Mister Pip (2 page)

It was easy to accept she was mad. Mr. Watts was more of a mystery because he'd come out of a world we didn't really know. My mum said his tribe had forgotten him. They wouldn't have left behind a company man.

I did not realize what a big impact the school had on my life until it closed. My sense of time was governed by the school year—when term began, when it ended, the holidays between. Now that we had been set free we had all this time on our hands. When we woke we no longer felt the brooms on our backsides or our mums shouting at us to
Ged up! Ged up, you lazybones!

We still woke when the roosters did, but now we lay there, listening to the dogs open their jaws and growl in their sleep. We also listened out for the mosquito, which we feared more than the redskins or the rebels.

We learned to eavesdrop on our parents—though some things we could see for ourselves. We were used to the redskins' helicopters buzzing in and out of the cloud around the mountain peaks. Now we saw them head out to sea in a straight line. The helicopter would reach a certain point, then turn around and come back as if it had forgotten something. Where they turned back was just a pinprick in the distance. We could not see the men thrown out. But that's what we heard. The redskins flung the captured rebels out the open door of the helicopter, their arms and legs kicking in the air. And whenever us kids strayed into range our mums and dads would stop talking, and so we knew, didn't we, that there was some fresh atrocity, the details we didn't yet know about.

The weeks passed. Now we had an idea of what our time was for. It was to be spent waiting. We waited, and we waited for the redskin soldiers, or the rebels, whoever got here first. It was a long, long time before they came to our village. But I know exactly when they did because that's what I had made up my mind to do—I had decided I would keep the time. It was three days before my fourteenth birthday when the redskins came into our village for the first time. Four weeks later the rebels arrived. But in the time leading up to those calamitous events, Pop Eye and his wife, Grace, came back into our lives.

G
ED UP, MATILDA,” MY MUM YELLED ONE morning. “You've got school today.” She must have enjoyed that moment. I could tell it cheered her up just to say it. As if we had slipped back into a comfortable old routine. I happened to know it was a Wednesday. My mum wouldn't have known that. I kept a pencil under my mat. And a calendar of days on the corner post.

My mum swept her broom near my head. She shouted at a rooster that had flown in the door.

“But we have no teachers,” I said.

And with a glimmer of a smile, my mum said, “You do now. Pop Eye is going to teach you kids.”

BOUGAINVILLE IS ONE of the most fertile places on earth. Drop a seed in the soil and three months later it is a plant with shiny green leaves. Another three months and you are picking its fruit. But for a machete, we would have no land of our own. Left alone the bush would march down the steep hillsides and bury our villages in flower and vine.

This is why it was easy to forget there had ever been a school. Creepers had smothered two trees in purple and red flowers, as if to soften the blow, and by that way crept onto the school roof; they had climbed in the windows and found a way across the ceiling. Another six months and our school would have disappeared from view.

We were all ages, from seven to fifteen. I counted twenty kids, about half the original school roll. I knew of two older boys who had gone off into the mountains to join the rebels. Three other families had left on that last boat to Rabaul. I don't know about the rest. Maybe they hadn't heard about the school opening. Over the coming weeks a few boys would return.

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 than 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.”