by Lloyd Jones
“When the missionaries came, we were taught to have faith in God. But when we asked to see God the missionaries refused to introduce us. Many of the old people preferred to stay with the wisdom of crabs, and the filefish that is shaped like the Southern Star, because if you were to swim with your head down you could swim from one island to another just by taking your bearings from the filefish. What do you kids think of that, eh?”
She leaned forward. Mr. Watts might as well not have been present.
“It’s better to have the company of filefish, don’t you think? If you did, then you could say your survival was simply a matter of faith, which is what one old fisherman, rescued from his sunken canoe, told my father when I was a girl. At night he knew where he was by the stars. During the day he kept his face in the water and followed the filefish. This is true.”
None of us was about to dispute it. The others sat rigid in their desks. The fear I felt from them made me a little embarrassed.
My mum gave a satisfied grunt. She had us where she wanted us. We were that shoal of petrified fish that a shark circles. She slowly straightened up out of her lean, as if taking care not to disturb her effect on us all.
“Now listen. Faith is like oxygen. It keeps you afloat at all times. Sometimes you need it. Sometimes you don’t. But when you do need it you better be practiced at having faith, otherwise it won’t work. That’s why the missionaries built all the churches. Before we got those churches we weren’t practicing enough. That’s what prayers are for—practice, children. Practice.
“Now, here are some words to learn off by heart. ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth…And the earth was without form, and void: and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’” My mum’s face opened to a rare smile. She found me in the desk up the back and held my eye. “‘And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.’”
“There is no sentence in the world more beautiful than that one.”
I was aware of several heads turning my way, as if I might beg to differ. Fortunately I was saved by Violet, who had her hand up. She wanted my mum to talk about the wisdom of crabs. At last my mum turned to Mr. Watts.
“Please,” he said.
“Crabs,” she said, and raised her gaze to the geckos on the ceiling. But she did not see them. Her mind was fastened to crabs, and in particular, to the sort of weather we can expect by looking at the behavior of crabs.
“Wind and rain are on the way if a crab digs straight down and blocks the hole with sand, leaving marks like sunrays. We can expect strong winds but no rain if a crab leaves behind a pile of sand but does not cover the hole.
“If the crab blocks the hole but does not scrape the mound flat there will be rain but no wind. When the crab leaves the sand piled up and the hole unblocked the weather will be fine. Never trust a white who says, ‘According to the radio rain is on the way.’ Trust crabs first and above all others.”
My mum glanced over at Mr. Watts, who laughed to show what a good sport he was.
I wished she could have found it in herself to laugh with him. Instead, she gave him an unfriendly nod to show she was finished with us, and swept out of the class into the afternoon furnace where birds squawked without a memory for the dead dog and the chopped roosters they had seen earlier in the day.
When school finished some of us went down to the beach to look for crabs, to see if what my mum had said was true. We found some unblocked holes, which was proof enough for the boys, but all you had to do was look up at the clear blue skies to find the weather. I wasn’t really interested in crabs.
I picked up a stick and in big letters scratched PIP into the sand. I did it above the high-tide line and stuck white heart seeds into the groove of the letters of his name.
The trouble with Great Expectations is that it’s a one-way conversation. There’s no talking back. Otherwise I would have told Pip about my mum coming to speak to the class, and how, seeing her at a distance—even though only two desks back from the end of the room—she had appeared different to me. More hostile.
When she dug in her heels all her heft raced to the surface of her skin. It was almost as if there were friction between her skin and the trailing air. She walked slowly, like a great sail sheet of resistance. She’d put her smile away, and that was a shame because I knew it to be a beautiful smile. There were nights when I saw the moonlight catch the tips of her teeth and I’d know then that she was lying in the dark with a smile. And by that smile I knew she had entered another world, one which I couldn’t reach—an adult world and, beyond that, a private world where she knew herself how only she and no one else could, let alone follow her there in back of those beautiful moonlit teeth.
Whatever I might say about my mum to Pip I knew he wouldn’t hear me. I could only follow him through some strange country that contained marshes and pork pies and people who spoke in long and confusing sentences. Sometimes, by the time Mr. Watts reached the end, you were no better off, you had no sense of what those sentences were trying to say, and maybe by then you were also paying too much attention to the geckos on the ceiling. But then the story would switch to Pip, to his voice, and suddenly you felt yourself reconnect.
