Mister Pip Page 6

  “Yes,” I said quickly.

  “You asked about Pip changing his name to Handel.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Mr. Watts returned to where I sat in the sand. He shielded his eyes and gazed up the beach, then in the other direction. He looked at me, and I had the impression he was annoyed for putting himself in the position of telling more. But he had come this far.

  “You need to understand. This has to be our secret, Matilda.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  “Grace is not my wife’s name,” he said. “Everyone here knows her as Grace, of course. But she changed it. Her name is Sheba. This happened many years ago, before you were born. Because of certain events, shall we say, and at a time in her life when she needed to make changes, she took the name of Sheba. Because of these difficulties she was having to deal with, I thought—or hoped, really—that she might grow into her name. It happens with other creatures. Once you know the name of that funny little amphibious creature with the helmet, it can’t be anything else than a turtle. A cat is a cat. It is impossible to think of a dog as being anything else than a dog. I hoped Sheba might eventually grow into her name.”

  He looked at me closely. I had an idea he was checking to see how safe this secret would be with me. He needn’t have worried. I was thinking about the name Sheba. If dog meant dog and could only ever be dog, and turtle turtle, what did Sheba mean?

  “That’s it, Matilda. Now you know something no one else on this whole island knows.”

  He waited, as if expecting something in return. But I didn’t have a secret to give him.

  “Well, until the next time,” he said. He gave me a wink, and wandered off.

  THE NEAREST VILLAGE WAS EIGHT KILOMETERS up the coast. But we got news from all over the island. It traveled along tracks through the jungle, over mountain passes. And it was never good news. No. We were hearing terrible things. Things we didn’t want to believe.

  There was talk of redskin reprisals against those villages that cooperated with the rebels. Little kids ran about with stories of people flung out of helicopters onto the treetops. They thought this might be fun, and it might even be something that they would like to try out for themselves. Those little kids were a sign of how loose our parents’ talk had become. They still kept back the worst of it. What we didn’t hear for ourselves we saw on their worried faces. And just like that, we were taken back to how the dog Black appeared with its sides ripped open.

  My mum’s prayer meetings were drawing more and more people. God would help us. We just needed to pray more. A prayer was like a tickle. Sooner or later God would have to look down to see what was tickling his bum.

  At night my mum maintained a restless silence. She was mentally fending off all that bad news to make space for God. On that subject, she asked if us kids ever heard the word of the Good Lord from Pop Eye.

  “Mr. Watts does not use the Bible,” I said.

  She let that sit in the air, as if it were a betrayal of our very safety. Then she returned to her other preoccupation, testing me with the names of relatives and fish and birds from our family tree.

  I failed miserably. I could think of no reason to remember them, whereas I knew the name of every character I had met in Great Expectations because I had heard them speak. They had shared their thoughts with me, and sometimes as Mr. Watts read aloud I could even see their faces. Pip, Miss Havisham, and Joe Gargery were more part of my life than my dead relatives, even the people around me.

  But Mum was not put off by my repeated failures. She said I should unblock my ears. She said she felt sorry for my heart. My heart, she said, didn’t have much of a choice for company. She wouldn’t let go of this task she set me. She was insistent. The tests continued, without success. Then she changed strategy. I have an idea she had seen the name PIP on the beach, because one night after I had failed her again she told me to write the names of the family tree in the sand.

  The next day I did as she asked—and she came to check on my progress. She became very angry when she saw Pip’s name next to the relatives’. She cuffed my hair.

  What did I think I was up to? Why did I have to act dumber than I looked? What was the point of sticking the name of a make-believe person next to her kin?

  I knew why. I knew exactly why I had done this. But did I have the courage to stand up for what I believed? I knew from experience you could get four-fifths of your answer right and my mum would pounce on that leftover bit that was wrong. In the end my mouth decided for me. Away it went—leaving me astonished at the way I threw the question back at her.

