Toby (13 page)

Shortly after two in the morning, a
Toby a Gentleman
segment rotated through a commercial break, and there he was. The man he knew. He cried a little and stopped eating the Fig Newtons and drifted in and out of sleep with the television on. He awoke to the echo of door-knocking and the theme music for the lunchtime news. His neck was sore. He waited for his parents’ footsteps, living room to front door,
but there were none. The knocking continued, so he walked slowly up the stairs.

Through the peephole, he saw Catherine Brassens and Hugo. She was in a red dress, with a white scarf. She wore eye makeup and carried a large bag: a diaper bag. The boy wore a tie-dyed sweatshirt with
Ladykiller,
backwards
r,
in giant white lettering.

“I heard something,” she said to Hugo.

Toby examined himself in the mirror near the door and fluffed up the hair at the top of his head to enhance the illusion of fullness. His suit was in exemplary condition, despite plenty of rolling about on the chesterfield. But Catherine and Hugo had just seen him in it. He rushed downstairs to change out of the Prada and into his Paul Smith, climbed back up the stairs, gathered his breath and his dignity, and opened the door.

“Hello, Catherine. Hugo.”

“It’s super-cool to see you again. Isn’t it, Hugo?” She chewed at a fingernail, and they both looked at the boy. “No one was home at your condominium. This was the only Mushinsky in the Dollard phone book, so I took a chance.”

“And I’m so delighted you did. Would you like to come in for a cup of coffee?”

She asked Hugo. “What do you think?”

The boy said nothing. Something in his little face suggested that he was embarrassed for them both. There was a tiny witch on a broom hanging from a nail near the house number—427—that Edward had not destroyed in his anti-Halloween fury. Hugo reached forward, touched the witch’s hat.

Again the fridge was empty. Toby made coffee and determined, upon tasting it, that he would cart his espresso maker to Dollard from the condo that same evening.

Since the moment he had granted her entrance, Catherine had not stopped talking. A crash on the autoroute, controversial claims about Georges Brassens’s sexuality in the latest biography, this hormone-twisting chemical they had discovered in baby bottles and cans of soda, Hugo’s bum rash, a Québécois hip hop artist she had actually dated in high school, the latest edition of
Tout le monde en parle.
This sort of behaviour was common in the television industry, especially at the end of the day, when staff gathered for drinks. It was usually induced by cocaine, but Toby suspected it also had something to do with profound loneliness. All the while his mother was talking, Hugo swished the milk around in his glass as though it were a rare Bordeaux.

Cod was the last thing Toby wanted to eat for breakfast, but if he didn’t do something with the fish soon, it would pass the smell threshold and devour all of Dollard-des-Ormeaux. He cooked and, along with Hugo, ignored Catherine. Every time Toby turned away from the stove, he made eye contact with the handsome boy and wondered two things: How was it, really, to live with a woman like this? And how would he get rid of them?

He served the food at a quarter to one, and she came to the point. “I was wondering if you could look after Hugo for a couple of hours this afternoon.”

The boy had already started eating. There was a booster pillow on the chair, but even so, the table was level with his chin. Toby had given him the smallest salad fork in the drawer, but it was too big. At least a half of every forkful fell on Hugo’s Ladykiller sweatshirt or on the floor.

“You know, I’d love that. I so would. But I’m helping my mom at her store this afternoon.”

“Why not bring him?”

“It’s a hot dog shop.”

“Kids love hot dogs.” Like every other francophone on the island, she called them hot dogs—
ot dog-uh
—not
chiens chauds.
“Don’t you love hot dogs, Hugo?”

The boy was not deaf. He just preferred not to speak, or look up when addressed, or smile, or play, or anything else Toby accepted as normal behaviour. “Hugo doesn’t talk?”

“He chooses not to.”

“Can you say something for me, Hugo?”

Hugo lifted a salad-fork full of fish to his mouth and sniffed it.

“I like children. I like Hugo. But to be perfectly honest, Catherine, I have no experience as a babysitter. If I weren’t working at my parents’ shop, maybe.”

“You’ll hardly notice him.”

“Who usually looks after Hugo when you aren’t able?”

“Friends. But they were all busy. It’s an opportunity to get to know him.”

Toby had already determined never to see her again. “I’m honoured that you would think of me, Catherine. But I’m sorry. We’re strangers. It’s not at all appropriate.”