As we progressed through the book something happened to me. At some point I felt myself enter the story. I hadn’t been assigned a part—nothing like that; I wasn’t identifiable on the page, but I was there, I was definitely there. I knew that orphaned white kid and that small, fragile place he squeezed into between his awful sister and lovable Joe Gargery, because the same space came to exist between Mr. Watts and my mum. And I knew I would have to choose between the two.
THE REDSKINS’ VISIT AFFECTED US IN DIFFERENT ways. Some of us were seen hiding food in the jungle. Others made escape plans. They thought about where to escape, and considered what they would do there. My mum’s response was to reach for our family history and pass on to me all that she knew.
Sea gods and turtles passed in and out of a long list of people I had never heard of. The names went in one ear and out the other. There were so many. At last she reached the end, or I thought she had. There was a pause. I looked across in the dark and saw the whites of her teeth.
“Pop Eye,” she said, “is the offspring of a shining cuckoo.”
I knew about the shining cuckoo. At a certain time of the year we saw them leave our skies. They were headed for the nests of strangers to the south. There they find a nest and boot out the eggs of the host bird and lay their own eggs before flying off. The chick of the shining cuckoo never meets its mother.
In the dark I heard my mum click her teeth. She thought she had Mr. Watts summed up. She could not see what us kids had come to see: a kind man. She only saw a white man. And white men had stolen her husband and my father. White men were to blame for the mine, and the blockade. A white man had given us the name of our island. White men had given me my name. By now it was also clear that the white world had forgotten us.
JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS, TWO MORE BABIES died of malaria. We buried them and marked their graves with white shells and stones carried up from the beach. All night we listened to the mothers wailing.
Their grief turned our thoughts back to a conflict few of us kids properly understood. We knew about the river pollution, and the terrible effect of the copper tailings after heavy rain. Fishermen spoke of a reddish stain that pushed out far beyond the reef into open sea. You only had to hate that to hate the mine. And there were other issues that took me years to grasp: the pitiful amount paid to the lessees by the mining company; and the wontok system of the redskins, who had arrived on our island in large numbers to work for the company, and who used their position to advance their own kind, elbowing the locals out of jobs.
In our village there were those who supported the rebels—my mum included. Though I suspect her support was nourished by the thought of my father in Townsville living what she called a “fat life.” Everyone else just wished
the fighting would go away, and for the white man to come back and reopen the mine. These people missed buying things. They missed having money to buy those things. Biscuits, rice, tinned fish, tinned beef, sugar. We were back to eating what our grandparents had—sweet potatoes, fish, chicken, mango, guava, cassava, nuts, and mud crab.
The men wanted beer. Some men brewed jungle juice and got drunk. We’d hear their drunken carry-on through the night. Their wild behavior was so loud, we were afraid they would be heard by the redskins. In the dark I heard my mum condemn them to hell for their foul language. Jungle juice turned them crazy. They sounded like men who wouldn’t care if the world ended tomorrow, and they shocked the night with their ranting.
But this night we heard a different voice, a voice of reason. The wild drunken cries fell away to a single calm voice. I recognized it. It belonged to Mabel’s dad; this quiet man with a flat nose and calm, listening eyes. Whenever he saw Mabel he tugged on one of her pigtails and laughed. A happy man. He must also have had some power because in the dead of night we heard him talk to the drunks. He did not raise his voice, so we did not hear what was said, but we heard its calm flow and soon, to our amazement, we heard one of the drunks begin to sob. Just like that. Mabel’s dad had talked a raving drunk man down into a sobbing child.
WHAT DID I HOPE FOR? Just hope itself, really, but in a particular way. I knew things could change because they had for Pip.
First, he is invited by the wealthy Miss Havisham up to her house to play cards with her adopted girl, Estella. I never took to Estella. I can say now that I was jealous of her. I didn’t like that other teasing girl, Sarah Pocket, either. I was always glad when it came time to leave Miss Havisham’s.
In Great Expectations we learned how a life could change without any warning. Pip is into the fourth year of his apprenticeship with Joe Gargery. So he has leaped ahead of me in age. But this didn’t matter. In other respects he stayed a true friend, a companion I worried about and thought of lots.
He will become a blacksmith, it seems. A blacksmith. There was another word to ask about. Mr. Watts said it was more than a job. By blacksmith Mr. Dickens meant more than a man hammering horseshoes into shape. Pip has settled into the routines that go with the blacksmith’s life, including nights huddled around the fire with Joe Gargery and others at a pub with the funny name of Three Jolly Bargemen, drinking ale and listening to one another’s nonsense.
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.
YOU 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.