While his nights were spent tracing her movements on the other side of that thin wall, Mr. Watts looked forward to Saturdays. On that day Grace washed her hair and clothes, and Mr. Watts came to know exactly what time to expect the whole sopping procession to pass by his window.
Winter arrived in the cold country. Great winds slammed into the side of the house. Trees were blown over. Rooftops were flicked off houses like bottle tops. In this weather Mr. Watts opened his door to Grace standing in the pouring rain.
My mum had her own theories. She said it was because Grace was lonely, and that it had as little to do with Mr. Watts as a free cup of tea.
Grace had come around to ask for Mr. Watts’ advice. She was thinking of giving up dental school. She wasn’t enjoying it, and for that she blamed the drill. All those open mouths and scared eyes. The eyes especially, she said. It was like unhooking a fish, only these were people.
That winter, the obstacle that was the wall was replaced by another—a wooden table that Mr. Watts sat on one side of, and Grace on the other. They were well used to each other’s company by now. The table was in the way until one night Grace stood up and carried her chair around to his side. She sat down next to Mr. Watts, then she took his hand and laid it on her lap.
Some in the audience laughed. One person whistled. Mr. Watts nodded and smiled bashfully. We liked him for that. Some sort of romance must have followed, but Mr. Watts chose not to share that with us. Besides, we knew he and Grace had been a couple, so there wasn’t any suspense to be gained by teasing that part of the story out. But he did have something new to share.
Looking around at our smiling faces, he must have adjudged there to be no finer or more appropriate moment than the present one. He touched his collar button. The white of his suit shone in the light from the fire.
“My darling Grace gave me great happiness,” he said. “None greater than when she gave me a child, a baby girl to whom we gave the name Sarah.”
Mr. Watts stopped here, but it wasn’t the usual pause for me to pass on what he had said. It was so he could collect himself. He stared into the night high above the flames of the fire.
Everyone saw him swallow, and our silence deepened.
He nodded up at that baby girl. He smiled away, and we smiled with him. He almost laughed, and we were ready to laugh too, when he said, “We could not stop looking at her. We stood by the rail of her cot, looking down at her face.” He nodded at the memory, then looked at his audience. “By the way, this is how white turns mulatto and black white. If you are the blaming kind, blame it on the horizon.” Those who got the point laughed; some of the rambos followed suit out of fear they had missed something.
Mr. Watts continued.
“I have told you I came into this world an orphaned boy. I have no memory of my parents. I have no photographs. I have no idea what they looked like. But in that baby’s face I thought I saw my dead parents emerge. I saw my mother’s eyes, my father’s cleft chin. I remember standing at the rail of the cot, staring with the hungry eyes of an explorer seeing new territory for the first time. It was familiar geography all muddled up. I saw bits and pieces of Anglo-Welsh heritage in a coffee-colored skin. Between us, me and Grace had created a new world.”
I liked that idea. It encouraged me to think about my father. Perhaps he wasn’t lost. Or we weren’t lost.
If I’d owned a mirror I would have peered in it for a trace of my lost father. The still pools up in the hill streams did not offer the same detail. My face shimmered and darkened. So I sat on a rock and moved my fingers around my face. I thought I might find some telltale trace of my dad there.
My father had a rubbery mouth—from all that fat laughter of his, I guess. My lips were thinner, like my mum’s, sharpened from making judgments. I traced my eyes but they just felt like my eyes. I found my ears. I have large ears and I will never lose them. They are listening ears. According to my mum, my dad had only ever used his to listen to his own booming laughter.
I decided that if I carried a trace of my dad it lay deeper than on the surface of things; maybe it circulated in the heart, or in the head wherever memory collects. And I thought I would sacrifice any physical likeness for the hope that he had not forgotten me, his daughter Matilda, wherever he was out there in the white world.
EACH NIGHT WE ASSEMBLED, SOME OF US sitting cross-legged on the ground, some lying with hands under heads to count the stars as they came out, one after another, like shy fish emerging from their holes in the reef. Some stood as if they might not stay (but they always did).
