The Folly (5 page)

She took a bone-china shoe from the mantelpiece and turned it over in her hands. The shoe was slim and white, with a gilt buckle and a wineglass heel. It feels as if I’ve always had this, she thought, but that’s impossible. Always. Slipper. It must have come from somewhere? A gift from Mr? For some reason, it called to mind the day on which he’d bricked up the fireplace. She saw him, kneeling in front of the gaping hole, holding a trowel laden with wet cement in one hand and a brick in the other. His hair was standing on end and his shoulders were
dandruffed with plaster chips and wood shavings. When she came in with the tea-tray he looked over one flaky shoulder and smiled woodenly, as if he was an advertisement for
DIY
products.

Suddenly the air was infused with the smell of meat. Mrs Malgas turned to the
TV
set on the hearth. A pitchfork hoisted a slab of red meat the size of a doorstep and threw it down on a grille. A familiar anthem, all sticky-fingered strings and saucy brass, came to the boil as the meat rebounded in slow motion from the grille, splashing large drops of fat and marinade. The smell of meat, basted in the surging melody, was overpowering. Mrs Malgas shut her eyes and fumbled for the flames, she felt the hot screen against her palms, a tacky button, she pressed it. She swallowed her nausea and held the cool sole of the shoe to her burning cheek.

The set was still sizzling when Mr Malgas traipsed in and switched on the light. The startled planes of the room banged into one another and fell back into their accustomed order.

Mr sat down on his La-Z-Boy with his hands dangling.

Mrs looked at the damp shadows on his shirt. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” she said.

“What’s been going on now?” He looked at the blank screen.

“Nothing.”

She put the china shoe back in its place. The
TV
set felt warm against her belly. She said, “So.”

He cleaned one fingernail with another.

“You did ask him?”

“I did. ‘Father’ turns out to be a nickname of sorts.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“As luck would have it, his real name is ‘Nieuwenhuizen’.”

The name snapped in half in the air and the two pieces dropped like twigs into the shaggy carpet. Mr hunted for them under the pretext of tying his shoelaces until her shadow fell over him.

“That’s impossible,” she said. “It’s too much of a coincidence.”

Mr looked at her slippers. The sheepskin was the same colour as the carpet. He saw her glossy shins, sprouting from the bulbs of her feet like saplings, and his own hands burrowing in the tufted fibres as if he was trying to uproot her. The idea made him uncomfortable. He raised his eyes to her face. It was scrunched into a small, livid fruit. In the juicy pulp of the eyes the pupils glinted like pips.

“I ask you,” she said, hawking. “Nieuwenhuizen of all things.” Her tongue held the two parts of the name together precisely, as if she was waiting for the glue to dry. “Nieuwenhuizen! Obviously an alias. A stage name. Did you ask for
ID
?”

“Nieuwenhuizen is a common name,” he said, focusing on her mouth.

“A criminal,” the mouth said. “I knew it. A killer.”

“I was at school with one.”

“Please,” said Mrs, using an intonation she had acquired from American television programmes, as Mr walked out of the room with his laces dragging behind him like dropped reins.

“Please,” she said again, as he returned in his socks, carrying the telephone directory. He flung the directory open on the coffee-table and rummaged through it. “Here: Nieuwenhuizen, C. J. of Roosevelt
Park. A midwife, it says. Nieuwenhuizen, D. L. of Malvern East, just down the road. Nieuwenhuizen, H. A. of Pine Park. Another Nieuwenhuizen, H. A. of Rndprkrf. Where’s that?”

Mrs knew, but she didn’t feel like telling.

“Never mind.” His finger cut a furrow down the page. “There must be twenty of them, thirty if you count the Nieuwhuises and the Nieuwhuyses and the Niehauses. There’s probably a Newhouse too.” He flipped. “What have we here? No. But there’s a Newburg, and a list of Newmans as long as my arm.”

“We live in the west,” she said, going over to the window, “but our name isn’t Van der Westhuizen.”

