Mister Pip

  Pop Eye was waiting for us inside. It was almost dark, though light enough to make out the tall thin white man in his linen suit. He stood at the front of the class, his eyes glancing away from our inspection. Everyone looked to see if he was wearing his red clown’s nose. He wasn’t. But there were other changes since I last saw him. His hair was long, nearly touching his shoulders. When it was short we hadn’t noticed the flecks of red and gray. His beard spilled down onto his chest.

  Our last teacher had been Mrs. Siau. She was a small woman, not much bigger than us younger kids. Pop Eye stood where she had and so he seemed too large for the room. His white hands relaxed at his sides. He didn’t look to where we were filing in the door. His eyes were fixed on the far end of the classroom. They didn’t budge—not even when a black dog came in wagging his tail. That was encouraging, because Mrs. Siau would have clapped her hands and aimed a foot at that dog’s arse.

  This was school, but not how I remembered it. Perhaps that’s why everything felt strange, as if we were trying to squeeze into an old life that didn’t exist anymore, at least not in the way we remembered. We found our old desks and even they felt changed. The cool touch of smooth wood on the backs of my legs was the only thing that was familiar. None of the kids looked at each other. Instead, we stared at our new and unexpected teacher. He seemed to be giving us permission to do exactly that. When the last of us took our places Pop Eye snapped out of his trance.

  He looked at our faces, taking each of us in, though careful not to linger. Just noting who had turned up. He signaled with a nod when that job was done. Then he glanced at a green vine hanging down from the ceiling. He reached up for it, tore it down, and bunched it in his hands like it was paper.

  I had never heard him speak. As far as I knew, no one in that class had. I don’t know what I was expecting, except when he spoke his voice was surprisingly small. He was a big man, and if he had shouted like our mums did he would have brought the roof down. Instead he spoke as if he was addressing each one of us personally.

  “I want this to be a place of light,” he said. “No matter what happens.” He paused there for us to digest this. When our parents spoke of the future we were given to understand it was an improvement on what we knew. For the first time we were hearing that the future was uncertain. And because this had come from someone outside of our lives we were more ready to listen. He looked around at our faces. If he was expecting a challenge he didn’t get one.

  “We must clear the space and make it ready for learning,” he said. “Make it new again.”

  When his large eyes rolled away to the open window with its screen of green, that’s when I noticed his tie. It was skinny, black, formal, but he’d left the top button of his shirt undone for his body to breathe. He brought up a delicate white hand to touch the knot. Then he turned back to us kids and raised an eyebrow.

  “Yes?” he asked.

  We looked around at each other and nodded. Someone thought to say “Yes, Mr. Watts,” and we all followed suit: “Yes, Mr. Watts.”

  That’s when he held up a finger as though something important had just come to him.

  “I know some of you call me Pop Eye. That’s okay too. I like Pop Eye.”

  And for the first time in all the years I’d seen him dragging Mrs. Pop Eye behind in that trolley, he smiled. After that I never called him Pop Eye again.

  We set to work. We dragged the flowering vine down off the roof, which was easy enough; it seemed to know what would eventually happen to it, which is why it didn’t hold on too tight. We hauled it away from the building to a clearing where we burned it in a thick white smoke. Mr. Watts sent a number of us kids off to find brooms. We swept out the classroom. Later in the day the sun dropped and exposed the cobwebs. We leaped at those with our hands.

  We were enjoying our first day back at school. Mr. Watts kept an eye on us. He allowed high spirits. But when he spoke we shut up.

  Now we returned to our desks to wait for him to dismiss us and send us home. He spoke in that same quiet voice that had come as such a surprise at the start of the day.

  “I want you to understand something. I am no teacher, but I will do my best. That’s my promise to you children. I believe, with your parents’ help, we can make a difference to our lives.”

  He stopped there like he’d just had a new thought, and he must have, because next he asked us to get up from our desks and to form a circle. He told us to hold hands or link arms, whatever we saw fit to do.

