The Folly (6 page)

“I have to help him.”

“You’re doing everything, you big baby. Look at Him. He’s messing around, pretending to be busy.”

Mr straightened his back wearily to watch his collaborator at work on the other side of the plot. Nieuwenhuizen lifted a bale of grass on his fork and shook a cloud of red dust out of it. Then he dumped the bale and thrashed around in the dust, snorting and waving the fork in front of him like a pair of horns. He had tied a bandanna with yellow polka dots over his mouth and donned a big-game hunter’s hat with a leopard-skin band and the brim turned up sharply on one side. His dirty grey hair jutted out on that side like a scorched tuft of grass.

Nieuwenhuizen waved. Mr raised his hand to wave back, and realized just then that Nieuwenhuizen was simply fanning his face. So Mr’s answering gesture had to be elided into a stretch instead and his sleeve had to mop up the sweat of his brow. This subterfuge only confused matters further, because it felt transparent and foolish. Nieuwenhuizen chuckled under his bandanna and speared another load of grass on his fork. With a flush of embarrassment darkening his tanned features, Mr went on raking. Mrs continued to speak to him, pointing out the folly of his ways, and the guile of His, but he ignored her and after a while she went away.

From her grandstand stool Mrs Malgas watched the day’s proceedings with mixed emotions.

Her husband’s part in the charade unfolding on the plot struck her as ridiculous and she very nearly laughed; yet as the day advanced and he toiled on with the same diligence, she felt obliged to take him seriously. It was as if a mantle of nobility had settled over him. She tried to brush this impression aside but it persisted, and she gazed upon him with new eyes, eyes which refused to distinguish between the man and what he was doing. She found herself becoming tearful.

There was something touching in the fact that the details of his person were familiar to her. His clothes contained him like a baggy second skin, imperfectly moulted: his overalls assumed the shape of his elbows and knees, and there were shiny bumps and ridges on his velskoene where the bones of his toes had pressed against the hide. Those were his favourite overalls, they had seen him through countless
DIY
projects, including the bricking up of the fireplace and the laying of the Slasto. She saw him kneeling, he looked over his shoulder and grinned. Each job had left a blemish on the cloth – a birthmark of enamel paint, a festering oil-stain, sutured cuts and tears, scabs of wood glue and Polyfilla. Just to look at them gave her pins and needles in her hands.

Now his steady exertions produced circles of sweat in his armpits, which spread out to meet a dark diamond in the small of his back, and the familiar khaki fabric changed slowly to chocolate-brown. This patient transformation flushed the hard-won scars to the surface; it also summoned up some elemental process of nature itself and
brought more tears to her eyes, which she had to dab away resentfully with the hem of her skirt.

As the hours passed, Mr’s neck seemed to redden visibly, but surely, she reasoned, that had more to do with the dust than the pale sunlight. More than once she was on the point of going to his rescue with a tube of Block Out and a pitcher of iced water, but she was held back by an intuition that this would implicate her in his foolhardy coalition with Him.

What made Nieuwenhuizen’s trickery all the more despicable was that Mr was so glad to be of service, and therefore so easy to exploit. It was clear to Mrs that He was avoiding Mr. He always contrived to be in some neck of the woods where Mr was not. And whereas Mr did the work of two men, He did nothing but stir and shake, and scare up clouds of dust to obscure His own idleness. Now He was down in the gutter next to the road herding dry leaves into piles; now He was galloping on the spot and hurling His trident into the blue; now He was prancing up and down along the hedge, beating it with the flat of His spade, raking it with His hands and kicking it with His feet, so that its leaves flew up in clattering flocks and whirled in circles overhead. Where would they come to roost? Where they liked. What was the purpose of it all? To make more work for Mr.

“Lunch!” Mrs Malgas called feebly at one o’clock, and again, “Lunch!” But her summons fell on deaf ears.

In the mid-afternoon, when Mr had single-handedly raked the entire plot and was driving the stragglers from the moat around the tent, Nieuwenhuizen was stalking from heap to heap stirring up a
new cloud of dust, which boiled over the hedge like a thunder-cloud, bruised and bloodied by the westering sun.

Nieuwenhuizen revolted Mrs Malgas. He was a source of dirt and chaos. She sealed all the windows, but His dust continued to sprout like a five o’clock shadow on the smooth surfaces of her home.

