The Amazing Absorbing Boy (6 page)

“How much?”

“I will calculate.” There was a screeching sound as if he was adding with his nail on a wall. “It is forty dollars. You bring it to me.”

I thought it would be much more than forty dollars. “Where you want me to drop it off?”

“Not drop off. Bring, bring. You understand? To same coffee shop where I give you.”

“You didn’t give me anything.”

“Father, son. Same thing. It is your duty.” He seemed angry so I did not interrupt him while he gave me the directions to his coffee shop in Parliament Street.

I was to meet him at noon so I went early to the food bank and got the biggest tins I could find. It took a while to locate the coffee shop even though it was within walking distance from Regent Park and before I entered I scanned the customers. There were just a couple old-timers seated around a table, and sitting by himself, another old man with a Wilson
hat and a greyish coat. I walked in, hoping that Bane had changed his mind. The group of old men glanced at me and returned to their staring at each other. I chose a table with my back safely against the wall. The man with the hat came across and pulled a chair next to me. He placed a tightly wound package on the table. I was about to tell him that I was waiting on someone when he asked if I had the money.

I was astonished. I was expecting a murderer, a Cossack, Bane, but this slight old man seated next to me resembled a dry, dusty moth. He was wearing glasses big enough to be goggles and behind it his eyes seemed real squinty. His voice seemed different too—although this could be just because of how safe he looked. He told me his name, which was very long but ended in “-ski.” I wondered if I should hand over the money to this harmless Mothski man. He noticed me staring at his package and said, “Teeth. I make for woman from Sri Lanka. Big, long teeth.” He measured the size with his thumb and forefinger. “Some prefer big teeth. Sri Lanka, Somali people. Some prefer small. It is their choice. Big one, small one, same price.”

“You are a dentist?”

“What else you expect me to be? Zookeeper?

I thought about mentioning a Cossack but instead I asked him, “You made some teeth for my father then?”

“Not some. One. Some cost plenty money. One cost forty. You have?”

When I gave him the money he took off his hat and pushed the bills into one of its inner folds. He replaced the hat on his head. “Now I buy you coffee.” He shouted to a pretty
orangeish girl clearing a table. The girl came over, frowning, maybe at his rude voice. “Two coffee. One for me and one for my friend here.” She looked at me and I noticed how big and nice her eyes were. When she went to get the coffee he told me, “Very pretty. You like?”

“Yes, she is pretty.”

“She remind?” I didn’t know what he was saying until he repeated the sentence.

I almost mentioned Rita from Mayaro Composite but didn’t want to get too friendly with this Mothski so I shook my head. He laughed, making a greasy, whirring sound, and revealed that when he was younger he had many girlfriends. He made teeth for their mothers and fathers back in Bulgaria. “I go to their house,” he told me. “And only when parents are dizzy on chair I make my move.” The girl brought across the coffee. He drank slowly with a slurping sound I always hated. “You make move on turkey girl?”

She didn’t look like a turkey one bit. Just the opposite. Maybe a peacock girl. I remained quiet.

“I tell you something.” He dragged his chair closer to me. “If you don’t try then you never know. Free advice.”

I tried to change the subject. “So you make false teeth?”

He looked at me sternly and I felt he was going to slip into his Cossack voice. “Open your mouth. Let me see.” I pulled away because he was clutching at my face with his nasty fingers but it was too late.

I managed to force out, “Don’t do that.” His grasp was strong and I felt his thumb digging into my cheek. The old
people from the other table were staring at us, but blankly, like cows.

He twisted my mouth open. “Nothing spoil as yet.” He bent a bit to get a better view and I slapped away his hand. I could still feel the imprint of his thumb. I noticed the orangeish girl staring with her wide eyes and I felt ashamed for having submitted to this slight Mothski man. Maybe I should stand up and pelt some good curses on him. Insult him upside down. “Many people report me,” he said sadly. “They say I practise without licence. Not a real teeth-doctor.” He said something that sounded like “zebo-lekar.” “But it is … how do you say it … is service for poor people. People from different place who come here. I feel so happy when I see somebody from far away. Rotten teeth. Bleeding gum. Loose molars. Bad filling. Stinky breath. Like if bomb explode inside mouth. I want to fix everything and make new. Like artist. My wife was artist too. I proposed with her father strapped tight on my chair.” He took his package from the table and got up. “But that is past tense now. Now I live byself.” I saw him blinking behind his goggles as if he wanted me to feel sorry for him but I felt he deserved all his bad luck. “My sons, they all disappear.”

“Maybe you treated them badly.” Don’t ask why this slipped out but Mothski glanced at me for a good minute or so. Finally he got up.

“I go now. But one more free pound of advice. You must make move on girl soon. You are good boy but if you not change in hurry then gifts just pass by, whoosh-whoosh.” As I watched
him shuffling out from the coffee shop in his goggles and hat, his body bent, I realized he was a moleman. Mothski the moleman. I remained in the coffee shop for another half an hour, trying to digest how this situation had turned out and what it could teach me about my new country, Canada. Every now and again the group in the nearby table would glance in their unfocused old people manner to my direction but I felt that they were looking past me, maybe at the dirty wallpaper.

My father showed up at the end of the week. That same night while he was watching
MacGyver
, I told him, “I paid the dentist for the teeth.”

He remained silent but I saw his toes twitching, a sign he was thinking. MacGyver was building a beeping aerial so that he and a woman could escape from a booby-trapped field and when my father said, “Is this sort of assness that does cause problems in this place,” I wasn’t sure if he talking to them or to me.