My mum was always the last to arrive. It was a point of pride with her. She liked to pretend she had her hands full with other, more important things.
That was the impression she hoped to give to anyone who might pay her the respect of noticing. She would wait until the last straggler had joined the audience. Only then did she allow herself the luxury of changing her mind, thinking she might have time to hear Mr. Watts speak after all, especially now that he had shown a capacity to surprise.
If you watched closely you saw Mr. Watts sink into himself. You saw his eyes close, as if reaching for faraway words, faint as distant stars. He never raised his voice. He didn’t have to. The only other noises came from the fire, the sea murmuring, and the nightlife in the trees waking from their daytime slumber. But on hearing Mr. Watts’ voice the creatures shut up as well. Even the trees listened. And the old women too, and with the respect they once reserved for prayer back when there was a roof to sit under and a white German pastor to stare at.
And the rambos were as enthralled as the rest of us. Three years in the jungle setting death traps for the redskins had made them dangerous, but when I saw the soft focus of their eyes by the fire, I saw faces that missed the classroom. They were practically kids themselves. The one with the sleepy eye would not have been more than twenty. The rest were in their teens.
Nowadays I’ve come to think of them as no more than children in torn clothes bearing weapons from another war. But they had power. They had the power to ask the question that no one else thought to ask. The question was simple enough. Who are you? So in the first instance they were after information. In the second, they found themselves seduced by Mr. Watts’ story. By the third night, it was settled. Mr. Watts was Pip and they—like the rest of us—were the audience.
Mr. Watts spoke with care so as not to leave anyone behind. Whenever he mentioned Grace’s name we wriggled in to get closer to the story of one of our own in the white world. When Mr. Watts’ voice started to falter we would know that the night’s storytelling was coming to an end. His voice would stall in the middle of a sentence, at which point some of us would join him in staring up at the black night. This was a trick of his because when we looked down again we saw him disappear into the night, back to his house.
I won’t try and mimic him here any more than what I’ve done so far. But the bones of his story remain with me, what I’ve come to think of as his Pacific version of Great Expectations. As with the original, Mr. Watts’ version was also serialized, parceled out over a number of nights with a deadline in mind.
During this time Mr. Watts had called a school holiday, so us kids only saw him at night. This meant we were back to idle days to fill.
So when I saw Mr. Watts start up the hill one morning, I set after him. And it wasn’t because I had a question to ask or a fragment from Great Expectations to share, or even to see if he was happy with my interpreting role so far. I followed Mr. Watts in the same unthinking loyal way that a dog gets up and follows its master or a tame parrot flies to the shoulder of its owner.
I caught up with him at Mrs. Watts’ grave. At my approach he turned his head just enough to see who it was, and finding no reason for alarm went back to staring at the grave. I saw a mosquito land on his neck. Mr. Watts failed to notice or didn’t care. I stood with him, looking down at Mrs. Watts’ place in the earth. “Can you keep a secret, Matilda?” he asked. Without waiting for my answer he co
ntinued. “There is a boat coming on the night after the full moon,” he said. “Another five nights and Gilbert’s father will take us out to meet it. A few hours of open sea and we will be in the Solomons, and from there, well, I daresay, it will be up to you.”
When I failed to respond Mr. Watts thought he knew the reason for my silence. “Your mum, too, Matilda,” he then said. But it wasn’t her that I was thinking of, it was my father. I would get to see him at last.
“Another thing, Matilda—this is very important. Don’t tell Dolores until I give you the word.” I kept my eyes on Mrs. Watts’ grave though I could feel Mr. Watts’ eyes on me. “You do understand, don’t you, Matilda? Just nod if you do.”
“Yes,” I said.
He was inviting me to leave behind the only world I knew. While I might have dreamed of it, I didn’t ever see myself leaving the island. I couldn’t see the world wanting to take me.
He said, “You have nothing to be afraid of.”
“No,” I said.