“That’s my argument exactly! We may not be called Van der Westhuizen – I’ll grant you that – but thousands of people are, at least, say, what … five thousand?… and many of them
are
to the west of something. See?” Her shoulders drooped, and he went on triumphantly, “There must be thousands of Nieuwenhuizens countrywide, and at any given moment I’ll bet a dozen of them are building new houses – or thinking about it, anyway. It’s the luck of the draw. No, that’s feeble. It’s the law of averages.”

“It’s too good to be true.”

Mr Malgas went to stand beside his wife. Nieuwenhuizen had built up the fire and was walking slowly round it, dragging his long shadow over the landscape.

After a while of looking straight through it, Mr Malgas became aware of his own face reflected in the glass. Then he saw that his whole body was there, floating in the chilly space beyond the burglar-bars,
and his wife’s face too, with its body below, and their lounge and its familiar clutter, dangerously cantilevered, and Nieuwenhuizen’s fire blazing in the middle of the carpet where the coffee-table should be. Tenderly, Mr put his arm around Mrs’s shoulders and drew her to him, and watched his pale reflection in the other room mimic the gesture.

“You shouldn’t hate him,” he said, “and there’s no need to be afraid of him. Even if it turns out that he’s not who he says he is, and I’m not saying it will, he means no harm. Look at him, out there in the cold, while we’re here in our cosy home. I almost feel sorry for him – although that’s unnecessary, as he’d be quick to point out. He’s very resourceful. He’s got a tea-set made out of tins and everything.”

She shrugged her shoulders under his heavy arm. “It can only bring trouble … and insects,” she whispered. After a pause, during which Mr listened intently to the silence of the house but could discern no sign of life, she said firmly, “Go ahead and be his friend. You’ll do as you please anyway, I know. But don’t come crying to me when he lets you down. And don’t expect me to call him ‘Nieuwenhuizen’. It’s even worse than ‘Father’. If I have to refer to him at all, I’ll just say ‘Him’, and you’ll know why.”

What is it with this Malgas? Nieuwenhuizen asked himself. He seems eager to serve. But he’s full of questions, and so hard to convince.

Nieuwenhuizen! he’d exclaimed. Really? Are you serious?

For Pete’s sake.

The more persuasively Nieuwenhuizen laid claim to the word that
was his name, the more detached he felt from it. It was a distressing experience, watching his personal noun drift away on the air.

But people will get used to almost anything.

By a circuitous process of reasoning, during which he walked round and round his fire until he was quite dizzy, Nieuwenhuizen reattached his name and decided that Malgas should be kept guessing.

The left foot of Mrs, which was daintily arched and pigeon-toed, stepped out of the bath, dripping soapy water, and stretched down to the floor, where it met with something cold and slimy. A plastic bath mat. She knew at once whose hideous creation it was.

Although she was loath to touch this gewgaw, she wanted to know more about it, as if that would teach her something important about Him.

She lifted the mat with the end of Mr’s toothbrush. Chkrs. It was woven, no, one really couldn’t call it weaving. It was knitted, knotted, out of plastic shopping bags. She identified three major supermarket chains by the predominance of certain colours and fragments of lettering. Pick n Pay. There seemed to be a Mr Hardware packet in there somewhere, sandy lettering on a muddy ground, but she couldn’t be sure. The words were warped into the fabric of the thing and could not be unravelled.

She dropped the mat in the bin under the hand-wash basin and sat on the toilet seat, wrapped in her towel, trying to figure out when Mr had smuggled it into her house. He was becoming more devious by the day.

T
he next morning Nieuwenhuizen hailed Mr Malgas as he went out to buy the Sunday newspapers and hurried over to meet him on the verge. “Phase One is upon us, Malgas,” he said earnestly. “Last night, after our little man to man, I got to thinking about the future. I asked myself the question: ‘Is it time?’ And the answer came back, loud and clear, in a tell-tale itching of the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet: ‘You can bet your boots it is.’ ”

“To do what?”

“I was coming to that: To ‘clear the land’!” He threw his hands up in two V signs and scored quotation marks around the words with his fingernails. “May I borrow a spade?”

“Only with pleasure!”

