Fatboy Fall Down

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  Orbits appreciated the fact that Wally treated him as an equal, but more than this, he had opened a window into town life. He spoke about the time when the Americans had a military base in the island, and he pointed out the roads built by the soldiers who had visited whorehouses that were still in operation. “The things the people build here tell we what they intentions was. The French and Spanish build with wood but the British use stone and concrete. They was here to stay.” Another day he said, “The British people build roads to avoid the mountain but the Americans cut through everything toute baghai. That is they style.” He had the habit of talking about events in the island’s past, when it was controlled by the French or the Spanish, as if these had happened just as recently as the battle between two women to lead the opposition party or the comment from the prime minister that who didn’t like what he was doing should leave for some other island. In this way, the history of the place, stirred with current rumours and commesse, seemed alive and completely the opposite of the lessons Orbits had done at school. And Wally spoke to him as a confidante, revealing information that was transformed by the rum and the smoky rooms into secrets that went beyond their jobs, beyond the island, beyond the century even. One afternoon, Orbits told Wally, “You know, if these miserable teachers didn’t only expect us to remember dates and names, maybe I would have passed my history exam.”

  “Believe it or not, it was my favourite subject. I was always interested in how my people manage to come down here. People from every corner of the earth land in this little place. Some with chains, some with guns and all with ghosts. What about you?”

  Not knowing how to respond, not wanting to reveal thoughts like these had never entered his mind, Orbits said, “I have enough trouble with my own parents to go so far back.”

  Wally, sensing his awkwardness, said in a boisterous voice, “The War of Captain Jenkins’ Ear. You ever hear about that one?”

  “A war about somebody ears? You joking.”

  Frequently Wally’s conversations shifted to even more impenetrable topics, about books he had read in his youth, the music he had compiled, the films he had seen. When he drifted to these topics, Orbits imagined he was taking a crash course in everything that was foreign to him. From time to time, he thought back to his teenage years, to the time when all he could think of was surviving.

  In the evenings when he got home, his head still spinning from the rum and the stories, he would tell his wife, “You ever listen to this fella Mussolini? I looking for his album all over the city.” Or, “The problem with this place is everybody listening to one kind of music. What kind of culture is that?” His wife listened quietly to Wally’s recycled comments, she smelled the rum and noticed Orbits’ red eyes, but she said nothing even when her husband mispronounced a name or mistook Mussolini for Mantovani or talked about a singing quartet he called the Beatlejuices. If Orbits had been sober during these periods, he would have noticed, over the months, the shift in his wife’s reactions from minor amusement to a frayed patience that gradually gave way to outright frustration. Finally, there was just indifference. But denied any kind of friendship for so long, he revelled in the conspiratorial tones that Wally used in the smoky rumshops surrounded by strangers. Once, while he was listening to Wally explain the differences between town and country politicians, both equally corrupt — the former looking only for solid cash and the latter for favours for his family — Orbits wondered once more if Wally had also been bullied at school. Yet he showed no scars, no signs of ever having been humiliated, no self-consciousness about his appetite. He wished he could be like that. Every once in a while, on his way home, his tipsiness giving him a languid optimism, he felt as if Wally’s confidence had wiped away some of the shame that had marked most of his youth. Maybe the teachers had not been as oppressive as he recalled, or the other students as cruel. Perhaps, too, he had misjudged his mother’s affection only for his younger brother. In this way, he felt that his association with Wally was helping him to reassess and readjust his life. The visits to the rumshops grew from weekly to every other day.

  One evening, a little over a year after he began the job, Orbits’ daughter said, “Daddy belly looking big.”

  “That is because I working with the government, Dee. All government workers have big bellies. It’s the law.”

  “Why mummy belly not big then?”

  “Because . . . you better ask her yourself.”

  The mother told the girl, “If you go to sleep early tonight, me and you and grandma will go to the mall tomorrow. Okay?”

