Mister Pip (20 page)

This wasn't Mr. Watts' story we were hearing at all. It wasn't his or Grace's story. It was a made-up story to which we'd all contributed. Mr. Watts was shining our experience of the world back at us. We had no mirrors. These things and anything else that might have said something about who we were and what we believed had been thrown onto the bonfire. I have come to think that Mr. Watts was giving back something of ourselves in the shape of a story.

ON THE SIXTH night, Mr. Watts told a tale, his own I believe, that established the place of the nonbeliever. I don't know if he gave it a title, but I will. I will call it “The Mayfly Story.” If you were my mum you might have felt you were listening to an admission from a heathen that everything he had said or believed was wrong. I have come to think of it as his gift to her.

The Mayfly Story

Some neighborhoods carry their history in their name. Wishbone Street is one of those. In this street lived a black woman, known to everyone as Mrs. Sutton, who measured her wealth in the number of dreams she had. Her know-it-all white husband, who was really only a woodwork teacher, which would have been okay but he was a bad woodwork teacher, said her wealth was worth nothing. With what can you buy a dream? How many dreams is an ice cream or a steak worth? He laughed and made fun of her.

Dreams are nervy things—all it takes is for one stern word to be spoken in their direction and they shrivel up and die. This is what happened. She had looked up at a critical moment in her telling to see her useless husband pick some sawdust out of his forearm hair. Now Mrs. Sutton tried writing the dream down on paper. As an extra precaution she wrapped the dream around a small stone she carried in her pocket.

Usually after cross words she would take herself off to a quiet place and wait for the shattered dream to return. Not this time. As she left the house her husband did not even look up. It was later, when she failed to return after dark, that he started to worry.

He waited for her to call because that is what he thought she would do. She would telephone from some lonely phone box somewhere in the night and ask him to come and drive her home. He waited and waited for that call. He waited until he could wait no longer and rushed out to look for her.

Someone spoke of seeing her walk in the direction of the river. Which now seems likely. Why? Because several days after her disappearance a slip of paper washed up on the banks and caught in the branches of an uprooted tree. Enough of the handwriting was legible. It seems Mrs. Sutton had dreamed she was a mayfly. Her husband, once a nonbeliever, was the only one to take the claim seriously. In fact, the once stupid husband was the only one to link the dream to his missing wife.

And he did more than that. At the library, where he'd gone to read up on his wife's transformation, Mr. Sutton learned that a mayfly will live up to three years in the mud at the bottom of a river.

For the next week he took himself off along the banks of the river, looking for a trace of his wife. He was a sad figure. We must imagine a man looking down at the water for the mud at the bottom. He supposed his wife would reappear when she thought the time was right. So he went back to the library to find out more on the life cycle of the mayfly.

He was not encouraged by what he read. On the day of its death the mayfly will rise from the river and turn itself into a winged insect. By then, the lazy bugger males have flown to the shade of the trees on the bank. As the females hover above the river they are rushed by the males. Once impregnated, the mayfly females fly upstream and bomb the surface of the river with eggs. As soon as that job is done they fall exhausted into the water. And there the frogs know what to look for.

It is hard to say which stage in the life cycle enraged Mr. Sutton the most. The waiting males or the greedy frogs.

A boy cycling home by the river saw Mr. Sutton wading up the river, his head bowed in concentration. He was trying to see through the water to where he supposed his wife had buried herself with several million other larvae. Poor Mr. Sutton. He was shouting and carrying on as he attempted to hit the frogs with the many stones he carried in his pockets.

We loved that story. I don't know where Mr. Watts fished it up from. Maybe he made it up on the spot. We all laughed. The rambos hooted. They especially liked the bit about Mr. Sutton trying to hit the frogs. Everyone was laughing so hard they didn't see Mr. Watts seek out my mum with a smile.

ON THE SIXTH night we also learned that Sarah, the future occupant of the spare room, had succumbed to disease. Meningitis. As he told us this Mr. Watts' voice ran dry. For the first time as he stared into the fire the mask of Pip almost fell away. We were in no doubt here; we weren't hearing invention.

After Mr. Watts composed himself he told us how he and Mrs. Watts buried their child. For a long time the two of them stood clinging to one another over the small plot of piled dirt. Mr. Watts said they stayed like that until after night fell, and they had no more tears, and their tongues were idle because there were no words. No one, he said, has yet invented words for a moment like that.

“Grief,” he said, and he shook his head back at the night.

He described Mrs. Watts' descent into depression. We heard how she could not get out of bed in the morning. She would not speak. Desperate for a remedy, Mr. Watts looked to the example of the hermit crab. How many times in its life does a hermit crab change its house? Three, four times? Mr. Watts thought that might be the answer. A new house, new windows with a different view. But what if her misery migrated with her? No. Mr. Watts decided the only way to mend his beloved Grace was for her to reinvent herself.

For the first time, we heard Mr. Watts ask a question of the audience. “I wonder, does anyone here know who the Queen of Sheba was?” He looked around our firelit faces. I was standing with my mum. I could hear her shallow breaths increase. I could feel her agitation rise, until every door in her was flapping open. She just had to speak up. And without raising her hand, which was how us kids had been instructed, she blurted, “It is in the Bible.”

When he heard her voice Mr. Watts knew exactly how far to turn his head. I have an idea he always knew where my mum was in the audience. He smiled at his old adversary.

