Fatboy Fall Down

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  About ten months after he began his work as a tour guide in the caves, a pack of unruly children was released from a bus. Orbits heard shouting from within. “Everybody make sure you remember the rules. If anybody get lost, they damn well lost for good. Furthermore, if anybody get bite, don’t come running to me but walk out of the cave and look for the bus. And finally, we leaving at three sharp and who not here will spend the night in the cave. The bats will like that.”

  When the teacher from the bus emerged, Orbits recognized him as a student from one of his high schools. He had been in a higher form and had been a relentless bully. He would stand outside the school compound with a group of other boys smoking and sooting the girls. Whenever he saw Orbits, he would say things like, “Run, is a earthquake,” or, “How you does iron you clothes, Fatboy? With a steamroller?” Orbits felt some of the old shame, but the teacher did not recognize him. “You is the guide?” he asked. When Orbits nodded, he fished into his pocket and withdrew a pack of cigarettes. “You better go up with them. I will come later.” He lit a cigarette, inhaled and immediately coughed into his elbow.

  Orbits noticed the teacher’s nicotine-stained teeth and his red stale-drunk eyes. “Okay, but is against the rules to enter the caves without the teacher. We will wait for you on the hill.”

  “Don’t bother with that. You have my permission.”

  “Okay. But I will have to write it up in my report book.”

  “Eh? Report book? What the hell this country coming to now?” The teacher quarrelled with his students the entire time they were in the cave and when the group emerged, Orbits noticed the teacher’s trouser muddy at the knees. He had fallen somewhere inside, and there was a patch of mud on his nose, too. Orbits wondered how he had been so terrified of this person. Some of the other teachers pretended allergies to avoid the muddy descent into the cave and there were times when, remembering how he had been treated at school, he could not help feeling some glee as they emerged from the tunnel miserable and muddy.

  It took a while to adjust to the smattering of respect given to him, and he still felt a kinship to the occasional fat student sulking in a corner, pretending to be allergic to the guano or muddy water or sick from the bus trip. He tried to urge these students and was confused and even irritated by their sturdy defences. During one trip, a girl he had encouraged into the cave emerged in tears. Her hair was streaked with mud. The teacher told her, “Is your fault for going in places that you not suited for. Who tell you to go?”

  “I did,” Orbits said. “We couldn’t leave her by herself out here.”

  The teacher looked Orbits up and down. “I see. You encourage her to go but is I who have to explain to the mother why the little . . . the little thing come back nasty like a hog.” That brought a fresh burst of crying from the girl. Orbits felt all of his old hatred of teachers rising to the surface as he walked towards the bus. He tried to keep this anger in check during other trips. One evening on his way back to the taxi stand he thought of the job at the swamp, where the sky was always blue and clotted with clouds of every shape, and his current job, which obscured everything but the jagged walls and the muddy water. Yet he enjoyed this job far more and once, while he was striding to the taxi stand, he thought that if someone, just two years earlier, had mentioned that he would be sprinting up and down the hill, skipping over boulders, breathing naturally, not wheezing, he would have seen that vision as close to impossible.

  ***

  A year and a half after he began working at the caves, a young female teacher told him, “This is my first excursion, so please help me keep an eye on these students.” Orbits was surprised because even though he had been commanded or tricked into common tasks, no one had requested his help so respectfully. So he spoke to the students firmly and when they strayed too far, he reminded them of water snakes or if they lingered at the end of the tour, he told them that bat guano in large doses was poisonous. “It will stunt your growth to three feet,” he said, repeating a teacher’s warning a month earlier. “And your ears will begin to resemble bat wings.” He added another teacher’s invention.

  While they were walking down the hill, the teacher asked Orbits, “Will that really happen? They will change into bats?”

  “No . . . I was just . . .”

  “I know it’s not true,” she said with a tinkle in her voice. “And thanks so much for the help, Mr. . . .”

  He hesitated for a while before he said, “Orbits.”

