Mister Pip (13 page)

The classroom block was one of only two buildings left standing. That was odd. My mum thought it was because the block was government property. It made no sense for the redskins to destroy it. It would be like destroying a bit of Moresby. The other place was Mr. Watts' house. Again, my mum thought she knew why, saying it was because Mr. Watts was white. The redskins wouldn't do anything to cause white displeasure. Port Moresby was dependent on Australian aid, which came in many forms—teachers, missionaries, canned fish, and even the helicopters used to drop the rebels out to sea.

This time no one rushed to set fire to Mr. Watts' house. People knew about Grace's fever, but it wasn't just that. I think they learned from the first time, after throwing Mr. Watts' things onto the fire, that it didn't make them feel any better.

Possibly this also explains why no one stopped their kids from attending Mr. Watts' class.

But there was one change. Our class was only half the size it had been. Some of the older boys had run off to join the rebels. And one girl, Genevieve, who was probably the one least interested in school and
Great Expectations,
had joined her brothers and sisters to walk to their relatives' village up in the hills.

M
R. WATTS BEGAN BY THANKING US FOR turning up. He had been unsure whether he would make it himself. Mrs. Watts was very sick. But here he was, and here we were, almost like old times, he might have said. Except what we had lost and what we had taken from Mr. Watts and his wife came between us in small but telling ways. We found ourselves looking away rather than meeting Mr. Watts' eyes. And his own steady gaze sought the corners of the ceiling at the far end of the room. We slipped under that gaze and watched what he did with his hands. We prepared ourselves to listen out for any hard-done-by note to slip into his voice.

“We have all lost our possessions and many of us our homes,” he said. “But these losses, severe though they may seem, remind us of what no person can take, and that is our minds and our imaginations.”

Daniel stuck up his hand.

“Yes, Daniel?”

“Where are our imaginations?”

“Out there, Daniel.”

We all turned to see what Mr. Watts was pointing to out the door.

“And in here.”

Our heads switched back to see him tap the side of his head.

“Close your eyes,” he said to Daniel, “and in a voice only you can hear, say your name. Say it to yourself only.”

I had moved to a desk two behind Daniel, so I could see the sides of his cheeks move with the spoken sound of his name.

“Have you found it, Daniel?”

“Yes, Mr. Watts. I have.”

“Let's all do it,” said Mr. Watts. “Close your eyes and silently recite your name.”

The sound of my name took me to a place deep inside my head. I already knew that words could take you into a new world, but I didn't know that on the strength of one word spoken for my ears only I would find myself in a room that no one else knew about. Matilda. Matilda. Matilda. I said it over and over. I tried out different versions, dragging the word out and expanding that room.
Ma til da
.

“Another thing,” Mr. Watts said. “No one in the history of your short lives has used the same voice as you with which to say your name. This is yours. Your special gift that no one can ever take from you. This is what our friend and colleague Mr. Dickens used to construct his stories with.”

Mr. Watts stopped to look, checking to see if he was traveling too fast for us and whether what he had said had sunk in.

I replied with a nod and Mr. Watts continued.

“Now, when Mr. Dickens sat down in 1860 to write
Great Expectations,
the first thing he did was clear a space for Pip's voice. That is what we did. We located that little room in ourselves where our voice is pure and alive. Mr. Dickens closed his eyes and waited until he heard that first line.”

Mr. Watts closed his eyes and we waited. He must have thought this was something he could test us with, because he snapped open his eyes to ask if anyone remembered that first line. None of us did. So he remembered for us. And as he closed his eyes a second time he quoted a line which is now ingrained in me as much as my own name. I will take to the grave the words Mr. Watts recited to us kids:
My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

At another time, all this talk of rooms and voices might have confused us. But the loss of our houses helped us to understand that what they had kept safe was more than our possessions; our houses had concealed our selves that no one else ever saw when we lay on our sleeping mats at night. Now Mr. Watts had given us all another room to lounge around in. The next stage was to furnish it.

