Mister Pip (16 page)

By the time the redskin soldiers arrived on the island we'd heard enough rumors to make up our own minds about the future. The whites would leave the island while the government soldiers rounded up the rebels. But during that time the mine would close. There would be no work. No money. The man with the German name now presented my father, and us, with a way out. He offered to sponsor my father.
Sponsor
was the word he used. It was to be years before I properly understood that word. I remember asking Mr. Watts, who seemed to think
sponsor
was close to another word:
adopt
. This makes all the more sense when I think back to what the man was offering and what I had seen of my father as he tried to shape himself around the Australians.

I tried to picture the life he was leading in Townsville. Mr. Dickens' England was my guide. I wondered if there were beggars there. I wondered if there were smokestacks and thieves, and kind souls like Joe Gargery, who you might have thought were drunk for all the sense they made when they spoke.

I wondered if my father's stomach had grown. Whether he drank beer and wore shorts and a crooked dog's smile. I wondered how often he thought about us—his Matilda and my mum. I tried to picture the school I might have gone to in Townsville had we got out before the blockade. But I got no further than the classroom that occupied my life. I got no closer to Townsville than to whatever Mr. Watts and Mr. Dickens could tell me.

My mum now hoped to join my dad, whenever that might be. This was just wishful thinking, because there was no Mr. Jaggers in my mum's life. We were trapped, without a way off the island.

When I saw my mum down at the beach I knew what she was thinking—the sea offers the only way out of this life. There it is, day after lazy day, showing us the way.

THE WORLD MR. WATTS encouraged us to escape to was not Australia or Moresby. It wasn't even another part of the island. It was the nineteenth-century England of
Great Expectations
. We were working our way there on assisted passage, each of us with our own fragments, with Mr. Watts as helmsman sorting and assembling them into some coherent order.

I was extremely competitive about our task. It was essential that I come up with more fragments than the other kids. It would offer the proof to myself that I, Matilda, cared more about Pip than anyone else.

I can remember where I was and what I was doing for every fragment I retrieved. Otherwise, I have no sense of time passing in the normal way. Along with medicines and our freedom, the blockade stole time from us. At first, you hardly noticed it happening. But then you suddenly stopped to think: no one has celebrated a birthday for a while.

I was much better at saving my fragments now. I didn't need to rush to Mr. Watts' house with the scene where Pip leaves his village at dawn for his new life in the city of London. I could sit on the beach in the shade of a palm tree and see the moment clearly: Joe offers a hearty farewell. Biddy wipes her eyes with her apron. But Pip has already moved on. He is looking forward.
It was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on
…There, I had retrieved one of Mr. Dickens' lines.

In another hour it would be nightfall. If I was to use a stick to write the fragment in the sand I could stop worrying about it and run down in the morning to retrieve it. So that's what I did.

In the morning, before my mum was up, before anyone could see it and steal it, or misunderstand it, I went down to the beach to get my words.

The world is gray at that hour; it moves more slowly. Even the seabirds are content to hold on to their reflections. If you look carefully you notice things that at a later hour you'd fail to see. This was always my mum's advice. Get down to the beach before the world has woken and you will find God. I didn't find God, but at the far end of the beach I saw two men glide ashore in a boat. They were full of quick movement for this hour. One of them, unmistakably, was Mr. Watts. The other, heavier figure was Gilbert's father. I watched them haul the boat up the dry creek bed. They didn't muck around. They didn't want to be caught by the dawn. They didn't want to be seen by anyone. And, as I didn't want Mr. Watts to see where I stored my fragments, I waited until they disappeared into the trees.

Then the only noise was the sand crunching under my feet. I found Mr. Dickens' sentence, shut my eyes, and committed it to memory before kicking away every trace.

ON MY WAY to the washing creek later that day I drifted into the area of Mrs. Watts' grave without thinking. I must have been in some sort of daydream. I don't recall. Or else my mind was a blank. A gray fog. I could hear the parrots and cockatiels and some thicket birds in the trees, but that's all until a voice called out, “Matilda. Are you on your way somewhere?”

“No, sir,” I said. “I'm just walking.”

“In that case, why don't you join me and Mrs. Watts.”

As he rose to his feet I took in the improvements to Mrs. Watts' grave—the bits of white coral set around the edges, the scattered purple and red bougainvillea.

I wondered if I was supposed to say hello to Mrs. Watts. After all, the invitation was to join him
and
Mrs. Watts. I felt unsure what I should do or say, especially to Mrs. Watts, and sat down awkwardly. Mr. Watts smiled at nothing in particular. I watched a large butterfly flap onto a tree trunk and disappear. I snuck a look at Mr. Watts. He was still smiling down at Mrs. Watts. I needed to say something, so I asked him if Mrs. Watts had ever read
Great Expectations
.

“Sadly, no,” he said. “She tried. But you know, Matilda, you cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames. For me, Matilda,
Great Expectations
is such a book. It gave me permission to change my life.”

He leaned back as if to put our talk beyond Mrs. Watts' hearing.

