Mister Pip (5 page)

Just as he had with Gilbert, Mr. Watts hunted me out with his large eager eyes. “Matilda, would you like to do the honors?”

I stood up and announced what everyone already knew.

“This is my mum.”

“And does Mum have a name?”

“Dolores,” I said, and slid lower into my desk. “Dolores Laimo.”

My mum smiled back at me. She was wearing the green scarf my dad had sent in the very last package we received. She wore it tied tight at the back of her head, which was the same way the rebels wore their bandannas. Her hair was pulled back in a tight bun. It gave her an air of defiance. Her mouth clamped down, her nostrils flared. My father used to say she had the blood of righteousness running in her veins. She should have been a churchwoman, he'd say, because persuasiveness for my mum was not an intellectual exercise. Quality of argument was neither here nor there. It was all about the intensity of belief. And every part of her—from the whites of her eyes to her muscular calves—rallied on her behalf.

My mum didn't smile enough. When she did it was nearly always in victory. Or else it was at nighttime when she thought she was all alone. When she was thinking she tended to look angry, as if the act of thinking was potentially ruinous, even ending in her humiliation. Even when she concentrated she looked angry. In fact, she appeared to be angry much of the time. I used to think it was because she was thinking about my dad. But she couldn't have been thinking about him all the time.

She knew the contents of what she called the Good Book. She thought about those contents a lot. And I wouldn't have thought there was anything in that book to make her angry, but that's how she appeared, and why a lot of the kids found her scary.

She must have anticipated this because she used her softer voice, the one I used to hear in the night before
Great Expectations
came between us.

“Children, I have come to talk to you about faith,” she said. “You must believe in something. Yes, you must. Even the palm trees believe in the air. And the fish believe in the sea.”

As she cast her eye around the room she began to empty her mind of the only subject she trusted, and knew, and cared anything about.

“When the missionaries came, we were taught to have faith in God. But when we asked to see God the missionaries refused to introduce us. Many of the old people preferred to stay with the wisdom of crabs, and the filefish that is shaped like the Southern Star, because if you were to swim with your head down you could swim from one island to another just by taking your bearings from the filefish. What do you kids think of that, eh?”

She leaned forward. Mr. Watts might as well not have been present.

“It's better to have the company of filefish, don't you think? If you did, then you could say your survival was simply a matter of faith, which is what one old fisherman, rescued from his sunken canoe, told my father when I was a girl. At night he knew where he was by the stars. During the day he kept his face in the water and followed the filefish. This is true.”

None of us was about to dispute it. The others sat rigid in their desks. The fear I felt from them made me a little embarrassed.

My mum gave a satisfied grunt. She had us where she wanted us. We were that shoal of petrified fish that a shark circles. She slowly straightened up out of her lean, as if taking care not to disturb her effect on us all.

“Now listen. Faith is like oxygen. It keeps you afloat at all times. Sometimes you need it. Sometimes you don't. But when you do need it you better be practiced at having faith, otherwise it won't work. That's why the missionaries built all the churches. Before we got those churches we weren't practicing enough. That's what prayers are for—practice, children. Practice.

“Now, here are some words to learn off by heart. ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth…And the earth was without form, and void: and darkness
was
upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.'” My mum's face opened to a rare smile. She found me in the desk up the back and held my eye. “‘And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.'”

“There is no sentence in the world more beautiful than that one.”

I was aware of several heads turning my way, as if I might beg to differ. Fortunately I was saved by Violet, who had her hand up. She wanted my mum to talk about the wisdom of crabs. At last my mum turned to Mr. Watts.

“Please,” he said.

“Crabs,” she said, and raised her gaze to the geckos on the ceiling. But she did not see them. Her mind was fastened to crabs, and in particular, to the sort of weather we can expect by looking at the behavior of crabs.

“Wind and rain are on the way if a crab digs straight down and blocks the hole with sand, leaving marks like sunrays. We can expect strong winds but no rain if a crab leaves behind a pile of sand but does not cover the hole.

“If the crab blocks the hole but does not scrape the mound flat there will be rain but no wind. When the crab leaves the sand piled up and the hole unblocked the weather will be fine. Never trust a white who says, ‘According to the radio rain is on the way.' Trust crabs first and above all others.”

My mum glanced over at Mr. Watts, who laughed to show what a good sport he was.

I wished she could have found it in herself to laugh with him. Instead, she gave him an unfriendly nod to show she was finished with us, and swept out of the class into the afternoon furnace where birds squawked without a memory for the dead dog and the chopped roosters they had seen earlier in the day.

When school finished some of us went down to the beach to look for crabs, to see if what my mum had said was true. We found some unblocked holes, which was proof enough for the boys, but all you had to do was look up at the clear blue skies to find the weather. I wasn't really interested in crabs.

I picked up a stick and in big letters scratched PIP into the sand. I did it above the high-tide line and stuck white heart seeds into the groove of the letters of his name.

The trouble with
Great Expectations
is that it's a one-way conversation. There's no talking back. Otherwise I would have told Pip about my mum coming to speak to the class, and how, seeing her at a distance—even though only two desks back from the end of the room—she had appeared different to me. More hostile.

When she dug in her heels all her heft raced to the surface of her skin. It was almost as if there were friction between her skin and the trailing air. She walked slowly, like a great sail sheet of resistance. She'd put her smile away, and that was a shame because I knew it to be a beautiful smile. There were nights when I saw the moonlight catch the tips of her teeth and I'd know then that she was lying in the dark with a smile. And by that smile I knew she had entered another world, one which I couldn't reach—an adult world and, beyond that, a private world where she knew herself how only
she
and no one else could, let alone follow her there in back of those beautiful moonlit teeth.

Whatever I might say about my mum to Pip I knew he wouldn't hear me. I could only follow him through some strange country that contained marshes and pork pies and people who spoke in long and confusing sentences. Sometimes, by the time Mr. Watts reached the end, you were no better off, you had no sense of what those sentences were trying to say, and maybe by then you were also paying too much attention to the geckos on the ceiling. But then the story would switch to Pip, to his voice, and suddenly you felt yourself reconnect.

As we progressed through the book something happened to me. At some point I felt myself enter the story. I hadn't been assigned a part—nothing like that; I wasn't identifiable on the page, but I was there, I was definitely there. I knew that orphaned white kid and that small, fragile place he squeezed into between his awful sister and lovable Joe Gargery, because 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.

“Pop 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 a sobbing child.

WHAT DID I HOPE FOR? Just hope itself, really, but in a particular way. I knew things could change because they had for Pip.

First, he is invited by the wealthy Miss Havisham up to her house to play cards with her adopted girl, Estella. I never took to Estella. I can say now that I was jealous of her. I didn't like that other teasing girl, Sarah Pocket, either. I was always glad when it came time to leave Miss Havisham's.

In
Great Expectations
we learned how a life could change without any warning. Pip is into the fourth year of his apprenticeship with Joe Gargery. So he has leaped ahead of me in age. But this didn't matter. In other respects he stayed a true friend, a companion I worried about and thought of lots.

He will become a blacksmith, it seems. A
blacksmith
. There was another word to ask about. Mr. Watts said it was more than a job. By
blacksmith
Mr. Dickens meant more than a man hammering horseshoes into shape. Pip has settled into the routines that go with the blacksmith's life, including nights huddled around the fire with Joe Gargery and others at a pub with the funny name of Three Jolly Bargemen, drinking ale and listening to one another's nonsense.