Mister Pip Read online

  “There is a place called Egypt,” she said. “I know nothing of that place. I wish I could tell you kids about Egypt. Forgive me for not knowing more. But if you care to listen, I will tell you everything I know about the color blue.”

  And so we heard about the color blue.

  “Blue is the color of the Pacific. It is the air we breathe. Blue is the gap in the air of all things, such as the palms and iron roofs. But for blue we would not see the fruit bats. Thank you, God, for giving us the color blue.

  “It is surprising where the color blue pops up,” continued Daniel’s grandmother. “Look and ye shall find. You can find blue squinting up in the cracks of the wharf at Kieta. And you know what it is trying to do? It is trying to get at the stinking fish guts, to take them back home. If blue was an animal or plant or bird, it would be a seagull. It gets its sticky beak into everything.

  “Blue also has magical powers,” she said. “You watch a reef and tell me if I am lying. Blue crashes onto a reef and what color does it release? It releases white! Now, how does it do that?”

  Our eyes sought out Mr. Watts for an explanation, but he pretended not to notice our questioning faces. He sat on the edge of the desk, his arms folded. Every part of him looked to be focused on what Daniel’s grandmother had to say. One by one our attention shifted back to the little old woman with the betel-stained mouth.

  “A final thing, children, and then I will let you go. Blue belongs to the sky and cannot be nicked, which is why the missionaries stuck blue in the windows of the first churches they built here on the island.”

  Mr. Watts did that now-familiar thing of opening his eyes wide as if waking from a sleep. He walked over to Daniel’s grandmother with an outstretched hand. The old woman gave hers for him to hold, then he turned to the class.

  “Today, we have been very lucky. Very lucky. We have received a handy reminder that while we may not know the whole world, we can, if we are clever enough, make it new. We can make it up with the things we find and see around us. We just have to look and try to be as imaginative as Daniel’s grandmother.” He put a hand on the shoulder of the old woman. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you so much.”

  Daniel’s grandmother grinned back at the class and we saw how few teeth she had left, and the few she did have explained why she whistled when she spoke.

  Others who came to speak to the class had to be persuaded by Mr. Watts to give up what they knew, and in some cases it was very little.

  The woman who had owned Black dropped her shy eyes to the ground. And when Giselle spoke, Mr. Watts had to lean towards her to catch what she said about wind. “Some islands have beautiful names for different winds. My favorite is the wind that is known as ‘gentle as a woman.’”

  Gilbert’s uncle, a big man, round as an oil drum, black as tar from toiling out at sea, came to speak to us about “broken dreams.” He said the best place to find a broken dream is on the wharf. “Look at all those dead fish with their eyes and mouths open. They can’t believe they are not in the sea and never will be again.”

  He stopped to look at Mr. Watts, as if to ask, Is this the sort of thing you’re after? Mr. Watts gave a nod, and Gilbert’s uncle continued.

  “At night the blimmin’ dogs and roosters chase after dreams and break them in two. The one good thing about a broken dream is that you can pick up the threads of it again. By the way, fish go to heaven. Don’t believe any other shit you hear.”

  He shifted from one bare foot to the other, tilting his nervous eyes to Mr. Watts, then back at us. “That’s all I’ve got for now,” he said.

  We heard about an island where the kids sit in a stone canoe and learn sacred sea chants by heart. We heard you can sing a song to make an orange tree grow. We heard about songs that worked like medicine. For example, you can sing a certain one to get rid of hiccups. There are even songs to get rid of sores and boils.

  We learned about remedies, such as placing the leaves of white lilies on sores. There was another scrubby plant whose long green leaves were good for earache. Leaves of another plant could be squeezed and drunk to cure diarrhea. Kina shells should be boiled for soup and fed to first-time mothers to stop the bleeding.

  Some stories will help you find happiness and truth. Some stories teach you not to make the same mistake twice. These ones offer instruction. Look here to the Good Book.

  A woman called May told a story about a frigate bird that had brought her a birthday card from a neighboring island. The card was folded inside an old toothpaste box that was taped under the bird’s wing. It was for her eighth birthday and the large bird seemed to know this because, she said, it stood with her mum and dad watching her as she read the note, and when she came to the words “Happy birthday, May,” she said everyone cheered and that’s when she saw the bird smile.

