by Lloyd Jones
When it came to Mr. Dickens, though, he knew he was on safe ground. And we felt happy for him. He always referred to him as Mr. Dickens—never Dickens or Charles. So we knew what to do when it was our turn to refer to the author. We spoke about Mr. Dickens until he began to feel real, or as real as Mr. Watts. We just didn’t know him yet.
Mr. Watts spoke to us about England. He had been there. He might as well have said “the moon.” We struggled to think of a question to ask. My friend Celia asked if there were black people there. Mr. Watts answered quickly, “Yes,” and as he shifted his attention around the room to look for another, better question, Celia snuck a sideways look at me from under her black pigtails.
We soon learned there were many Englands, and Mr. Watts had only been to two or three of them. The England he visited was very different from the one Mr. Dickens had lived and worked in. This was a challenging notion for those of us who had never been anywhere, because we had the feeling that life on the island was much the same as it had been for our grandfathers and their grandfathers, especially after the blockade was imposed.
My mum liked to tell a story about my grandfather back when he took the steamboat to Rabaul for the first time. He had to nudge another passenger standing up on deck to ask, “What are those large pigs I can see moving behind the trees?” He had just seen his first motorcar.
Away from Mr. Dickens and England, Mr. Watts was lost. Once when Gilbert stuck up his hand to ask how the motorcar worked, Mr. Watts stammered out a reply. He scratched his head. He started again. We all knew about petrol and the key in the ignition. It was the rest of it Gilbert wanted to know about. We were told it was complicated. Mr. Watts said it was easier to explain with a drawing. Once again we were asked to be patient and he would see what he could do.
We knew Mr. Watts was aware of his shortcomings—no one had to tell him—because not long after we resumed school he invited our mums to come into the classroom and share what they knew of the world.
MABEL’S MUM WAS THE FIRST TO COME and speak to us. Mrs. Kabui arrived at the open door in a blaze of late afternoon light. Mr. Watts held out a welcoming hand, and Mrs. Kabui walked quickly towards it. She spoke in a whisper to Mr. Watts. I saw Mabel shift to the edge of her chair. Mr. Watts gave a nod and Mrs. Kabui looked relieved.
“Class, we are very lucky today,” began Mr. Watts. “Mrs. Kabui has agreed to share with us the remarkable life and times of the heart seed.”
Mabel’s mum gave a shy smile. She stood barefoot in a white blouse and a red skirt. As soon as she smiled you forgot the tear in the shoulder of her blouse and the pawing marks left by the grubby fingers of a child. She spoke softly and chose her words with great care.
“Thank you, Mr. Watts. Thank you very much. I am here today hoping to surprise you kids.” She looked around to see if we were ready. We were.
“What if I was to tell you that some gardens begin their lives in oceans?” Again she looked around the class, her gaze skipping over the desk where her daughter sat. Her smile was for us all. “I am here today to talk about the heart seed.”
She told us that one day a heart seed floats on the water. The next day it washes up on the beach. The next week the sea breeze and sun have dried it to something light as a husk. The next month sees a wind turn it over and over until it reaches soil. Three months later a sapling grows out of the earth. Nine months later its white flowers open and glance back at the sea whence it came.
“Why am I telling you this, children? Because its stamen makes a fierce flame and keeps away the mosquitoes.”
Mr. Watts blinked, like someone just waking up. I have an idea he had been expecting to hear more and that Mabel’s mum caught him off-guard with her abrupt ending.
“Very good, Mrs. Kabui. Excellent. The heart seed.”
He nodded in our direction, which was a sign for us all to rise and applaud. Mabel clapped her hands the loudest and for the longest. Her mother bent at the hips and dropped her head. She came up laughing. Everyone was pleased. No one had suffered embarrassment or shame.
Great Expectations was next. We knew that. We followed Mr. Watts with our eyes. We watched him pick the book up from his desk. Mabel’s mum saw it too. She whispered something to Mr. Watts behind her hand. We heard him say, “Yes, of course. Of course.” We saw him gesture to an empty desk and Mabel’s mum sat down to be read to from the greatest novel by the greatest English writer of the nineteenth century.
