Mister Pip (14 page)

Pop Eye.
She put all her contempt into that name. Pop Eye is a man who stands beneath a coconut tree never believing a coconut will fall until it lands on his head. He would eat a sunfish, given half a chance. Dumb bugger. Does your Mr. Watts know a stonefish when he sees one? His ignorance makes him a dangerous man. And you, Matilda, why do you look to an ignorant, dangerous man for a teacher? This is how crazy the world has become. Can your Mr. Watts build a house? Can he paddle out to the reef at sunset and sneak up on a shoal of parrot fish? Your Mr. Watts is dependent on other souls to feed him and his wife. He is nothing by himself.

Once upon a time I would have walked away from her attack on Mr. Watts—now I listened. In her mocking I could hear Estella. So I trailed after her like a mangy dog after a scrap of food. I followed her from our crude shelter to the garden to the creek until she tried to bat me away. She called me names. I was a mosquito. I was a tick on a dog's arse. “What's the matter with you, girl? Do you not have a shadow of your own to play with?”

Most of the time her words fell harmlessly off me. But that last sentence stuck.
Do you not have a shadow of your own to play with?
I smiled at my mum. I wanted to thank her, but I didn't know how. I went to hug her, but she saw that coming and took a step back. She raised her hands, pretending I had turned into a demon. I couldn't speak in case what she had said escaped my mouth with the other words. I was a bird with a worm caught in its beak.

I ran to Mr. Watts' house with my fragment. I wasn't going to let it leak from my mind. I ran past the schoolhouse and followed a path half covered in overgrowth. One of the more general criticisms directed Mr. Watts' way was that he didn't take care of his property. And it wasn't just my mum who said this. But as every other house was burned to the ground, I wonder if there was purpose behind Mr. Watts' neglect, that in the end he was the smart one.

As I made my way there I felt a bit like Pip approaching Satis House. I also felt nervous. At least Pip had been invited by Miss Havisham. I hoped Mr. Watts wouldn't mind my turning up like this. I thought he wouldn't mind so much, given the responsibility of our task and once he heard the quality of my fragment.

The house came into view and I found myself stalled by the memories it stirred inside me. The sight of the wooden steps and wooden gables and door. These things were beautiful reminders of the outside world.

I climbed the steps to a small verandah and peered in the open door to a large room. On this side of the house the shutters were partially closed and the light cast a wide rippled path across the wooden floor. In the corner I could make out Mrs. Watts. She lay on her sleeping mat. Most of her was obscured by Mr. Watts. He knelt beside his sick wife, stroking her hair and dabbing her forehead with a damp-looking rag.

My eyes greedily took in a ceiling fan and a standing fan (neither working, of course). On a far bench I could see a large can of corned beef. I couldn't remember when I last saw such a can, any can for that matter. But whenever that was I'm sure I would never have been able to imagine a day in the future when an ordinary thing such as a can would represent a broad hope.

I put away the surprise of these things and stepped inside the room. I couldn't hold on to my fragment any longer. The doors flew open and I blurted—

“Do you not have a shadow of your own to play with?”

Mr. Watts slowly turned his head and at once I realized my mistake in coming here. He wasn't as pleased to see me as I had hoped, nor did my fragment make the sort of impression I was expecting. He looked to me, to explain.

“It's gist,” I said. “What Estella says to Pip.”

I was used to Mr. Watts' silences and that way of his of walking to the open door of the classroom as if all the answers to everything lay outside, and where he stood on the brink of confirming our wild guesses as right or wrong according to what he could see.

So I waited and waited, and finally, with what seemed a huge effort, he stirred himself sufficiently to turn back into the teacher I knew, and said, “I think that gets to the heart of the matter, Matilda.” He looked up at the ceiling for a moment. “Yes, I think so,” he said.

Only now did I pay slight attention to the heaviness of his voice, but I did not see his sadness. I felt only the disappointment of his underwhelming response. His eyes settled on me, and I wondered if he was waiting for more.

“Would you like to write it down, Matilda?”

He looked across to where his white jacket hung from a peg. Up close and away from the distraction of Mr. Watts himself when he wore the jacket, I saw how grimy it was; it almost shone with its filth. The insides were slimy to touch. I found the exercise book and the pencil. Now I knelt down on the floor and entered my fragment.

My pencil-holding fingers had gotten clumsy. I was out of practice. My letters wobbled to start with.

I wondered if Mr. Watts thought I was taking too long over my fragment, because he called over to me. “When you finish, Matilda, return the book to my jacket if you wouldn't mind. And the pencil.”

I looked to see where that tired voice had come from, or what caused it. I couldn't see Mrs. Watts' eyes. Mr. Watts' hand was covering them. I finished my fragment, returned the exercise book and pencil to their safe place, and left, quietly closing the door after me.

I
DIDN'T TELL MY MUM THAT I HAD BEEN TO the Wattses' house. She would consider such a visit to be a betrayal. Even though I thought of myself as being in Mr. Watts' camp, it didn't mean I wanted to rub my mum's nose in that fact. I knew where the boundaries lay and I took care to step lightly around them.

And then sometimes I caught a glimpse of someone called Dolores, who was her own person, and not just someone's mother.

Early one morning when I crept up on her standing alone on the beach and looking out to sea, I knew from the stillness in her shoulders she was looking for something. Or possibly what she was looking for was floating on a tide of hope within her, and not out there in that huge baffling blue ocean-sky that separated us from the world.