  She smiled and stroked her hair. “This country and its nicknames! Even I have a nickname.” They continued walking and she added, “You not going to ask me?”

  “Ask you what?”

  “What is my nickname, silly? Okay, don’t ask. I will tell you.” She leaned closer and whispered, “It’s Miss Teapot.”

  Orbits looked at her. He saw a slim woman with a puckish nose and big eyes in a perfectly framed face. “But you don’t look like a teapot.”

  She giggled. “I should hope not. It’s from a poem I used to recite at school when I was a child. Little children can be such bullies.” Orbits looked at her again; he was struck by her wisdom. She returned his gaze and he looked away. “Why do they call you Orbits?”

  “I wanted to be an astro— wanted to be a pilot.”

  “Oh gosh. That’s amazing. Everyone here seems to have such limited ambitions. A pilot! Goodness.”

  A student shouted, “Miss, hurry up. The bus ready to leave. You could talk to your boyfriend later.”

  “These children!”

  Orbits and Miss Teapot were married fourteen months later. He was twenty-two, one year younger than her. During the courtship, conducted mostly in the cinemas and chicken and chips joints, she spoke of her family, her school, the other teachers, the island and the world outside. She was in constant motion, stroking her hair, leaning forward and backward, rubbing his wrists, laughing at something she had just said, rolling her eyes. Orbits always felt shy during these sessions and he said little.

  But Miss Teapot didn’t seem to notice. In the cinema, she guided his hands to her breasts, pinned her lips against his and forked her tongue into his mouth. She misunderstood his shyness and awkwardness for decorum and once during a movie, she told him, “You just like one of these gunslingers who hardly say a word. Strong and silent and never cracking a single smile. Like John Wayne, who always looks as if he is ready to turn a corner the way he walks. No, not him. He looks like a bully. Maybe Clint Eastwood. My parents will like you for sure.”

  Parents? Later, his tongue felt limp in her mouth.

  Her parents’ house was the last in a lane. It was a light-blue concrete flat with a paved driveway and bordered on both sides by zinnias and petunias and with a lawn that was uniformly cut. Inside the T-shaped structure, there were bedrooms on either side of the living room, which was separated from the dining room with an arch directly above a three-foot partition on which were little curios, delicate looking china dolls and other figurines. The kitchen was partially blocked off with a screen of diamond-shaped crystals. Orbits noticed that the house had been built in a modern fashion with none of the abutting cupboards that came in the way of doors and no electrical wires snaking around plumbing pipes as in the house of his parents. He noticed, too, that the minimalism also applied to the furniture: a couch and a recliner on one end of the living room and on the other end, a desk. At his parents’ house, every inch was choked up with safes, tables, and shelves. Above the desk, he saw three rows of books, all neatly stacked. There were placemats and rectangular pieces of carpet beneath all the furniture and a rug beneath the glass-topped table in the dining room. Remarkably, the interior was of one colour, a pale yellow that made Orbits think of a quiet Mexican villa.

  During his first visit, Miss Teapot told a man who was seated at the desk, reading a newspaper, his glasses low over his face. “Dad, this is the boy.”

  Orbits felt trapped by all
the mats, wondering whether he should step over those that led to the sofa or to the father’s desk. The father glanced up and motioned to a nearby sofa. Orbits sat and prepared himself for questioning, but the father returned to his newspapers. A woman emerged from the kitchen and said, “Teepee said you are the quiet kind so don’t feel you have to make conversation.” She had the same mannerisms as her daughter. “We know everything about you.” Orbits considered what they might know but couldn’t think of anything other than his former life as a fatboy.

  During dinner, served with cutlery and on china plates and cups, mother and daughter chatted about her lesson plans at school and about the students. Orbits was glad the focus was not on him because he was trying to navigate his way around all the tiny bowls of food and properly use his knife and fork. The mother must have noticed because she asked him, “I hope the food is okay. What’s your name again?”