  Some of us who had heard a minister speak and knew about church closed their eyes and dropped their chins onto their chests. But there was no prayer. There was no sermon. Instead, Mr. Watts thanked us all for turning up.

  “I wasn’t sure you would,” he said. “I will be honest with you. I have no wisdom, none at all. The truest thing I can tell you is that whatever we have between us is all we’ve got. Oh, and of course Mr. Dickens.”

  Who was Mr. Dickens? And why, in a village population of less than sixty, had we not met him before? Some of the older kids tried to pretend they knew who he was. One even said he was a friend of his uncle’s, and encouraged by our interest went on to say he had met Mr. Dickens. His claim was soon exposed by our questions and he sloped off like a kicked dog. It turned out no one knew Mr. Dickens.

  “Tomorrow,” I told my mum, “we meet Mr. Dickens.”

  She stopped sweeping and thought. “That’s a white man’s name.” She shook her head and spat out the door. “No. You heard wrong, Matilda. Pop Eye is the last white man. There is no other.”

  “Mr. Watts says there is.”

  I had heard Mr. Watts speak. I had heard him say he would always be honest with us kids. If he said we were to meet Mr. Dickens, then I felt sure that we would. I was looking forward to seeing another white man. It never occurred to me to ask where this Mr. Dickens had been hiding himself. But then I had no reason to doubt Mr. Watts’ word.

  My mum must have reconsidered overnight, because next morning when I ran off to school she called me back.

  “This Mr. Dickens, Matilda—if you get the chance, why don’t you ask him to fix our generator.”

  Every other kid turned up to school with similar instructions. They were to ask Mr. Dickens for anti-malaria tablets, aspirin, generator fuel, beer, kerosene, wax candles. We sat at our desks with our shopping lists and waited for Mr. Watts to introduce Mr. Dickens. He wasn’t there when we arrived. There was just Mr. Watts, as we had found him the day before, standing tall at the front of the class, lost in a dream, I’d say, because there was nothing left to discover about that back wall. We kept our eyes on the window. We didn’t want to miss a white man strolling past.

  We could see the beach palms spreading up to a blue sky. And a turquoise sea so still we hardly noticed it. Halfway to the horizon we could see a redskins’ gunboat. It was like a gray sea mouse—it crawled along with its guns aimed at us. In the direction of the hills we heard sporadic gunfire. We were used to that sound—sometimes it was the rebels testing their restored rifles—and besides, we knew it was a longer way off than what it sounded. We had come to know the amplifying effects of water, so the gunfire just merged with the background chorus of the grunting pigs and shrieking birds.

  While we waited for Mr. Watts to wake from his dream I counted three lime-green geckos and a pale one on the ceiling. A flower-pecker bird flew in the open window and out again. That got our attention because if we had been ready with a net we could have eaten it. As the bird flew out the window, Mr. Watts began to read to us.

  I had never been read to in English before. Nor had the others. We didn’t have books in our homes, and before the blockade our only books had come from Moresby, and those were written in pidgin. When Mr. Watts read to us we fell quiet. It was a new sound in the world. He read slowly so we heard the shape of each word.

  “‘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 tha
n Pip. So I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.’”

  There had been no warning from Mr. Watts. He just began to read. My desk was in the second row from the back. Gilbert Masoi sat in front, and I couldn’t see past his fat shoulders and big woolly head. So when I heard Mr. Watts speak I thought he was talking about himself. That he was Pip. It was only as he began to walk between our desks that I saw the book in his hand.

  He kept reading and we kept listening. It was some time before he stopped, but when he looked up we sat stunned by the silence. The flow of words had ended. Slowly we stirred back into our bodies and our lives.

  Mr. Watts closed the book and held the paperback up in one hand, like a church minister. We saw him smile from one corner of the room to the other. “That was chapter one of Great Expectations, which, incidentally, is the greatest novel by the greatest English writer of the nineteenth century, Charles Dickens.”

