Also, it turns out there are two convicts on the marshes at the moment that Magwitch surprises Pip in the graveyard. Why hadn’t Mr. Watts told us about the other convict? When Compeyson first turned up on the page I did not believe in him. I read on and discovered him to be a sworn enemy of Magwitch’s. Compeyson turns out to be the same man who disappointed Miss Havisham on her wedding day. Years later, it is Compeyson who turns in Magwitch as he and Pip and Herbert Pocket sit mid-river in a boat, waiting for a steamship to spirit Magwitch out of England. Here, the pattern is clear. Pip is cast in his old role of savior. Only this time it is not to be.
In Mr. Dickens’ version, as Compeyson directs a boat of militia towards them, Magwitch launches himself at his old adversary. The enemies tumble into the river. There is a struggle underwater from which Magwitch emerges the victor—a doomed victor while Compeyson drifts out of the story on the tide.
I suppose Miss Havisham’s honor is upheld by Magwitch’s vanquishing of Compeyson, but at what cost? Lives have been ruined all over the place.
At first, Mr. Watts’ omissions made me angry. Why hadn’t he stuck with Mr. Dickens’ version? What was he protecting us from?
Possibly himself, or a rebuke from my mum, which I suppose adds up to the same thing. During the devil versus Pip debate the problem of finding the appropriate language had come up. Mr. Watts, ever conciliatory, tried to help her with the suggestion that people’s imaginations sometimes got in the way. My mum, forever seeking advantage, countered by saying she thought it was a problem with blimmin’ Dickens too.
On this occasion she had stayed on to listen to Mr. Watts read, and was able to retrieve a sentence from Great Expectations that irritated her beyond all reason. As I had grown accustomed to my expectations, I had insensibly begun to notice their effect upon myself and those around me. Us kids sat back in our usual state of tremulous excitement reserved for these debates between my mum and Mr. Watts. We didn’t see anything wrong with the sentence. Why, you could look out the open window and see that a statement about self-fulfillment was hardly a surprise to the grass or the flowers or the creepers growing everywhere.
My mum said she had no problem with stating the obvious. The problem was that silly blimmin’ word insensibly. What was the point of that word? It just confused. If it hadn’t been for that silly bloody insensibly, she’d have gotten it the first time. Instead, insensibly had led her to suspect it wasn’t so straightforward after all.
She made Mr. Watts read the offending sentence and suddenly all of us kids saw what she was talking about. Maybe Mr. Watts as well. She said it was just “fancy nancy English talk.” It’s what you did to spice up a bland dish or to make a white dress more interesting by sewing in a red or blue hemline; that’s what that word insensibly was there for—to pretty up a plain sentence. She thought Mr. Watts should remove the offending word.
At first, he said he couldn’t; you couldn’t muck around with Dickens. The word belonged to him; the whole sentence did. To whip out an inconvenient word would be an act of vandalism, like smashing the window of a chapel.
He said all that and I think from that day on he did the opposite. He pulled the embroidery out of Mr. Dickens’ story to make it easier on our young ears.
Mr. Dickens. It took me a long time to drop the Mister. Mr. Watts, however, has remained Mr. Watts.
During those years in Townsville I went on reading Dickens with mixed enjoyment. I read Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House. The book I kept coming back to was Great Expectations. I never tired of it. And with each rereading I got more out of it. Of course, for me it contains so many personal touchstones. To this day I cannot read Pip’s confession—It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home—without feeling the same of my island.
We are deep into the book, chapter 18 to be precise, when Pip discovers there is no going back to his old life on the marshes. For me, in my life, the same discovery had come much earlier. I was still a frightened black kid suffering from shock trauma when I’d looked down at the green of Honiara from the airplane, but I’d also known from that moment on there would be no return.
My mum belonged to all that I was trying to forget. I didn’t want to forget her. But there was always a chance the other things would ride back on that memory. I’d see those soldiers again, smell my mum’s fear as if she were standing right by me, here at the bus stop or in the library.