Malgas was delighted that the action was about to begin at last. He was also secretly touched that Nieuwenhuizen had said “upon
us
” rather than “upon me.” He fetched a spade from his garage and gave expert instructions about its use. Then he rushed off to the café, promising to return in two ticks.

Nieuwenhuizen ran a finger over the blade. It was blunt. He began sharpening it on a kerbstone. Before long he heard Malgas huffing and puffing back, and he quickly retired to the inner reaches of the plot (block
IVF
) and threw himself into his task.

Malgas was not so easily put off. He craned his neck. “Need a hand there Father?”

“Thanks but no thanks,” Nieuwenhuizen responded without looking up. “I’ll give you a call when I need you. You go home and catch up on the news.”

Malgas went sadly on his way.

Nieuwenhuizen set upon the vegetation with a vengeance, flattening stems with his boots and hacking at roots with his spade. In a minute he was immersed in a cloud of dust and scented sap, which he gulped down in dry, foaming draughts. The brew was intoxicating.

Mr Malgas watched the slaughter from his lounge, and then from his kitchen, and finally, as the dust thickened, from the side of his house through the garden wall. He found Nieuwenhuizen’s methods outlandish. The man wielded the spade with authority despite his off-beat sense of rhythm, and he had stamina, you had to admit. There was power in his thin arms too, for with one blow he was capable of shearing a small shrub clean off at the root, leaving nothing but a cross-section of stem like a peppermint spat out in the dust.

But his technique … What could one say? It was flawed. He spent
an inordinate amount of energy on purely decorative effects. Between blows he liked to hum a bar or two from a march and lay about him with the spade, inscribing fleeting arabesques and curlicues on the moted air. He also enjoyed twirling it like a baton, whirling it like an umbrella and tossing it up like a drum-major’s mace. In a different context these affectations might have served to demonstrate his dexterity, but strange to say here they had the opposite effect: the implement, moving gracefully through space, acquired a life of its own. Rather than guiding it, Nieuwenhuizen seemed to trip after it like a clumsy dancing partner, flinging his limbs in many directions.

“The worst thing about all this tomfoolery,” Mr Malgas thought, “is the amount of precious time it wastes.”

Nieuwenhuizen was unstoppable. When a tap-root resisted his assault he hopped up on the spade with his boots on either side of the handle and swayed backwards and forwards like a jockey, driving the blade underground. Then he threw his weight upon the handle and popped a sod as big as his head out of the earth.

Day after day, block by labelled block, the deforestation went on. The call for Mr Malgas never came. But he was not one to stand on ceremony: every evening after work he went next door uninvited, bearing some little excuse for a visit filched from the store. On Monday, for example, it was a brand-new spade with a pillar-box red ferrule to match Nieuwenhuizen’s tent; on Tuesday, again, it was a pitchfork to match the spade and a five-litre keg of fuel for the hurricane-lamp.

Nieuwenhuizen humoured him.

Wednesday’s defoliation brought Nieuwenhuizen something out of the ordinary. At noon he was cutting a wide swath through a thicket of kakiebos when he came across his anthill. This scenic attraction had been missing without trace for several days and it gave him quite a turn to bump into it in the middle of nowhere. He composed himself by stropping his new blade unnecessarily on the Malgases’ wall.

Nieuwenhuizen had always assumed, without giving the matter much thought, that the anthill was full of ants. (By “always,” of course, he meant since his arrival on the plot.) He imagined the demolition of the hill: his blade would find lubricated grooves in the air to slot into, it would swoop with a whistle and cleave through the crown with a corky pop. Then wave upon wave of hot red ants would boil down the slopes.

But when he tried to breach the surface his blade rebounded with a hand-numbing clang. It took hours of patient chipping with the sharp point of the blade to break through the shell, and then he exposed nothing but an elaborate system of empty corridors. He hacked a thick chunk of the stuff from the core, which was softer than the shell and riddled with holes like a Swiss cheese, and examined it more closely: no sign of life.

It was too much for him. He went to bed.