As he had in the classroom, he gestured for her to continue. By now other faces were looking our way. One of the rambos stood up and came forward, parting the audience with his machete so he could see who the voice belonged to. Now that she had the attention of everyone my mum suffered an uncharacteristic crisis of confidence. Her head dropped. Her voice wasn't as strong as before, and she addressed the ground rather than the faces looking her way.

“The Queen of Sheba was a very wise black woman who sought out Solomon to see if she could match his legendary wisdom with her own.” That's what she said. She and Mr. Watts stared at one another, and it was Mr. Watts who chose to end it the way that he did.

He looked around the rest of his audience and began to recite from the King James Bible. “‘She communed with him of all that was in her heart…and there was nothing hid.'”

S
OME PEOPLE CAN LOOK TO THE TIDE AS A guide to the passing of the hour. Others look at a budding fruit and automatically know the month. On the edge of the silvery ocean, a pale thread of moon whispered to me: a new moon was on its way.

I had been patiently counting the days down to the two events—our departure, yes, but more important, that moment when Mr. Watts would choose to let my mum in on the plan to leave the island.

I was certain Mr. Watts hadn't spoken to my mum about it yet. She would have said something. There would have been some sign she knew, some lift in her mood. She would want to break the news to me.

I reminded myself what Mr. Watts had said about speaking to my mum. He wanted that job for himself. And that was fine. I just wished he would get on with it, because my mum deserved more time to prepare herself than what Mr. Watts clearly meant to give her.

I must have felt emboldened by what Mr. Watts had to say about the Queen of Sheba, the bit about her communing of all that was in her heart, because as the audience broke up I followed Mr. Watts into the shadows. I wanted to speak to him alone, so I trod lightly, careful not to disturb the earth or Mr. Watts. We were almost at the schoolhouse before he stopped and looked behind him.

I saw his great relief—it was only me, and not a ghost clutching a machete, standing in his footprints. “Matilda. Jesus,” he said. “I wish you wouldn't creep up on me like that.” As quickly, his relief soured. He looked impatient, as if he knew what was coming.

“Have you spoken to my mum, Mr. Watts?”

“No,” he said, and he averted his eyes, pretending he heard something in the distance. Then he came back to me. “Not yet, Matilda.”

Not yet.
For me “Not yet” came a bit long after “No.” That's when I understood or at least thought I did.

“I won't go without my mum,” I told him.

He looked at me a long while, testing my resolve.

He was waiting for me to change my mind. He was waiting for me to take back what I had said. I stared at the ground like an ingrate.

“Of course not,” he said at last.

But what did he mean by “Of course not”? He would tell my mum? Or he would accept my decision? I waited for him to explain himself.

“Of course not,” he repeated, and carried on into the night.

I decided Mr. Watts was just tired from his storytelling, and it wasn't what I'd said as much as the tone I'd used to express myself. I was the baby chick that had spat back the worm. Perhaps he was letting me sit in my own pool of insolence, and in fact had every intention of speaking to my mum.

I could have run after him. I could have asked politely for some clarification. But I didn't. I knew what I preferred, and that was—I didn't want to know. Rather, I wanted to believe.

The next morning I woke to excited talk. My mum was on all fours talking to someone at our doorway, her large bum in my face. Outside I could hear other voices. My mum wriggled out to join them. I dressed quickly and followed after.

We walked to the edge of the jungle where the rambos slept each night. We stared at the trampled grass and the coals of the previous night's fire. They had left without a word or a good-bye. All that story had got up and run off into the night. We stared at the edge of the green jungle. A jittery thicket bird hopped from branch to branch, its small alert head turning left and right. We wondered what had spooked them.

My mum thought it was a good thing. Although we were used to them and they were accepting of us, we were pleased that they were gone. We thought we would sleep easier. Some of us had other concerns. Did this mean we would miss out on Mr. Watts' final installment? Would we find out what had become of the brave schoolgirl who returned all those years later in a trolley towed by a man with a red nose?

I decided to speak to Mr. Watts about that installment. I'd make sure he understood there was still an audience. The story didn't finish there. And I knew he had another night at his disposal before he and Mr. Masoi would drag the boat from the dry creek.

I waited for the sun to pick itself off the horizon. I was giving Mr. Watts time to wake up properly, when the redskin soldiers filed out of the dark jungle. Their uniforms were torn, and many of them wore bandages. Their faces looked drained. I now know what kind of person those blank faces are attached to. Their mouths were irritable and sour. They hardly looked at us.

One soldier snatched a banana out of a small boy's hand. It was Christopher Nutua's little brother, and Mr. Nutua could do nothing but clasp his hands behind his back and turn his face inside out with shame. We watched the soldier bite into it and throw the rest away, uneaten. Their officer observed this through his ailing eyes and did not say a word.

We were still adjusting to the change of mood, when we saw they had a hostage. It was one of the rambos who had camped here. His face was a mess, beaten many times. But I was sure which one it was. It was the same juiced-up one who had declared he would fuck Mr. Watts in the arse. One of the soldiers pulled him out of line. The officer shoved him in the small of the back. He gave another shove and this time the rambo fell to the ground. That's when we saw his hands were tied behind his back. One of the other soldiers moved quickly to boot him in the ribs. The prisoner's mouth opened but we heard no sound. Just a gaping mouth that a fish stabbed with a knife will produce. Another soldier picked him up and gripped him by the throat so that the boy's eyes bulged with fear through the pulp and mess that was his face.