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.
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 eve
n 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.