  “The next day we ate it for my birthday lunch.”

  When Mr. Watts heard that, his head reared back and his arms dropped to his sides. He looked appalled. I wonder if May noticed, because she then said, “Of course, the bird didn’t know about that part.”

  Still, we all felt uncomfortable because Mr. Watts had been made to feel uncomfortable.

  One old woman stood before us and shouted, “Ged up, you lazybones! Get off your arses and follow the seabirds out to the fishing grounds.” It was a traditional story.

  Another woman from my mum’s prayer group came to talk to us about good manners. “Silence is an indicator of good manners,” she said. “When I was growing up, silence was the bits left over after the blimmin’ dogs and the blimmin’ roosters and the generators had had a go at the world. Most of us kids didn’t know what to do with it. Sometimes we mistook silence for being bored. But silence is good for a lot of things—sleeping, being at one with God, thinking about the Good Book.

  “Also,” she added, waving a finger at us girls in the class, “stay away from boys who abuse silence. Boys who shout have mud in their souls. A man who knows about the wind and sailing a boat also knows about silence and is likely to be more sensitive to the presence of God. Other than that, I don’t want to tell you girls where to shop.”

  Agnes Haripa began her talk on sex with a smile. She didn’t speak until she had every one of us smiling back at her. Gilbert was slow to respond and she stood patiently smiling at him for some time before Mr. Watts intervened and asked Gilbert if he was going to oblige. To help Gilbert, Mr. Watts produced a smile of his own. “Oh yeah,” said Gilbert, and Mrs. Haripa was able to get on with her lesson.

  “Today I wish to speak on what the lychee can teach us,” she said. “Sweet things are never worn on the outside.” She held up a spiky lychee for all of us to see, as if none of us had ever set eyes on this fruit. We knew about its thin hard shell. You peeled it off and sank your teeth into its creamy-textured, almond-tasting flesh. “But like a lychee,” continued Agnes, “a person’s sweet smile says nothing about a person’s heart. A smile can be a trick. To stay sweet you have to protect yourself. Girls, protect your sweets from the boys. Look at the lychee. Would it taste so sweet if its fruits were exposed to the sun and the rains and the longing of dogs?”

  We caught on. We knew what she wanted and chanted back, “No, Mrs. Haripa.”

  “No,” she said. “Them fruits would dry up and shrivel. They’d lose their sweetness, which is why the lychee’s sweet part sits behind a hard shell. Everyone knows this to be true, but hardly anyone ever asks why. Now you kids know.”

  She made another sweeping inspection of our faces. She was looking for a troublemaker, someone who might have a question. Questions were all right so long as you knew what seeded a question. Was the question a genuine attempt to find something out or was it to trip you up? Mrs. Haripa was a friend of my mum’s. They belonged to the same prayer group.

  “I don’t think there are any questions, Mrs. Haripa,” said Mr. Watts, to our great relief. “However, if I may say so, I found your talk on the preservation of innocence very affecting.”

  Mrs.
Haripa’s eyes blazed at Mr. Watts. She wasn’t sure if the white man was making fun of her. What was that smile hiding? Some white cunning? And these kids knew his masks better than she did. Why were those kids all of a sudden smiling that way? Perhaps she should have spoken about the cassava or the many uses of chicken feathers.

  I was enjoying her discomfort so much I almost missed Mr. Watts’ raised eyebrow, which was a cue for me to stand up and thank Mrs. Haripa for her contribution.

  The class broke into polite applause and then Mrs. Haripa nodded happily back at us. And we were happy for her. We wanted our cousins and our mothers and grandmothers to tell us stuff. We didn’t want them scared to come to class. But we also saw how shame and a fear of looking stupid was never far from the surface, and this is what kept some at a distance; these ones made it as far as the clearing before doubt made a skittery run across their hearts. Marooned by doubt and unable to come closer for wondering if their story of the gecko was important enough to share. Then we might look up in time to catch the back view of someone fleeing across the open ground for the trees.