“We were strangers a couple of nights ago, but that didn’t stop you from fucking me.”

At the vulgarity, a crucial tendon in Toby’s left hand failed and he dropped his fork on the table. Hugo seemed not to have heard, or to have noticed, the word. The moment she and her son finished their lunch, Toby would ask them to leave. He would, very quietly, suggest to Catherine that she never come back here again. In his deeper regions, where he responded to his own secret emergencies, Toby wanted to
plop the boy in front of a television station devoted to educational cartoons and fuck his mother again.

Catherine began to cry. Her tears had a disastrous effect on her eye makeup, so Toby directed her to the bathroom and returned to the table. Hugo looked longingly in the direction his mother had gone.

“You don’t want to spend the afternoon at a hot dog shop, do you?”

Hugo turned to Toby, blinked.

“I’m a man you don’t know. You’re supposed to avoid people like me.”

The boy had finished all of his fish and most of the risotto.

“You want something more to drink? Water? Another milk?”

A nod, the gentlest and slightest nod in the history of communication, at the word “milk.” So Toby poured half a glass for Hugo, and they sat together in silence until Catherine reappeared.

“I’ll pay you. How about that?”

“No.”

She had not reapplied the makeup. There were faint freckles on the bridge of her nose that he had not yet noticed. “I’ll do anything, Toby. What do you want me to do?”

“To go have a lovely day with your son, I suppose.”

“If he’s not with you, I’ll leave him in the car for two hours. Strapped into his seat. You want that? Maybe he learns how to get out, and he opens the door and runs into traffic. Does that sound like a good idea to you? It sounds monstrous to me. Monstrous.”

The flagship family hot dog shop was tucked into an old neighbourhood corner without ample parking, a relic of 1960s Dollard, when people still used sidewalks. It was clean inside, even after Toby had switched on the fluorescent lights. The white and black menu sign above the counter, first acquired in 1984 with the participation of the RC Cola company, was the only surface of the store that cried out for a mop.

Nahla, a pregnant woman in a plain black dress and a hijab, whispered advice and suggestions to him before she jetted off for her ultrasound. The soda machine was new, and his mother had engaged in some creative cost-cutting measures, so it was fortunate that Nahla had a few minutes to train him. Most other rituals returned immediately, bursting with the sounds, smells, and recollections of his teen years; all those girls he feared and adored with teased-up hair and Calvin Klein perfume who came into Le Chien Chaud for strawberry milkshakes. For the post-lunch afternoon shift, she suggested he pull only ten dogs out of the freezer. Ten seemed scant, a mistake, but Nahla insisted. Toby placed them on the warmer and brewed coffee in a machine Karen had purchased in 1974 from a Baron de Burger that had gone into receivership; the heating coils inside the machine looked as though jackals had been gnawing on them.

Catherine wrote a mini instruction manual on a sheet of paper she had ripped out of her address book. Toby fashioned a small apron out of a tea towel and some duct tape, and handed it to the boy. Hugo held out his hand as though he were receiving a giant insect. It seemed excessive, all the kissing and hugging and baby-talking, but Toby was unfamiliar with the rituals of parenting in the twenty-first century. Catherine planted one on Toby’s mouth and discreetly
grabbed his behind, cried a little bit, and departed. It wasn’t until she was in her car and away that Hugo ran for her.

The boy screamed and jumped at the window, pounded on the glass. When he could not open the heavy door, Hugo threw himself onto the white tile floor and shouted nonsense words, kicked and straightened and rolled. He ripped off his duct-tape apron and tossed it at the wall. Two men in coveralls and workboots entered the store and looked down at Hugo; before Toby could convince them that the tantrum would soon end, they exited again. It was two thirty.

When a moment of silence arrived, Toby offered Hugo some apple juice. The boy eyed it suspiciously, nodded, and sat at one of the four tables with the little plastic bottle and a straw. He slurped occasionally. Toby sat across from him, and they held eye contact much longer than allowed by polite society. This took them to two forty-five.

It was at this point that Toby began to notice the smell. No one had yet entered the store, save for the two men in coveralls, but eventually someone in Dollard-des-Ormeaux would crave a hot dog. According to Catherine’s note, there were diapers and wipes in the bag. There were no further instructions. He waited as long as he could, hoping Catherine might arrive early. But the smell advanced.

“Would you like me to change your diaper?”

