by Lloyd Jones
I looked around at the assembled crowd. The men’s faces sweated in the heat. The women looked down at Mrs. Watts with worry. When a small branch broke off from the treetops and dropped a long way down, nobody paid it any attention. If anything, that falling branch reminded us that something needed to be said. That’s when I heard my mum offer a prayer for Grace. She recited the Lord’s Prayer, though not all the way through. In one place she got lost. She closed her eyes and bit her lip and fumbled about in her memory until she found the missing lines. In the end she got there.
It must have been because the silence was unsatisfying that Mr. Masoi asked my mum to say the prayer again. This time she recited it all the way through, and with open eyes. Mr. Watts nodded and mouthed a silent thank-you.
Someone else remembered a line: “…from dust to dust…” but then petered out. We were back to silence. We waited with our hanging heads, and it came back: “The earth was without form, and void: and darkness…everywhere…” Mrs. Siep lost the thread again. As Mr. Watts nodded his thanks she interrupted him.
“No. Wait!” she almost shouted, and we all frowned at a woman who would shout over the shroud of a dead woman. “No,” she said more quietly, dropping her hand back to her side. “What I meant to say is this. What I want to say…”
She waited for Mr. Watts to lift his sad pale head.
“I knew Grace when she was small. This small.” She placed her hand near her knee. Mrs. Siep looked around for my mum.
“That’s right,” she said. “We were all at the same school.”
“And the nuns. The German nuns,” said another.
“Mr. Watts,” said Mabel’s mum. “Your Grace was the cleverest of all us girls.”
“Thank you,” Mr. Watts mumbled.
Now one of the older men spoke up. “I knew her mother. She was also beautiful…” The man who said this did look up but feasted his eyes on an old memory of female beauty.
Others began to speak. They gave their bits of memory to Mr. Watts. They filled in a picture of his dead wife. In this way he learned of a girl he had never met. A girl who could hold her breath underwater for longer than anyone else. A girl who could speak German with the nuns. A tiny girl who once got lost. They searched everywhere for her. And where did they find her? Curled up under the shell of a boat. A fleshy little crab frightened of the sun. Someone said that and we all began to laugh until we remembered where we were.
The big things came back to us, and the little things. Mr. Watts did not care how small. He learned what color ribbons his dead wife wore to school as a girl. He heard how she lost a front tooth. It happened as she lay prone on a canoe, daydreaming she was a fish, when the prow popped up and smacked her lip. He learned how proud she had been of her first pair of shoes. So proud, she carried them everywhere with her, preferring anyway to walk barefoot.
Mr. Watts leaned back. His jaw opened. I thought he was about to laugh. All us kids were hoping. In the end he settled for a smile. Still, he had looked up. We considered that the first step to a better future. And now he glanced at the treetops and didn’t care if anyone saw his watery eyes.
For a while I had the impression that Mr. Watts would prefer to join his wife in the ground, but now I saw him happy to remain with us. Especially after hearing all those fragments to do with Grace. It was like adding kindling to a fire. We wanted to keep that thin smile on his pale face.
Mr. Masoi remembered Grace running up the beach bawling her eyes out. She was holding her finger up with a fishhook buried in the flesh. Daniel, who wasn’t even alive then, clapped his hands and said he also remembered Mrs. Watts as a young girl. “She was climbing up a tree and I was climbing up behind her.”
We all looked to see what Mr. Watts made of that. “Thank you, Daniel,” he said. “Thank you for that lovely memory.” Just as he said to all the others.
The stories kept coming until he held up his hands to say, “Thank you, everyone. Thank you for your kind words. Such memories,” he said. “My dear Grace. Now she will know she was beloved.” He stopped there, but the words I expected to hear were “after all.” Because for as long as I could remember, Grace Watts was not really included in the village. She lived with a white man, a man whom our parents didn’t especially warm to. It was partly that, and partly the strange sight of her standing in that trolley towed along by Mr. Watts wearing a red clown’s nose. We did not understand the reason for this, we had no idea what it meant, and so it had been convenient to think Mrs. Watts was mad.