To that end Mr. Watts announced a special task. We would retrieve
Great Expectations.

Some of us were not sure what Mr. Watts meant by the word
retrieve
. Then when it became clear—thanks to Daniel's question—we still wondered if we understood.
Great Expectations
had gone up in flames and could not be retrieved from the ashes. Of course Mr. Watts had a different approach in mind. “Let's see if we can remember it,” he said.

And that's what we did; not in an hour but over many weeks, more likely it was months. After my pencil and calendar were lost in the burning of our houses, I didn't bother with recording the passing of time. One day blended into the next.

Mr. Watts instructed us to dream freely. We did not have to remember the story in any order or even as it really happened, but as it came to us. “You won't always remember at a convenient moment,” he warned us. “It might come to you in the night. If so, you must hang on to that fragment until we meet in class. There you can share it, and add it to the others. When we have gathered all the fragments we will put together the story. It will be as good as new.”

We had done this sort of thing before. In the past, when we still had our nets and lines, we would divide up the catch on the beach. That's what we set out to do now with
Great Expectations
.

In the class that day we did not retrieve much. It was hard to hold a thought steady. You only had to look out the door to see a scrub fowl wander into view, or stare ahead to consider the white whiskers emerging in Mr. Watts' beard. A stray thought like that could hook you. There was nothing left in the world to think about after remembering the taste of scrub fowl or wondering about Mr. Watts getting older so quickly.

Once I began to turn up fragments of
Great Expectations
it was surprising where and when I found them. This was most often at night, when I needed another world to escape to, but it also would occur in unexpected moments. I might be gazing out to sea thinking of nothing in particular, and then, without warning, I would find myself with Pip walking up to Satis House with its cobwebs and gloom, and its determination to look backwards.

I remembered how I felt, how protective I had been towards Pip. I didn't like the way Estella spoke to him, and I didn't like the way Sarah Pocket teased and taunted him with gossip. I could never understand why Pip would accept the baiting of those two and never spat back.

There. I had two fragments. The first—Miss Havisham's decision to stop the clocks—I took to class. I was so terrified I would forget it, I didn't allow myself to be spoken to. I turned my head away from the other kids rather than risk having my fragment make room for other thoughts and conversations. I had it stored in the little room as Mr. Watts had directed us to. I had closed the door. But I didn't know how secure that door was, or what would happen once other people's voices started pounding on it.

Around this time Mr. Watts shared a secret with us kids. It came after Celia shared her fragment—the scene when Pip comes home from giving his sister's pie to Magwitch and finds the armed constabulary in the kitchen. Celia claimed to know Pip's heart of guilt. Yet she wondered how she had come to think the police were there to arrest Pip. Where had that come from? she asked aloud. How was it that she had conjured up something that was not in the book?

I had always liked her, but now I admired Celia. I hadn't stopped to think that someone else might also treasure the book and actively inhabit that world. The quality of Celia's question meant that the book must also occupy her thoughts. Possibly Pip too.

Mr. Watts thanked Celia. Her comment, he said, provided us with an interesting insight into the parallel world the reader develops from the words on the page. “Thank you, thank you,” he said, and Celia glowed in this praise.

Mr. Watts put it to the rest of the class. “What shall we do with Celia's fragment? How can we save it to make sure we don't forget it?”

We wondered aloud. Our hands shot up with suggestions. We could find a stick and write it down in the sand—Daniel's idea. We fell silent. Gilbert raised his hand. We could write it in a secret place. Mr. Watts liked that idea. He stuck up his finger so our minds could group around Gilbert's recommendation.

“A secret place is a fine idea. But it would have to be
completely
safe,” warned Mr. Watts.

We agreed.

“It would have to be
our
secret.” There was no doubting where his emphasis lay. He looked around at our faces, and we saw his seriousness. I thought there must be some danger associated with this secret, whatever it was. “Our secret,” he said once more.

