by Lloyd Jones
Mrs. Siep inclined her head and for the second time we broke into applause. My mum joined in. I saw her whisper something to Mrs. Siep, who stepped aside for her.
The change in the atmosphere was instant. We braced ourselves.
“I know,” she said, “you have been hearing some story from Mr. Watts, and a story in particular, but I want to tell you this. Stories have a job to do. They can’t just lie around like lazybone dogs. They have to teach you something. For example, if you know the words you can sing a song to make a fish swim onto your hook. There are even songs to get rid of skin rash and bad dreams. But I want to tell you kids about the devil I met when I was your age. This was back when the church was still here and the mission hadn’t moved. We still had the wharf, and the village was much bigger than it is today.
“Well, the first devil I met was back then. I’ll tell you kids this just in case I am intersected by a redskin bullet, because you need to know what to look out for, and maybe in this specialist area Mr. Watts is no blimmin’ good.”
She gave him a quick smile as if to say she was joking. Only I knew she wasn’t. She continued.
“This woman, she live by herself, and one day she saw us kids hanging about. She came over and started shouting. Hey! If you fellas pinched the church money I will pluck your eyelashes out. People will see a plucked chicken and know what you did, that you shitty kids stole the church money.
“She was scary. We heard she knew magic. She once turned a white man into marmalade and spread him on her toast.”
The whole class looked at Mr. Watts. Here was something he might care to challenge. A woman turning a white man into marmalade and spreading him on her toast. Mr. Watts had just heard a ridiculous boast but he gave nothing away. He stood, as he usually did during my mum’s performances, with his eyes half-closed and an attentive look on his face.
“So when she asked us kids if we stole the church money we said no, but that was the wrong answer. We could tell that because she looked grumpy. She was thinking what she would say next or maybe she was bored—we couldn’t tell, and we thought we could walk away. Then she said, Well, what if I was to ask you kids to steal the church money?
“Us boys and girls—we didn’t dare look at one another. We would sooner die than steal the church money. If we stole the church money we would die whether we wanted to or not. We weren’t going to steal the church money. No way.
“The devil woman read our thoughts because she said, Listen to me. If I tell you kids to steal the church money you will. And you know why? Well, none of us did and none of us knew what to say. No, I thought so, she said, bloody useless kids. Now, watch this.”
My mum paused, and we all looked at her. She even had Mr. Watts’ attention. “I will try to describe what happened next,” she said.
“There was a ball of darkness, not quite smoke, that streamed away from where us kids were standing. We covered our eyes and when we dared to look there was a black bird. Though it wasn’t a bird any of us had seen before. It had an angry head, the body of a pigeon, and sharp claws, which it used to snatch two small birds, one in each claw. Its beak opened far back and we saw one of its eyes watching us and we knew it was the devil. And while its eye held us kids, it fed one bird into its beak and made a lazy chopping sound, swallowed, and ate the second bird the same way. Then the ugly bird turned into blackness and poured back at our feet. In a blink the ugly woman is back before us with feathers sticking out of her mouth.
“Now, she said to us kids, fetch me the collection from the church next Sunday or else. And don’t tell anyone. I will know if you do and I will come for you when you are sleeping on your mats, and I will take your eyeballs and feed them to the fish.
“We didn’t tell our parents because we treasured our eyeballs. And who wants to go blind in the world? But us kids also knew that we stood to commit two crimes. One, we would steal the church money, and two, we’d do something we knew was wrong. So we would be two times wrong. And that darkness would be darker than the dark that comes when you can no longer see. So we did nothing. We let the collection pass under our noses and we did nothing because by Sunday we had decided the lesser darkness would be okay. The devil woman could come and snatch our eyeballs and feed them to the fish.
“We waited all day Sunday for the devil woman to show. And we waited for her to pour through the open window at school the day after. We decided to tell the minister what had happened. He said what we had done was to outwit the devil. He said the devil had been sent to test us kids. That’s what the devil is for. To test your convictions. But if we stole the church money, then the woman would have shown up for sure because she’d have had us kids in the palm of the devil’s own hand. The minister said, Well done, you kids, and gave us each a sweet.”
At the end of the story, my mum looked across to Mr. Watts, and the two of them held each other’s eye until they remembered us. Had she not done that, us kids would have thought we were hearing a story just about the devil, and we wouldn’t have given the redskins a second thought.
MY MUM NEVER ASKED me outright how I thought these visits of hers went. She wanted to know: she just came at it from a different angle. That night she asked me if I believed in the devil. Stupidly I answered no. She asked me why—after everything I had been told about the devil—so I recited Mr. Watts’ words back to her. I said the devil was a symbol. He isn’t living flesh.
“Nor is Pip,” she said.
But I had my answer ready. “You cannot hear the devil’s voice. You can hear Pip’s.”
On this point she went quiet. I waited, and I waited, until all I heard back was her gentle snore.
When she showed up in class the next morning it was obvious she hadn’t come to speak to us. She had come to pick a fight with Mr. Watts.
“My daughter, my lovely Matilda,” she began, “tells me she does not believe in the devil. She believes in Pip.”
