The Amazing Absorbing Boy

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  My father never said a word about what he had seen; not that night, not even during his bad moments. But his attitude towards me changed. Rather than his usual quarrels, he would now stare at me as if I was an enemy in his apartment. He crashed plates against the kitchen walls and slammed his bedroom door and I would hear him swearing in his room and banging against the wall if the television was too loud. Once, the genie and his master got into the elevator from the floor beneath ours and they both gazed disapprovingly at me. I couldn’t say whether this was because they had spotted me with Canella or because they heard all the commotion from their balcony beneath ours.

  Even though I finally had some spicy details to share with Paul my mind was more on my father and on the genie and his master. For the first time I wished I lived in a place far from Regent Park without a father who would suddenly walk in and catch me stroking a woman’s breast. During my weekends, instead of going to the Art Bar, I began to stroll around these little streets with their old houses half-covered with vines and plants, and pretending I would one day live in one of these buildings. I thought of them as villas and wished I knew what their insides looked like. I ventured further and further each trip and—as the weather was now warmish with people dressed in shorts and light shirts—I walked for an hour or so before I took a streetcar.

  During some of these walks I would recall the Art Bar people and what I would have said if I was asked to read out a poem or something. I played around with a story of a boy who walked around some strange city touching all sorts of objects and immediately getting a vision of other people grazing their hands on these same objects. I believe the boy could also gauge the thoughts of the touchers during the exact moment of contact. Maybe his name was the Astonishing Connection Boy or Memory Lad or something like that. One night the beginning of another story—but with the same boy—formed, just like that:

  When my mother died, I felt I had already received glimpses of all that would follow. Like if I was once again sitting on a dusty, silvery asteroid and could see through lanes of swirling space dust and dark, puffed-up clouds and even the samaan tree in our front yard where the shadows of our Mayaro neighbours cast a crooked picket fence on the coffin. I could even make out Uncle Boysie still looking funny in his black suit, staring again at the road as if in this replay my father would suddenly appear in a big puff of sulphurous smoke.

  Chapter Seven

  AUNTIE UMBRELLA

  It was Auntie Umbrella who appeared like a puff of sulphurous smoke. I was making my way to our apartment after work and when I spotted her outside the door I thought at first it was my imagination because I had been thinking so much of Mayaro but there was no mistaking Auntie Umbrella. Although she was my father’s sister she was the total opposite of him in looks. She was black like tar and had stumpy bandy legs that made her resemble one of these evil Dalek robots from Doctor Who. When I noticed an umbrella reinforced with bicycle spokes parked right next to a scrape-up brown suitcase, I knew for sure it was my auntie. She was trembling like mad either from vexation or the nightcoldness and when she spotted me instead of giving a hug she said, “Open the door fast, boy. This is not weather for man nor beast.” Then she pushed me aside, dragged her suitcase inside, took a long look at the apartment, and headed for my father’s bedroom.

  “What you doing here, auntie?” I asked when she came out.

  “What?” She had the habit of closing one eye whenever she was about to quote some criticizing verse from her Bible. Instead she launched into a long speech about my father; it seemed he was supposed to meet her at the airport.

  “So he knew you was coming?”

  “You hard of hearing, boy?” She glared at me with one eye.

  “So how you find this place?”

  “The Lord always protect his shepherd.” But what she said next had little to do with the Lord. She had been dragging her suitcase and her umbrella around for the last two hours, asking directions from people who pretended they couldn’t understand her accent. I felt they might have been afraid of her, especially as she mentioned the customs people in the airport making a big fuss about her reinforced umbrella.

  That night for the first time since I came to Canada I wished my father was at home. While she was sweeping and cleaning and packing away, she was shooting questions at me like if I was on the witness box. Where was my father? Did he still chain smoke? What nonsense was he pretending to invent now? Why was the place so messy? Did I have a girlfriend? Why was my hair so long? How much effort would it take to simply put up a few pictures of the Lord? Was there a Presbyterian Church nearby? She didn’t wait for any answers either, because after every question, she would sing, Jesus loves me, this, I know, in her scratch-up voice.

  When I was about seven, she had dragged me to the tall, whitewashed Presbyterian Church next to a rumshop, and although I had put on my best manners while the preacher, who was also the principal of the Canadian Missionary school, talked about angels and ladders and locusts, and once, about a picture of Moses imprinted on a thick round cassava pone, when we got home Auntie Umbrella complained to my mother about my behaviour. “The little boy like a top,” she had said. “He can’t hold still for a single minute. Good material for the devil.” To tell the truth, while all this was going on I was wondering how everybody in the church excepting me could spot old-man Moses on the cake. My mother always listened quietly to all of auntie’s proverbs but once I heard Uncle Boysie telling her in a lighthearted way, “The damn woman like a bat that get hit with lightning. Feel she so special with all this fire and brimstone talk.”

