Mister Pip (9 page)

We never saw Sam again.

T
HE DISTANCE FROM PIP'S HOUSE IN THE marshes to the “metropolis” of London was about five hours. We understood without Mr. Watts saying so that five hours indicated a great distance. In eighteen-hundred-and-fifty-something it might have been. But five hours was nearer than a century and a half and a whole lot closer than half a world away. We heard that Pip was scared of London's “immensity.”
Immensity?

We stared back at Mr. Watts for an explanation. “Sheer numbers, crowds, a sense of bewilderment and of overwhelming scale…” And with the book in hand Mr. Watts' thoughts would drift back to his own experience of London. He spoke about the excitement of his first visit. The smile left his face. I think it was for having the young man he once was in his thoughts. He said everything was vaguely familiar since he had already been led around London by Mr. Dickens.

He spoke of being poor; and of giving an old woman beggar the last of his money and wandering in a park afterwards warmed by the thought of his good deed. Then it had gotten cold. A nasty rain fell and he hurried from the park gates. He waited to cross a busy road. He looked in the lit window of a café and, wishing he had money to buy something, happened to see the old hag buttering a scone, and when she raised her eyes, Mr. Watts said, she looked through him without a flicker of recognition.

We laughed like dogs at our stupid teacher. Mr. Watts nodded. He knew.

He was happy to be the brunt of the joke, but the moment he dropped his eyes to the open pages of
Great Expectations
we shut up. For a moment he didn't read. We had an idea he was back in London with his younger self staring in that lit window—this was one of those moments that reminded us of Mr. Watts' status as the last white man on the island. There he stood before us, one of a kind, with a memory of a place none of us kids had visited or seen or could imagine except in the way supplied by Mr. Dickens.

When we heard the words
metropolis
and
London
our minds drew a blank. Even Mr. Watts' attempts to find a local reference fell flat. He took us down to the beach. There he dug a channel in the sand for the tide to run up. This was the Thames. He found a number of gray rocks and bundled these into one place. These he called buildings. We heard about skylights and coachmen and horsehair, but stopped asking for explanations. We'd learned to recognize the important stuff.

We were meeting Mr. Wemmick, Mr. Jaggers' creepy offsider, for the first time when my mum turned up to class with one of the women from her prayer group. This was Mrs. Siep. Mrs. Siep's three boys had joined the rebels. Her husband was also thought to have joined them. If he hadn't, then he must be lying dead someplace. Mrs. Siep didn't say.

Mr. Watts vacated his place and my mum gently pushed Mrs. Siep forward and introduced her. Mrs. Siep checked that where she stood was the correct spot. My mum made a small adjustment. We saw Mrs. Siep take a small step back.

“I have two pieces of information to give you kids,” announced Mrs. Siep. “The first is about fish bait. You need to catch a remora fish if you wish to catch something bigger. What you do is tie a line around the tail of a remora and it will fish for you—this is the truth, I have seen it with my own eyes. The remora has a sucking disc on top of its head and will use this to attach itself to a shark or turtle or large fish. If you catch a sunfish, cut the line. They are poisonous.”

Mrs. Siep inclined her head, and as she took a backwards step we broke into applause. This was new for us, and that we did it without prompting from Mr. Watts says something about the gentlemanly ways we were cultivating under his guidance, as much as Mrs. Siep's dignity. She spoke from some inner calm place that my own mum did not know how to locate.

Mrs. Siep smiled, and as she looked up we ended our applause. She stepped forward once more.

“I will begin with a question. What will you do if you are all alone at sea? This is my second information,” she said. “If you are feeling lonely, look out for the triggerfish. God mixed the souls of dogs and triggerfish together because, like dogs, a triggerfish will roll over on its side and look up at you.”

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?”

W
E 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?”

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?