She stopped to allow Mr. Watts to catch up and say what he wished. As usual he showed no sign of surprise.
“Well, Dolores,” he said calmly, “what if we were to say that on the page Pip and the devil have the same status?”
It was Mr. Watts’ turn to pause. He waited, but I knew he had lost her.
“Well, let’s see,” he said. “Pip is an orphan who is given the chance to create his own self and destiny. Pip’s experience also reminds us of the emigrant’s experience. Each leaves behind the place he grew up in. Each strikes out on his own. Each is free to create himself anew. Each is also free to make mistakes…”
And there my mum saw what she thought was a chink in Mr. Watts’ argument.
She held up a hand, and interrupting Mr. Watts she asked him, “But how will he know if he’s made a mistake?”
WE FINISHED GREAT EXPECTATIONS ON February 10. My calculations were out by four days due to Christmas Day and Mr. Watts taking three days off school to nurse a cold.
I was confused by the book’s ending. I didn’t understand why Pip would continue to want Estella so much. Especially as I understood her role in the scheme of things. Miss Havisham had put a stone in place of her heart. And that stone was the forge for Estella to break other men’s hearts. It was Miss Havisham’s payback for what had happened to her on her wedding day. I understood that part—we all knew about payback. And Magwitch, the escaped convict—while I very much liked and admired the idea of his payback to Pip, his getting rich in Australia to pay for the boy to escape the marshes, who in turn had helped him escape the marshes—I didn’t understand why he would return to England. He comes back, knowing the risk of being tossed into prison again just to see how his project of turning Pip into a gentleman has progressed; then it’s up to Pip and his new friend Herbert Pocket to help Magwitch escape a second time. I liked that. I could see the pattern.
“Curiosity killed the cat,” was Mr. Watts’ explanation. “If everything we did made sense, the world would be a different place. Life would be less interesting, don’t you think?”
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So Mr. Watts didn’t really know either. When Mr. Watts read those final chapters I wasn’t sure I had listened properly. If what I heard was correct, then it was unsatisfactory. Magwitch, it turns out, is Estella’s father. Why had it taken so long to find out this fact? Our class had sat through fifty-nine days of readings, and what we now saw was a spider’s web. Bits of story finding and connecting with one another. But what if the pattern I thought I was hearing was all wrong?
I would have to wait for the right moment to ask my questions. I didn’t want to appear dumb. The book’s magic hold on me was no secret, and often Mr. Watts singled me out to discuss something to do with the story. So, rather than shatter that confidence in me, I kept my mouth shut.
For several days after the final reading of Great Expectations our class felt flat. There was nothing to look forward to anymore. The story was at an end. So was our journeying in that world. We were back to our own. Without any prospect of escape, our days lost their purpose. We waited for Mr. Watts to come up with something new to fill that hole in our lives.
His solution, no doubt spurred by the rows of glum faces, was to read Great Expectations a second time. Only this time we would share the task of reading it aloud. He thought it would be good for our English. Maybe. But nothing would change for our reading it a second time. The story was set. Pip would disappoint Joe Gargery, but Joe being Joe would find it in his heart to forgive. Pip would also chase after Estella—a rotten choice, but one he was committed to forever. Reading it a second or third or fourth time, as we did, would not change those events. Our only consolation was that by reading it a second and third time we would still have another country to flee to. And that would save our sanity.
We watched Mr. Watts walk to the desk and pick up his book. We waited to be chosen to begin the reading. As Mr. Watts turned around to face us, the book open at the graveyard scene, Daniel stuck up his hand.
“Yes, Daniel?” said Mr. Watts.
“What’s it like to be white?”
Daniel immediately turned in his desk to look in my direction. Mr. Watts followed the trail, and chose to drop his gaze just short of my desk. So he knew where the question had come from. I knew he knew. Nevertheless he addressed his answer to Daniel.
“What is it like to be white? What is it like to be white on this island? A bit of what the last mammoth must have felt, I suppose. Lonely at times.”
Mammoth? We had no idea what he meant. Even though Daniel’s question was of great interest, we pretended we didn’t care. We didn’t want any part of that ambush, so we kept our follow-up questions to ourselves. Mr. Watts, though, had one of his own.
“What’s it like to be black?”
He’d asked it of Daniel but now he looked at the whole class.
“Normal,” said Daniel, for all of us.
I thought Mr. Watts was about to laugh. Maybe he was about to, before changing his mind and dropping his face into Great Expectations.
“I see,” he said.
We got a better answer to Daniel’s question a week later when the redskins came back to our village.
They arrived before dawn. Their helicopters put down way up the beach by the point and this side of the river. So we didn’t have the same warning as last time. This time we were woken by voices and high whistles.
We had been waiting for this moment. Crazy as this may sound, we had willed it.
There are days when the humidity rises and rises and gets heavier and heavier until, at last, it bursts. The rain falls and you breathe again. That was how the tension of the past few weeks had felt. This is what happens, you wait and wait. Until you wish the redskins would just come so that the waiting can be over with.
It felt like something we had rehearsed, the way we came out of our houses. It was funny how we seemed to know what to do without being told or asked. The redskins had painted their faces black. We saw their eyes shift. There was no shouting. There was no need. Everyone knew what to do. The soldiers and us. We were already known to one another.