  She had never married and even though she lived in Rio Claro, close to an hour away from Mayaro, some nasty rumours had sprung up about her. I had overheard Latchmin, the sign lady, telling another woman from the church that Auntie Umbrella was once engaged to be married to a bus driver who on the day of the wedding disappeared completely, bus and all. According to her story, Auntie went up and down the island searching for him but all in vain. Another story was that she was engaged to a musician who disappeared too. Auntie would stop the taxi or whatever else she was travelling in whenever she heard ballroom music streaming out from a house and rush up the stairs like a madwoman. All the stories were about her almost getting married, maybe because she could frighten anybody.

  Even though I never believed these stories—that always seemed to be about stumpy, quarrelsome people like Auntie—the musician story may have had some little truth because her house, which was boxy like her, was filled with music instruments such as a one-string guitar and a piano that I never saw open.

  “Where all the furniture in this place, boy?” She had hooked up thick glasses that doubled the size of her criticizing eyes.

  “This is all it have.”

  “Where you does sleep?”

  I pointed to the foam.

  She let out a long sigh that halfway through changed into a belch. After a while she said, “Foam-poam,” and I remembered her habit of rhyming words whenever she disapproved of something. That night it was strange hearing hymns coming out from my father’s bedroom.

  When I awoke the next morning she was sitting at the kitchen table, dressed in going-out clothes. For a minute I had the horrible idea that she was planning to accompany me to the gas station but she asked, “You have a key for this place?”

  I held out the key. “Where you going?”

  “The Lord don’t make mistake. He send me here.”

  All day at work I wondered what Auntie Umbrella was doing. I prayed that she was not going from apartment to apartment like these Jehovah pests, harassing busy people with Watchtower magazines. I didn’t know what to expect so I was relieved when I got home and saw her by the kitchen table wearing one of my father’s old sweaters. She had a red marker in her hand and scattered before her on the table were copies of the Star and Metro and Caribbean and Indian newspapers. There were even a couple in Chinese writing. “Where you get these, Auntie?”

  “From thes
e boxes by the street corner.” She patted the nearby chair. “Come here and tell me about Canada.”

  “I really don’t know much about the place. I here barely three months.” I tried to think of some excuse to leave. “What exactly you want to know?”

  “Describe Canada for me, Sam.” She closed her eyes.

  “It like a mall.”

  One eye opened. “That is all? Describe the people and take your time.”

  I thought deeply. “It don’t have any albino people here.”

  Which was true. There were four in Mayaro, and a couple in Rio Claro but auntie didn’t seem impressed. “How you could tell for sure?”

  I chose a safer observation. “If you cross the road you could come to a different country.”

  “America?”

  “No, no. Batches of people from some country or the other sticking together.”

  “Like in Trinidad with all the Indian in the central, the Creole in Laventille and the white and them in St Clair?” I didn’t even know that but I nodded. She thought for a while before she asked, “Where you working?”

  “At a gas station.”

  I thought she was going to criticize because in Trinidad that sort of work was only done by uneducated people. Instead she asked, “And you father? Boysie say that he involve in some workman compensation scheme. Scheme, in truth.”

  “I really don’t know, Auntie. We don’t …”

  I felt embarrassed to go further but she said in a suddenly cheerful voice, “He will land straight in hell. With he foot in the air like a dead cockroach.” She burst out in a hymn before she asked, “It true that everybody in this place could get free treatment for any disease?”

  I wondered whether she was sent here because of some horrible disease like leper or Ebola but she then asked about the lottery winners who were pictured in the Star, praising their luck and thanking their gods from Guyana and Hungary and Russia for guiding them to Canada. I knew she was not interested in gambling because in Trinidad she always complained about betting and drinking. Next, she asked about a woman from some electric company who got a million dollars after she was fired. I think she was a little angry that I could not answer any of her questions.

  Early the next morning as I was coming out from the bathroom she glanced at my towel and told me, “I hope you not involve still with this comic book nonsense. Tying your mother good towel on some mangy pothound.” I was surprised she could still remember when I had brought home a stray puppy and tied a red towel around its neck so it would look like Krypto. I was eight or nine then. “Superman-pooperman.” She almost cracked a smile. “Now tell me about these senior bus tours.”

  So it went every day. By the end of the first week, the blue recycling box was completely filled with newspapers, and during that time, Auntie Umbrella had discovered there was a zoo with animals from around the world, an Exhibition place with many activities, a science centre with all sorts of fancy gadgets, ballrooms packed with rich women in fancy clothes dancing, and all sorts of art galleries. In the nights, while I was sleeping on my foam, I would spot her on the balcony gazing at the lights from the CN tower shining in our patch of the city. “It look as if somebody sprinkle jewels all over the place,” she told me one night. “The Lord take his time when he was making Canada.”

  I was sleepy but still alert enough to tell her, “And it is a real safe place in the night too. Old people does be walking around in the parks all the time.” I was tempted to mention the Coffee Time in Parliament Street.