  But Orbits persisted. “Ask your mummy, Dee. Ask her.”

  She slammed shut her book and took the girl’s hand. “Because I don’t come home every evening smelling of rum and pork and nasty food and talking nonsense about things I don’t understand.” She turned to her daughter. “Do you want to go to grandma? She will read you a story.”

  Orbits felt his wife was pushing him aside. He asked her, “That is true, girl? I does really be talking nonsense about things I don’t understand?”

  He had asked the question in a jocular manner that at one time would have provoked some amusing rejoinder from his wife, but she remained serious. “Look, Orbits, you have your life to live and I have mine.”

  “What you mean by that?” he asked, sitting on the end of the bed

  “Nothing. Don’t bother.”

  He asked the question louder, his jocular tone gone. She got up from her desk and stood over him. “Everything I do is with my parents and my child. You are always missing. I might as well be a single mother.”

  “That is what you want?” he asked quietly.

  “Never mind.”

  “Never mind?” He felt his temper, roused by the rum he had consumed a few hours earlier, rising and he tried to adopt a joking tone so she would not suspect. “I going to get send to detention now? Or penance on the blackboard? Eh, Dee? Ask your mother.”

  Now his wife turned from her folders. “Ask him, Dee . . . ask him what is his intention.”

  “Ask her what she mean by intention, Dee. Intention about what?”

  Now she faced him directly. “About everything. What is it you want from your family? From yourself?”

  He began to lose control. It sounded like one of her lesson plans. This is what I have become, he thought. A part of her syllabus. A hollow thing with no life. He told her, “I happy with anything that fall in my lap.”

  “And that is it?”

  “What the hell you expect me to say?” He was startled by his voice and the fright in his daughter’s eyes. She began to cry. “I can’t predict the future,” he said softly.

  The next day at work, chatting with Wally, sipping rum in a restaurant, the light low and the fan creaking steadily, the aroma of meaty soups wafting from the kitchen, his argument with his wife seemed removed; it could have happened to some other person, maybe one of the other customers or a passenger, a man or woman on the bus who discussed marital problems with no inhibitions. Yet, the moment he got home and saw his wife, distant, her shoulders hunched, her head over her books, her annoyance visible only from her measured breathing, his own defences went up.

  In the nights after the drunkenness had gone and he was awake on the bed, turned away from the desk, he felt like an appendage, like the tadpole tails that had dropped off in the teacher’s experiment. In the mornings, he left before his wife, no goodbye kisses now, no little flirtations. He tried to stabilize himself by counting his footsteps to the bus stop, but the minute he got on board and noticed the always-inquisitive faces of the other passengers, he felt they knew that he had been rushed, tricked and trapped into marriage. “I didn’t know I got married until after the wedding.”

  The man sitting next to him nodded his head sadly, and Orbits realized he had spoken aloud. “I see something on a gravestone just like that,” the man said. “About a woman.” Orbits guessed the man
was referring to the epitaph he had seen on his honeymoon. Yet at intervals, he saw himself more clearly, and he would wonder if the other passengers were also noticing this man who, always expecting rejection, was forever preparing for it. Then the blame shifted from his wife and her parents to his mother, his teachers, his taunting schoolmates, to himself.

  In the afternoons and evenings, when Wally spoke of important government officials and the transfer of funds between permanent secretaries and of his family who had fled to Canada, Orbits saw his own problems as inconsequential and temporary, but his wife’s question remained with him, resurrected the minute his tipsiness shifted into a dull reflectiveness. During one session, Wally mentioned his relatives’ idea that he should migrate to Canada. “What I will do in that cold place?” Wally asked. “With nobody understanding my accent I will be roaming from one end to the next like a madman.” Orbits had laughed at Wally’s lugubrious description, but on the bus, he tried to imagine his own future and could think of nothing specific. When Starboy was about fourteen or so he had announced he was going to build a raft to sail around the world. “Kon-tiki-tiki-tiki,” their mother had said as if his brother were still a baby. Orbits’ fantasies were punctured more disdainfully. He recalled an essay his teacher had given the class when he was in primary school. The students were asked to write about their imagined lives as adults. Orbits had written about a thin and successful man who had dedicated his life to helping poor people.

