Mister Pip (23 page)

“And your father's full name is?”

I told him, and watched him write it out. Joseph Francis Laimo.

“My mother is Dolores Mary Laimo,” I said.

Then he sat back as he had before and studied me over his arched hands and white knees.

“Why don't you tell me about your mum, Matilda.”

I
REMEMBERED MY FATHER'S DESCRIPTION as he looked out the airplane window and saw how tiny our home was. Now I knew what he meant when he said the plane rolled over on its side without falling out of the sky, and how the window filled up with view.

I saw the green of Honiara and its rooftops, and as we went higher it grew smaller and smaller until all I could see was blue. I was leaving for Townsville, to be with my father.

I knew all about departure. I knew from Pip about how to leave a place. I knew you don't look back.

I didn't get to see Gilbert and his family again. I don't know what happened to them. Only good things, I hope.

We were so many hours up in the air. The cool cabin was another new experience, to feel goose bumps. I am sure I dozed off, because when I next looked out the window there was Australia, flat, pegged out, and gray like a skin. It wasn't so far away after all. I kept waiting for the plane to land, but it took many hours before it dropped in the air. The knot in my stomach had nothing to do with the descent, though. I was hoping that my father would like me. I was hoping that I would live up to his memory of me.

I had on new shoes, a new skirt, and a new white blouse. In a paper bag I carried my old skirt and old blouse, practically rags, and a toothbrush.

A black man is easily spotted in Townsville, especially at the airport, and there he stood in the door of the terminal, waving both arms, his face one big shining smile. From the tarmac there was time to note some changes in him, and I felt my mum's critical side in me.

His transformation into a white man was near complete. He wore shorts, and boots that rose no higher than his ankles. A white shirt did little to hide his bulging stomach. My father and beer liked each other. That's what my mum used to say.

A man with flags had directed the plane to its park on the tarmac. Now it was my father's turn to stand as the flagman had, his arms held open to me. I didn't know what to do with my face. I wanted to smile, but instead my eyes grew hot, and before I knew it there were tears. These were happy tears.

My father wore a silver chain around his neck. After a hug he took it off and slipped the chain over my head. I think he just felt the need to give me something, and that chain was handy. I still wear it today.

“Look at you,” he said. “Look at you.” He turned around to the airport crowd with his beaming face and white teeth, as if to invite others to admire me. He asked if I had any luggage.

“Just me and this,” I said, holding up the paper bag. He picked me up under the arms and spun me around. I didn't know if he had been told about my mum. For all I knew he had been expecting her to get off that plane with me. He didn't say, and gave little away.

My father placed a hand on my shoulder to direct me inside the terminal out of the hot Townsville sun. That's when I saw him turn his head and glance across the empty gray tarmac to the plane. And when he saw me notice that, he smiled through his glassy eyes and changed the subject. “We've got some eating to catch up on,” he said. “I've bought you a birthday cake for each of your birthdays I missed.”

“That's four cakes,” I said.

He chuckled, and we walked into the terminal and its cool air, my father's hand on my shoulder.

I WENT TO the local high school. I had several years to make up, and at first I sat in a class among white kids younger than me.

On my second day I went along to the school library to see if it had
Great Expectations
. I found a copy sitting on a shelf—not hidden or in a “safe place,” but there for anyone to come along and pick it up. It was a hardback. It looked indestructible. I carried it to one of the tables and sat down to read.

It was more wordy than I remembered. Much more wordy, and more difficult. But for the names I recognized on the pages I might have been reading a different book. Then an unpleasant truth dawned on me. Mr. Watts had read a different version to us kids. A simpler version. He'd stuck to the bare bones of
Great Expectations,
and he'd straightened out sentences, ad-libbed in fact, to help us arrive at a more definite place in our heads. Mr. Watts had rewritten Mr. Dickens' masterwork.

I puzzled my way through this new version of
Great Expectations,
underlining each word of every sentence with the stub of my finger. I read very slowly. And when I got to the end I read it once again to make sure I understood what Mr. Watts had done, and that any disappointment wasn't my own error.

The attempts of us kids to retrieve fragments were little more than efforts to rebuild a castle with straw. We had failed to remember correctly; of course our failure was guaranteed because Mr. Watts hadn't given us the full story the first time around. I was surprised to discover the character of Orlick. In Mr. Dickens' version, Orlick is competing with Pip for Joe Gargery's favors. Ultimately Orlick will attack Pip's sister and leave her an insensible mess, a speechless invalid. He even tries to kill Pip! Why hadn't Mr. Watts told us this?

Also, it turns out there are two convicts on the marshes at the moment that Magwitch surprises Pip in the graveyard. Why hadn't Mr. Watts told us about the other convict? When Compeyson first turned up on the page I did not believe in him. I read on and discovered him to be a sworn enemy of Magwitch's. Compeyson turns out to be the same man who disappointed Miss Havisham on her wedding day. Years later, it is Compeyson who turns in Magwitch as he and Pip and Herbert Pocket sit mid-river in a boat, waiting for a steamship to spirit Magwitch out of England. Here, the pattern is clear. Pip is cast in his old role of savior. Only this time it is not to be.