  She took my advice but went out in the days instead, and from then, I heard about the squirrels walking around as if they were not afraid of a single soul, and ducks that were not muddy and nasty like the Trinidadian variety but green and white, and flowers which were a perfect shade of red, and no miserable vines and stray dogs and rubbish all over. I never liked the area close to Regent Park but she seemed to see a balance between the lanes and the boxy apartment buildings and the little parks. “Everything design so nice. A place for everybody.” She made Regent Park seem like one big playground, and I have to admit that on my way to and from work, I started to notice all the things that I didn’t have time to study before. The big greenhouse for flowers in Allan Gardens and all the grassy areas with benches for sleeping people and old people with no shoes. I sometimes varied my route and saw some pretty old houses that where not mashed up and haunted looking and hiding in the back of junked cars and bushes, but well kept like those cartoon gingerbread cottages. I observed how all the buildings in some areas were alike and matching, and that there were no macco big mansion right next to rundown shacks like in Trinidad.

  Eight days after she materialized I felt a rough hand on my shoulder. I was returning from work and when I turned, I saw my father with an old plaid hat and little grey stubbles all over his long face. “She went back as yet?”

  I knew who he was talking about but he made me so nervous that I asked him, “Who?”

  “Who? Who the hell you think I talking about? The Dolly Lama? Or that blasted woman you bring in my apartment without asking for permission? Eh? Your damn hypocrite aunt, that is who.”

  “No. She still there.”

  “When she intend to leave?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t say anything about that.”

  I saw him thinking. He looked a little like a dangerous spy in his hat and long coat. “She brought a lot of luggage?”

  Just for spite I told him, “A lot.”

  “The bitch! What she does be doing all day?”

  “Cleaning the place. Singing. And walking about in the park and watching the squirrels and flowers and ducks. She like the place.”

  He looked at me like if I was mad. After a while he said, “And with that damn umbrella stick up on her head, I sure.”

  Because he didn’t say anything else I asked him, “When you coming back?”

  “When that miserable old Presbyterian leave.”

  “Where you staying?”

  “You is a blasted police inspector or something now?” He walked away with his coat flapping around his legs. I wondered if he was returning to a shelter. Surrounded by chanting molemen.

  If my father was upset about Aunt Umbrella’s visit to Canada, I think the place had the opposite effect on her. She stopped peppering me with questions and even her voice seemed to soften from its flat, criticizing scratch-bottle tone. She bought a broad straw hat and one evening, I noticed a brand-new red umbrella parked next to the couch. I started to get used to her and to tell the truth, I really enjoyed all the cakes and pies and cookies she baked. In Trinidad she would mention bake sales at the church to my mother but I thought this was just a Presbyterian habit. Now, she baked every single day, experimenting with the recipes she cut out from the newspapers. Fish, chicken, eggplant, sweet potatoes, apples, and pears—everything landed up in the oven. It seemed she had come with a good stock of money.

  While the food was baking, she would sit before the television and switch from channel to channel. I thought she might not have approved of all the kissing and cursing and the rude boys and girls on television but while she was watching, she would pull the couch forward until she was just a few inches from the screen. One night she told me, “Look how friendly this politician mister is.” I noticed a fat smiling man making chopping gestures with his hands as he spoke. He looked as if he was wringing a baby’s neck. “And his cheeks so fat and nice. Just like a little child.” The politician was saying something about clamping down on immigrants. “I feel I could just reach over and pinch them up good and proper.” Another night, she frightened me when she mentioned that old people here didn’t hideaway in rockers and settees but went about climbing and exercising and roller-skating. I had this picture of Auntie Umbrella with roller skates on her feet and umbrella on her head, scattering people on all sides. But she was interested in another type of show: those where people were selected to have their houses fixed up for free.

  Listening to her, you woul
d think there were packs of renovating people roaming all over Toronto just looking for people with old houses. “Who would believe that?” She would say over and over as old carpets and cabinets were ripped out and mildewed walls repainted and couches and tables replaced in fast motion. When there were advertisements, she would sing one of her hymns and I had this idea she was picturing the grey Presbyterian Church in Mayaro getting spruced up by muscular men and pretty women with tight jerseys.

  I think these shows encouraged her to fix up the apartment in Regent Park because she bought doilies and vases and glass angels and wire flowers from a dollar store and I would see her sometimes glancing around and scratching her head before she shifted this or that. One night she discovered a channel that fixed up not old houses but ugly people. This show starred a woman who looked like she could frighten away bats but by the time the doctors had scraped her face and dug out a piece of her nose and siphoned out a bucket of nasty fat and capped her teeth, she resembled a movie star. Her boyfriend and family were waiting for her in a big hotel room and when she walked down the steps, everybody began to cry, don’t ask me why.

  “Look at that, eh. Look at that,” Auntie Umbrella said, and I felt she was imagining her church people in Trinidad clapping and bawling as she entered the church fixed up, good and proper, from the top of her flat head straight down to her bandy legs. I don’t think this thought was far off the mark because I soon noticed she began to wear colourful bow clips and would constantly tap back her teeth, which to tell the truth, were sort of pushed out. Whenever she did that, I would remember Mothski the moleman who could fix her up for only forty dollars. But it seemed she had come to Canada with a tidy sum of money because she bought new dresses and shoes and grassy green purses and frilly shawls. “Who would ever know,” she told me one night. “That old people could get such special treatment. Discounts on every side.” She thought for a while and added, “Is the small things that add up to the big picture.” She was happier than I had ever seen her, and one day she surprised me by saying, “Your mother would have liked this place.”