The Amazing Absorbing Boy (13 page)

Sitting with her on the streetcar, her eyes opening each time the vehicle stopped, I prayed that my father would be away. As we walked towards the apartment, I was suddenly struck by this dangerous thing I was doing. I opened the door nervously and saw an empty plate on the kitchen table and a
Popular Mechanics
magazine on the couch before the television. The balcony door was closed which meant that he was not outside, smoking. Canella went to the washroom and for a moment, I had this dreadful thought that my father
might be in there. When she returned, she took off her coat, placed it on the kitchen table, and walked over to the couch. She laid back her head and closed her eyes. As I sat next to her I noticed her breasts poking out from behind her shirt. She made a little tired sound and slid her head onto my shoulder. Some of my tipsiness returned—or maybe it was nervousness—and I played with the collar of her shirt and its top button. She placed her hand over mine and once more squeezed my fingers. But I was determined to get to her breasts and I loosened the button and slipped my hand down. I felt her hands over mine guiding me. Her skin felt soft and slightly oily, or maybe silky and from the dim balcony light, it seemed really pale. It was strange then that I should remember Paula who was two years older than everyone from our fourth form. She had showed me her breasts while we were walking home from a school bazaar but laughed and ran away when I tried to stroke them.

When Canella suddenly stiffened, I thought I had reached that point with her, too. “Stop,” she told me in a quiet voice and when I glanced up at her I saw her staring at the door. I turned around. The door was open and it took a while before I saw the shadow of my father framed against the doorway. I froze. Canella buttoned her blouse and slid upright. I wondered how long he had been standing there, gazing at us. Without saying a word, he went to his room.

Canella got her coat and in the hall she walked with long strides. On our way to the streetcar, I spotted the old man and his genie sitting together on a bench in the park.
Canella didn’t speak for the entire five minutes it took for us to get to the streetcar but at its entrance she held my hands, looked at my face, and pulled me towards her. She told me softly, “We are always hostile to those who reflect our weaknesses.” Then she walked away. On my way back, I wondered if she was talking about my father, or me, or her dwarf from Florence or her Lebanese poet. Or herself. On my way back, as I passed the genie, I heard his handler saying in his mocking voice, “This is the new way. Always games and foolishness,” and the genie cackling and saying, “
Phoolish-ness
.”

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:

I
t 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 these 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.