Sometimes I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t keep the door closed on that little room in my head where I’d put her. My mum kept her own hours and she could surprise me at any time of her own choosing. She would open that door and slap her hands down on her hips as if to ask, “Just what in the name of the Good Lord do you think you’re up to?” I had stopped at the cosmetics counter. That’s all. Or my eye caught up with the condoms sitting behind glass near the checkout operator. Those things belonged to a world that didn’t include me yet, but I was beginning to think they could—at some time in the future.
Other times my mum popped up when you might expect her to. On one occasion, it was the sight of a mum with her daughter in the underwear department. The mum was as happy as a pig in molasses. She picked up one bra after another and waved it under the scornful eye of her daughter. The daughter locked herself away behind her folded arms. She refused to come out and play this game with her mum. Those arms were folded against any possibility of a mother’s counsel breaking through to her.
I did not know that girl or her mum. But I knew the tension between them. It was unspoken and yet as powerful as the spoken word; it was invisible and yet as solid as a wall.
I stood there staring until a stroller banged into the backs of my legs. A small white boy shrieked at me. “Sorry,” the mother said.
This is how I moved in the world of mothers and their kids, as a spectator wanders in a zoo, fascinated and repelled.
IN TOWNSVILLE, I won the senior English Prize. I walked across the stage to receive my certificate, and when I turned to face the applause I saw my father on his feet with his hands raised. He was so ridiculously proud of me. I was his champ. That’s what he liked to call me. Champ. When we had visitors over he liked to wheel me out so he could say to them, “Ask her anything at all about Charles Dickens.”
He was so proud of me. I didn’t have the heart to tell him about Mr. Watts. I let him think I was all his own work.
I graduated from the University of Queensland. In my second year, at the start of the third semester, he flew down to Brisbane to visit. I met him at the airport and was surprised to see with him the woman who cleaned the house once a week. Her name was Maria. She was from the Philippines and her English wasn’t very good. Now I saw her walk across the tarmac on my father’s arm. His forehead was beaded with sweat. When I saw how nervous he was I felt childishly reassured. He still loved his Matilda.
Still, it wasn’t the same after Maria moved in. She tried her best. In some ways she tried too hard. She wanted me to like her. But I couldn’t love her like my mum. She asked me to talk about my mum. She said my father would not speak of her. I enjoyed hearing that.
My mum was a memory that could not be shared around, and besides, mention of her tended to shift our thoughts back to the island, and that wasn’t a place either I or my dad wished to visit. Maria knew she couldn’t replace my mum, but when she asked me to describe her I could only say, “She was a very brave woman, the bravest, and—just about everything about my dad made her angry.” Maria laughed, and I smiled because I was off the hook.
PEOPLE SOMETIMES ASK ME “Why Dickens?,” which I always take to be a gentle rebuke. I point to the one book that supplied me with another world at a time when it was desperately needed. It gave me a friend in Pip. It taught me you can slip under the skin of another just as easily as your own, even when that skin is white and belongs to a boy alive in Dickens’ England. Now, if that isn’t an act of magic I don’t know what is.
Personally, though, I am loath to push Great Expectations onto anyone, my father especially. I am mindful of Mr. Watts’ disappointment in Grace’s inability to love what he loved, and I have never wanted to know that disappointment, or for my father to feel, as Grace must have, like a pup with a saucer of milk pushed towards her in the shape of a book. No. Some areas of life are not meant to overlap.
In Brisbane, for a time, I was a relief teacher in a big Catholic high school for boys. I learned that every teacher has a get-out-of-jail card. Mine was to read Great Expectations aloud. I would ask my new class to be quiet for ten minutes. That’s all I asked for. If at the end of ten minutes they were bored, then they were free to get up and leave. They loved the idea of that. Mutiny rushed through their veins. Their faces grew bold with thoughts of what they would do.