Over and above my own enjoyment I had to listen very carefully because later that night my mum would want an update on Pip. I paid special attention to Mr. Watts’ pronunciation. I liked to surprise my mum with a new word she didn’t know. What I didn’t know at the time was all of us kids were carrying installments of Great Expectations back to our families.
The voice that reached me in the dark sounded put out and offended.
“So he took his mother’s pork pie.”
Pork pie. I grinned in the dark. She didn’t know how to say it like Mr. Watts did.
But now I saw I had some explaining to do. The deaths of Pip’s mum and dad clearly hadn’t sunk in. I’d explained this before, and now I did so all over again. I told her Pip’s sister and a man called Joe bring him up—“by hand,” I added, having thought about those words and their meaning.
“So he took his sister’s pork pie.”
“Yes,” I conceded.
“And what did Pop Eye have to say about this?”
Mr. Watts hadn’t said anything, but I knew this would be the wrong answer.
“Mr. Watts said it is best to wait until all the facts are known.”
To this day it impresses me that I was able to come up with that reply. I’m sure I was just repeating what I’d overheard somewhere else, but whenever that was has passed from memory.
I heard my mum shift on her mat. She was waiting for me to go on, but I was equally determined to wait for her to say “Then what happened?”—which she did a few moments later, dragging the words out of herself, irritated at having to ask me.
A rimy morning was the phrase I decided to bring home with me. I used it now to create the picture of Pip carrying the pork pie and file off to the convict Magwitch waiting in the marshes. “It was a rimy morning…”
I paused, wickedly, in the dark for my mother to ask what it meant. All she did was breathe more sternly as if she knew my mind and what I was up to.
Earlier in the day I had stuck up my hand for the very first time. I didn’t wave it around like Mabel did. I waited patiently until Mr. Watts nodded. I started in the usual way.
“My name is Matilda.”
“Yes, Matilda,” said Mr. Watts.
“What is a rimy morning?”
“A rimy morning is a frosty morning. It is a word you don’t hear much anymore.” He smiled. “Matilda is a nice name, too. Where did you get such a pretty one?” he asked.
“My father.”
“And he…?”
I anticipated his question. My dad had worked with Australians up at the mine. They had given him the name Matilda. He had given it to my mum. And she had given it to me. I explained all this.
“A sort of hand-me-down.” Mr. Watts glanced away with the thought. Suddenly he looked gloomy. I don’t know why. He turned back to the pages and noticed I had my hand up again.
“Yes, Matilda.”
“What is a frosty morning?”
Whenever he considered a question, Mr. Watts’ gaze explored the back wall or journeyed to the open window, as if the answer could be found there. This time he put the question to the class. “Can anyone tell me what a frosty morning is?”
Nobody could. We were amazed when he told us the truth of a rimy morning. We could not imagine air so cold that it made smoke come out of your mouth or caused grass to snap in your hands. We could not imagine such a world. None of us kids had tasted anything cold for months, since the last generator had stopped working. For us something cold was something left in the shade or buffed by the night
air.
A rimy morning. I waited for my mum to bite. But that bait didn’t interest her. She didn’t care what a rimy morning was. Or else she didn’t want to appear dumb or backwards. So when her question didn’t come I brought her up to date with events more pleasing to her. The sight of the old convict chomping into the food like a dog. And the possibility of the police in the kitchen when Pip arrives home. She was especially pleased about that. In the dark I heard her smack her lips.
But that was the last time she asked to hear an installment from Great Expectations. And I blame “a rimy morning.” Although she didn’t say so, I knew she thought I was showing off and that I was biting off a bigger piece of the world than she could handle with language like “a rimy morning.” She didn’t want to encourage me by asking questions. She didn’t want me to go deeper into that other world. She worried she would lose her Matilda to Victorian England.