  “Orbits,” Miss Teapot said, and mother and daughter laughed. The father glanced up from his newspaper, which he had brought to the table. He had thin, downturned lips, crinkled like the rim of a broken saucer, and he seemed to be perpetually squinting. “It’s not the food. He is a health nut.”

  “That’s good. There are too many lickrish people in this place. When I was still working, I used to pass this doubles vendor and see all these obese people eating doubles after doubles and licking their wrists clean,” the mother said. “This country is a feeding ground for diabetes.”

  “Eew,” Miss Teapot said. And to Orbits, “Mom was a teacher. Dad, too, but they retired earlier this year.”

  “What work do you do?” the father asked.

  “He is a field guide and researcher,” Miss Teapot said quickly. “He is thinking of opening his own business.”

  “Business?” The father folded his newspapers slowly.

  Orbits could not recall ever mentioning anything about business to Miss Teapot, and he was relieved when the mother asked him about his “studies.”

  “I am doing a few courses,” he said, which was true as Miss Teapot had signed him up for a correspondence course in meteorology, the only thing that caught his fancy in the myriad booklets she had presented him.

  “In meteorology,” she said. “He always wanted to be a pilot.”

  “A pilot, you say. ‘I know that I shall meet my fate / Somewhere among the clouds above.’ It’s a line from Yeats. Have you heard it? Or this: ‘I sweep the skies with fire and steel / My highway is the cloud / I swoop, I soar, aloft I wheel / My engine laughing loud.’”

  “Dad is a true romantic,” Miss Teapot said. “That’s why he hasn’t gotten a phone. Mom is just happy with her books.”

  “My imagination is my carriage,” the father said. “It takes me hither and thither. That is why I surround myself with Russian novels.” He gestured idly to a shelf stacked with books so thick Orbits wondered who would have the patience to read through them. “Pushkin. Dostoevsky. Nabokov.” He pronounced each word with a little flourish at the end as if he was patting these writers on their backs. Everything was strange about this house: the inhabitants, their language, the furniture, the order. Orbits felt completely out of place and was comforted only by Miss Teapot’s ease as if there was nothing unnatural about a stranger finding himself in the middle of this organized cell. At his parents’ home, the dinner conversation was confined to his father’s elaborate descriptions of dentures followed by his mother’s chuckles and her intermittent shouting to Starboy, who always ate in his room. Here, the father continued to talk of his Russian novels. “Pushkin was mixed race. Did you know that?”

  “Everyone knows that, Dad,” Miss Teapot answered in an amused way. “Dad says the most obvious things,” she told Orbits.

  Pushkin sounded like a pet name, maybe for a fluffy cat or a sleepy baby. Come Pusskins, come here for some milk. But Orbits nodded. He continued to nod during the dinner and surprisingly felt a bit sleepy. When he was leaving, Miss Teapot asked him, “So when are we going to meet your parents?”

  Orbits had not planned for nor even thought of this. He went along with Miss Teapot’s invitation to visit her parents only because she had allowed him to feel her up and he had no idea where this was leading or if there was a particular protocol. At that time, marriage or even a permanent relationship was the furthest thing from his mind. “When do you want to come?” he asked, trying to think of some roadblock.

  “Next weekend.”

  “Okay,” he said, but the minute he stepped into the taxi, he felt trapped. He contrasted his parents’ place with the neat house and landscaped yard he had just left. His father had junk all over the place, his mother still treated him as a fat little child, and his horrible brother was always waiting for an opportunity to condemn. What if his father casually took off his dentures during dinner? What if his mother revealed the reason for his nickname? What if his brother just opened his mouth? Over the following days, he tried to think of some way out. These ranged from telling her they were all struck with dengue or some other contagious disease to avoiding her altogether. He realized these were just temporary measures.

  Each day she reminded him of how eager she was to meet his parents, and each day when he got home, his horror grew at what he saw. He tried to clean up the place, adjusting the linoleum to cover the holes on the floor, straightening the safe and the cupboard that jutted out so close to the door he had been forced to pass sideways during his fat period. The day before her visit, he brought doilies that he placed on every piece of furniture.