Concealing my own smile, I would start at chapter one, the scene where the convict seizes Pip by the chin. Show us where you live. Pint out the place. You cannot read Dickens without putting in a little more effort. You cannot eat a ripe pawpaw without its innards and juice spilling down your chin. Likewise, the language of Dickens makes your mouth do strange things, and when you’re not used to his words your jaw will creak. Anyway, I had to remember to stop after ten minutes. I’d look up and wait. No one ever rose from their desks.
Yet by the time I began my thesis on Dickens’ orphans I knew more about a man I’d never met, except through his books and biographies, than I did of the man who had made the introduction.
I thank God for Maria coming along when she did because now I had an excuse not to return to Townsville. Maria and my dad needed some breathing space. But whenever I thought of them lying beneath the slow-moving bedroom fan, I got rid of Maria and stuck my mum there. I put my dad’s arm around her shoulder. I stuck my mum’s face on his chest. I stuck that smile on her that I’d seen in that photograph of my young parents in happier times.
I heard the relief in my dad’s voice when I phoned to say I wouldn’t be returning home at the end of the semester. I let him think I would be working over the summer break; I didn’t tell him about a visit to Mr. Watts’ old life in Wellington, New Zealand.
IT WAS DECEMBER. SO I DID NOT EXPECT TO find such a cold and drafty place. A wind hurled itself at trees, at people. Paper—I have never seen so much windblown paper—blew across the tarmac; it stuck in the overhead pylons. The seabirds kept out of the air and instead milled about in a school playground that I passed in a taxi.
I thought about Grace, fresh out of school, her face stuck to the window of a taxi such as the one that took me into the center of the small, bustling city. I stayed at a rowdy backpackers’. There were young people from every country. They had come here to climb, hike, surf, ski, bungee, to get drunk.
Much of what Mr. Watts had told us kids about his world came flooding back. The shock of brick in every direction. And the grass. Mr. Watts was right. Grass has far too much say. It fills windows. It lines streets. It marches away to hilltop after hilltop.
If Mr. Watts had held back certain characters from Great Expectations, who had he omitted from his own life?
I looked in the phone book. It had listings for forty-three Wattses. I can’t remember if it was call number nine or number ten who said, “Oh, I think you want June Watts…” She named a street, and I found a J. Watts at that address. And when I dialed, the voice at the other end said, “Hello, June Watts speaking…”
“Is there a Mr. Watts?”
There was a pause. “Who is speaking?”
“My name is Matilda, Mrs. Watts. Your husband was my teacher…”
“Tom was?” I thought she was about to laugh, and then there was a different noise from her, as if maybe it was no surprise after all.
“This was a long time ago. On an island.”
“Oh,” she said. In the silence that followed I had a sense of her gathering herself. “So I take it you know that woman, Grace.”
“Yes, Mrs. Watts,” I said. “I knew of her. I did not really know her. Grace died some years back.”
Nothing came from Mrs. Watts’ end.
“I thought I might visit, Mrs. Watts,” I said.
The silence lengthened into judgment.
“I was hoping…”
“I’m a bit tied up today,” she said. “What did you say this is about?”
“Your husband, Mrs. Watts. He was my teacher.”
“Yes. You said. But today is difficult. I was about to go out.”
“I can only visit today. I fly back to Australia tomorrow afternoon.”
There was an intake of breath. I waited with my eyes closed.
“Well, I suppose,” she said. “It won’t take long, will it?”
She gave me directions to her house, which involved catching a train. From the station there was a ten-minute walk through a neighborhood of brick houses, each with a bit of fenced land, and block walls; some were covered with bad words my mum would have taken a scrubbing brush to. Or else she would have stared those words down until they curled up with shame and dropped off the wall in flakes. I passed a sports field where I saw some bird life—ducks, magpies, seagulls—and a gang in hoods, their bums hanging out of baggy trousers, cuffs lapping over sneakers. And when I left the park behind I walked past a number of cold, wind-bashed houses with dried-up gardens.