“That’s right. You don’t. Please remember what I said, Matilda.”
“I know,” I said.
“Make no mistake, I intend to speak to Dolores. For now, though, it is our secret. Just you, me, and the trees. Oh, and Mrs. Watts.”
ONCE MORE I found myself lying wide awake in the dark with a secret, while listening to the breathy sleep of my mum. Mr. Watts didn’t trust her. And now, in effect, I had been told not to trust her either with what I knew; that in less than a week she would be leaving the island with me and Mr. Watts. And, who knew, it might be only a few more weeks before she saw my father again.
I ached to tell her. Once she asked me if there was something I wished to say because, she said, she could hear the wings of something flapping inside my head.
“Just thinking,” I said.
“About?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
“In that case you might find time to go and ask Mr. Masoi for a fish.”
I felt bad, knowing how much hope my news would give her. It would give her a reason to start thinking about my father in a different way. It would turn her thoughts to that outside world. It would force her to imagine her part in it. But I also understood—without any need for Mr. Watts to spell it out for me—my mum was a risk with that information. And I knew, even more than Mr. Watts did, what lengths she would go to score a point against him.
Around the other kids I felt my cheeks bursting with my secret, and at the same time I felt a sorrow. They didn’t know that in less than a week I would never see them again. Part of me was already farewelling things—the trees, the floating sky, the slow tumbling hill-streams, the shrieking of the birds at dawn, the greedy noises of the pigs.
But Mr. Watts’ secret plans began to trouble me. If we were to leave the island my mum would need some warning—more than what Mr. Watts was planning to give her. She would be expected to make up her mind on the spot. I was afraid she would say no, and I was afraid of what I would choose.
I wasn’t prepared to break my promise to Mr. Watts, but I felt my mum needed some mental preparation. The only way I knew how to help her was to tell her about Mr. Jaggers’ visit to Pip in the marshes. This is the part of Mr. Dickens’ story that has always stayed with me. The idea that your life could change without warning was very appealing. I suppose my mum would use different language. She would have said, as Pip later does, that her prayers had been answered. So this is what I talked about to my mum as we woke and lay like stunned fish beneath the splintered dawn.
I talked knowledgably, and quickly, about a world I had never been to, but felt I knew as intimately as this patch of tropical coast where we lived, and my mum listened, as anyone would, to have a bigger share of the world. What she heard about was Pip’s readiness to leave behind everything that had gone into making him—his scarecrow sister, dear old Joe Gargery, pompous Mr. Pumblechook, the marshes and their murky light—everything that was home.
AROUND THE RAMBOS’ campfire, the world Mr. Watts revealed to us was not from the island, or Australia or New Zealand, or even from nineteenth-century England. No. Mr. Watts and Grace had created an entirely new space, which they called the spare room.
The spare room. This presented some translation difficulty. I talked about a womb to be filled, a hull to fill with fish. I spoke of the coconut hollowed out of its white flesh and milk. The spare room, Mr. Watts said, was meant for their coffee-colored child to one day call her own.
Before Sarah’s birth they had used the spare room as a dumping ground for all the things they had no use for. Now they agreed to start again with it empty. They wanted it to be unspoken for. They wanted their vision of some unrealized place to inhabit the room. Why leave things to chance? they thought. And why pass up the opportunity of a blank wall? Why go in for wallpaper covered with kingfishers and flocks of birds in flight when they could put useful information up on the walls? They agreed to gather their worlds side by side, and leave it to their daughter to pick and choose what she wanted.
One night Grace wrote the names of her family over the wall, a history that went all the way back to a mythical flying fish.
For the first time since I’d started translating for Mr. Watts I was interrupted. Grace’s half-blind grandmother asked Mr. Watts if her wayward granddaughter had remembered to write her name up on the wall.
Mr. Watts closed his eyes. His hand cupped his chin. He began to nod. “Yes, she did,” he said, and the old woman breathed again. Now someone else—an aunt of Grace’s—stuck up a hand to ask the same thing. And so did another five or six relatives until all were satisfied their name was on the wall of a room of a house out there, somewhere, in the white world.