  He had been surprised when the teacher asked him to read the essay before the class. But two paragraphs down, he heard the snickers of the boys in the front row. He stopped and looked at the teacher, who had a meditative look, before he continued. The laughter grew louder. At the final paragraph, Orbits felt like crying, but he continued to read. “In conclusion, I will help everyone who come to me for help. All the chimney sweepers and orphans and children with leper.”

  The teacher had scrambled him. “You will help the chimney sweepers, Mr. Dickens?” Slap. “How much you see around here?” Slap. “Orphan, Mr. Mark Twain? And children with lepers?” All of them in Chacachacare. How much lepery children you see here?” Slap. The teacher had stopped only when a girl pointed at Orbits’ pants and held her hand against her mouth. “Go and clean yourself, Mr. Tommy Lee Jones,” he shouted, using the name Orbits had adopted in the essay.

  Orbits was humiliated by the memory, and he looked around the bus nervously. He tried to recall if he had cried during the episode. “I never cry,” he muttered to himself, and suddenly he saw the abuse as funny. “Fatboy fall down but he didn’t shed a single tear.” He decided he would relate the episode to his wife. Let her know what he had had to undergo. He had survived and now he had a wife, a daughter, and a respectable job. He had answered her question almost two decades earlier in an essay. But by the time he dropped off, the tipsy notion of redemption had begun to fade. He walked quickly to his wife’s house. He related the episode to her. He made the teacher more tyrannical and his own stoicism more heroic. He omitted the shame of peeing his pants. He added breezy dialogue; he made himself Tommy Lee Jones. His wife was not impressed. She continued marking her papers. “Hello. You didn’t hear what I just say?” he asked her.

  “And I am supposed to be impressed? How long ago was that? And what happened in the interim?”

  “Interim? A big word. A very big word.” Dee was asleep, so he had to speak to her directly. “Almost as big as . . .” He tried to think of a word. “As petty. No, that too small. As malcontent.” His mood began to shift as he sensed the ridiculousness of his behaviour; the word he had picked up from Wally and was not even sure of its meaning.

  Her eyes were flashing, so Orbits was surprised when she began to sniffle. He rose from the bed and hugged her. He took her to the bed and there they made love for the last time. In the years to come, he invented more amenable versions of this final bit of intimacy, but for a long time, he only recalled her unmoving body beneath his and her eyes cold and unblinking.

  The following day he told Wally, “Me and the madam going through a rough patch.”

  “Well, boy, I always say that love is like a nice peaceful sleep and that marriage is the alarm clock.” Orbits laughed, and he noticed the other male employee listening in an irritated manner. Later in a restaurant, Wally divided the nip of rum into two glasses and said, “They say marriage is a process of discovery, but the real discovery is about the kind of man or woman the other party would have preferred.”

  Wally, speaking like this, trivialized the issue, and Orbits felt his domestic situation was just a temporary rift that would in time set itself right, but at home, the breach seemed to widen each day. On his way from work, tipsy from the rum, he considered ways he could ameliorate the situation, but by the time he had arrived at the house, he felt that apologizing would be an admission of wrongdoing. As far as he was concerned, the fault lay elsewhere. It was his wife who had refused to move out, who ganged up with her parents, who cut him out of her life. So he walked into the house shackled with an undefinable rage. Sometimes he imagined he was living several lives at once, and he wondered whether jumping from dread to anger to guilt to a pinprick of pleasure was normal. Yet at other times, he felt he was a bystander helplessly watching events unfold. He began to be plagued by dreams of his brother flailing in a pond, trapped on the upper floor of a burning building, bleeding from bullet wounds. And always he was on the sideline watching. Paralyzed.