In Mr. Dickens' version, as Compeyson directs a boat of militia towards them, Magwitch launches himself at his old adversary. The enemies tumble into the river. There is a struggle underwater from which Magwitch emerges the victor—a doomed victor while Compeyson drifts out of the story on the tide.

I suppose Miss Havisham's honor is upheld by Magwitch's vanquishing of Compeyson, but at what cost? Lives have been ruined all over the place.

At first, Mr. Watts' omissions made me angry. Why hadn't he stuck with Mr. Dickens' version? What was he protecting us from?

Possibly himself, or a rebuke from my mum, which I suppose adds up to the same thing. During the devil versus Pip debate the problem of finding the appropriate language had come up. Mr. Watts, ever conciliatory, tried to help her with the suggestion that people's imaginations sometimes got in the way. My mum, forever seeking advantage, countered by saying she thought it was a problem with blimmin' Dickens too.

On this occasion she had stayed on to listen to Mr. Watts read, and was able to retrieve a sentence from
Great Expectations
that irritated her beyond all reason.
As I had grown accustomed to my expectations, I had insensibly begun to notice their effect upon myself and those around me
. Us kids sat back in our usual state of tremulous excitement reserved for these debates between my mum and Mr. Watts. We didn't see anything wrong with the sentence. Why, you could look out the open window and see that a statement about self-fulfillment was hardly a surprise to the grass or the flowers or the creepers growing everywhere.

My mum said she had no problem with stating the obvious. The problem was that silly blimmin' word
insensibly
. What was the point of that word? It just confused. If it hadn't been for that silly bloody
insensibly,
she'd have gotten it the first time. Instead,
insensibly
had led her to suspect it wasn't so straightforward after all.

She made Mr. Watts read the offending sentence and suddenly all of us kids saw what she was talking about. Maybe Mr. Watts as well. She said it was just “fancy nancy English talk.” It's what you did to spice up a bland dish or to make a white dress more interesting by sewing in a red or blue hemline; that's what that word
insensibly
was there for—to pretty up a plain sentence. She thought Mr. Watts should remove the offending word.

At first, he said he couldn't; you couldn't muck around with Dickens. The word belonged to him; the whole sentence did. To whip out an inconvenient word would be an act of vandalism, like smashing the window of a chapel.

He said all that and I think from that day on he did the opposite. He pulled the embroidery out of Mr. Dickens' story to make it easier on our young ears.

Mr. Dickens
. It took me a long time to drop the
Mister
. Mr. Watts, however, has remained Mr. Watts.

During those years in Townsville I went on reading Dickens with mixed enjoyment. I read
Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House.
The book I kept coming back to was
Great Expectations
. I never tired of it. And with each rereading I got more out of it. Of course, for me it contains so many personal touchstones. To this day I cannot read Pip's confession—
It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home
—without feeling the same of my island.

We are deep into the book, chapter 18 to be precise, when Pip discovers there is no going back to his old life on the marshes. For me, in my life, the same discovery had come much earlier. I was still a frightened black kid suffering from shock trauma when I'd looked down at the green of Honiara from the airplane, but I'd also known from that moment on there would be no return.

My mum belonged to all that I was trying to forget. I didn't want to forget her. But there was always a chance the other things would ride back on that memory. I'd see those soldiers again, smell my mum's fear as if she were standing right by me, here at the bus stop or in the library.

Sometimes I couldn't help it. I couldn't keep the door closed on that little room in my head where I'd put her. My mum kept her own hours and she could surprise me at any time of her own choosing. She would open that door and slap her hands down on her hips as if to ask, “Just what in the name of the Good Lord do you think you're up to?” I had stopped at the cosmetics counter. That's all. Or my eye caught up with the condoms sitting behind glass near the checkout operator. Those things belonged to a world that didn't include me yet, but I was beginning to think they could—at some time in the future.

Other times my mum popped up when you might expect her to. On one occasion, it was the sight of a mum with her daughter in the underwear department. The mum was as happy as a pig in molasses. She picked up one bra after another and waved it under the scornful eye of her daughter. The daughter locked herself away behind her folded arms. She refused to come out and play this game with her mum. Those arms were folded against any possibility of a mother's counsel breaking through to her.

I did not know that girl or her mum. But I knew the tension between them. It was unspoken and yet as powerful as the spoken word; it was invisible and yet as solid as a wall.

I stood there staring until a stroller banged into the backs of my legs. A small white boy shrieked at me. “Sorry,” the mother said.

This is how I moved in the world of mothers and their kids, as a spectator wanders in a zoo, fascinated and repelled.

IN TOWNSVILLE, I won the senior English Prize. I walked across the stage to receive my certificate, and when I turned to face the applause I saw my father on his feet with his hands raised. He was so ridiculously proud of me. I was his champ. That's what he liked to call me.
Champ
. When we had visitors over he liked to wheel me out so he could say to them, “Ask her anything at all about Charles Dickens.”