AROUND DAWN WE HEARD THE REDSKINS’ helicopters pass over the village and then return. They hovered in the air like giant dragonflies, peering down at the clearing. They saw a line of abandoned houses and an empty beach because we had cleared off. Everyone. The old people. Mums and dads. The kids. And those dogs and chickens that had names. We hid in the jungle and waited. We waited until we heard the helicopters beat over the treetops. We could feel the breeze their blades sent down. I remember looking around our huddled group and wondering where Mr. Watts and Grace were.
We kept under the trees and followed a bush track back to the village. The dogs that had been too old and skinny to move from their favorite places lifted their snouts. The roosters strutted around. Seeing them made you feel human, because they didn’t know anything. They didn’t know about guns and the redskins from Moresby. They didn’t know about the mine or about the politics or of our fears. The roosters only knew how to be roosters.
The helicopters had gone but we were left with our fear. We didn’t know what to do with it. We walked around. We stood in doorways. We stared off into space. Then, one by one, we realized there was nothing else to do but return to our normal routine. That meant school.
Mr. Watts stood at the front of the class as we filed in. I waited until the last of the kids had slid into their desks before I stuck up my hand. I asked him if he had heard the helicopters, and if so, where had he and Mrs. Watts hidden themselves. It was the question we had all brought to school.
Our faces seemed to amuse Mr. Watts. He jiggled a pencil in his palm. “We didn’t hide, Matilda,” he said. “Mrs. Watts wasn’t up to an early morning excursion. As for myself, I like to use that hour for reading.” And that was that.
“Will we have the pleasure of your mother in class today, Matilda?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, and tried hard not to sound so unhappy about it.
As it turned out, another mum got the times confused and turned up. She was married to Wilson Masoi, a fisherman, and their son Gilbert came to class only if his father decided he wouldn’t go fishing. She was a large woman. She came through the doorway side-on. The boy with the big woolly head who sat in front of me was Gilbert. Today I could see right over the top of him because he was slumped over his desk, ashamed to see his mother in class.
It didn’t escape Mr. Watts’ attention. He looked toward the back of the class as if he had forgotten something. “Gilbert. Would you like to introduce your mother to the class?”
Gilbert winced. He bit the insides of his cheeks. Slowly he gathered himself up. He managed to stand, but with his chin attached to his chest, his eyes trying to poke through the top of his eyelids. We heard him mutter, “This is Mum.”
“Oh, come now, Gilbert,” said Mr. Watts. “Does Mum have a name?”
“Mrs. Masoi.”
“Mrs. Masoi. Thank you, Gilbert. You may sit down.”
Mr. Watts conferred with Gilbert’s mum. As he did so, he took a light hold of Mrs. Masoi’s elbow. She had a big head of black cotton hair. She was barefoot and her shapeless white dress was filthy. As they ended their private conversation I heard Mr. Watts say, “Jolly good.” And to the rest of us he announced, “Mrs. Masoi has some cooking tips to share.”
Gilbert’s mum turned to face us. She closed her eyes and recited: “To kill an octopus, bite it above the eyes. When cooking a turtle, place it shell down first.” She looked across to Mr. Watts, who nodded for her to continue. She closed her eyes a second time. “To kill a pig, get two fat uncles to place a board across its throat.”
After the pig recipe she opened her eyes and looked to Mr. Watts. He tried to make a joke and asked how big those uncles should be. Mrs. Masoi answered, “Fat ones. Fat is good. Skinny no bloody good.” Poor Gilbert. He was wincing, and shuffling his big behind in the desk in front of me.
THE NEXT MORNING we woke to the helicopters again. My mum was bent over me, her face pinched with panic. She was yelling at me to hurry. I could hear people shouting outside, and the beating of the blades. Dust and bits of leaves flew in the open window. My mum threw my clothes at me. Outside, people were running in all directions.
I reached the edge of the bush with my mum pulling me deeper and deeper into the trees. We knew the helicopters had landed because the sound of their blades was even. Everywhere in the shadows I saw sweating faces. We tried to blend in with the stillness of the trees. Some stood. Others crouched; those mums with little ones crouched. They stuck their teats into the mouths of their babies to shut them up. No one spoke. We waited and waited. We sat still. Our faces dripped sweat. We waited until we heard the helicopters beat overhead into the distance. Even then we waited until Gilbert’s father came back to give the all clear. Slowly we picked our way out of the jungle and walked back to our houses.
