“No, sir,” I said. “I’m just walking.”
“In that case, why don’t you join me and Mrs. Watts.”
As he rose to his feet I took in the improvements to Mrs. Watts’ grave—the bits of white coral set around the edges, the scattered purple and red bougainvillea.
I wondered if I was supposed to say hello to Mrs. Watts. After all, the invitation was to join him and Mrs. Watts. I felt unsure what I should do or say, especially to Mrs. Watts, and sat down awkwardly. Mr. Watts smiled at nothing in particular. I watched a large butterfly flap onto a tree trunk and disappear. I snuck a look at Mr. Watts. He was still smiling down at Mrs. Watts. I needed to say something, so I asked him if Mrs. Watts had ever read Great Expectations.
“Sadly, no,” he said. “She tried. But you know, Matilda, you cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames. For me, Matilda, Great Expectations is such a book. It gave me permission to change my life.”
He leaned back as if to put our talk beyond Mrs. Watts’ hearing.
“Grace, however, put the book down so many times she lost her place. If the phone rang it was like a prayer answered. Finally she refused point-blank to have anything to do with it. Well, not quite—she said she would read Great Expectations through to the end if I would try the Bible. So that was that.”
I was encouraged by Mr. Watts’ chattiness, and these confidences he was sharing with me. There was another question I was burning to ask, and it occurred to me that this was the moment. If I could just summon up the courage. But I couldn’t find a way of getting from Mr. Watts’ disappointment in his dead wife’s failure to love Great Expectations to why he used to tow Mrs. Watts behind on a cart. And why he wore that red clown’s nose. The moment passed. A twig fell at his feet and by the time Mr. Watts bent to pick it up the opportunity was lost.
THE RAMBOS ARRIVED WITHOUT WARNING, their eyes bobbing in their black faces, mops of overgrown, ropy hair dangling with colored ties. These rebel fighters wore cutoff jeans. Some wore boots taken from redskin soldiers. I took an instant dislike to those ones. Most of them, though, went barefoot. Their T-shirts stuck to their skinny torsos. Some had button-down shirts with no buttons left or sleeves torn off at the shoulder. As with the redskins they carried their guns and rifles close—like next of kin.
Two popped up on the edge of the jungle. Three more came from the beach. One from around the corner of our shelter. Two more arrived from behind the classroom block. They crawled down out of the trees. No more than a dozen of them.
We were not sure how to receive them, even though they were our boys. The troubling thing is they’d snuck up on us, which wasn’t seen as a friendly thing. But that wasn’t all. They seemed to know about us. Had they been watching us? Had they stood in the shadows of the giant trees, listening to Mr. Watts talk of his wife’s failure to read the book us kids were working so hard to bring back to life? Nothing they found came as a surprise. Neither our crude shelters nor the schoolhouse that lingered as some hard trace of the old and trusted world we had once known and walked about in.
They were our boys, but there were no faces in that lot that we knew. We watched them regroup near the jungle, some crouching with their rifles. You could see they weren’t sure about us either. And their doubt made us afraid. So much was uncertain.
They seemed to know that the redskins had paid a visit. But they didn’t know what had been said or given to them. We knew what had happened to other villages that collaborated with the redskins. In the minds of the rambos we might be such a village.
Gilbert’s father padded over to them with some fruit. The rambos made no effort to meet him halfway. They stayed put with their rifles and suspicion. They were too far away for us to hear what was said. After a few minutes one of the crouching rambos stood up to help himself to a guava. The others watched him eat, and since he didn’t drop dead they unfolded themselves from the ground, released their weapons, and followed suit. They were hungrier than they had let on. We watched them spit out the seeds and skin.
Mr. Masoi got their attention and pointed to the rest of us looking on like the spectators we had become. We had an idea Gilbert’s father was offering them shelter and food. Though I imagine he as much as the rest of us was hoping they would leave, just light up out of here, because their presence made us a target for the redskin soldiers.
