Fatboy Fall Down Read online

  He knew this was not the true extent of the island. There were shanty towns and settlements of squatters from other islands, places that were dirty and filled with vagrants and drug dealers talking in the slang of religious men, but travelling in the maxis and seeing everything through the eyes of the tourists, hearing it being described in such an unfamiliar — and unexpected — manner, gave him a new appreciation of the place. The foreigners were always saying things like, “Wow, the ocean is so green,” or “The light adds so many different shades to the forest.” He had actually passed some of these places before and had noticed nothing. He began to view villages like the one in which he grew up, with their old, crumbling houses renovated so erratically that the parts never matched, as romantic and the confusion of flowers and shrubs that surrounded these houses as exotic.

  One day the vehicle passed his old house. The front door was shut, as were all the windows. In the evening when he got home, he saw his wife on the couch and her mother sitting next to her. “Your wife needs you,” the older woman said sternly and disappeared into the kitchen.

  He sat and asked, in what he hoped was a concerned voice, “What happened?”

  “You are never here again.”

  “It’s my work and—”

  “Now I need you more than ever.”

  “I thought you wanted to spend more time with your mother.” He knew this sounded silly, and he glanced up to see his father-in-law glaring at him. Old man, what the ass you looking at? he thought. You have nothing better to do all day than sit by that desk with a newspaper or a book you pretending to read? “Is everything ok?”

  She began to cry, small sobs that sounded like breathless chuckles. He wasn’t sure about the protocol for comforting a crying person, so he wiped his own eyes and issued a few sniffles. He thought of how often he had cried at school after being bullied. The memory shattered his decision to never show this weakness again, to withhold all his tears, and he broke down and began to sob louder than his wife.

  In the end, it was she who had to comfort him. “Don’t worry,” she told him in the bedroom. “Just now the baby will arrive and it all be over. Hush, hush.”

  But the tears wouldn’t stop. “I will make sure I here when the baby come,” he promised.

  But he missed everything.

  Two weeks after his breakdown, Baby Rabbit came to his office and told him, “Your father called from the station and left a message. Is better you go now.” On his way there, he debated whether his mother had fallen ill or word had gotten around of his malingering all across the country while his pregnant wife was alone at home. It was neither: when he got there, he saw a crowd gathered on the porch. He heard a sound, a low wailing ululation that sounded at once like a plea and a curse. He rushed inside. The sound had come from his mother, who was surrounded by other women. She was screaming, “Why this had to happen? Why he had to go? Why they had to go and do that to him? Oh god, why?”

  He felt a hand on his shoulder and saw his father’s red eyes. “Starboy,” his father said, leading him to his brother’s bedroom.

  He seemed to be asleep with the blanket pulled over his body as he had done as a child during rainy nights. “What happened?” he asked his father. He was aware that a group had gathered at the doorway to peep.

  “We don’t know. They find him in the abandoned community centre up on the hill. He was gone by then.” His father began to cry but soundlessly, his face hidden by his hand. He seemed like someone shielding his eyes from the sun, his body ruffling so gently it was hardly noticeable. “He was gone . . .”

  “Hug your father, boy,” someone shouted from the doorway. “Don’t be selfish. Hug the man. He alone know what he going through.”

  He was so enraged by the intrusion that he wanted to say, Why the hell you don’t come and hug him? Instead, he rushed to the door and pulled it shut. Someone outside sucked their teeth. He saw his father now at the body, rubbing the feet. “I could look at him?” he asked.

  When his father remained silent, he raised the sheet and saw his brother’s face looking more peaceful than he could recall. Robbed of his scowl and frown, he looked handsome in a way that Orbits had not seen over the last years. There was a tiny bruise on his lower lip, like a wire drawn over the flesh, and a blue welt above one closed eye. His eyelashes were long, almost feminine. In death, he appeared frail and imaginative and beautiful. Maybe like one of the Russian novelists. No, like a poet who daily gazed at the sinking of the day. Each day with more apprehension. Orbits pulled the sheet lower and saw bruises around his brother’s neck and on his shoulder. He replaced the sheet and asked his father once more, “What happened?” He could hear bawling outside, and he tried to differentiate how many bawlers there were. In the room, it was difficult to tell.

  A man knocked and entered the room. Orbits recognized him as the sergeant who conducted most of his investigations propped on a stool in the rumshop. He pulled down the sheet to expose the entire body. “It look like a suicide. You want an autopsy done or not?”

  When his father said nothing, Orbits told the sergeant, “Do what you have to do.”

  “No! No! Nobody going to cut up my baby. Somebody do this to him and you have to find that person.” His mother rushed to the body and had to be restrained by some other women. Once more, she began her horrible low moan, and Orbits felt as if her life were climbing onto the prolonged sound and slipping out of her body. He left the room and felt hands patting his shoulders as he walked out of the house.