June Watts had given me clear instructions. I was not to confuse A with B. Visitors to A would be met by a vicious dog.
This large, slow-moving woman in white slacks was not who I would have expected for Mr. Watts’ wife. I did not think a wife of Mr. Watts’ would wear a word on her top. It said “Smile.” And thinking this might be a general expectation of hers, I did. She did not smile back.
I suppose I also came as a bit of a surprise. I imagine her expectations were based on the accent she heard on the phone, which was now distinctly Australian. I am sure she wasn’t expecting someone this black. I wore black shoes too. And my black hair had grown out like it had during the blockade when my mum would threaten to pick me up and use my mop to scratch an itch on her back that she couldn’t get to.
June Watts closed the door after me and showed me into a front room. Lace curtains guarded the windows and produced a sickly light. When without any warning Mrs. Watts clapped her hands, I jumped. A big gray cat resentfully got down from an armchair. Mrs. Watts directed me to the chair while she sat on the couch on the other side of the coffee table. There was a packet of cigarettes on the table. She reached for them and at the same moment tipped her eyes up at me. “You don’t mind if I smoke?” she said. “I’m feeling nervous for some reason.”
“Oh, there’s no need to feel nervous of me, Mrs. Watts.” I laughed to show how friendly I was. “I am very pleased you invited me here today. Your husband had a big influence on me.”
“Tom did?”
She grunted like she had on the phone. She lit a cigarette and got up to open a window.
“I married a weak man, Matilda,” she said. “I don’t want to sound unkind, but it’s true. Tom was not a brave man. He should have left me rather than carry on the way he did.”
Mrs. Watts drew on her cigarette and exhaled. She waved the smoke away and returned to the couch.
“I don’t suppose he told you any of that, did he?”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Watts. Any of what, exactly?”
She turned her head to the hall.
“The other woman lived next door. That’s A with the dog I told you about. I should have known something was going on. I used to catch him with his ear to the wall. I’d say, ‘Tom, what on earth are you doing?’ I can’t remember what lie he told, there were so many, but he got away with it, didn’t he, because not once did I suspect anything going on between those two. Even when she was taken off to Porirua and he used to go and visit, I had no reason to suspect.”
“Porirua?”
“The mental hospital. You know, the loony bin.” She paused to stub her cigarette out. “I can make a cup of tea if you’d l
ike one.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Watts. I would,” I said.
There were photographs on the main wall. I tried to take them all in with a single glance. I did not want June Watts to think I was nosy. I was nosy, but I didn’t want her to know. So I only remember one photo—of a young couple. He has dark hair and a lively face. His mouth is open with pink and white laughter. He wears a red flower in his buttonhole. She looks young, but her face is cold, not quite angry but prepared to be—in a pale blue dress and matching shoes. While June Watts fussed about in the kitchen I stared at the flower in the lapel of Mr. Watts’ jacket. If we ran out of talk I thought I would ask after the name of that flower.
I joined her in the kitchen. She moved slowly. Her hip seemed to be the problem.
“Mrs. Watts, do you ever recall Mr. Watts wearing a red clown’s nose?”
She dropped a tea bag into a cup and stopped to think.
“I never saw him with one on. Though it wouldn’t surprise me.” I waited for her to ask me why I had asked that question.
I went on waiting. If I were a dog I would have sat on my hindquarters and hung my tongue out. But she did not ask the question. She unplugged the jug and filled our cups. “I have some biscuits. Afghans.”
“That would be nice, Mrs. Watts.”
She said, “I don’t have many visitors. I went out and got the afghans especially.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Watts. That was very thoughtful.”
I followed her back to the front room with the tray.
“I met Tom at the Standards Association. That’s where we both worked. We were responsible for setting the standards for pretty much anything you can think of. The ratio of cement to water in all things. We were young. Everyone was young in those days. That’s the main complaint you hear from people who are getting old. You stop seeing young people. You begin to wonder if there are any left and whether there were only young people when you were young.”