I have said we lost all sense of time. But I will guess. I will say the mine had been closed for nearly three years when those rambos came into our lives. That meant those boys had been living in the jungle killing redskins and fleeing from them for three years. We were the same color. We were from the same island. But living the way they did had changed them. They were different from us. We saw it in their eyes, and in the way their heads moved. They had turned into creatures of the forest.
Untrusting of open spaces they set up camp near the trees and away from the pigs. They kept to themselves until dark. I heard later they had asked for medicines, though I hadn’t noticed any sick or wounded. I saw different people take them food. We were out to make a favorable impression.
The smaller kids willed one another closer and closer. One of the rambos would suddenly turn his head or hiss or clap his hands, and the little kids scattered like fish. The rambos rocked back and laughed, and that laughter was one of the more reassuring things we heard. Behind their betel-stained mouths and crazed stares, maybe they weren’t so different after all.
That night they made a small fire. We could see their silhouettes rising and falling away into the dark, but they couldn’t see us. Or hear our whispers. I lay beside my mum and I could feel the tension in her. I could hear the tightness of her breath. She would have liked to go over there and tell them to pipe down. Young ones were trying to sleep. The voices of the rambos carried in the dark. They were seventy meters away but sounded as if they were right next to us.
Some of them were drinking jungle juice; these ones grew louder and more boisterous. Real soldiers would have kept quiet and moved like shadows, which is how these boys had entered our village. But jungle juice has that effect. It made them forget who they were.
I watched my mum get up and arrange herself across the entrance of our shelter. I asked her what she was doing. She didn’t answer at first. “They want girls,” she said eventually. Strange. I had not felt included until she barricaded our sleeping place. Now I felt odd, like a piece of fruit that doesn’t know it’s fruit and therefore the object of someone’s appetite.
It was the next day, just on dark, that they found Mr. Watts. My mum and some others, including me, were taking the rambos some food when we saw Mr. Watts heading towards us. Two rambos walked on either side of him. They couldn’t believe what they had found. They used their rifle butts to nudge their prize forward. Mr. Watts looked irritated. He did not need that shove in the back. I watched him adjust his glasses.
One by one the other rambos leaped to their feet. Mr. Watts pretended not to notice the fuss. A drunk one rushed forward and in his mad jungle-juiced state shouted into Mr. Watts’ face, “I will fuck you up the arse!”
I saw Mr. Watts stiffen and his head make a wary turn. He removed his glasses and studied them. As if his mind was elsewhere, on whatever he had been doing before being interrupted. The drunken rambo danced around Mr. Watts and made a crude finger gesture. Some of the others laughed, including the two who had found Mr. Watts. The drunken rambo had started to unbuckle his trousers. “I fuck you.”
Mr. Watts had heard enough. In a very firm voice he said, “You will do nothing of the sort.” Pointing back at the ground from where the rambo had sprung, he said, “You will sit down there and you will listen.”
Mr. Watts did not look to see if he had persuaded the rambo. For him the man had ceased to exist. In all our eyes the drunk now looked like a ridiculous man. He
knew it, too, because he turned away from our watchful eyes to do up his belt. The others moved to separate themselves from their companion. Then the rambo we felt might be in charge though we could never be sure—a solid man with one sleepy eye—got up from the campsite and approached Mr. Watts to ask him his name. He spoke pleasantly, and Mr. Watts answered without any hesitation. “My name is Pip.”
“Mister Pip,” said the rambo.
There were many of us who could have said Mr. Watts was lying. We could have stuck up our hands as if in class. Instead we did nothing and said nothing. We were too shocked to dispute what he said. But as the man asked Mr. Watts his name, it was as if the word was already on the tip of his tongue—ready for that question. Of course, the rambos did not know its significance. They had never heard of Pip or Mr. Dickens or Great Expectations. They didn’t know anything. For them it was simply another white man’s name.
The rambo repeated the word Pip and it sounded like something unpleasant he wished to expel from his mouth.
