Mister Pip (17 page)

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.

M
R. 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.

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.