A
lthough I continued going to the Coffee Time at Parliament-Street I never saw Mothski again. Most likely, he was busy frightening some poor victim with his Cossack talk. I liked the coffee shop though, because it was usually empty except for the old-timers who mostly stared at each other and coughed and read the
Toronto Sun
. Every now and again they gazed sleepily at the tight-jeans girls who carried their purchases outside to chat and smoke in little groups. Once the orangeish girl caught me staring at a group and she looked a little angry, which gave me the idea that maybe she was jealous. Even though I never talked with her, just the idea that there was a pretty girl close-by, who was my age, gave me a nice feeling. Off and on, I would imagine that I was sitting on one of the wooden stools in Mrs. Bango’s parlour or the dry goods store that was hooked up to a rumshop, and that the old-timers were fishermen who had just returned with their catch of moonshine and kingfish
and bonito, and instead of drinking coffee and staring at the
Sun
, they were sipping Puncheon rum and quarrelling about some alderman who never returned after the elections in spite of all the bribes they sent his way. Talking and listening and never removing the cigarette from their mouths.

Here, most of the old people ate rice puddings and drank soup with trembling spoons and nearly dead lips. There was a telephone nearby and mostly black men would come in to make calls, waving their arms and sometimes glancing at me surrounded by old-timers. Maybe they were wondering what I was doing there with all these people with brown spots on their pink faces. I pretended I was staring at the faded wall pictures of men with hockey costumes and sticks and masks posing like comic book warriors, or at the old clock that was stuck at three o’clock. Every evening a moleman came in and he too would gaze at the clock as he sipped his coffee. This moleman was neither white, black nor brown and I put him down as a
cocopanyol
, a mixture of everything. A few times I thought I should go over and talk with him but he was always concentrating so hard on the clock that I felt he might be mad. Sometimes when I glanced at the orangeish girl with her nice jewellery I would wonder how she might decorate the place if she was allowed to. It might be yellow and pink and orange instead of plain cream colour. She might have a picture of her father and mother smiling with each other just above the counter.

Twice a week, I would head for the food bank. My father, when he was around, never asked where the food had come from and I never bothered explaining. Maybe he felt I had
bought it with Uncle Boysie’s money but one night he asked me, “You working as yet?” and when I said I wasn’t he added, “I see,” in his mocking voice. A couple days later he asked where I disappeared to every evening and I remained quiet because the coffee shop was my own little secret.

Although the old-timers never talked with me, just being around the same familiar faces every day removed some of my loneliness. But one day, one of the group, a man of about sixty with a big head, which looked like that of Christopher Plummer from
The Sound of Music
, said something to me in a strange language. He had never spoken with me before and I felt it was to show off to the pretty oldish lady at his side. I had never seen her there before and now the Christopher Plummer man was in a happy mood, laughing and waving around his hands as he spoke.

From then on, she was with him every evening. He began to seem slightly out of place in the gloomy group, but he would wave to me and he would say, “Yaksha mash,” or “Ko-me-chi-wa.” Though I didn’t understand what he was saying to me, his friendliness told me these were greetings of some sort, and I returned them in the Trinidadian fashion by nodding my head quickly, once. And the small pretty lady would pull at his sleeve and tell him that some day he would get into trouble for striking up conversations with perfect strangers. But she always said this loudly and with a mischievous smile, as if she was enjoying my confusion.

Soon, the Christopher Plummer man began dressing like a
saga boy
, with burgundy and navy blue coats and brown
leather jackets and medallions around his neck, maybe to match the lady who favoured these light green and yellowish pants. They seemed so different from all the old people I had ever known, not only because of their stylish clothing but also in the way they held hands and seemed not to have a single worry in the world. Sometimes I would play my old game and place them in a Trinidadian setting and I would imagine everyone staring and
mauvais-languing
this grandparent couple for carrying on like carefree teenagers. Me, I was just happy to bounce up a happy face every now and again, especially after the sourness in my father’s apartment.

“So where are you from?” he asked about a week after the nice-looking lady showed up. I think this was the first English statement he made to me but before I could answer, he looked at the lady and added, “Wait a minute, let me guess.” She glanced from him to me, smiling. “India?”

“No.”

“Iran?”

I shook my head and felt some of my shyness stripping off with this game of his. I was surprised that the other old-timers just continued staring at the Sunshine Girls in the newspapers. In Trinidad, they would have joined in the game even if they didn’t understand what was going on.

“Are you sure? I had a friend from Iran who looked exactly like you. Could it be Pakistan or Afghanistan?”

“Trinidad,” I told him.

“I was wrong by just a few thousand miles, dear,” he told the lady. “And I think I know why. He’s never spoken to us.
Why don’t you say something for us in Trinidadianese.” The lady whispered into his ear and he asked me, “Is bashfulness a Trinidadian trait?” I didn’t tell him that over there, bashfulness was viewed as a kind of sly weakness. A cover up for some shameful secret. Or worse, a sign of pride that was an even worse vice.
Now
, the old-timers seemed interested and they stared at me as if I had crawled out from a nearby hole. One of them, a short man with a red cap and a nose that resembled a big spreading yam, snorted directly at me. “Just the opposite,” I told them. “Everybody like
bacchanal
there.” The Plummer man leaned towards the lady and they both stared at me for a good minute or two.

While I was walking back to Regent Park on that cool day in April, I wondered for the first time how all these people on the street and in the subway I was always watching, saw
me
. A couple with a pram gave me the usual one-second glance. Same with a woman who peeked up from her book, and I wondered if she had made an assessment in just one second. But how could this be? How could all of them notice my clothes and shoes and expression so quickly? Unless these things were not important. In Trinidad the glances were long and questioning; they were like the silent beginning of a conversation.