  Now, I asked, where’s the value in knowing a few scattered and unreliable facts about dead relatives when you could know all there was to know about a made-up person such as Pip?

  She gave me a look of pure hate. She didn’t say anything at first. Maybe she was afraid if she opened her mouth too quickly all that would come out would be anger. I waited for the slap. Instead she kicked out at the sand around PIP, then kicked out at the air over his name.

  “He isn’t a blood relative!” she yelled.

  Well, no, Pip wasn’t a relative, I explained, but I felt closer to him than the names of those strangers she made me write in the sand. This was not what she wanted to hear. She knew where to place the blame. She looked up the beach in the direction of the old mission house.

  The next day Mabel stuck up her hand to ask Mr. Watts if he believed in God.

  He looked up at the ceiling; his eyes went searching.

  “That is one of those difficult questions I warned the class about,” he said. He fiddled with the book in his hands. He was trying to find our place in Great Expectations, but his mind was elsewhere.

  Then it was Gilbert’s turn to ask. “What about the devil?”

  We saw a slow smile creep out onto Mr. Watts’ face, and I felt embarrassed for us kids and Mr. Watts because I knew he had just guessed the source of these questions.

  “No,” he said. “I do not believe in the devil.”

  This is not something I would have mentioned to my mum. I was not that dumb. One of the other kids must have blabbed, which led to Mr. Watts’ heathen beliefs circulating at that evening’s prayer meeting.

  The following day Mr. Watts was just about to read from Great Expectations, when my mum strode into the classroom. She wore the same head wrap she had worn the other time. Now I understood why. It gave her a frightening authority.

  Her heavy eyelids drew back and she gave Mr. Watts a hostile look. Then, with a start, she caught sight of the book in his hands. I thought she might try and grab it off him and drive a stake through its covers. Instead she took a deep breath and announced to Mr. Watts she had some informations (she always said “informations”) to share with the class.

  Mr. Watts politely closed Great Expectations. As usual he was guided by his innate sense of courtesy. He gestured for my mum to take the floor and she started in.

  “Some white fellas do not believe in the devil or God,” she said, “because they think they don’t have to. Believe it or not there are some white folk who on the strength of a glance out the window will not pack away a raincoat for their holiday. A white will make sure he has a life jacket in the boat and enough petrol in the tank for a long trip out to sea, but he will not take the same precautions by stocking up on faith for the hurly-burly of daily life.”

  She bobbed from side to side. She was more cocky than I’d ever seen her.

  “Mr. Watts, here, he thinks he is ready for all things. But if this was true, then the man shot by the redskin must be wondering how come he didn’t see the helicopter until it was too late. So. But for the rest of us peoples—and that means my beautiful flower, Matilda—pack the teachings of the Good Book into your person. That way you kids can save Mr. Watts because I am not going to be the one.”

  We looked as one to Mr. Watts to see if he minded. We were glad to find him smiling behind my mum’s back. And when she saw us kids smiling too, it made her madd
er. I was already ashamed by her words, but I also knew her anger didn’t really have to do with Mr. Watts’ own religious beliefs or lack of. What made her blood run hot was this white boy Pip and his place in my life. For that she held Mr. Watts personally responsible.

  If my mum had set out to insult Mr. Watts and show him up, then she failed—if Mr. Watts’ smile was anything to go by.

  “Once again, Dolores, you have provided us with food for thought,” he said.

  My mum shot him a look of suspicion. I knew she didn’t know that expression: food for thought. She would be wondering if the white man was insulting her without her knowing it. And if that was so, how stupid would she look to us kids?

  “I have more,” she said.

  Mr. Watts kindly gestured for her to carry on, and I sank deeper behind my desk.

  “I wish to talk about braids,” she announced, and to my horror, she began addressing her remarks to me.

  “Matilda, as a young woman your grandmother wore her hair in braids and them braids were thick as rope. Them braids were so strong us kids used to swing on them.”

  Some of the class laughed, and this encouraged my mum to shift her attention off me.

