good question, Mabel. In fact, my first response is that you have asked me something to which there is no answer. But I will give it my best shot. Some of you will know Mr. Dickens when we finish the book. The book is fifty-nine chapters long. If I read a chapter a day, that's fifty-nine days.”

This was difficult information to bring home. We had met Mr. Dickens but we did not know him yet, and would not know him for another fifty-eight days. It was December 10, 1991. I quickly calculated—we would not know Mr. Dickens until February 6, 1992.

I
N THE TROPICS NIGHT FALLS QUICKLY. There is no lingering memory of the day just been. One moment you can see the dogs looking skinny and mangy. In the next they have turned into black shadows. If you are not ready with candles and kerosene lamps, the quick fall of night is like being put away in a dark cell, from where there is no release until the following dawn.

During the blockade we could not waste fuel or candles. But as the rebels and redskins went on butchering one another, we had another reason for hiding under the cover of night. Mr. Watts had given us kids another world to spend the night in. We could escape to another place. It didn't matter that it was Victorian England. We found we could easily get there. It was just the blimmin' dogs and the blimmin' roosters that tried to keep us here.

By the time Mr. Watts reached the end of chapter one I felt like I had been spoken to by this boy Pip. This boy who I couldn't see to touch but knew by ear. I had found a new friend.

The surprising thing is where I'd found him—not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could slip inside the skin of another. Or travel to another place with marshes, and where, to our ears, the bad people spoke like pirates. I think Mr. Watts enjoyed the spoken parts. When he spoke them he became the voices. That's another thing that impressed us—for the time he was reading, Mr. Watts had a way of absenting himself. And we forgot all about him being there. When Magwitch, the escaped convict, threatens to rip out Pip's heart and liver if he doesn't bring him some food, and a file for his leg irons, we didn't hear Mr. Watts, we heard Magwitch, and it was like the convict was in the classroom with us. We had only to close our eyes to be sure.

There was also a lot of stuff I didn't understand. At night I lay on my mat wondering what marshes were; and what were wittles and leg irons? I had an idea from their sound.
Marshes
. I wondered if quicksand was the same. I knew about quicksand because a man up at the mine had sunk into it, never to be seen again. That happened years earlier when the mine was still open and there were white people crawling over Panguna like ants over a corpse.

Mr. Watts had given us kids another piece of the world. I found I could go back to it as often as I liked. What's more, I could pick up any moment in the story. Not that I thought of what we were hearing as story. No. I was hearing someone give an account of themselves and all that had happened. I was still discovering my favorite bits. Pip in the graveyard surrounded by the headstones of his dead parents and five dead brothers ranked high. We knew about death—we had seen all those babies buried up on the hillside. Me and Pip had something else in common; I was eleven when my father left, so neither of us really knew our fathers.

I'd met mine, of course, but then I only knew my dad as a child knows a parent, as a sort of crude outline filled in with one or two colors. I'd never seen my father scared or cry. I'd never heard him admit to any wrongdoing. I have no idea what he dreamed of. And once I'd seen a smile pinned to one cheek and darkness to the other when my mum had yelled at him. Now he was gone, and I was left with just an impression—one of male warmth, big arms, and loud laughter.

The shape of the letters on the headstone gave Pip the idea his father was a “square, stout, dark man with curly black hair.”

Encouraged by Pip's example I tried to build a picture of my own dad. I found some examples of his handwriting. He wrote in small capital letters. What did that say about him? He wanted to be noticed, but not too noticeable? There was that booming laugh of his, of course. I slept in the same room as my mum, and that night in the dark I asked her if Dad was a happy man. She said, “Never at the right time, though usually after he had been drinking.”

I asked her if she thought he was a “stout man.” In the dark I heard her raise herself up on an elbow. “
Stout!
Where did you get that word from, girl?”

“Mr. Watts.”

“Pop Eye. Him,” she said as she let herself down again.

“It was in a book.”

“What blimmin' book?”

“Great Expectations.”

I had given her three quick answers. The last one was the most stunning. I had lost her. I could hear her brooding next to me. She shifted on her mat. I could hear her angry breath. I don't know what made her so angry all the time. As we lay there the night filled up with noise. We listened to the dogs growling at shadows, and to the ocean shuffle up the beach and draw out. We lay like that for a very long time before my mum spoke.

“So, Matilda, aren't you going to tell me about that book?”

This was the first time I had been in a position to tell her anything about the world. But this was a place she did not know about and hadn't heard of. She couldn't even pretend to know, so it was up to me to color in that world for her. I couldn't remember the exact words Mr. Watts had read to us, and I didn't think I would be able to make it possible for my mum to slip into that world that us kids had or into Pip's life or some other's, that of the convict, say. So I told her in my own words about Pip having no mum or dad or brothers, and my mum cried out, “He is lost.”

“No,” I said. “There is a sister. She is married to a man called Joe. They are the ones who bring up Pip.”

I told her about the convict creeping up on Pip in the cemetery. How he threatened to rip out his heart and liver if Pip didn't do what he asked. I told her how Pip went back to the house for a file and food to take to the convict in the morning.