My mum saved her own memory for last. She didn’t share it with the others on the hill over the open grave. I was the only one who got to hear it, and it came later that night, hours after we had buried Mrs. Watts. She lay back, talking up at the crude roof that held out the night.
“Grace was the smartest of all us kids, Matilda. She always had her hand up. Blimmin’ smart, eh. She seemed to know everything without first being told. There are some people in the world like that. They are born with a dictionary in them. Or an encyclopedia. Or six languages. I don’t know how it happens, but it does. And when Grace won her scholarship to Australia we were so happy.
“We were proud because Grace was going to show the white world how smart a black kid could be. She went to secondary school in Brisbane. Then we heard she was at dental school in New Zealand. She was going to come back here and look after our teeth. How we looked forward to that day. But when she came back she was a different person.”
My mum stopped, and it was clear that “different” didn’t mean better. I thought maybe discretion prevented her saying more. But it was just the moment of someone recalling a painful memory.
“She told us she couldn’t fix our teeth. She had stopped her training. Instead of a dental nurse we got Pop Eye. She used her scholarship to hook a white man. We did not know what to say to her; we did not know how to be around her. And I will tell you another thing, Matilda: we did not know how sick Grace was. We did not know anymore if she was black or white. There. That’s all I have to say on the matter because now she is dead.”
The thud was the sound of my mum’s hand falling on the ground between us. In a matter of seconds I heard the heavy breath of her sleep.
I WASN’T SURE HOW LONG MR. WATTS’ mourning would last. Some of us worried that he would not come out of his house again—that, like Miss Havisham, he would become stuck. So it was a surprise, three days later, when Mr. Watts sent Gilbert to find me and ask why I wasn’t in school.
In class Mr. Watts waited for everyone to sit down at their desks. His smile was firm, as if to say he was no longer a grieving man. When we were all seated he held up a finger.
“Do you remember that scene when Pip is met at the gates of Miss Havisham’s by a very discourteous Sarah Pocket…?” He looked around at our faces to see if anyone did. “You remember, I’m sure. Miss Havisham informs Pip, cruelly, that Estella has gone to another country to be educated and turned into a lady. Admired by all, she tells poor Pip. And having cracked that egg over his head she then asks if he feels he has lost her.”
We were always quiet when Mr. Watts spoke. We never played up. But now we fell into another, deeper level of quiet. We were quiet quiet.
We were mice listening out for the scampering feet of cats. We had an idea he was speaking of Mrs. Watts. His anger was listed on behalf of Pip’s suffering, but it came of his own loss. We waited for him to come out of that place of mourning. We saw him wake up before us. He blinked, and looked pleased to see us kids. “So. What else do we have?”
Our hands shot up. My own included. We all wanted to take Mr. Watts’ thoughts away from his wife’s death.
In the days that followed we worked hard to produce scraps of a vanished world. We walked around with a squint. “What’s the matter with you blimmin’ kids. Is the sun in your eye?” our mums would say. Of course I did not tell my mum about our project. She was liable to say, “That won’t hook a fish or peel a banana.” And she was right. But we weren’t after fish or bananas. We we
re after something bigger. We were trying to get ourselves another life.
More than that, Mr. Watts had reminded us of our duty, and in language that made us sit up straight. Our duty was to save Mr. Dickens’ finest work from extinction. Mr. Watts now joined the endeavor, and of course his efforts surpassed our own.
He stood before us and recited: Pip is to be brought up as a gentleman—in a word, as a young fellow of great expectations.
We were hearing Dickens. We felt a rush of joy. Mr. Watts grinned into his beard. He’d just brought up to the surface a whole fragment intact. Word for word. Just as Mr. Dickens had written. It wasn’t like some of our own poorly remembered and half-grasped efforts. He looked around at our impressed faces. “Does anyone remember who said that?”
Gilbert answered, “Mr. Jaggers.”
“Mr. Jaggers, the…?”
“Lawyer!”
Our chorused response made Mr. Watts smile.
