Mister Pip (6 page)

One night a stranger enters the pub and asks to have Pip pointed out to him. This is Mr. Jaggers, a lawyer from London. He seemed a brave man to us kids. A man unafraid to walk into a group of strangers and start waving his finger about. He asks Pip for a private conference. So Joe and Pip bring him back to the house, and there Mr. Jaggers declares his interest. He has some news for Pip. His life is about to change.

The reading stumbled around these new words as Mr. Watts had to explain what a lawyer was, as well as the word
benefactor
—which led to the word
beneficiary
. That was the lawyer's news. Pip was the beneficiary of a lot of money set aside by someone who wished to keep their identity a secret. The money would be used to turn Pip into a gentleman. So he was about to change
into
something.

When I first heard that I fretted to the end of the chapter. I needed to see what he would change into before I could be sure we would remain friends. I didn't want him to change.

Mr. Watts then talked about what it was to be a gentleman. Though it meant many things, he thought the word
gentleman
best described how a man should be in the world. “A gentleman is a man who never forgets his manners, no matter the situation. No matter how awful, or how difficult the situation.”

Christopher Nutua had his hand up.

“Can a poor person be a gentleman?” he asked.

“A poor person most certainly can,” said Mr. Watts. He was usually tolerant of our questions, even of our dumbest questions, but this one made him testy. “Money and social standing don't come into it. We are talking about qualities. And those qualities are easily identified. A gentleman will always do the right thing.”

We understood what had been revealed, and that it was Mr. Watts' personal conviction. He glanced around the class. As there were no more questions he resumed reading, and I listened carefully.

The money meant Pip would get to leave behind everything he'd known—the marshes, his rotten sister, dear old rambling Joe, the blacksmith's forge—for the big, unknown city of London.

By now I understood the importance of the forge in the book. The forge was home: it embraced all those things that give a life its shape. For me, it meant the bush tracks, the mountains that stood over us, the sea that sometimes ran away from us; it was the ripe smell of blood I could not get out of my nostrils since I saw Black with its belly ripped open. It was the hot sun. It was the fruits we ate, the fish, the nuts. The noises we heard at night. It was the earthy smell of the makeshift latrines. And the tall trees, which like the sea sometimes looked eager to get away from us. It was the jungle and its constant reminder of how small you were, and how unimportant, compared to the giant trees and their canopy's greed for sunlight. It was the laughter of the women in the streams with their washing. It was their joking, teasing delight in discovering a girl secretly washing her rags. It was fear, and it was loss.

Away from class I found myself wondering about the life my dad was leading, and what he had become. I wondered if he was a gentleman, and whether he had forgotten all that had gone into making him. I wondered if he remembered me, and if he ever thought about my mum. I wondered if the thought of us kept him awake at night like the thought of him did her.

I SAT WATCHING my mum wash our clothes in a hill stream. She beat the dirt out against a smooth rock, then soaked the bruised cloth in the water, shook it out, and let it float.

I had been keeping my distance. It was my way of punishing her for having been rude to Mr. Watts. Now I thought of another way of getting at her. I took aim at the back of her head and asked her if she missed my dad. No angry look flashed over her shoulder, which is what I had expected. No. What happened was her hands became busier. So did her shoulders.

“Why do you ask, girl?”

I shrugged, but of course she didn't see that. A new silence was about to open up between us.

“Sometimes,” she added. “Sometimes I will look up and see the jungle part, and there is your father, Matilda. And he is walking towards me.”

“And me?”

She dropped the washing and turned to me.

“And you. Yes. Your father is walking towards us both. And then I have memories.”

“Which are?”

“No blimmin' use,” she said. “That's what they are. But since you ask, I do remember back when the mine was open and your father was in court on a disorderly charge.”

I didn't know any of this, and yet her tone of voice suggested my father's misdemeanor was no worse, say, than his forgetting to bring her something home from Arawa. His court appearance was no more calamitous than an instant of forgetfulness. This is what she wished me to believe. But I didn't. I wished she hadn't told me. There was more.

“I remember how soft and red his face looked,” she said. “How very sorry in a pray-to-God-I-am-sorry sort of way. Well, I remember looking out the window of the courthouse. I saw an airplane draw a white line in the sky, and at the same time a coconut fell past the window. For a moment, I did not know which one to look at, eh—at that thing that was rising or the thing that was falling.”

She pushed off her knees and stood up so she could look at me.

“If you really must know, Matilda, I didn't know if I was looking at a bad man or a man who loved me.”

I was hearing more than I wanted. This was adult talk. And because she was watching me carefully I knew she had caught up with that thought.

“I miss sea horses too,” she said more brightly. “You will never find a more wise eye anywhere than in a sea horse. This is true. I made that discovery when I was younger than you. And I discovered something about parrot fish. They stare at you in their hundreds and actually remember you from the day before and the day before that one.”

“That's a lie.” I laughed.

“No,” she said. “It's true.” She held her breath, and so did I, and she was the first to burst out laughing.

Now that I had met Miss Havisham, and knew more about her unhappy past, I had changed my mind about my mum being like Pip's sister. She had more in common with Miss Havisham—Miss Havisham who cannot move on from the day of her greatest disappointment. On the clock, the exact hour and minute that the bridegroom failed to show. The wedding feast untouched, left for the cobwebs to mark time.

Miss Havisham remains in her wedding gown for an event that has been and gone. I had an idea my mum was stuck in a similar moment. Only it had to do with an argument with my dad. Her frown gave her away. A frown that could be traced back to the original moment. I had an idea that whatever my dad had said still rang in her ears.