  His mother asked, “Orbits, you feeling alright? Don’t tell me that you and all hearing voices.” She was referring to the postman who claimed that voices in his head had been directing him to regularly throw the mails into a river. The voices stopped after he received a solid licking from the villagers.

  “Maybe the boy have a little chick that he invite over, Mamoose. A little chickadee,” the father said. “A nice little craft.”

  Starboy’s sarcastic comment about the unlikelihood of a girlfriend was drowned by the mother’s laughter. “A nice roly-poly little girlfriend.” She still made these fat jokes although at that point, Orbits was the slimmest and healthiest in the family.

  “Yes, I invite somebody over so please behave like civilized people for a few hours. Then you could all go back to being savages. Pusskins would be ashamed of you.” They all stood still. His father began to tongue-swish his denture in his mouth as he usually did when he was thinking deeply, and his mother’s mouth was open, but nothing came out. Orbits went into his room and pulled the blanket over his head.

  The next evening in the taxi, he tried to prepare Miss Teapot. His parents were simple and honest, he said. They were frugal and hardworking. Then he changed his mind and said they were always joking. He recalled a word used by her father and said they were addicted to bantering. He tried to think of other plasters, but his family seemed irredeemable. He visualized multiple scenes, each more embarrassing than the other, but when he entered the house he was dumbfounded.

  His father was in his lab coat stained red and green, with his legs crossed, his mother was wearing some kind of wedding gown, and Starboy was in short pants and socks like a tourist. They were arrayed on the sofa as if they were posing for a photograph. Worse was to come: in their effort to appear cultured they had adopted confusing accents that ranged from Indian to Cockney to southern American.

  “It is veddy nice to be meeting you,” the father said. Orbits noticed he was wearing a new chalk-white denture, prominently displayed because of his fixed smile.

  The mother got up and held out her hand limply. “Most pleased to make your acquaintance, I can assure you.” She, too, had a frozen smile that, coupled with her makeup, gave her a corpse-like appearance.

  Thankfully, Starboy remained seated, scowling at nothing in particular.

  “Would y’all care to join us at the table,” the mother said. “It would be
my utmost pleasure.”

  The food, too, was a surprise; instead of oily fried vegetables, the bowls contained wedges of boiled pumpkin and breadfruit, macaroni threaded with sliced meat, and an array of fruits. After each gulp, his father said, “Veddy nice.”

  Miss Teapot, who had been stunned into speechlessness so far, recovered to say, “Wow. This is very good. You must have taken ages to prepare all of this.”

  “It is mah pleasure,” the mother said. “Try some of the soufflah.”

  “And the ghote meat,” the father added. “Veddy nice ghote.”

  Orbits began to feel a slight relief.

  Then Starboy asked, “So I hear you are a teacher. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, at a primary school. Common Entrance class.”

  “Veddy nice.”

  “I think exams are a waste of time. Just rote learning. Does nothing to improve the mind.”

  Orbits knew his brother was being contentious, but Miss Teapot said, “I can see your point. All the students suffer from stress. It’s so competitive, especially among the parents.”

  “I am waiting on my A-level results. The first in the family, but I don’t care if I pass or fail. This country doesn’t respect originality.”

  “What subjects did you take?”

  “Chemistry, biology and physics. Useless.”

  Miss Teapot turned to the mother. “You all must be so proud. Such bright children. One a scientist and the other almost a pilot.”

  The two most frightful scenarios Orbits had imagined were his brother showing off and his father having a denture accident. And that was exactly what happened, but one disaster cancelled out the other. When his father’s denture fell on the table, Miss Teapot began to giggle.

  The father replaced it in his mouth, stretching his lips this way and that and smacking his tongue. “Isn’t that ironic?” Miss Teapot said. “Orbits told me you were a dentist.”