  ***

  As he had done in the past, he sought comfort from food, and by the time he moved out, after nearly eight months of silence between him and his wife, he was close to Wally’s size. He had never expected to return to his parents’ place, and apart from his last years, when he moved to a place about which he had always fantasized, he spent the rest of his life in the house where he had grown up. During those eight months of silence, he knew it was just weakness that was keeping him in place. Weakness and the frail hope that magically he and his wife would remember what they had liked about each other. To this end, he summoned images like those of the night he had run all the way to the hospital, but that memory came hitched to the recollection of his in-laws’ impatience and intransigence. Every single memory was burdened with another, and one day at work he told Wally he was leaving early. “A little emergency,” he told his boss, who spread his hands and crossed his legs tragically like a fat Charlie Chaplin. That afternoon, he travelled around for three hours, perhaps hoping he would have a moment of lucidity when everything would make sense and the world would right itself. By the time he arrived at his in-laws’ place, he had resigned himself to the only option available.

  In the village, a husband’s abandonment of his wife, or, more commonly, a wife’s hasty departure, was always a scene of bacchanal. There were curses, threats, recriminations, and unabashed crying. Neighbours came out and took sides. Intermittently, there were open scuffles. Orbits’ departure had none of this drama: while he was packing his clothes into two suitcases, his wife was at her desk, papers before her, a red marker in her hand. When he walked out of the room with the suitcases, his father-in-law did not look up from his book, nor did his mother-in-law emerge from the kitchen. He felt a faint hope when, on the porch, he heard his wife saying, “Dee, go and tell your daddy goodbye.”

  His daughter had been in the yard, under a cherry tree, pretending to have a picnic with her dolls. He scooped up his daughter. “What you have inside there?” she asked, pointing to the suitcases on the ground.

  “Nothing much. Just some old clothes.”

  “Mummy buy new clothes. For me too. You want to see them?”

  “No, Dee. Some other time. Daddy have to go now.”

  “To work? But it getting dark.”

  “Yes, it getting dark.” He put down his daughter and glanced at the bedroom to see if the curtain had shifted. Instead he heard a low humming, one of his wife’s favourite songs. As he walked away from the house, with e
ach step he felt the lifelessness of the last hours falling away, so that by the time he reached the junction he had to compose himself before he opened the taxi’s door. Instinctively he looked up at the sky. In the twilight, the wavy clouds appeared iridescent, and he imagined that if he were twenty years younger, he would pretend there was a big fete somewhere beyond with firecrackers and strobe lights and women with gauzy tinsel dresses dancing with men who grew transparent the further away they moved from their partners. A term from his meteorological course came to him: polar stratospheric clouds, a phenomenon that only occurred thousands of miles away. In the car, he continued gazing up until the sun sank and the sky went pitch black. He thought of the composed wife and the innocent child and the impassive in-laws he had left behind, and one clear thought burst through his despair: how do these people manage to live such orderly lives?

  ***

  All his old fears resurfaced when he moved back. On the first night, sleeping in his old room, he thought: Nothing has changed. I am back where I began. Fat and useless. Chimney sweep. Slap. Lepers. Slap. Fatboy fall down. Hahaha. This is my life. I was a fool to expect anything more. But this self-pity melted over the following weeks as he realized it was not the same; he now had a job, a friend, and his mother’s attention was not directed elsewhere. Her fascination with the evangelical churches had come to an end — the pastor accused of molestation, beaten and duly driven out to another village — and now she was home or in her backyard garden, her new project, for most of the day. But she still spoke in the slightly demented manner of someone clinging to a shifting and insubstantial optimism. She was overjoyed that Orbits had returned, and she claimed that she had anticipated this event down to the date. She brought out vegetables from her garden and packed containers of chicken and rice for his work each morning. In the nights when he returned, his parents would be asleep and the table laden with covered dishes.