  He continued to walk until he reached the junction. He was not thinking; he watched his feet moving forward and he felt as helpless as when he was a child. With each step, his brother’s face appeared, younger each time until he was just four years old, clinging to his mother’s breast. God is paying me back for hating my brother, he thought. He tried to shift his thoughts from what he had just witnessed; he didn’t want to know if his brother was murdered or had committed suicide. He recalled taking this route a year and a half earlier. It was with his wife-to-be, and he had been startled at how quickly his marriage had been settled. He had felt trapped that night. But now he wanted to be with his wife; he wanted to be far away from the chaos he had actively sought out over the last two months. He broke into a run and pushed out his hand at the first taxi he saw. The branches streaming outside the car’s window seemed to be alive with fingers; another passenger was whistling a song from a Hindi movie.

  When he got to his in-laws’ place, the lights were off and the house was empty. Already wrought by the death of his brother, he rushed through the house calling his wife’s name. He walked around the house and looked into the drain at the back and at the branches of the trees before he returned inside. He sat on his mother-in-law’s couch, leaning forward, his head on his knees, tired and drained. He did not hear the car arriving or the door opening. “You finally decided to show yourself.” He could see his mother-in-law was seething with rage, and he waited for some equivalent emotion. “Well, congratulation.”

  “Where Teepee?”

  “She in the hospital, but I wonder why you asking.”

  “I really wonder,” the father repeated.

  “I have to go now,” he said. “I could get a lift?” He asked again, louder.

  “Find your own way,” his mother-in-law said. “We waited long enough.”

  “We don’t have time for this,” the father added. “For this damn foolishness.”

  The closest hospital was three miles away and he ran, recklessly at times, not diverting to the pavement when a car approached or avoiding the broken bottles on the road. Midway there, he stopped to catch his breath. He bent over and saw the clasp of a sandal had come undone. He took both off and prepared for the rest of the journey. Why am I doing this? The voice seemed to have come from somewhere close by, and he glanced around. Again, he heard the voice as he sped off.

  He arrived at the ho
spital two hours later. He mentioned his wife’s name to a nurse. She looked at the sandals in his hand and the sweat running down his shirt and pointed to the front desk. No one was there. He walked up the stairway and saw men in pyjamas walking about. On another floor, he saw patients dragging their IV poles. An old man with unruly grey hair that gave him a clownish look seemed to smile, but it was just his lips flapping, trying to find words. The nurses seemed hoggish and the white-clad doctors indifferent, so he climbed another flight of stairs. At the end of the floor, he saw his wife on a cot, her head turned to the window. He walked in and called her name softly. She opened her eyes and when she tried to sit up, he put his hand on her shoulder and sat on the bed. He asked if she was okay and she smiled weakly. “Where is the baby?”

  “In the respirator,” a sturdy-looking black woman in the adjoining bed said. The woman glanced past him and added, “Don’t worry, dearie, is just a precaution. They will bring her out as soon as she strong enough. Look, she coming now.”

  A nurse walked in with a bundle. “You is the father?”

  He nodded and she passed the bundle to him. The woman on the nearby bed walked over. “Is a pretty little baby girl. I could see you will have trouble on you hands when she grow up.”

  Orbits placed the bundle on his wife’s chest.

  “What happened to your foot?”

  He looked down and saw blood. “Nothing. Is nothing.” But the blood reminded him of his brother; and in the years to come, he always connected these three: blood, birth and death.

  He was not there when his wife went into the hospital nor was he there when she was released the following day. His in-laws blamed him for his absence, and his parents blamed him for not showing up at the wake. Yet he told neither of his reasons. He wanted to tell his mother, but it seemed inappropriate in this moment of grief; and it was only during the ceremony preceding the cremation when she was sitting, wasted and numb, that he whispered, “My wife had a baby.”

  She grasped his hand tightly. “Tell me again.”

  “My wife had a baby.”

  She offered a sickly smile, and he felt it was a kind of madness caused by grief. But later as the priest was talking about reincarnation and the soul limping from one vessel to the next and death as just a stepping stone, he saw her looking at him and nodding. When it was time to take the coffin into the hearse, the women who had been eyeing her warily came up, but she waved them away. She maintained this strength during the cremation and while the body was burning, she told Orbits, “You and Starboy never get along and yet you find a way to bring him back. You find a way.” She held his hand, squeezing with unexpected vigour.

  Eventually, word got around to his in-laws about his brother’s death, and they tried to make amends not through direct apologies but by skidding out of their stiffness. When he returned after work, the mother said, “Look, the new father reach.”

  Yes, you old bitch, the father reach.

  “Mr. Meteorologist, I wonder what the weather going to be today?”

  I wish it was a flood that would drown you old ass.

  “Listen to how the baby crying as if it know the father arrive.”

  It crying because it surrounded by bloodsucking parasites.

  He began to hate them not only for their earlier treatment of him but also because of their assumption he could be so easily fooled. He stopped bothering to acknowledge them, not answering their questions or engaging in any conversation, and whereas before he had made an effort at etiquette, now he ate noisily, dipping into his food with his hands, piling everything into one plate.

  “Moms,” the father said one evening. “Look how the boy invent a new convenient way to mix everything together.”