  An aunt of Mabel’s turned up with a woven mat. She had come to talk about “directions and luck.” “Weavings can tell you a thing or two,” she said. “My grandmother wove me a sleeping mat in case I got lost in my dreams. All I had to do was roll over until I felt a raised seam. That seam was the current that would deliver me home.

  “She also told me a story about a young woman who carried the knowledge of the tides and sea currents inside of her body. Then she made up a song about the various directions a person can take. My niece was given such a mat as this one I hold in my hands. She was to sing her way from the airport to her other aunt’s house in Brisbane. I heard later she forgot the song and left the mat in the toilet. In any case, her aunt and cousins turned up at the airport.”

  My mum even returned to speak of things I had never heard her say before. Mr. Watts stationed himself behind her. I thought he looked nervous. He fidgeted, and his gaze couldn’t settle in one place.

  “Women were never allowed to go to sea—ever!” she barked. “Why not? I will tell you why, even though it is obvious to the thickest tree trunk. Women are too valuable. That is why. So the fellas went. If a woman was to go, look at what might be lost—there would be no babies, no food on the table, and the noise of the sweeping broom would be lost forever. Plus, the island would starve to death.

  “But, sometimes, and this is according to my aunt Josephine, if you saw a young woman standing on a reef following the flight of a seabird, it was a sure thing she had lost her virginity and she had it in her head to strike out to the nearest white man’s city. So if you girls look at the seabirds you had better do it from the beach or bloody watch out!”

  IT WAS ALWAYS A RELIEF TO RETURN TO Great Expectations. It contained a world that was whole and made sense, unlike ours. If it was a relief for us, then what must it have been for Mr. Watts? I feel equally sure he was more comfortable in the world of Mr. Dickens than he was in our black-faced world of superstition and mythic flying fish. In Great Expectations he was back among white people.

  Sometimes as he read we saw him smile privately, leaving us to wonder why, at that particular moment—only to realize yet again that there were parts of Mr. Watts we could not possibly know because of our ignorance of where he’d come from, and to reflect on what he’d given up in order to join Grace on our island.

  Whenever I walked near Mr. Watts’ desk I tried not to look too obviously at the book sitting there. I was dying to pick it up and gaze at the words and locate Pip’s name on the page. But I didn’t want to reveal my desire. I didn’t want to reveal a part of myself that I thought of as private, and possibly even shameful. I was still mindful of Mrs. Haripa’s lesson on the lychee.

  Outside the class we were seeing more of Mr. Watts. We saw him wander among the trees with a basket to pick fruits. Some of the parents gave him and Mrs. Watts food as a thank-you for his stocking our empty heads every day. Gilbert’s father always had a fish left over for Mr. Watts.

  He saved his white linen suit for school, and that’s how we saw him most of the time, as a “gentleman.” To see him on the beach in his baggy old shorts with a plastic bucket was to wonder what had happened to Mr. Watts of the classroom. You saw how terribly thin he had become or really was, which was akin to making a discovery—I couldn’t be sure of which. He looked like a skinny white vine. To see him so stooped was to realize the special effort he made to dress and stand tall in class. On the beach, though, he was like the rest of us. Head down, alert to whatever had washed up. He wore an old white shirt, which, unusually, he had left unbuttoned, but as he drew nearer I saw it had lost all its buttons.

  I had collected a basket of cowrie shells and was adding these to the heart seeds to make PIP even more visible, when Mr. Watts looked up from his beachcombing. He saw me and left the water’s edge to walk up the sand.

  “A shrine,” he said approvingly. “Pip in the Pacific.” He thought about that. “Well, who knows? He might well have made it here. Great Expectations doesn’t tell the whole of Pip’s life. The book ends…” He stopped when he saw me place my hands against my ears.

  I didn’t want to be told. I wanted to hear from the book. I wanted to move at the book’s pace. I didn’t want to jump ahead. “You are quite right, Matilda. All in good time…”

  He was about to add something else, when he frowned. I thought I heard him swear. If he did he muffled it. In the end I wasn’t sure if I’d heard correctly and the heat in my cheeks was all for nothing. Balancing on one leg he brought his right foot up to his crotch and studied it. The problem was a flapping toenail on his big toe. He pulled it back on its skinny hinges.