To Mr. Watts’ suggestion they paint the walls of the spare room white, Grace scribbled a history of white on the island where I was born.
And now, to the startled ears of all us kids, we began to hear all the fragments that our mums and uncles and aunts had brought along to Mr. Watts’ class. Our thoughts on the color white. Our thoughts on the color blue. Mr. Watts was assembling his story out of the experience of our lives, the same things we had heard shared with our class. But Mr. Watts introduced new information as well, such as Grace’s thoughts on the color brown.
There were no brown ice-blocks until the cola one was invented, and then it came and went like a comet. When they were all gone Grace asked the man in the shop why and he said because no one wanted them. She said, “We do.” He said, “You kids don’t bloody count. Now bugger off.”
Around the fire, the rambos slapped each other and hooted with laughter, and a lone dog, some way off, took up the call.
I began another tricky translation—Mr. Watts’ thoughts on the color white. Miss Ryan once told him she used white chewing gum to steady a white tooth she had knocked on a water fountain before a date with the airline pilot who she remembered smelling of black shoe polish!
Mr. Watts paused, looking at me. He seemed very pleased with himself. It was obvious that he expected his audience would be charmed once I passed this on. But what the blimmin’ heck was black shoe polish?
“Otherwise,” Mr. Watts continued, “everyone in those days smelled of white soap.”
I caught the eyes of Celia and Victoria. I saw I wasn’t alone in what I felt. We were beginning to feel nervous for Mr. Watts. He wasn’t making any sense. I found my thoughts escaping to Great Expectations, to Joe Gargery and the nonsense that had flowed out of him.
I remembered listening to Mr. Watts read and hearing words that on their own I understood, but once they were turned into sentences made no sense at all. When we asked for the meaning of Joe’s observations Mr. Watts replied that we didn’t need to know. If the blacksmith didn’t make sense, that was the point. While that might be true, I was worried that Mr. Watts had now gotten his characters mixed up, that somehow he had slipped out of Pip and into Joe Gargery’s skin. My translation failed to move the audience in the way Mr. Watts’ self-satisfied smile hope
d for. Instead, he found himself looking at an audience of dogfaces still waiting for the promised bone.
He recovered and spoke about a neighbor of Miss Ryan’s who used to row flying-boat people ashore in the islands. The neighbor was holding a paintbrush dipped in white paint when he was found dead of a heart attack by the half-painted letterbox. Too much white sugar, we heard. Or was it salt?
So he was back onto the color white.
The whitest white, he said, is the inside of a toilet bowl. Whiteness is next to cleanliness. Cleanliness is next to godliness.
White, he said, used to be exclusively the color of airline pilots and air hostesses. As a child you first learned about the white countries.
Bread is white; so is foam, fat, and milk.
White is the color of elastic that keeps everything up and in its rightful place. White is the color of ambulances, voting papers, and the coats of parking attendants.
“Above all,” he said, “white is a feeling.”
I had fallen into Mr. Watts’ rhythm and translated that statement without hesitation.
A fleeting thought can come and go with its license to surprise. Words written or spoken aloud have to be explained. When I passed on Mr. Watts’ opinion about “white being a feeling,” I swear the entire island fell quiet. We all had long suspected this but didn’t know for sure. Now we were about to hear.
We waited and waited, and while we waited Mr. Watts stood rigid, his eyes sloping away from us. At first, filled with regret, I thought, for letting that door open. But then I saw him nod to himself, and in as frank and honest a voice as I ever heard him use, he said, “This is true. We feel white around black people.”
It made everyone uncomfortable to hear this, and yet I suspect we wanted to hear more, but that’s when Daniel piped up.
“We feel the same,” he said. “We feel black around white people.” And that snapped the tension. People laughed, and one of the rambos got up and made a drunk’s walk over to high-five with Daniel. Daniel beamed. He knew he’d said something but wasn’t sure what.