  I wish I could invent a way for all you bitches to be a thousand miles from me.

  That night he told his wife, “We should find a little place.”

  She was not aware of the situation with her parents — he never mentioned it — and she remarked she would want to be close to her mother during this period as the older woman knew so much about babies and child-rearing. Child-rearing, he thought. Just like rearing an animal. Rearing a goat or a sheep. Animal husbandry. Sometimes he was surprised at the extent of his anger, and during a moment of unusual clarity in his office, he considered whether he was trying to displace guilt with hatred. For as long as he could remember, he had resented his brother, and every single day he went over how he could have adjusted their relationship, how he might have pre-empted his brother’s death. He was older by almost four years, and yet he had simmered in resentment at Starboy’s favoured status.

  He began spending more time at his parents’ place, going there straight from his work. They had both handled the death of their son in different and unexpected ways. His father, the former joker, grew withdrawn, betraying no emotion as his wife talked in a nonsensical way about gods, spirits and alien beings, placing these entities alongside each other as she did the deities from different religions. She visited pundits and priests and once a local seerwoman, who assured her that her dead son was now happier than he had ever been, and he was grieving to see her.

  During every visit, she asked Orbits about his daughter, whether she had taken her first step or uttered a word. Orbits invented little things, but the truth was he had no idea. During his wife’s leave from school, he would lay next to her in the bed, hold the baby above him and marvel that he’d had a hand in the creation of this complete little thing. He was stunned by her growing recognition of her mother, gurgling in delight and pushing out her little hand, or the way she crept around like a morrocoy. At his primary school eighteen years earlier, the teacher had displayed some little black tadpoles in a bottle, and Orbits had been intrigued by the way their tails had dropped out so they gradually began to resemble frogs. He had wanted the project to continue — maybe they would become something more than frogs — but the teacher had emptied the aquarium at the back of the school, close to the latrines.

  Each week it seemed his daughter was doing something new, showing some unexpected sign of intelligence or familiarity with her mother and grandmother. When his wife returned to school, his daughter was transferred to the care of his mother-in-law. During the first year or so, she would tell the child, “Look, your daddy get back from work, Chickadee” or “Ask your daddy what the weather is going to be tomorrow because I taking you to the mall.” He never responded to these provocations, and soon the indirect repartee stopped.

  By then he no longer bothered to ask his wife about moving out, but the idea was never out of his mind. In his tiny office, he tried to imagine himself living in one of the little villages he had passed in a maxi taxi earlier in the week. On occasion, he hit on a particular house, a little flat far from the road and hidden by shrubs. He imagined quiet weekends with his family and a return of the affection that once existed between himself and his wife. He missed the light jokes, the tenderness, the mischievousness, the attention. He feared that his wife was becoming a version of her mother even though he understood that her new hardness was because she was balancing the responsibilities of motherhood with those of her profession. He, on the other hand, did nothing but write a single prediction on a sheet of paper. He had always known she was far more realistic than him, and one day while he was in a maxi taxi, looking at the old but well-kept houses in a coastal village, he had the sudden fear that she would come to her senses and leave him. She has her parents, her job, her child, he thought. What use I am to her?

  He tried to come up with ways he could reignite some of the lost affection, but all these measures involved him interacting with her parents. In the maxi, he watched the foreign couples’ public displays of affection, and although he knew the island viewed this behaviour as inconsiderate and lewd, he sometimes closed his eyes and imagined it was him and his wife. One evening after the skullcap-wearing driver had returned the last of his passengers to a hotel, he told
Orbits, “I want to make a little detour to check out one of the outsides. You could remain in the van if you want.” He pulled into a dirt trace and stopped before a shack. A mixed-race girl of about six or so saw the vehicle and ran out from the porch, which was covered with carat, a palm thatch. “A outside child,” he told Orbits and stepped out.

  He disappeared into the shack, and when he returned a few minutes later, the girl was with him, holding his hand and skipping along. “Bye, Daddy,” she said.

  He stooped to kiss her and said, “Till next week then, Cherry.”

  “So your wife know about all of this?” Orbits asked him in the vehicle.

  “Yeah. The girl spend a few weekends with us. Together with the other outsides. I want them to know each other.”

  “And the mothers?”

  He chuckled. “That is a different story. I had to part a few fights in the beginning. One of them nearly knife the other. They settle down now. Everything does settle down if you give it time.” He began to talk of growing up not knowing his father and of his early troubles. “Had a time when I used to work just to save money to buy a gun. I do a little robbery here and there, and the gun was just to scare people. A little prop. But that is the past tense now. As you see, nowadays I moving different. Try to talk to some of these young fellas too. Try to put some sense in their heads. Put some god in their heart. But they not ready. When the time reach, it reach. God pull me out in the nick of time.”

  He spoke in this manner, not making much sense, frequently contradicting himself, but Orbits felt he was happy in a sort of delusional way. He had worked out a philosophy that forgave his mistakes and allowed him to be contented. “You know sometimes I does look at the sky and even though I can’t see the big man I know he there. When you look at the sky what you does see?”