  Now we felt silly as bats for thinking we were going to be introduced to someone by the name of Mr. Dickens. Perhaps Mr. Watts had an idea of what was going on in our heads, though. “When you read the work of a great writer,” he told us, “you are making the acquaintance of that person. So you can say you have met Mr. Dickens on the page, so to speak. But you don’t know him yet.”

  One of the younger kids, Mabel, put up her hand to ask a question. At first we thought Mr. Watts hadn’t seen her because he carried on over the top of Mabel’s waving hand. “I welcome questions. I won’t always be able to answer them. Remember that,” he said. “Also, when you raise your hand to ask me something, would you be so kind as to give your name.”

  He nodded in Mabel’s direction. She mustn’t have taken in what Mr. Watts had just said, because she started to ask her question until Mr. Watts stopped her mid-sentence with a raised eyebrow, which, for the first time in twenty-four hours, reminded us of his nickname.

  “Mabel, Mr. Watts,” she said.

  “Good. I’m very pleased to meet you, Mabel. That is a pretty name,” he said.

  Mabel shone. She wriggled in her desk. Then she spoke.

  “When can we say we know Mr. Dickens?”

  Mr. Watts brought two fingers up to his chin. We watched him think for a moment.

  “That is a very good question, Mabel. In fact, my first response is that you have asked me something to which there is no answer. But I will give it my best shot. Some of you will know Mr. Dickens when we finish the book. The book is fifty-nine chapters long. If I read a chapter a day, that’s fifty-nine days.”

  This was difficult information to bring home. We had met Mr. Dickens but we did not know him yet, and would not know him for another fifty-eight days. It was December 10, 1991. I quickly calculated—we would not know Mr. Dickens until February 6, 1992.

  IN THE TROPICS NIGHT FALLS QUICKLY. There is no lingering memory of the day just been. One moment you can see the dogs looking skinny and mangy. In the next they have turned into black shadows. If you are not ready with candles and kerosene lamps, the quick fall of night is like being put away in a dark cell, from where there is no release until the following dawn.

  During the blockade we could not waste fuel or candles. But as the rebels and redskins went on butchering one another, we had another reason for hiding under the cover of night. Mr. Watts had given us kids another world to spend the night in. We could escape to another place. It didn’t matter that it was Victorian England. We found we could easily get there. It was just the blimmin’ dogs and the blimmin’ roosters that tried to keep us here.

  By the time Mr. Watts reached the end of chapter one I felt like I had been spoken to by this boy Pip. This boy who I couldn’t see to touch but knew by ear. I had found a new friend.

  The surprising thing is where I’d found him—not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could slip inside the skin of another. Or travel to another place with marshes, and where, to our ears, the bad people spoke like pirates. I think Mr. Watts enjoyed the spoken parts. When he spoke them he became the voices. That’s another thing that impressed us—for the time he was reading, Mr. Watts had a way of absenting himself. And we forgot all about him being there. When Magwitch, the escaped convict, threatens to rip out Pip’s heart and liver if he doesn’t bring him some food, and a file for his leg irons, we didn’t hear Mr. Watts, we heard Magwitch, and it was like the convict was in the classroom with us. We had only to close our eyes to be sure.

  There was also a lot of stuff I didn’t understand. At night I lay on my mat wondering what marshes were; and what were wittles and leg irons? I had an idea from their sound. Marshes. I wondered if quicksand was the same. I knew about quicksand because a man up at the mine had sunk into it, never to be seen again. That happened years earlier when the mine was still open and there were white people crawling over Panguna like ants over a corpse.

  Mr. Watts had given us kids another piece of the world. I found I could go back to it as often as I liked. What’s more, I could pick up any moment in the story. Not that I thought of what we were hearing as story. No. I was hearing someone give an account of themselves and all that had happened. I was still discovering my favorite bits. Pip in the graveyard surrounded by the headstones of his dead parents and five dead brothers ranked high. We knew about death—we had seen all those babies buried up on the hillside. Me and Pip had something else in common; I was eleven when my father left, so neither of us really knew our fathers.