In the clearing the sun beat down on our dead animals. Chooks and roosters sprawled on their swollen sides. Their heads lay elsewhere in the dust, and it was hard to know which head went where. The same machete blows that took their heads cut down washing and garden stakes.
An old dog had its belly ripped open. We stared at that dog, and thought about a story Gilbert’s father had brought from further up the coast where most of the fighting was going on. Now we knew what a human being split open would look like. There was no need to wonder anymore. To stare at that black dog was to see your sister or brother or mum or dad in that same state. You saw how disrespectful the sun could be, and how dumb the palms were to flutter back at the sea and up at the sky. The great shame of trees is that they have no conscience. They just go on staring.
Mabel’s dad picked up the dog, and while he held it dripping in his arms he yelled at a boy to come and help stuff the insides back where they belonged. The two of them walked to the edge of the jungle and turfed it into the shadows. The dog’s name was Black.
Our prized possession—a goat—had disappeared. If she’d been chopped up we’d have found her entrails. We looked in the jungle. One or two promising paths ended in waterfalls or screens of jungle. The redskins must have taken her with them. In our heads we worked out how this would have been done.
We saw a rope, no, two ropes—hindquarter and forequarter—slung around the beast. We saw it airlifted. We saw its big eyes fill with wonder for the treetops it had never seen suddenly appear below. We tried to imagine what it would feel like to be a goat and have the feeling of lightness tickling its hooves.
THE BLOCKADE WAS IMPOSED in the first half of 1990. We thought it would be just a matter of time before the outside world came to help us. Patience was the word we heard whispered. But now look at what had happened. The wrong people had found us.
We didn’t care about the chooks and roosters so much. We could eat fish, and the trees dripped with fruit. It was Black and his insides exposed to the harsh sun that we thought about.
My mum came and spoke to the class later that same day. She didn’t warn me. I had no idea what she would talk about. She didn’t know anything outside of what she knew from the Bible.
Just as he had with Gilbert, Mr. Watts hunted me out with his l
arge eager eyes. “Matilda, would you like to do the honors?”
I stood up and announced what everyone already knew.
“This is my mum.”
“And does Mum have a name?”
“Dolores,” I said, and slid lower into my desk. “Dolores Laimo.”
My mum smiled back at me. She was wearing the green scarf my dad had sent in the very last package we received. She wore it tied tight at the back of her head, which was the same way the rebels wore their bandannas. Her hair was pulled back in a tight bun. It gave her an air of defiance. Her mouth clamped down, her nostrils flared. My father used to say she had the blood of righteousness running in her veins. She should have been a churchwoman, he’d say, because persuasiveness for my mum was not an intellectual exercise. Quality of argument was neither here nor there. It was all about the intensity of belief. And every part of her—from the whites of her eyes to her muscular calves—rallied on her behalf.
My mum didn’t smile enough. When she did it was nearly always in victory. Or else it was at nighttime when she thought she was all alone. When she was thinking she tended to look angry, as if the act of thinking was potentially ruinous, even ending in her humiliation. Even when she concentrated she looked angry. In fact, she appeared to be angry much of the time. I used to think it was because she was thinking about my dad. But she couldn’t have been thinking about him all the time.
She knew the contents of what she called the Good Book. She thought about those contents a lot. And I wouldn’t have thought there was anything in that book to make her angry, but that’s how she appeared, and why a lot of the kids found her scary.
She must have anticipated this because she used her softer voice, the one I used to hear in the night before Great Expectations came between us.
“Children, I have come to talk to you about faith,” she said. “You must believe in something. Yes, you must. Even the palm trees believe in the air. And the fish believe in the sea.”
As she cast her eye around the room she began to empty her mind of the only subject she trusted, and knew, and cared anything about.