Perhaps if we had been starving to death the outside world would have helped. We would have been an aid project. But we had food. We had our gardens and our fruit, and we had fish so long as Gilbert's father's boat was kept a secret.

Secrets were the last things we gave up. Our parents had stopped keeping from us the things they heard. They no longer cared. Discretion required effort, and what was the point? What did it matter when you had nothing, and nothing to look forward to? We were practically in the same state that the Bible says mankind came into the world as.

We washed our only clothes and sat naked waiting for them to dry in the sun. We got about barefoot. The roof of our shelter let in the stars, the sun, and the heavier downpours. At night we lay on a bed of sand carried up from the beach by the handful. We were never cold, though, or really that uncomfortable. The hardest part was getting through the boredom of the night.

My mum's pidgin Bible had gone up in flames, so at night, while I tried to summon passages from
Great Expectations
she did the same with her Bible. I would hear her mumbling in the dark, and I'd have to roll away from her and put a hand over my ear to concentrate on my own retrievals.

It was easier in class. For some reason, whenever one of us produced a fragment I could almost always remember another one either side of it. It happened this way for the others as well. As the list grew it was clear that Victoria, Gilbert, Mabel, and even Daniel thought about
Great Expectations
as much as I did.

When Mr. Watts read out my fragment on Pip walking up to Miss Havisham's, Gilbert suddenly remembered Mr. Pumblechook. He referred to him as a bullfrog, and it was Victoria who remembered the name Pumblechook; now it was Violet waving her hand madly. She had remembered something. Wasn't it Mr. Pumblechook who had taken Pip to the town hall to be apprenticed to Joe Gargery, the blacksmith? Mr. Watts broke into a smile. He was as pleased with our efforts as we were. We got noisy with excitement. Sometimes he would have to hold up a hand to slow us down while he recorded the fragments in the exercise book. After each entry he wrote our name.

I LAY IN THE DARK trying to put names to the things I heard in the night. The rasping call of the shining cuckoo. The lazy flip-flop of the sea—so much louder at night than during the day. The odd sharp voice, rising above the joyless croaking of frogs. A clip over the ear for some kid misbehaving, or maybe for simply being awake. The low neighing laugh of an old man. My mum's wakefulness.

“Hey, Matilda?” It wasn't much of a whisper. She meant to wake me. “Hey,” she said, and this time I felt her breath on my face. She gave my arm a tug. “I've got something to tell you.”

I was trying to decide how to answer. I was awake, as it happens, but it wasn't convenient to admit that just then. I was thinking about the visit of Mr. Jaggers to Pip's neighborhood in the marshes, trying to remember how Pip felt when told of his good luck. I was on the brink of retrieving this fragment when my mum continued, and what she said shattered all that had been building in my head.

“I suppose you heard. Grace Watts is dead.”

IT MUST HAVE BEEN at an hour when even the birds hadn't woken that I heard the tramp of men's feet pass our hut. It was Gilbert's father and some other, older men. I saw their backs as they disappeared behind the schoolhouse.

They dug a hole up on the hillside for Mrs. Watts. They had no shovels. They used sticks and machetes to break up the ground. After that they used their hands and a broken oar to scoop out a grave.

When the time came to bury Mrs. Watts, every one of us—kids, old people, anyone who could walk—went up the hill to support Mr. Watts. I remember the soft footfall of feet, and the silence of the mourners. I remember the damp air that smelled of the forest, and the tinkling of the mountain streams dropping into shining pools. It was the world getting on with its business.

Us kids were free to stare at our teacher. We did not need to wonder what he was thinking and feeling because Mr. Watts did not shift his eyes from the hole in the ground. He had on his suit, and the same white shirt we always saw him in. Only he had washed it, and put it on before it was properly dry. So you could see the pink areas of his chest through the wet cotton. He had on a green tie we were seeing for the first time. He wore socks and shoes. His face was very pale. His beard fell clean off his chin as he hung his head over Mrs. Watts.

She was wrapped from top to bottom in some matting that some of the other women had made. I happened to catch Gilbert walk around the head of Mrs. Watts to sneak a look. He looked away quickly when he realized I had seen him prying. My angry face wasn't really for Gilbert. It was for me.

I couldn't stop wondering if Mrs. Watts was already dead when I had rushed into their house that time. What if she was already dead as I knelt on the floor proudly entering my fragment into Mr. Watts' exercise book? It shamed me to think back to the disappointment I felt because Mr. Watts had not been forthcoming with praise. Poor Mr. Watts. As I looked up, Gilbert caught my eye and mouthed something at me.

I looked around at the assembled crowd. The men's faces sweated in the heat. The women looked down at Mrs. Watts with worry. When a small branch broke off from the treetops and dropped a long way down, nobody paid it any attention. If anything, that falling branch reminded us that something needed to be said. That's when I heard my mum offer a prayer for Grace. She recited the Lord's Prayer, though not all the way through. In one place she got lost. She closed her eyes and bit her lip and fumbled about in her memory until she found the missing lines. In the end she got there.

It must have been because the silence was unsatisfying that Mr. Masoi asked my mum to say the prayer again. This time she recited it all the way through, and with open eyes. Mr. Watts nodded and mouthed a silent thank-you.