Milady Filacia

12: The Boys

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"Buon pomeriggio, Vendi!"

Though they'd been standing around outside smoking for a while, they'd only just realized that I existed. It was the Scrabblers, as I called them; four men who came to Buoncuore once or twice a week, sat at an inside table and played at Scrabble over espressos and, occasionally, glasses full of gelato and fruit. They were young, for Scrabble enthusiasts: early thirties or late twenties, by the looks of them. From my place behind the freezer I'd managed to pick up their names and ethnicities: Yoet and Ermolai from Moldova, around the same age, one with clingy sand-coloured hair that fell limp across his forehead and a chin full of adult acne, the other with close-cropped coily black hair and a most rectangular face; Kossi from Sierra Leone, who always wore suits (beige, khaki and mint green were his go-to colours) and had the look of a Miami circuit-runner; and Bas, who I'd always (confusingly) assumed was Chinese until one day the Moldovans mentioned something about bombs or landmines or something in Tajikistan, and how Bas's mother will get her legs blown off if she keeps milking the goats in the valley.

"You've finally got customers!" Yoet blurted out, enthusiastically, throwing his hands in the air.

"I get customers all the time," I said, bringing them menus. "All fucking Germans and Swiss."

"You got interesting customers! Yay!"

"No other customers, though, today, eh?" Bas pointed out.

"It's a dead day." I nodded to them. "As you can tell."

Kossi shook his hand out, as if it'd just been burned. "Oo. This man's packing fi-re. What's it today, Vendi? Apricot? Mint? Malaga?" he kissed his fingers. "Mm. I've been starving myself all day for this."

Meanwhile, Ermolai, or Mo, as his friends called him, was setting up the board.

"You guys make this place look like a nerd-dump," I pointed out. 

"Hey, I'm not the one working part-time scooping ice cream for tourists," Kossi teased in his rich, sub-Saharan-accented tone. "Nah, I've got a travel job and a wife, good life! Good life, lads." Despite his talkativeness, Kossi had never elaborated on what his 'travel job' entailed, and I'd always been a bit too suspicious to ask. He had a mysterious, mob-boss Internet-scammer type look about him, and I decided to just leave it at that.

"You talk as if you're not a grown man cracking open a Scrabble set in public twice a week."

Kossi burst out in jarring, lively laughter. "I like the new guy!" he announced, a revelation.

"Go easy, Vendi!" said Yoet (often referred to as just 'Yo', and thus the Moldovan pair becomes Yo and Mo). "Once you get girlfriend and wife, you come Scrabble with us too."

"But only girlfriend and wife, not one or the other." Bas. 

"You think this guy's getting pussy!?" An outburst from Kossi, more loud, strained-out laughter, HA HA HA's in real life. "This guy's a poof - you know - gay! Jus' look at him, HAH!"

"Ha, ha," I said, moving back to the freezer. I poked my head around the corner to make sure Dieter was still there, distilled behind his laptop screen.

"Nah, I'm jus' joking, man. Unless you are gay, are you?"

I gave him a look, very funny, fuck you. He laughed again. "You know," he continued, fingering together his first word on the panel, "Mo's got a brother comin' in any second now, fresh from - uh - " he snapped his fingers " - Manchester, the university there, yah. Twenty-two, just graduated."

"What's his name?Po?"

"He has smarts," Mo said, ignoring my comment. He pushed his glasses up his nose as he fiddled around with the little letter squares. "Almost was top of class. Speak English perfect, better more than English people. Better more than Vendi." He flicked his eyes up to meet mine. "You see. He speak English better more than you, you will be shameful. Manchester University. He go for literature."