He’s the salt of the earth, Nieuwenhuizen was thinking. A bit of a clod, but as solid as a rock for all that. And on top of it an eager beaver and a busy bee. He’ll do. But as for that flimsy Mrs of his … lurking behind the wall as if she’s invisible. She’s no more than a scrap of tissue-paper. If you hold her up to the light you can see right through her.

An astute observer on higher ground may have understood the way in which Nieuwenhuizen kept his distance from Malgas in terms of the predictable revolution of the one man around the other, for when Malgas had raised his final heap Nieuwenhuizen was standing by to shake the excess dust out of it, and they straightened their backs and lowered their implements in unison. They walked in step – although Malgas was a single pace behind – to the middle of the plot, paused on the spot above the subterranean ruins of the anthill (
VIE
), and surveyed the landscape. It was an affecting sight – the stubbled earth with its ordered rows of mounds like so many graves. “How many?” Malgas wondered, while Nieuwenhuizen counted them under his breath.

A few meaningful glances were exchanged. Malgas went home to fetch his wheelbarrow. Mrs tried to attract his attention through the bedroom window, but he looked the other way. When he returned,
whistling to disguise the unseemly
scree-scree-scree
of the axle, Nieuwenhuizen had rolled aside the hearthstones from the mouth of his tent to make space for the big heap.

In the gathering darkness they loaded the provisional heaps onto the barrow one by one and conveyed them to the depot. A jaundiced eye may have observed that Nieuwenhuizen did a great deal of pointing and waving, whereas Malgas wielded the fork and pushed the barrow. It was dark by the time they were done. The darkness brought with it, paradoxically, a boyish lightheartedness, which Nieuwenhuizen acknowledged by leaping onto the barrow and standing to attention, and Malgas confirmed by stepping once more into the breach and taking him on a tour of the site. When Nieuwenhuizen had had his fill of swaying hilariously and waving to unseen crowds of spectators, Malgas deposited him in the shadow of the heap.

The mountain of rotting vegetation towered over them. Here and there the turned leaves glowed like embers in the faded foliage, as if the whole mass would burst into flames if they so much as whispered near it.

With due caution, Nieuwenhuizen angled his face away and spoke for the first time since work had begun that morning. “Malgas, you’ve done a splendid job. I don’t think I could have done it without you. I give you my word: nothing will grow here again, unless we want it to. Go home now. Rest. When you’ve refreshed yourself, come back, if you like, and we’ll burn this heap to the ground, root and branch. Thanks a million, see you later.”

Malgas understood intuitively the significance of this effusive utterance,
just as he had appreciated the abbreviated chit-chat of the morning: it was in direct proportion to the satiated fullness of a job well done. So he himself embarked on a comprehensive response, which Nieuwenhuizen graciously allowed to run to three paragraphs before bidding him farewell and crawling without further ado into his tent.

Malgas went home.

Nieuwenhuizen lay on his back, with his head pillowed on one of his boots and his bare feet cushioned on his hat. A candle in a bully-beef tin rested on his stomach.

An insect was scaling the vault of mosquito-netting above him, and he followed its progress with interest. In everyday circumstances he would have squashed the intruder for reasons of hygiene, but he felt reckless tonight; and in any case, he had held the candle up a moment before and established that it was on the outside of the net. It was a perfectly ordinary bug, of the sort one might encounter in a cartoon wearing a waistcoat and spats. Its feet seemed disproportionately large and were shaped like exclamation marks.

The bug reached the apex of the tent, where the net was suspended from the tent-pole, and stopped. He willed it to keep going, over the top and down the other side, but it wouldn’t budge. He flicked at it with his forefinger, hoping that it would curl itself into a ball and tumble down the way it had come, but it merely put out its feelers and clung to its position.

He held the flame close, to make out the expression on its face.

Meanwhile, Malgas stood on the scale in his bathroom, gazing down over the curvature of his belly at the figures on the dial, and tried to recall the wording of his recent thank-you speech.

He had started: “Ladies and gentlemen – I beg your pardon – Father. It gives me great pleasure to take this public opportunity of expressing my gratitude for …” But the rest of it was gone. He remembered some isolated words – “honour,” “neighbourly,” “vicinity,” “collaboration,” “endeavour.” And he remembered what he was saying when Nieuwenhuizen interrupted him: “When the time comes —”

“Cheerio!”