Mr. Watts then began to recite from Great Expectations. “My Christian name is Philip, but my infant tongue could make of it nothing longer or more explicit, so I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.”
I could not make up my mind whether this was spectacular daring or complete foolishness.
The man with the sleepy eye began asking questions. Where had he come from? What was he doing here? Was he a spy? Had the Australian government sent him? I heard these questions but I didn’t hear any of Mr. Watts’ answers. My mum had a firm hold of my wrist and was pulling me away. We were abandoning Mr. Watts. I was quite sure we would never see him again, and like my mum I was very afraid.
We ran the last bit to the beach. But where were we running to? The sea spread out to the far corner of the sky. We were stuck. There was nowhere for us to escape to but our shelters.
On dark we crept back like wayward kids now sorry for thinking they could strike out on their own. Maybe that isn’t quite right. It wasn’t relief that we felt. Rather, we lay down in wait for some terrible thing we felt was about to happen.
After some time I heard Gilbert’s father calling for me outside the entrance.
“Matilda, are you there? Come.”
My mum answered for me. She said I wasn’t here. That’s when the large head of Gilbert’s father poked inside. “Matilda,” he said, “Mr. Watts wants you.”
My mum told him I was staying put. Gilbert’s father told her it was all right. He would look after me. He promised her. It wasn’t what she was thinking. He said, “Dolores, I will take care of Matilda.” I felt my mum release her grip of my skinny ankle.
Gilbert’s father held my hand, but for all I knew his hand might be the same one that leads the trusting goat to its slaughter.
The rambos’ campfire flickered and flared against the bumpy dark. I was noticing those sorts of things, along with my beating chest and my nervous sweat. As we drew closer it became clear that something had changed.
Mr. Watts was standing and chatting to the man with the sleepy eye. When Mr. Watts saw me he looked relieved. He excused himself and came over. His expression was somewhat perplexed, just as it was after Gilbert raised his hand to ask why Pip didn’t kidnap Estella if he liked her so much. He placed a hand on my shoulder. In this way, Gilbert’s father released me into Mr. Watts’ care.
“Thank you, Matilda. I hope you don’t mind. I want you here in case there is a need to translate.”
Something had happened after we ran off to the beach and later slid inside our shelters like snails hiding from the world. In our absence Mr. Watts had asserted his natural authority. Already, I noticed, the voices around the fire fell quiet when he spoke. With his hand on my shoulder he turned me around to face those shining faces.
“You have asked me to explain what I am doing here,” he said. “In a sense, you are asking for my story. I am happy to oblige but I have two conditions. One, I do not want to be interrupted. Two, my story will take several nights. Seven nights in total.”
ON THAT FIRST NIGHT a crowd gathered, including the rambo who threatened to fuck Mr. Watts up the arse, all us kids, and our parents, who filed out of the shadows to stand at our backs.
Word had spread that Mr. Watts was ready to tell his story. Most of us had come to hear about a world we had never seen. We were greedy for that world. Any world other than this one, which we were sick of—sick of the fear it held. Others, gossips, came for different reasons. Everyone had a theory about Mr. Watts. My mum was there to hear about his life with Grace and, from her point of view, to learn at last how this unfortunate event had come about.
The first night was the scariest because we did not know the depth of the rambos’ interest or the length of their patience. They had invited Mr. Watts to explain himself, and this is what he set out to do, with his easy voice and delivery us kids knew so well. His one condition was that no one was to interrupt him.
Those rambos had not heard a storytelling voice for years. The boys sat there, with their mouths and ears open to catch every word, their weapons resting on the ground in front of their bare feet like useless relics.
Mr. Watts’ decision to introduce himself as Pip to the rebels was risky, but it was easy to see why he’d made it. Pip would be a convenient role for Mr. Watts to drop into. If he wanted, he could tell Pip’s story as Mr. Dickens had written it and claim it as his own, or he could take elements from it and make it into whatever he wished, and weave something new. Mr. Watts chose the second option.