  “I expect it will work itself free soon enough,” he said, as we stared at the pink flesh that lies behind a toenail. “There are some things you never expect to lose, things you think will forever be part of you, even if it is only a toenail.”

  “A big toenail,” I said.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Not just any.”

  “What will happen when it comes off?”

  “I expect another one will grow.”

  “So that’s okay,” I said. “Nothing’s lost.”

  “Except that particular toenail,” he said. “You could say the same about a house or one’s country. No two are the same. You gain as you lose, and vice versa.” He stared off distantly, as if everything he’d parted with trailed out to sea and over the horizon. Television. Picture theaters. Cars. Friends. Family. Tinned food. Shops.

  Here was my opportunity to ask if he missed the white world, and to ask what he felt he had gained by giving up the chance to leave the island when he could. And did he regret it now?

  Of course, my courage failed me. This was the first time I had spoken to Mr. Watts alone and I was very aware of his status as a grown-up and as a white. Besides, our favorite topic was Mr. Dickens, rather than ourselves, so I was happier to shift the conversation from his toenail (and its surprising associations) to Great Expectations. I had some matters to raise with Mr. Watts.

  I was troubled by what I had detected to be a shift in Pip’s personality now that he was in London. I didn’t like his London friends. I didn’t take to his housemate Herbert Pocket, and I couldn’t understand why Pip had, and it worried me that he was leaving me behind. Nor could I understand why he had changed his name to Handel.

  Mr. Watts plonked himself down on the sand beside me. He leaned back on his hands and squinted at the sparkling sea.

  “Let’s see if I can explain, Matilda. This is how I see it, which is not to say it’s the only way, but it is my answer to it. Pip is an orphan. He is like an emigrant. He is in the process of migrating from one level of society to another. A change of name is as good as a change of clothes. It is to help him on his way.”

  I was stuck on the word emigrant. To ask Mr. Watts its meaning, though, would be a risk. Mr. Watts’ approach assumed a shared intelligence. And w
hile that was flattering it was also intimidating. I didn’t want to disappoint Mr. Watts. I didn’t want to say anything that might rock his faith in me. So I moved on to another thing that troubled me—Pip’s treatment of Joe Gargery.

  First, his embarrassment when Joe turns up in London unannounced. Pip acts in a superior way to his loyal old blacksmith friend. Then, on his trip home from London, he goes out of his way to avoid Joe. He has only come back to visit Estella. He can’t be bothered with Joe anymore.

  With Mr. Watts’ encouragement I had spoken freely, and was pleased to think I had made an important observation, though it seemed to make him tired.

  “It is hard to be a perfect human being, Matilda,” he said. “Pip is only human. He has been given the opportunity to turn himself into whomever he chooses. He is free to choose. He is even free to make bad choices.”

  “Like Estella,” I said.

  “Oh, you don’t like Estella?”

  “She’s mean.”

  “That she is,” he said. “But we find out why in due course.”

  Once more I thought he was about to tell me, only to catch himself and glance away with what he knew. There was no hurry for the information. We had all eternity in front of us. If we were in any doubt about that we had only to look out to sea.

  Mr. Watts had settled himself in the sand. Now I watched him pick himself up. As he raised himself to his full height he realized, with some annoyance, he had forgotten his bucket. He eyed it for a moment. I could have passed it up to him but I was too engrossed in Mr. Watts’ irritation. How hard was it to reach for a plastic bucket?

  He placed his free hand on his hip and, as he bent down for the bucket, his face turned red with the effort. Just for a moment he reverted to Pop Eye. But then as he straightened he filled out to the classroom version I knew. He ironed out an ache in the small of his back and turned to look along the beach.

  “Well,” he said, “I think I can hear Mrs. Watts calling me.”

  I watched him walk away with his plastic bucket, a much older man than I’d come to realize. His linen suit and careful classroom manner concealed his frailty. He stopped and looked over his shoulder, as if trying hard to reach a decision about me. He called out, “Matilda, can you keep a secret?”