Mrs Malgas came into the bathroom to talk some sense into her husband.

She found him wallowing in the muddy water, with his feet propped on the taps. He was preoccupied with his blisters, which had appeared in exactly the same spot on each hand: the web between thumb and forefinger. He prodded each blister in turn with the forefinger of the other hand, hoping that they would pop, but they held their shape tenaciously, like blobs of molten solder.

Mrs turned her attention to his feet. She didn’t care much for them in this naked state, against a background of creamy ceramic tiles; she preferred them in shoes. They were childish feet, too soft and pink for the large brown body they were required to support. Their creased soles and shapeless toes made them look like underinflated bath toys.

His whole anatomy was stubbornly indifferent to her evaluations. She left him to soak.

But she was on hand, when he had dried himself, to rub some of her cold cream into the back of his neck, which was sunburnt after all.

The Buccaneer Steakhouse in the Helpmekaar Centre was one of the finest establishments of its kind anywhere. Its corporate motto was on everyone’s lips: “Pleased to meet you, meat to please you.” The Manageress, a Mrs Dworkin, and Mr Malgas were on first-name terms, so she was happy to take his order over the phone: two racks of ribs, one with chips and one with a baked potato.

“Nothing for me, thanks,” Mrs said peevishly. “We always make do with a snack on Saturdays and I’m not going to change the habits of a lifetime just because of Him.”

The Buccaneer was famous too for its cut-throat prices and speedy service, and within half an hour Malgas and Nieuwenhuizen were sitting on their stones at the foot of the dead mountain, in the moth-beaten light of the hurricane-lamp, with the distinctive customized polystyrene containers open on their knees. Nieuwenhuizen had chosen the baked potato and it steamed enticingly as he sliced it open with his plastic knife. He unwrapped a little brick of butter and dropped it into the gash.

“Baked in their jackets,” Malgas said under his breath, repeating a phrase that Nieuwenhuizen had just used: “I’ve always loved them baked in their jackets.” Malgas sighed and salted his chips. “It’s better to give than to receive,” he mused, “although receiving can also be
good. Look, there’s even vinegar in a little plastic bag – they think of everything.” He bent his head over the ribs and breathed in a blend of BBQ Sauce and charbroiled lamb; by a happy coincidence, the Buccaneer’s spicy marinade combined exquisitely with the delicate herby aroma of the heap … tarragon … cinnamon … kakiebos … It was perfect.

But what was that? Something medicinal had seeped into the mixture and threatened to spoil it entirely. Eucalyptus? No, lanolin? Camphor? Malgas sniffed again, and ascertained that the offensive smell was coming from the back of his neck! All at once he became acutely aware of how fresh and clean he was. There were creases in his shorts where creases had no business to be. There was a parting in his newly shampooed hair. The tops of his long socks were neatly folded – not once, but twice! “I’ve made an unforgivable booboo,” he thought angrily, and forgave himself immediately. “The thought of bathing wouldn’t have entered my head if she hadn’t turned up her nose and run the water.”

“Ingenious contraption,” he said to cover his embarrassment.

“Notice the built-in hinges here, and the little triangular compartment in the corner for Sauce. Brilliant.”

Nieuwenhuizen peered into the container, grunted, wiped his fingers on his safari suit and tore another rib from the rack.

When they had eaten their fill they moved their stones back in preparation for the bonfire.

“Say a few words, Father,” Malgas suggested.

“Why not? I’m in a talkative mood.” Nieuwenhuizen gathered his thoughts as he scoured the grease from his palms with a handful of sand, and then called for silence, cleared his throat, and began: “We have dined sumptuously, thanks to the generosity of our friend and colleague Malgas. Now let us enjoy a blazing fire and sit around it chatting amiably.”

“Hear! Hear!” Malgas exclaimed. “Well spoken!”

Nieuwenhuizen took a match from a waterproof container, struck it, and dabbed the base of the heap with the flame.

It wouldn’t burn.

“It so happens,” said Malgas, reaching into the darkness and producing, with a flourish, a king-size pack of Blitz Firelighters.

Nieuwenhuizen shook his head resolutely.