Mister Pip (24 page)

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.

I
T 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 like 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.”

I waited until she bit into her afghan before I did the same. Catching the crumbs in her hand, she said, “I didn't think about Grace much. I didn't give her nearly enough thought. She was always laughing.” Mrs. Watts pulled a face.
Always laughing
. I understood this was a criticism. “It was like being around someone who is permanently pissed.”

She reached for another cigarette and struck a match. Her smoker's face concentrated. “So, how is Tom? The silly old bugger. It's been so long. Have you seen him recently?”

The cat clawing at the armchair caught her attention so she did not have any sense of my reeling backwards. I quickly composed myself and made a decision. “He was fine when I last saw him,” I said. “But that was some years ago, Mrs. Watts. I live in Brisbane now.”

“Well, I'm over it all now. It's all water under the bridge, isn't it? I have my own problems.”

She paused, and I suppose it was for me to ask what those problems might be, but I was not interested. Instead I asked her what Mr. Watts had done at the Standards Association.

“Same as the rest of us,” she said. “Clerical work and what have you. I was a secretary. Tom was in publications.”