He reached inside the breast pocket of his jacket and took out an exercise book. It had been folded in half to fit his pocket. Mr. Watts smoothed it out on his desk, then held it up for all of us kids to see. With his other hand he reached into another pocket to produce a pencil. Years later I would see on TV a magician produce a white rabbit with a similar flourish. It was a wonderful sight but not nearly as astonishing as what Mr. Watts produced.
Astonishing
is not too strong a word if you lived the way we did. Privately, though, each of us wondered how Mr. Watts had saved these items from the bonfire.

Mr. Watts smiled at our gaping faces. “What a responsibility we have,” he said. “What a responsibility. We must make sure that Mr. Dickens' greatest book is not lost forever.” He began to pace up and down the center aisle. “Can you imagine if it was lost forever? Just think. Future generations could point their finger at us and accuse us all of not looking after what we had been given to take care of.”

We tried to look how we felt we should in this situation. Solemn. Serious.

“Right, then,” he said. “I take your silence to be agreement. Entry number one is Celia's.”

Mr. Watts returned to the desk, sat, and began to write. Once when he looked up we thought he had forgotten something and I saw Celia half rise from her chair. Mr. Watts resumed writing and she sat down again. When he finished he stared at what he had written. “I wonder if I've gotten everything down correctly,” he said. “Let's find out.” He read back the words. Celia blushed. It was clear Mr. Watts had added a line or two of his own. He looked up and found Celia. She gave him a quick nod and Mr. Watts pretended to look relieved.

Now he looked around for another contribution. “Matilda, what have you got for us?”

As I retrieved my scene with Pip making his way to Satis House, Mr. Watts smiled to himself, and before I had even finished he was bent over, scribbling in the exercise book.

When I started on my second fragment he stopped writing, raised his eyes, and looked away. He looked so troubled I lost all confidence. Perhaps I had failed to remember correctly.

“Estella's remorseless teasing of Pip,” he said at last. “This is an important aspect of their relationship. He loves what he cannot have.”

He stopped there and pushed back in his chair. His large eyes flicked up to the stunned geckos stuck over the ceiling. Then he stood up abruptly and walked to the door. He looked out at the brilliant green sunshine.

What did he find out there? Where did his thoughts go to? London? Australia? To his white tribe? Home?

We saw him nod again, as if he'd just found what it was he was after. He swung around to face us and his eyes went straight to my desk.

“We need words, Matilda. We need to remember what Estella actually says to Pip.”

The others sitting in the front turned to look at me. Along with Mr. Watts they waited for me to retrieve the words. My mind went blank. I could not remember word for word what Estella had said to Pip, and as that became clear to the others, one by one their heads turned back to the front. We waited for Mr. Watts to walk back to the desk. He looked like a man made weary by bad news.

“I should warn you,” he said, “this will be the hardest part of our task. But it is an important part. We must try hard to remember what one character says to another.” As he said this he appeared overtaken by a separate thought. “However, if we can get the gist of what is meant, that will be something, at least.”

Gist.
This needed explaining. Mr. Watts put it this way. “If I say
tree,
I will think English oak, you will think palm tree. They are both trees. A palm and an oak both successfully describe what a tree is, but they are different trees.”

So this is what
gist
meant. We could fill in the gaps with our own worlds. I saw Gilbert scratch his head before deciding to stick his hand up.

“What about the canoe tree?”

It was plain Mr. Watts wasn't sure what a canoe tree was.

“What's its other name, Gilbert?”

“Just canoe tree,” he said.

Mr. Watts decided to gamble.

“A canoe tree qualifies.”

Gilbert sat back pleased.

Gist examples were to be a matter of last resort. I knew what Mr. Watts was after. He wanted the actual words. But the more I tried to remember Estella's cruel words to Pip, the more they drifted away from me. The day world kept intruding and mocking my attempts at remembering.

MY MUM HAD PACKED away her guilt someplace and recovered her voice. And now, as if to make up for lost time, she returned to her favorite pastime of constant putdowns of Mr. Watts, or Pop Eye, as she was back to calling him.