Read Online The Amazing Absorbing Boy by Rabindranath Maharaj - Free Book Online Page B

chemicals but he didn’t talk much that day, even when Roy later said that if Canadians didn’t begin to make more babies in a hurry, the country would be unrecognizable in a couple years. “Where did you say you were from?” Roy glanced over as if he had noticed me sitting at the table for the first time.
    Just for spite, I told him Regent Park, instead of Trinidad. He shook his head, doubled a page in his western, and went outside again with his dragging footsteps. He was grumbling under his breath and I wondered how he would have reacted if I had said, “Strange visitor from another planet.” Because Norbert was gazing at the cakes on the counter and not saying anything, I asked him, “When is your friend coming back?’
    The minute the question popped from my mouth, I regretted it because Norbert took a while before he answered. “She’s met some old friends there.” He said it in a dry voice that came from high up his throat, which made me think that the meeting had taken place on a dark bridge over a deserted tunnel. That was all he said for the entire evening and I decided to leave him alone. In the days that followed, I noticed that although he was as stylishly dressed as usual, he was no longer greeting me in his different languages. He also stopped talking about Cabbagetown and more about his German places. Once when the old grey man brought up the topic of his two dead brothers from the war, Norbert interrupted him to say that in this Dresden place, many innocent people had also beenkilled. The other fella hit back by saying that it was the same in London where, early in the battle, there were never any advance warnings of air strikes. Norbert said that the difference was that people were willing to discuss one city while pushing the other under the carpet.
    This argument didn’t blow up in a big shouting match as it might have done in Trinidad but that day, I felt that something had changed in the Coffee Time. More and more, Norbert took the side of Roy whenever he began his complaints of politicians who were bringing in foreigners just to get more votes, even though these people could barely even speak English. When Roy was listing off the problems in the places these foreigners came from, like Nigeria and Pakistan and Jamaica, I felt relieved that he didn’t know more about Trinidad. I noticed, too, that he always used the old-fashioned names like Ceylon and Rhodesia and Dutch Guiana. He felt that Canada was changing into an unfamiliar, dangerous place, with strange people in unusual clothes walking all over Toronto. Talking about Cabbagetown, Roy said they were lucky not to have welfare palaces like the ones along Kingston Road, and then rattled off a list of posh places for refugees from Somalia and Ethiopia. “Guess who’s paying for all this?” This became their new topic.
    I don’t think they were making up this refugee talk but sometimes while they were grumbling, I would think that the Cabbagetown stories of poor families had interested me more because I was in no better condition, and also because these people had turned out so well. I couldn’t understandwhy they were now discussing these new gold-digging foreigners right in front of me and one night, as I was walking to my apartment, I had to laugh when the thought hit me that they had one of these old people diseases that blanked out colour. That same night I decided that I would cut down my visits to the coffee shop because I wasn’t making any progress with the orangeish girl who worked there.
    The next day I began to explore the area beyond Coffee Time and came across other coffee shops with busy young people staring over their laptops and talking into gadgets hooked up over their ears. I would imagine myself like this, maybe five or six years down the road. I looked through the window of a Starbucks place at a girl facing away from me. She was sitting on a stool and there were tear strips on her tight jeans. I began to wonder if