“Correct,” he said. “Mr. Jaggers, the lawyer.”
I closed my eyes and stacked the words inside my skull. Pip is to be brought up as a gentleman—in a word, as a young fellow of great expectations. Miraculously, a whole sentence came to me. I waved my hand to get Mr. Watts’ attention.
“Yes, Matilda?”
“My dream was out.”
Mr. Watts moved away in the direction of the door. There was an agonizing wait while he deliberated. He started to nod and I was able to breathe again.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. I do believe you are right. Now, does anyone remember the next bit? Mr. Jaggers lays down the conditions. One, Pip must always bear his name of Pip. Two, the name of his benefactor must remain a secret.”
Daniel raised his hand but Mr. Watts guessed his question.
“Ah, yes. Benefactor again. Well, it’s a person who provides or gives to another.”
“Like a tree?” asked Daniel.
Mr. Watts didn’t think so.
“I know you were probably thinking palm oil, Daniel, but I think we will get ourselves lost if we go too far down that track. Let’s just say a benefactor is someone who gives someone else money and opportunity…”
Our faces gave us away.
“Opportunity. Chance,” said Mr. Watts. “The window opens and the bird flies out.”
WE HAD DIFFERENT WAYS of measuring time. We could count back to the day when the redskins stood over us while we torched our homes. We could count back to the first bonfire. Others less fortunate could count back to their baby’s death from malaria. Some would forever be stuck on that day.
If I tried hard and concentrated I could almost count back to when I last saw my father. He was standing on the edge of the airstrip, staring at the small white plane as if he and his battered brown suitcase had no business with one another.
My mum rarely mentioned my dad. Perhaps she thought it was easier this way, on her and me. I have no doubt that he occupied her thoughts, however, even more than her efforts to retrieve passages from the lost Bible. But the only time she spoke of my dad was when something went wrong, and then it was to mark him with shame. “If your father could see us now,” she’d say.
After Mr. Watts produced the fragment on Pip’s change of fortune, I realized that a Mr. Jaggers–type character had entered my father’s life. He’d heard about the copper mine needing men who could drive graders and tractors. The trucks winding up Panguna mountain carried fill between the mine and the tailrace. So that’s what he did, only my father’s truck carried machines and parts up from the depot in Arawa.
Six months after starting that job, he became the new storeman at the depot. My mum said it was because he was trusted. The whites didn’t trust the redskins. The redskins took and gave to their own, and whenever challenged they produced faces that denied any knowledge of what they had done. Or so my mum said.
The new job meant my father had more contact with the white Australians. His English was good. I know because on a visit to Arawa I had seen him talk and laugh with the Australians. The white men wore mustaches, sunglasses, and shorts and socks. Their stomachs were large. And my father was trying hard to be like them, the way he stuck his tummy out. He, too, placed his hands on his hips to turn himself into a teapot. But it was when I saw him smile a sly smile, a white man’s smile, that I knew. Well, maybe I am my mother’s daughter for thinking this. I can’t help what I saw. I saw my father sliding away from us.
The Mr. Jaggers in my father’s life was his boss, a mining engineer, one of the many contracted. He was Australian but with a German-sounding name. I’d heard my mum and father discuss this man. My father called him “his friend.” My mum said his friend made him drunk. This was true She said seeing him stand in that dock facing charges of disorderly behavior provided enough shame for a lifetime. She didn’t need to go back for more. His drinking began with that storeman’s job. This is one of the reasons why my mum refused to move from the village. She did not want to move to Arawa to see my father turn into a white man.
I remember she was in more of a mood to listen when he brought back news from Panguna. The situation up at the mine was serious and it seemed to get worse with the passing of every day. It spiraled out of control after the rebels got their hands on some explosives, which they used to blow up sections of the road. Some more time passed. We heard the rebels were armed. The Japanese had left behind a large cache of arms from World War II. We heard the rebels were restoring the guns. We heard there were secret workshops in the jungle where they worked on the rifles to make them like new again. Soon we heard that the trucks winding up Panguna were getting shot at.