When the redskin in charge spoke we were glad to hear it was a pleasant voice; we were expecting him to shout at us. What he wanted was simple enough. He wanted the names of everyone in our village. He said it was for security reasons, and we mustn’t be afraid. He asked for our cooperation. We should give our names and our ages. He never once raised his voice. What he asked for was a simple thing to comply with—our names were not dangerous in any way: they were not explosives, they did not contain hidden fishhooks.
Two soldiers walked along our line taking down our names. In one or two cases we took the pen from the soldier to write our name correctly. We smiled as we did so. We were happy to help, especially with the correct spelling. The names did not take long to collect.
Two sheets of paper were handed to the officer. We watched him look slowly down the list. He was after a particular name, perhaps one from our village who had joined the rebels.
When the officer finally looked up it was clear he wasn’t interested in us kids. He was only interested in grown-up faces. He took an interest in each one. Whenever one of our parents dropped their eyes he counted this as a victory. When he’d finished with staring down the last one he announced that he had a question. He said it wasn’t a hard question and that all of us would know the answer. He smiled to himself when he said this. He asked why there were no young men in the village. There were girls, so why not young men?
He folded his arms and looked hard at the ground, as if sharing a curious puzzle with us. I felt he knew the answer but that wasn’t really the point of the exercise. He wanted us to tell him. We also understood that to tell him what he already knew would be an admission of wrongdoing. We were being pecked at—the way a seabird will turn over a morsel of crab with its beak. He had all the information at his fingertips. But it wasn’t enough. He wanted more.
For the moment we were saved from giving an answer. A soldier came jogging in from the beach. He spoke with the officer. We were too far away to hear what was said, but we saw the effect of the news on the officer—the wince at the corner of his mouth, the way his hand slapped his thigh. We watched him walk with the soldier in the direction of the beach. In a few minutes he came striding back. His light taunting mood of earlier was gone.
He walked along our line staring into our faces. When he got to the end he came and stood in front of us, clenched his hands behind his back, and rocked on his feet.
“Who is Pip?” he asked.
No one answered.
“I asked for all your names,” he said. “You did not give me them all. Why?”
Those of us in Mr. Watts’ class knew the answer. And my mum. But she had closed her eyes and ears. I thought she was praying. So she didn’t see us kids catch one another’s eye. Or the one beaming with the answer.
“Pip belongs to Mr. Dickens, sir,” Daniel blurted out.
The officer walked over to where Daniel stood. “Who is this Mister Dickens?” he sneered.
And Daniel, who looked so proud to be giving the answers, pointed in the direction of the schoolhouse. We all knew where he meant; it wasn’t the schoolhouse but the old church mission buried out of view by the vegetation.
The officer said something in pidgin to a number of his men. As one they looked off to where Daniel had pointed. The officer hadn’t forgotten him. He snapped his fingers for Daniel to leave the line. He jogged into position as he had seen the soldiers do. The officer gave him a queer look. I thought he might hit Daniel for being insolent. Instead he placed a hand on Daniel’s shoulder and instructed him to go with the soldiers to fetch this Mr. Dickens.
We were used to Mr. Watts in his suit. We were used to his eyes that wanted to leave his face, and the lean skinny frame that his clothes hung off. We had forgotten the shock of white in our sweating green world. And this we experienced all over again when Mr. Watts and his wife were rounded up by the soldiers.
The officer stood with his back to us, and as the parade approach
ed from the direction of the schoolhouse he folded his arms. Daniel led the way. He looked so proud. He marched, swinging his arms at his sides. Now I saw Mr. Watts through redskin eyes. I saw all those things we had grown used to fresh again. Mr. Watts towered over the soldiers. He blinked in the sun, even though the light was not that strong at this hour. But then I don’t think his blinking had to do with the sunlight. I’d seen Mr. Watts do this whenever my mum said something directly insulting. On those occasions I thought he was fighting back hurt feelings.
I may have got that wrong, however, because when he arrived at the clearing I saw blinking was his way to avoid eye contact. He looked everywhere but at us, the people and faces he knew. If you wanted to be critical you might have said he looked like the important and self-regarding white men that my grandfather had become part of a human pyramid for; he looked like a man about to make a speech, who was simply waiting to be invited to step forward.
There were other, smaller changes too. It was a while since we had last seen him wear a tie. His left hand fidgeted with where it was tied around his throat. He had found a shirt that buttoned up. He wore shoes. He was dressed like someone going to catch a plane.
The redskin soldiers seemed to forget about us. They stared at Mr. Watts, isolating him with their stare. Once more we saw what a strange fish had washed up on our shore.
They must have seen whites before. In Moresby there are plenty of whites. In Lae and Rabaul too. For years, until the hostilities, the whites from Australia used to run and operate the mine. We used to see their helicopters and light planes. We saw their pleasure craft out to sea. And if I had been older at that time, then I would have noticed, as my mum did, that whenever our men returned from the white world they came back changed in some way.
The officer walked across to Mr. Watts. He positioned himself half a step closer than he needed to do and peered up at his face.
“You are Mister Dickens.”