Hugo shook his head.

“It’s unhealthy, I would imagine, to sit and stew in it. It doesn’t hurt or chafe?”

Again, he shook his head.

“Do you do it on the floor or what?”

Hugo looked out the window. “
Maman.
”

“She’ll be back soon, but not soon enough, I’m afraid.” Toby worried that the moment he stepped into the washroom with the boy, a rush of hungry teenagers would walk into the shop. Or worse, the health inspector. He phoned home to see if Edward and Karen had returned. They had not.

The public washroom in Le Chien Chaud was equipped with a changing table that unfolded from the wall. Toby propped the door open for psychological access to the outside world. “Are you ready?”

Hugo shook his head.

“I don’t really know how to do this. So let’s be a team. If I do something wrong, let me know, please?”

The boy ran out of the washroom and into the restaurant, where he hugged a garbage can. It took several minutes to extract him from the can, as Toby worked through a number of strategies: asking, then begging, then gently pulling, then less gently pulling, then yanking. He carted Hugo to the moulded plastic table in the washroom and made certain the boy was steady. To take Hugo’s attention off the unpleasantness, Toby pulled a plush panda out of the diaper bag and bestowed it upon him. Hugo hugged the panda and looked vacantly up at the fluorescent lights of the men’s washroom.

“I’m going to take off your pants now, is that all right?”

No response, so Toby removed them. Winnie the Pooh and Tigger were imprinted on the front of the diaper, having a hell of a time with some bees. It lent an atmosphere of levity to the proceedings.

“It can’t be so bad, right, if Winnie the Pooh’s involved?”

Hugo swallowed.

Toby unfastened the first of the Velcro strips, and the smell roared through him. He endeavoured to breathe
through his mouth, but the knowledge that he was inhaling the smell unfiltered was fouler than the odour itself. Toby abandoned the boy on the table for a moment as he walked in a circle to psych himself up, a boxer who knew he was outmatched by the fiend in the ring.

The bells above the front door sounded, and a woman in a beige trench coat walked into the shop. Toby caught only a glimpse of her as she walked straight to the counter. “
Un instant, s’il vous plaît,
” Toby shouted. “I’ll be right there.”

One had to move swiftly. Toby unfastened the other side of the diaper, and it opened heavily, with an amount of shit that seemed more fitting of a grizzly bear than a two-year-old boy. Hugo shifted up on the change table, to perform some feat with the panda, and a portion of the warm shit rolled out of the diaper and into Toby’s hand. Toby unconsciously flicked it out of his hand and, briefly, onto his Paul Smith pants. “No!” he shouted, startling Hugo, who turned onto his front and struggled to his feet. The Lady Killer sweatshirt dangled to its natural length, touching the chunks that had attached themselves to the boy’s bottom. Toby lifted the boy off the table and onto the floor while he washed his hands, splashed water on his pants, and gagged in the sink. Hugo scampered out the washroom door. “No, Hugo!”

Toby caught up with the boy in front of the condiment station, busily cleaning himself with the panda.

The woman in the trench coat leaned on the counter as though Hugo were a grenade that might go off at any moment. She wore plastic-framed eyeglasses with a beaded strap, in case she wanted to take them off and let them dangle.

“I’m sorry, Madame,” he said. “This isn’t at all normal.”

“No,” she said.

“Do you have children?”

“No.”

“I’ll serve you in just a moment. I do appreciate your patience.”

It was three fifteen. Toby decided that as soon as Catherine arrived to pick up her son, he would attack her with the shitty panda. He spoke sweetly to the boy, who valiantly tried to escape. Toby carried him back into the washroom, closed the door, and removed all of his clothes. The dirty diaper lay on the corner of the change table, threatening to fall off, so Toby snatched it up and, without thinking, tossed it into the toilet. While Toby filled the sink with warm water, Hugo stopped crying long enough to pull the flush handle.

“No!”

“No!” said Hugo.

Toby lowered the boy into the sink water and splashed the shit off him. Hugo kicked at first and then settled in, defeated. It seemed unhygienic to allow the boy to rest in the water, as he was immediately surrounded by floating debris. So Toby unstopped the water, let it drain, and repeated the process three times. Then he held Hugo under the hand dryer, which was at first funny to the boy and then a form of torture. The pants had escaped shitless and there was, luckily, an extra shirt in the diaper bag.