By the time the redskin soldiers arrived on the island we’d heard enough rumors to make up our own minds about the future. The whites would leave the island while the government soldiers rounded up the rebels. But during that time the mine would close. There would be no work. No money. The man with the German name now presented my father, and us, with a way out. He offered to sponsor my father. Sponsor was the word he used. It was to be years before I properly understood that word. I remember asking Mr. Watts, who seemed to think sponsor was close to another word: adopt. This makes all the more sense when I think back to what the man was offering and what I had seen of my father as he tried to shape himself around the Australians.
I tried to picture the life he was leading in Townsville. Mr. Dickens’ England was my guide. I wondered if there were beggars there. I wondered if there were smokestacks and thieves, and kind souls like Joe Gargery, who you might have thought were drunk for all the sense they made when they spoke.
I wondered if my father’s stomach had grown. Whether he drank beer and wore shorts and a crooked dog’s smile. I wondered how often he thought about us—his Matilda and my mum. I tried to picture the school I might have gone to in Townsville had we got out before the blockade. But I got no further than the classroom that occupied my life. I got no closer to Townsville than to whatever Mr. Watts and Mr. Dickens could tell me.
My mum now hoped to join my dad, whenever that might be. This was just wishful thinking, because there was no Mr. Jaggers in my mum’s life. We were trapped, without a way off the island.
When I saw my mum down at the beach I knew what she was thinking—the sea offers the only way out of this life. There it is, day after lazy day, showing us the way.
THE WORLD MR. WATTS encouraged us to escape to was not Australia or Moresby. It wasn’t even another part of the island. It was the nineteenth-century England of Great Expectations. We were working our way there on assisted passage, each of us with our own fragments, with Mr. Watts as helmsman sorting and assembling them into some coherent order.
I was extremely competitive about our task. It was essential that I come up with more fragments than the other kids. It would offer the proof to myself that I, Matilda, cared more about Pip than anyone else.
I can remember where I was and what I was doing for every fragment I retrieved. Otherwise, I have no sense of time passing in the normal way. Along with medicin
es and our freedom, the blockade stole time from us. At first, you hardly noticed it happening. But then you suddenly stopped to think: no one has celebrated a birthday for a while.
I was much better at saving my fragments now. I didn’t need to rush to Mr. Watts’ house with the scene where Pip leaves his village at dawn for his new life in the city of London. I could sit on the beach in the shade of a palm tree and see the moment clearly: Joe offers a hearty farewell. Biddy wipes her eyes with her apron. But Pip has already moved on. He is looking forward. It was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on…There, I had retrieved one of Mr. Dickens’ lines.
In another hour it would be nightfall. If I was to use a stick to write the fragment in the sand I could stop worrying about it and run down in the morning to retrieve it. So that’s what I did.
In the morning, before my mum was up, before anyone could see it and steal it, or misunderstand it, I went down to the beach to get my words.
The world is gray at that hour; it moves more slowly. Even the seabirds are content to hold on to their reflections. If you look carefully you notice things that at a later hour you’d fail to see. This was always my mum’s advice. Get down to the beach before the world has woken and you will find God. I didn’t find God, but at the far end of the beach I saw two men glide ashore in a boat. They were full of quick movement for this hour. One of them, unmistakably, was Mr. Watts. The other, heavier figure was Gilbert’s father. I watched them haul the boat up the dry creek bed. They didn’t muck around. They didn’t want to be caught by the dawn. They didn’t want to be seen by anyone. And, as I didn’t want Mr. Watts to see where I stored my fragments, I waited until they disappeared into the trees.
Then the only noise was the sand crunching under my feet. I found Mr. Dickens’ sentence, shut my eyes, and committed it to memory before kicking away every trace.
ON MY WAY to the washing creek later that day I drifted into the area of Mrs. Watts’ grave without thinking. I must have been in some sort of daydream. I don’t recall. Or else my mind was a blank. A gray fog. I could hear the parrots and cockatiels and some thicket birds in the trees, but that’s all until a voice called out, “Matilda. Are you on your way somewhere?”