When Mr Malgas arrived that evening he found Nieuwenhuizen shut up in his tent, fast asleep. The stillness of the camp was unnerving. The visitor made his offerings – a Cadac gas-bottle which he had filled with his own hands and a Mr Hardware
T
-shirt,
XL
– and went back home.

Mrs had the full story. She wanted to re-enact it too, with her fish-knife and a heap of creamed cauliflower, but Mr wouldn’t hear of it.

“He trimmed the grass all round neatly,” she insisted. “It reminded me of when you had that mole removed and Dr Dinnerstein —”

“Mr Dinnerstein,” Mr corrected her. “Now stop playing with your food and eat up.”

Not everyone is cut out to retail Hardware. In a day’s work a hardware man might have to arrive at creative solutions to a dozen all-important little problems. Mr Malgas, who was ideally suited to the vocation, was upset to find that he couldn’t concentrate. He dispensed tacks instead of panel-pins and insecticide instead of whitewash.

Insects. He couldn’t get them out of his mind. Mrs was right: there had been a remarkable increase in their numbers recently.

On Thursday evening he had three excuses for visiting Nieuwenhuizen: a carton of mosquito coils, a stick of insect repellent and a length of fly-paper that he insisted on tying to a branch of the thorn-tree. On Friday, by contrast, he took a newfangled contraption which allowed one to balance a three-legged pot on top of a gas-bottle and so eliminated the bother of building a fire.

Nieuwenhuizen accepted these gifts with equanimity. He took each one in both hands, looked at it from different sides and said, “Thank you, it’s just what I need.” Then he found a place to stow it and looked at his benefactor expectantly.

Malgas would have appreciated a more enthusiastic response,
especially to the gas-bottle gizmo, which he thought would suit Nieuwenhuizen down to the ground. But he was satisfied all the same. Each evening he was able to inspect the building site. He was pleased to see that progress was being made, even though the grid system escaped him and he felt a pang when he saw the footpaths vanishing under swaths of cut grass and topsoil.

As he made his rounds he arranged the practical considerations of building a new house into ear-catching pairs, the easier to enumerate their pros and cons – bricks and mortar, nuts and bolts, ups and downs (in relation to pipes, this was), rands and cents, days and weeks. Nieuwenhuizen, hunkering down at the fire to stir some simmering brew or reclining before the tent gazing up at the heavens, chuckled inwardly but would not be drawn. Undeterred, Malgas always found the opportunity to say something like, “Remember now, when you get round to the actual construction as such, I’m right here on your doorstep. I’m handy. Make a note of it. Here, tie this around your finger.”

Malgas was demonstrating the versatility of the new cooking gizmo on Friday night when Nieuwenhuizen butted in to take up his offer of assistance. “Why don’t you come over first thing tomorrow and give me a hand to get rid of this compost.”

At that moment Malgas heard a metallic click in the air between Nieuwenhuizen and himself. More than likely it was the gizmo slotting into place on the gas-bottle. But Malgas came to believe that it was his relationship with Nieuwenhuizen shifting gear from co-operation to collaboration.

At dawn on the appointed day Malgas shouldered a brand-new rake (the price-tag was still wrapped around one of its colour-co-ordinated teeth) and marched next door.

“Malgas.”

“Father.”

“How goes?”

“Well. Yourself?”

“Raring to go.”

“Same here.”

“Good.”

They went on in this way, exhaling small talk in fussily pinked clouds of condensation, while Nieuwenhuizen decanted two mugs of coffee from the three-legged pot. Malgas was so caught up in the drama of the situation that he didn’t think to ask after the gas-bottle gizmo. He found himself copying Nieuwenhuizen’s clipped sentences. The restraint of the exchange marked it as a prelude to constructive effort and Malgas was proud to keep up his end.

“Sugar?”

“One.”

“Honey …”

“Better.”

They sipped the scalding coffee. “It’s got a muddy aftertaste,” Malgas thought. “And what’s this afloat in it? Fish-scales?” But he didn’t care, it was strong and stimulating. The ear of the mug still would not admit his finger, but that didn’t matter either, because he preferred to curl his hands around the hot tin bowl, the way his host did.