“Grace, however, put the book down so many times she lost her place. If the phone rang it was like a prayer answered. Finally she refused point-blank to have anything to do with it. Well, not quite—she said she would read
Great Expectations
through to the end if I would try the Bible. So that was that.”

I was encouraged by Mr. Watts' chattiness, and these confidences he was sharing with me. There was another question I was burning to ask, and it occurred to me that this was the moment. If I could just summon up the courage. But I couldn't find a way of getting from Mr. Watts' disappointment in his dead wife's failure to love
Great Expectations
to why he used to tow Mrs. Watts behind on a cart. And why he wore that red clown's nose. The moment passed. A twig fell at his feet and by the time Mr. Watts bent to pick it up the opportunity was lost.

T
HE RAMBOS ARRIVED WITHOUT WARNING, their eyes bobbing in their black faces, mops of overgrown, ropy hair dangling with colored ties. These rebel fighters wore cutoff jeans. Some wore boots taken from redskin soldiers. I took an instant dislike to those ones. Most of them, though, went barefoot. Their T-shirts stuck to their skinny torsos. Some had button-down shirts with no buttons left or sleeves torn off at the shoulder. As with the redskins they carried their guns and rifles close—like next of kin.

Two popped up on the edge of the jungle. Three more came from the beach. One from around the corner of our shelter. Two more arrived from behind the classroom block. They crawled down out of the trees. No more than a dozen of them.

We were not sure how to receive them, even though they were our boys. The troubling thing is they'd snuck up on us, which wasn't seen as a friendly thing. But that wasn't all. They seemed to know about us. Had they been watching us? Had they stood in the shadows of the giant trees, listening to Mr. Watts talk of his wife's failure to read the book us kids were working so hard to bring back to life? Nothing they found came as a surprise. Neither our crude shelters nor the schoolhouse that lingered as some hard trace of the old and trusted world we had once known and walked about in.

They were our boys, but there were no faces in that lot that we knew. We watched them regroup near the jungle, some crouching with their rifles. You could see they weren't sure about us either. And their doubt made us afraid. So much was uncertain.

They seemed to know that the redskins had paid a visit. But they didn't know what had been said or given to them. We knew what had happened to other villages that collaborated with the redskins. In the minds of the rambos we might be such a village.

Gilbert's father padded over to them with some fruit. The rambos made no effort to meet him halfway. They stayed put with their rifles and suspicion. They were too far away for us to hear what was said. After a few minutes one of the crouching rambos stood up to help himself to a guava. The others watched him eat, and since he didn't drop dead they unfolded themselves from the ground, released their weapons, and followed suit. They were hungrier than they had let on. We watched them spit out the seeds and skin.

Mr. Masoi got their attention and pointed to the rest of us looking on like the spectators we had become. We had an idea Gilbert's father was offering them shelter and food. Though I imagine he as much as the rest of us was hoping they would leave, just light up out of here, because their presence made us a target for the redskin soldiers.

I have said we lost all sense of time. But I will guess. I will say the mine had been closed for nearly three years when those rambos came into our lives. That meant those boys had been living in the jungle killing redskins and fleeing from them for three years. We were the same color. We were from the same island. But living the way they did had changed them. They were different from us. We saw it in their eyes, and in the way their heads moved. They had turned into creatures of the forest.

Untrusting of open spaces they set up camp near the trees and away from the pigs. They kept to themselves until dark. I heard later they had asked for medicines, though I hadn't noticed any sick or wounded. I saw different people take them food. We were out to make a favorable impression.

The smaller kids willed one another closer and closer. One of the rambos would suddenly turn his head or hiss or clap his hands, and the little kids scattered like fish. The rambos rocked back and laughed, and that laughter was one of the more reassuring things we heard. Behind their betel-stained mouths and crazed stares, maybe they weren't so different after all.

That night they made a small fire. We could see their silhouettes rising and falling away into the dark, but they couldn't see us. Or hear our whispers. I lay beside my mum and I could feel the tension in her. I could hear the tightness of her breath. She would have liked to go over there and tell them to pipe down. Young ones were trying to sleep. The voices of the rambos carried in the dark. They were seventy meters away but sounded as if they were right next to us.

Some of them were drinking jungle juice; these ones grew louder and more boisterous. Real soldiers would have kept quiet and moved like shadows, which is how these boys had entered our village. But jungle juice has that effect. It made them forget who they were.

I watched my mum get up and arrange herself across the entrance of our shelter. I asked her what she was doing. She didn't answer at first. “They want girls,” she said eventually. Strange. I had not felt included until she barricaded our sleeping place. Now I felt odd, like a piece of fruit that doesn't know it's fruit and therefore the object of someone's appetite.

It was the next day, just on dark, that they found Mr. Watts. My mum and some others, including me, were taking the rambos some food when we saw Mr. Watts heading towards us. Two rambos walked on either side of him. They couldn't believe what they had found. They used their rifle butts to nudge their prize forward. Mr. Watts looked irritated. He did not need that shove in the back. I watched him adjust his glasses.