  “This is true. If the tide was up we would hold on to the end of a braid in case we stumbled on coral.

  “My mum’s braids were so blimmin’ long that us kids used to sit in Uncle’s wheelchair and hang on to them while her big bum rose above the bike seat. We cheered at that big bum. We hooted like dogs drunk on jungle juice.”

  This time Mr. Watts laughed along with us kids.

  “Now,” she said, “the reason for braids is to keep flies off you and to shoo away the boys who want to stick their hands where they shouldn’t. A girl who wears braids knows right from wrong—and she’s no bloody show-off.”

  My poor mum. As quickly as she had won us she lost us. And she didn’t know why. It was as if she didn’t listen to herself.

  By the time she arrived at her closing argument we sat with folded arms and bolted-on expressions of polite interest. “So, when you bring two strands of hair together and tease them into rope you begin to understand the idea of partnership…and you understand how God and the devil know each other.”

  My mum was so eager for us kids to know what she knew, but she didn’t know how to plant it in our heads. She thought she could bully us into knowing what she did. Did she notice that whenever she got onto God and the devil, every kid’s face dropped? We preferred hearing about dogs drunk on jungle juice.

  The moment she left, Mr. Watts knew what to do. He picked up Great Expectations, and as he began to read we picked our faces up off our desk lids.

  CHRISTMAS DAY. It rained, then the sun burst down on the new puddles. We listened to the croaking of frogs. I saw Celia’s little brother Virgil walk by with a frog on the end of a stick. Once I would have asked him to get me a frog. But those things didn’t interest me anymore.

  There was no school that day, so there was no update on Pip. And there was no feast. That day, of all days, our parents had decided it was too risky to cook. The smoke would give away our position. As if it didn’t on any other day. And really, what difference did it make? The redskins knew where we were. So did the rambos, which was the new name for the barefoot rebels who wore bandannas. By now nearly all the young men in the village had joined the rebels, so them we did not fear. But we could tell by the nervous and strained faces of our parents that things were changing, and for us they might change at any moment.

  We did not live with quite the same easiness of before. Our heads turned for any unexpected sound. Whenever I heard one of the helicopters I knew what it was to feel your heart stop along with your breath.

  There were old people who knew about magic. Some asked for potions to make them invisible for when the redskins came. Others, my mum and most of the mums of the kids in Mr. Watts’ class, turned to prayer.

  In the tree above the praying women were hundreds of bats hanging upside down. They looked as if they were holding tiny prayerbooks between their wings. It was during one of these prayer meetings, just on dark, that Victoria’s older brother Sam staggered out of the jungle. He wore the rebels’ bandanna. He carried an old rifle in his hand. He was barefoot and his clothes were ripped. He dragged a wounded leg behind him.

  As the prayer group looked up, Sam seemed to realize he was home and allowed himself to fall over. One of us was sent off to fetch Mr. Watts. I wonder if he understood the problem, because he arrived eating a banana.

  Once he saw Sam he handed the rest of the banana to me, and he knelt down by him. He gave Sam a drink from a small flask (I heard later it was alcohol), then he rested Sam’s head back and fit a piece of wood into his mouth and nodded at Gilbert’s father to start hacking. He used a fish knife to dig three redskin bullets out of Sam’s leg. He laid the bullets on the grass and we formed a circle around them and stared at them the way we did at a catch of fish laid out on the sand. The bullets were misshapen and a runny color of red.

  We didn’t like Victoria’s brother being here. We were scared the redskins would discover him, which would make us a rebel village. We knew what happened to rebel villages. They were burned down, and had other things done to them that were not spoken aloud around young ears. That was the last time I saw Sam before he was taken into the bush. His mother sat with him day and night, feeding him special roots and water.