Nieuwenhuizen put forward a plan of action, starting with the grid – big letters down this side and Roman numbers down that – and explaining tersely how one might approach the intersections as appropriate points at which to heap up the dead vegetation. Then he posed an important question: At a later stage, when the ground had been cleared in an economical fashion, might one not convey each of these small provisional heaps to a depot in the vicinity of the camp, on the spot now occupied by the fireplace, and amalgamate them into one mountain to facilitate the incineration? No?

Malgas listened with mounting excitement. The grid system was a revelation. As for the words hovering in bubbles around Nieuwenhuizen’s head, moored to his lips by filaments of saliva – “economical,” “provisional,” “accumulation,” “depot,” “vicinity,” “incineration” – they left him in no doubt that a great deal of intelligent forethought had gone into the plan, and he felt a thrill of vindication. With a full heart he set out for the work-station allocated to him on the wagon-wheel frontier. Nieuwenhuizen stayed behind at the tent, tinkering with one of his gadgets.

“Wish me luck, Father.”

“Good luck, Malgas.”

The sun was rising as usual behind the hedge when Malgas tramped across the devastated plot. Grass and weeds mown down, fractured stems and lacerated leaves, flayed boles and bulbs, dismembered trunks and dislocated roots told a moving tale of cruelty and kindness in the name of progress. The carpet underfoot was steeped in dew and its own spilt fluids, and it offered up a savoury aroma as he passed over.
The sun brushed the back of his neck with tepid fingers and made him shiver with anticipation. His eyes in turn caressed the bruised skin of the horizon, and then snagged on the protruding tip of his own rooftop. It was stained, he noticed, with the blood of the dawn. He went on bravely. The house thrust itself up through the horizon with every step he took, until it squatted clean and complete in the early morning air. The walls were as white as paper, the windows in them were blinding mirrors. The wagon-wheels began to plash through the sunshine: soon he would be bathed in the full splendour of a new working day.

Malgas arrived at the wall and took his stand. He squinted back the way he had come. For a split second he lost sight of the purpose of his journey – but before this seed of doubt could germinate, his eye fell on Nieuwenhuizen in the distance, in the lee of the hedge, with his fork pointing dramatically into the air. As if they had rehearsed this moment carefully beforehand, Malgas raised the rake in a reciprocal gesture. There was a symmetrical pause, charged with intent. Then, as one man, they set to.

Malgas spread his feet and put his head down. The shaft of the rake slid through his fist, the teeth bit into the matted stalks and stems, he drew the bounty in. At first he felt stiff and clumsy. But at each pass the rake grew more accustomed to use, as if the wood itself had softened to the shape of his hands.

Nieuwenhuizen struck up a song, but Malgas shut his ears to it, went in search of the rhythm in his own musculature and found it without difficulty. He was a natural. He began to perspire in a healthy, deserving way. The sun rose quickly, liberating delicious scents of
decomposition from the vegetation. In no more than an hour Malgas had raised three provisional heaps, each comprising four barrowloads, each at home on the exact spot the grid prescribed.

“Pssst.”

Malgas’s sense of communion with the fruits of his labour was so pronounced by now that for a moment he thought one of the heaps was addressing him in a cryptic language of gaseous vapours.

“Hey!”

There was no mistaking this human voice. He traced it to the small face of his wife, which jelled in a pie-slice of spokes and rim. He motioned the face to go away, but instead it grew larger and spoke again.

“Come here. I want to ask you something.”

“Get back in the house.”

He turned his attention to his work, but his rhythm had been broken: the rake twisted and fell on barren soil.

“What is it then? Be quick.”

“Why aren’t you at work?”

“I’m working.”

“You know what I mean: who’s minding the shop?”

“Van Vuuren.”

“That monkey. What he knows about Hardware’s dangerous. I can see him swilling our life’s work down the drain.”

Mr did not answer. He loosened one of his laces and tied it again in a double bow.

“Typical,” she sniffed. “You’ll give Him the shirt off your back, although you don’t know Him from Adam, while your own family goes hungry.”