For the next six nights I stood near Mr. Watts while he recounted his great expectations. It was a slow telling. Whenever his account departed from the one we knew, which is to say the one we were trying to retrieve, I heard a shift in Mr. Watts’ voice. If I looked up I caught him glancing my way, which was his silent plea for me to just go along with whatever he said and not to dispute any of it. Sometimes he astonished us kids by using actual lines from the book—lines we recognized the moment we heard them. These were Mr. Dickens’ lines not yet entered into the exercise book, and I’d have to restrain myself from congratulating him. He had known so much more than he let on when he set us the task of retrieving the book. For some reason I didn’t feel annoyed, or let down. To have so trustingly closed our eyes in a bid to remember the bits of story that our wily teacher had known about all along.
Mr. Watts’ story was to prove just as compelling as Great Expectations had to us kids. This time the whole village listened in wonder, sitting by a small fire on an island all but forgotten, where the most unspeakable things happened without once raising the ire of the outside world.
MR. WATTS’ PIP GREW UP IN A BRICK DEPOT on a copper mine road without any memory of his parents. His father had disappeared without a trace, “lost at sea.” His mum got drunk on jungle juice and fell off a tree inside the house. When she hit the ground her eyes bounced out of her skull. When she lost her eyeballs she also lost her memory. She could not remember what she could not see, and so she came to forget about Mr. Watts. Her next of kin were cane growers in Queensland, so that’s where she spent the rest of her days, in darkness, walking among the clacking cane.
Happily, my translations improved with practice, and I began to relax when I saw people listened without noticing me. They held their heads at concentrated angles, their ears pricked like dogs that think they’ve just caught the sound of the broom headed in their direction.
The orphan, Mr. Watts, was brought up by Miss Ryan, an old recluse in a big house with dark rooms covered in cobwebs. Mr. Watts did not say much about his childhood. We didn’t hear anything of school. We heard about a large garden. He would help the old woman with the weeding and planting. There was only one adventure.
For Mr. Watts’ twelfth birthday, Miss Ryan arranged for a hot-air balloon to take the two of them high up above the house and its gardens. As they slowly rose in the air, he was amazed to discover a pattern in the garden. What he’d always thought of as a wilderness had instead been
careful planting to resemble the pattern of Irish lace given to Miss Ryan for a wedding dress by the man who had promised to marry her. He then failed to turn up for the wedding ceremony. The man was an airline pilot. For all the years Mr. Watts was growing up under Miss Ryan’s care, her beautiful landing strip failed to attract his plane.
Two days shy of his eighteenth birthday Mr. Watts came home to find Miss Ryan sprawled across the flower bed she had been weeding, her gardening gloves on her swollen fingers, her straw hat still tied beneath her chin, a ladybug crawling across her forehead, which Mr. Watts encouraged onto a leaf.
The old woman had no next of kin, and although she had never formally adopted Mr. Watts she left him her property.
Some time must have passed, and Mr. Watts must have accounted for it in some way. I no longer remember what he said or what I said on his behalf. Much of it won’t be relevant anyway. So I will race forward to Mr. Watts’ decision to turn the house into two flats. He rented the front half of the house to a beautiful black woman from this island.
Mr. Watts had never seen anyone so black. He had never seen teeth so white or eyes that sparkled with such wicked fun. The young Mr. Watts was bewitched by her, by her blackness, by her white dental uniform, and she must have known this, he thought, because she taunted him mercilessly. She flashed her smile. She teased. She reached out and at the same time she danced away.
They shared the house. A single wall separated their lives, but if he placed his ear to it he could hear her move about. He became an expert at tracing her movements. When the radio was on he knew she was cooking. He knew when she was running a bath. He knew when the television was on and he pictured her coiled up on the floor with her feet tucked under her round bum, which is how he had once seen her when he came to collect the rent. Mr. Watts had a sense of her life but couldn’t get near her for that wall standing between them.