Y
OU CANNOT BE ANY MORE STUCK THAN the only white person living among black people. Mr. Watts was another I regarded as stuck. He had given us Pip, and I had come to know this Pip as if he were real and I could feel his breath on my cheek. I had learned to enter the soul of another. Now I tried to do the same with Mr. Watts.

I watched his face and I listened to his voice and I tried to hear how his mind ticked, and what he thought. What was Mr. Watts thinking as our mums and dads, our uncles and aunts, and sometimes an older brother or sister came to share with the class what they knew of the world? He liked to position himself to one side as our visitor delivered their story or anecdote or theory.

We always watched Mr. Watts' face for a sign that what we were hearing was nonsense. His face never gave such a sign. It displayed a respectful interest, even when Daniel's grandmother, stooped and old on her canes, peered back at our class with her weak eyes.

“There is a place called Egypt,” she said. “I know nothing of that place. I wish I could tell you kids about Egypt. Forgive me for not knowing more. But if you care to listen, I will tell you everything I know about the color blue.”

And so we heard about the color blue.

“Blue is the color of the Pacific. It is the air we breathe. Blue is the gap in the air of all things, such as the palms and iron roofs. But for blue we would not see the fruit bats. Thank you, God, for giving us the color blue.

“It is surprising where the color blue pops up,” continued Daniel's grandmother. “Look and ye shall find. You can find blue squinting up in the cracks of the wharf at Kieta. And you know what it is trying to do? It is trying to get at the stinking fish guts, to take them back home. If blue was an animal or plant or bird, it would be a seagull. It gets its sticky beak into everything.

“Blue also has magical powers,” she said. “You watch a reef and tell me if I am lying. Blue crashes onto a reef and what color does it release? It releases white! Now, how does it do that?”

Our eyes sought out Mr. Watts for an explanation, but he pretended not to notice our questioning faces. He sat on the edge of the desk, his arms folded. Every part of him looked to be focused on what Daniel's grandmother had to say. One by one our attention shifted back to the little old woman with the betel-stained mouth.

“A final thing, children, and then I will let you go. Blue belongs to the sky and cannot be nicked, which is why the missionaries stuck blue in the windows of the first churches they built here on the island.”

Mr. Watts did that now-familiar thing of opening his eyes wide as if waking from a sleep. He walked over to Daniel's grandmother with an outstretched hand. The old woman gave hers for him to hold, then he turned to the class.

“Today, we have been very lucky. Very lucky. We have received a handy reminder that while we may not know the whole world, we can, if we are clever enough, make it new. We can make it up with the things we find and see around us. We just have to look and try to be as imaginative as Daniel's grandmother.” He put a hand on the shoulder of the old woman. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you so much.”

Daniel's grandmother grinned back at the class and we saw how few teeth she had left, and the few she did have explained why she whistled when she spoke.

Others who came to speak to the class had to be persuaded by Mr. Watts to give up what they knew, and in some cases it was very little.

The woman who had owned Black dropped her shy eyes to the ground. And when Giselle spoke, Mr. Watts had to lean towards her to catch what she said about wind. “Some islands have beautiful names for different winds. My favorite is the wind that is known as ‘gentle as a woman.'”

Gilbert's uncle, a big man, round as an oil drum, black as tar from toiling out at sea, came to speak to us about “broken dreams.” He said the best place to find a broken dream is on the wharf. “Look at all those dead fish with their eyes and mouths open. They can't believe they are not in the sea and never will be again.”

He stopped to look at Mr. Watts, as if to ask, Is this the sort of thing you're after? Mr. Watts gave a nod, and Gilbert's uncle continued.

“At night the blimmin' dogs and roosters chase after dreams and break them in two. The one good thing about a broken dream is that you can pick up the threads of it again. By the way, fish go to heaven. Don't believe any other shit you hear.”

He shifted from one bare foot to the other, tilting his nervous eyes to Mr. Watts, then back at us. “That's all I've got for now,” he said.

We heard about an island where the kids sit in a stone canoe and learn sacred sea chants by heart. We heard you can sing a song to make an orange tree grow. We heard about songs that worked like medicine. For example, you can sing a certain one to get rid of hiccups. There are even songs to get rid of sores and boils.

We learned about remedies, such as placing the leaves of white lilies on sores. There was another scrubby plant whose long green leaves were good for earache. Leaves of another plant could be squeezed and drunk to cure diarrhea. Kina shells should be boiled for soup and fed to first-time mothers to stop the bleeding.

Some stories will help you find happiness and truth. Some stories teach you not to make the same mistake twice. These ones offer instruction. Look here to the Good Book.

A woman called May told a story about a frigate bird that had brought her a birthday card from a neighboring island. The card was folded inside an old toothpaste box that was taped under the bird's wing. It was for her eighth birthday and the large bird seemed to know this because, she said, it stood with her mum and dad watching her as she read the note, and when she came to the words “Happy birthday, May,” she said everyone cheered and that's when she saw the bird smile.

“The next day we ate it for my birthday lunch.”

When Mr. Watts heard that, his head reared back and his arms dropped to his sides. He looked appalled. I wonder if May noticed, because she then said, “Of course, the bird didn't know about that part.”

Still, we all felt uncomfortable because Mr. Watts had been made to feel uncomfortable.

One old woman stood before us and shouted, “Ged up, you lazybones! Get off your arses and follow the seabirds out to the fishing grounds.” It was a traditional story.