  I’d met mine, of course, but then I only knew my dad as a child knows a parent, as a sort of crude outline filled in with one or two colors. I’d never seen my father scared or cry. I’d never heard him admit to any wrongdoing. I have no idea what he dreamed of. And once I’d seen a smile pinned to one cheek and darkness to the other when my mum had yelled at him. Now he was gone, and I was left with just an impression—one of male warmth, big arms, and loud laughter.

  The shape of the letters on the headstone gave Pip the idea his father was a “square, stout, dark man with curly black hair.”

  Encouraged by Pip’s example I tried to build a picture of my own dad. I found some examples of his handwriting. He wrote in small capital letters. What did that say about him? He wanted to be noticed, but not too noticeable? There was that booming laugh of his, of course. I slept in the same room as my mum, and that night in the dark I asked her if Dad was a happy man. She said, “Never at the right time, though usually after he had been drinking.”

  I asked her if she thought he was a “stout man.” In the dark I heard her raise herself up on an elbow. “Stout! Where did you get that word from, girl?”

  “Mr. Watts.”

  “Pop Eye. Him,” she said as she let herself down again.

  “It was in a book.”

  “What blimmin’ book?”

  “Great Expectations.”

  I had given her three quick answers. The last one was the most stunning. I had lost her. I could hear her brooding next to me. She shifted on her mat. I could hear her angry breath. I don’t know what made her so angry all the time. As we lay there the night filled up with noise. We listened to the dogs growling at shadows, and to the ocean shuffle up the beach and draw out. We lay like that for a very long time before my mum spoke.

  “So, Matilda, aren’t you going to tell me about that book?”

  This was the first time I had been in a position to tell her anything about the world. But this was a place she did not know about and hadn’t heard of. She couldn’t even pretend to know, so it was up to me to color in that world for her. I couldn’t remember the exact words Mr. Watts had read to us, and I didn’t think I would be able to make it possible for my mum to slip into that world that us kids had or into Pip’s life or some other’s, that of the convict, say. So I told her in my own words about Pip having no mum or dad or brothers, and my mum cried out, “He is lost.”

  “No,” I said. “There is a sister. She is married to a
man called Joe. They are the ones who bring up Pip.”

  I told her about the convict creeping up on Pip in the cemetery. How he threatened to rip out his heart and liver if Pip didn’t do what he asked. I told her how Pip went back to the house for a file and food to take to the convict in the morning.

  I hadn’t done it justice in my telling. There was no sound to what I said. Just the bare facts. And when I reached the end I had to say, “That’s all I know, so far.”

  A dog howled at the night. Something squawked. We heard a high voice from one of the nearby houses. Then my mum spoke.

  “What would you do, girl? If a man was hiding in the jungle and he ask you to steal from me. Would you do that?”

  “No,” I said, and I thanked the Lord for the dark so that my lying face could not be seen.

  “Pop Eye should be teaching you kids proper behavior,” she said. “I want to know everything that happens in that book. You hear me, Matilda?”

  WHEN WE WEREN’T being read Great Expectations we did our schoolwork, our spelling, our times tables. Mr. Watts got us to memorize countries beginning with A—America, Andorra, Australia—through to Z—Zambia, Zimbabwe. We had no books. We had our minds and we had our memories, and according to Mr. Watts, that’s all we needed.

  There were gaps in Mr. Watts’ knowledge. Large gaps, as it turned out, for which he apologized. He knew the word chemistry but could not tell us much more than that. He handed on the names of famous people such as Darwin, Einstein, Plato, Archimedes, Aristotle. We wondered if he was making them up, because he struggled to explain why they were famous or why we had to know them. Yet he was our teacher and he never relinquished that status. When an unfamiliar fish washed up on the beach it felt right to ask Mr. Watts to come and identify the strange eel-like serpent. It didn’t matter that he would end up standing over the creature with the same blank face as the rest of us.