I hadn't done it justice in my telling. There was no sound to what I said. Just the bare facts. And when I reached the end I had to say, “That's all I know, so far.”

A dog howled at the night. Something squawked. We heard a high voice from one of the nearby houses. Then my mum spoke.

“What would you do, girl? If a man was hiding in the jungle and he ask you to steal from me. Would you do that?”

“No,” I said, and I thanked the Lord for the dark so that my lying face could not be seen.

“Pop Eye should be teaching you kids proper behavior,” she said. “I want to know everything that happens in that book. You hear me, Matilda?”

WHEN WE WEREN'T being read
Great Expectations
we did our schoolwork, our spelling, our times tables. Mr. Watts got us to memorize countries beginning with A—America, Andorra, Australia—through to Z—Zambia, Zimbabwe. We had no books. We had our minds and we had our memories, and according to Mr. Watts, that's all we needed.

There were gaps in Mr. Watts' knowledge. Large gaps, as it turned out, for which he apologized. He knew the word
chemistry
but could not tell us much more than that. He handed on the names of famous people such as Darwin, Einstein, Plato, Archimedes, Aristotle. We wondered if he was making them up, because he struggled to explain why they were famous or why we had to know them. Yet he was our teacher and he never relinquished that status. When an unfamiliar fish washed up on the beach it felt right to ask Mr. Watts to come and identify the strange eel-like serpent. It didn't matter that he would end up standing over the creature with the same blank face as the rest of us.

When it came to Mr. Dickens, though, he knew he was on safe ground. And we felt happy for him. He always referred to him as Mr. Dickens—never Dickens or Charles. So we knew what to do when it was our turn to refer to the author. We spoke about Mr. Dickens until he began to feel real, or as real as Mr. Watts. We just didn't know him yet.

Mr. Watts spoke to us about England. He had been there. He might as well have said “the moon.” We struggled to think of a question to ask. My friend Celia asked if there were black people there. Mr. Watts answered quickly, “Yes,” and as he shifted his attention around the room to look for another, better question, Celia snuck a sideways look at me from under her black pigtails.

We soon learned there were many Englands, and Mr. Watts had only been to two or three of them. The England he visited was very different from the one Mr. Dickens had lived and worked in. This was a challenging notion for those of us who had never been anywhere, because we had the feeling that life on the island was much the same as it had been for our grandfathers and their grandfathers, especially after the blockade was imposed.

My mum liked to tell a story about my grandfather back when he took the steamboat to Rabaul for the first time. He had to nudge another passenger standing up on deck to ask, “What are those large pigs I can see moving behind the trees?” He had just seen his first motorcar.

Away from Mr. Dickens and England, Mr. Watts was lost. Once when Gilbert stuck up his hand to ask how the motorcar worked, Mr. Watts stammered out a reply. He scratched his head. He started again. We all knew about petrol and the key in the ignition. It was the rest of it Gilbert wanted to know about. We were told it was complicated. Mr. Watts said it was easier to explain with a drawing. Once again we were asked to be patient and he would see what he could do.

We knew Mr. Watts was aware of his shortcomings—no one had to tell him—because not long after we resumed school he invited our mums to come into the classroom and share what they knew of the world.

M
ABEL'S MUM WAS THE FIRST TO COME and speak to us. Mrs. Kabui arrived at the open door in a blaze of late afternoon light. Mr. Watts held out a welcoming hand, and Mrs. Kabui walked quickly towards it. She spoke in a whisper to Mr. Watts. I saw Mabel shift to the edge of her chair. Mr. Watts gave a nod and Mrs. Kabui looked relieved.

“Class, we are very lucky today,” began Mr. Watts. “Mrs. Kabui has agreed to share with us the remarkable life and times of the heart seed.”

Mabel's mum gave a shy smile. She stood barefoot in a white blouse and a red skirt. As soon as she smiled you forgot the tear in the shoulder of her blouse and the pawing marks left by the grubby fingers of a child. She spoke softly and chose her words with great care.

“Thank you, Mr. Watts. Thank you very much. I am here today hoping to surprise you kids.” She looked around to see if we were ready. We were.

“What if I was to tell you that some gardens begin their lives in oceans?” Again she looked around the class, her gaze skipping over the desk where her daughter sat. Her smile was for us all. “I am here today to talk about the heart seed.”

She told us that one day a heart seed floats on the water. The next day it washes up on the beach. The next week the sea breeze and sun have dried it to something light as a husk. The next month sees a wind turn it over and over until it reaches soil. Three months later a sapling grows out of the earth. Nine months later its white flowers open and glance back at the sea whence it came.

“Why am I telling you this, children? Because its stamen makes a fierce flame and keeps away the mosquitoes.”

Mr. Watts blinked, like someone just waking up. I have an idea he had been expecting to hear more and that Mabel's mum caught him off-guard with her abrupt ending.

“Very good, Mrs. Kabui. Excellent. The heart seed.”

He nodded in our direction, which was a sign for us all to rise and applaud. Mabel clapped her hands the loudest and for the longest. Her mother bent at the hips and dropped her head. She came up laughing. Everyone was pleased. No one had suffered embarrassment or shame.