  Two weeks after Gilbert’s father dug the bullets out he took Sam out to sea in his boat. It was nighttime and in the black stillness we could hear the slapping of the oars on the water. Gilbert’s father’s boat had an outboard, but he didn’t want to use the last of his fuel; he was saving that. He was gone for two days. We were asleep when he dragged his boat up on the third night. And when I saw him the next day he did not look the same.

  We never saw Sam again.

  THE DISTANCE FROM PIP’S HOUSE IN THE marshes to the “metropolis” of London was about five hours. We understood without Mr. Watts saying so that five hours indicated a great distance. In eighteen-hundred-and-fifty-something it might have been. But five hours was nearer than a century and a half and a whole lot closer than half a world away. We heard that Pip was scared of London’s “immensity.” Immensity?

  We stared back at Mr. Watts for an explanation. “Sheer numbers, crowds, a sense of bewilderment and of overwhelming scale…” And with the book in hand Mr. Watts’ thoughts would drift back to his own experience of London. He spoke about the excitement of his first visit. The smile left his face. I think it was for having the young man he once was in his thoughts. He said everything was vaguely familiar since he had already been led around London by Mr. Dickens.

  He spoke of being poor; and of giving an old woman beggar the last of his money and wandering in a park afterwards warmed by the thought of his good deed. Then it had gotten cold. A nasty rain fell and he hurried from the park gates. He waited to cross a busy road. He looked in the lit window of a café and, wishing he had money to buy something, happened to see the old hag buttering a scone, and when she raised her eyes, Mr. Watts said, she looked through him without a flicker of recognition.

  We laughed like dogs at our stupid teacher. Mr. Watts nodded. He knew.

  He was happy to be the brunt of the joke, but the moment he dropped his eyes to the open pages of Great Expectations we shut up. For a moment he didn’t read. We had an idea he was back in London with his younger self staring in that lit window—this was one of those moments that reminded us of Mr. Watts’ status as the last white man on the island. There he stood before us, one of a kind, with a memory of a place none of us kids had visited or seen or could imagine except in the way supplied by Mr. Dickens.

  When we heard the words metropolis and London our minds drew a blank. Even Mr. Watts’ attempts to find a local reference fell flat. He took us down to the beach. There he dug a channel in the sand for the tide to run up. This was the Thames. He found a number of gray rocks and bundled these into one place. These he
called buildings. We heard about skylights and coachmen and horsehair, but stopped asking for explanations. We’d learned to recognize the important stuff.

  We were meeting Mr. Wemmick, Mr. Jaggers’ creepy offsider, for the first time when my mum turned up to class with one of the women from her prayer group. This was Mrs. Siep. Mrs. Siep’s three boys had joined the rebels. Her husband was also thought to have joined them. If he hadn’t, then he must be lying dead someplace. Mrs. Siep didn’t say.

  Mr. Watts vacated his place and my mum gently pushed Mrs. Siep forward and introduced her. Mrs. Siep checked that where she stood was the correct spot. My mum made a small adjustment. We saw Mrs. Siep take a small step back.

  “I have two pieces of information to give you kids,” announced Mrs. Siep. “The first is about fish bait. You need to catch a remora fish if you wish to catch something bigger. What you do is tie a line around the tail of a remora and it will fish for you—this is the truth, I have seen it with my own eyes. The remora has a sucking disc on top of its head and will use this to attach itself to a shark or turtle or large fish. If you catch a sunfish, cut the line. They are poisonous.”

  Mrs. Siep inclined her head, and as she took a backwards step we broke into applause. This was new for us, and that we did it without prompting from Mr. Watts says something about the gentlemanly ways we were cultivating under his guidance, as much as Mrs. Siep’s dignity. She spoke from some inner calm place that my own mum did not know how to locate.

  Mrs. Siep smiled, and as she looked up we ended our applause. She stepped forward once more.

  “I will begin with a question. What will you do if you are all alone at sea? This is my second information,” she said. “If you are feeling lonely, look out for the triggerfish. God mixed the souls of dogs and triggerfish together because, like dogs, a triggerfish will roll over on its side and look up at you.”