The Folly (7 page)

It was a crestfallen Mr who barged through his house a few minutes later, snatched a key from a hook and went to the garage. Mrs followed him silently to the back door and waited there until he returned carrying a petrol tin.

“You be careful with that,” she said.

Mr took two six-packs of beer from the fridge (Lions and Castles).

“You be careful with that too,” she said, following in his footsteps to the front door and watching after him through the bars of the security gate. Then she went back to her stool in the darkened lounge.

Nieuwenhuizen took the petrol tin and departed for the top of the heap. Malgas wanted to go with him, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “You’ll get your boots dirty,” he crowed. Malgas was left behind at the camp, staring dejectedly at his Hush Puppies. Nieuwenhuizen went up the
heap in leaps and bounds and in no time at all he was standing on the summit. Instead of emptying the petrol into the “core,” as Malgas had proposed, he raised the tin in an expansive toast and kicked his heels.

Malgas took the opportunity to break the Firelighters into sticks and spike the lower slopes. When that was done, he saw that Nieuwenhuizen was still occupied, so he slipped off his garters and pushed his socks down to his ankles. He ruffled his hair. He began to feel much better. Nieuwenhuizen stopped dancing and started pouring libations, first to the cardinal points of the compass and then to the lesser-known points in between.
NNW
,
SSE
,
NWS
. Malgas stretched himself out on the ground, rolled over a few times, and then looked up at the stars. They were far away, no argument. Mrs liked to describe them as pinpricks in a velvet tarpaulin. They had names, which the fundis were familiar with, and they were said to be “wheeling.” Furthermore, your stars foretold. If you understood how to join them together, like puzzles, you could arrive at mythological beings and household names. “He probably knows just how to do it. He’s travelled. Why don’t I, when I know so much about the world? Over coffee I – blast! – the chocolate digestives!”

When Nieuwenhuizen eventually returned he was greeted by enthusiastic cries of “Speech! Speech!” but he waved the request aside. His adventures on the heap had had a marvellously soothing effect on him, for he patted Malgas between the shoulder-blades and handed him the matches. “Do the honours – you’re the guest. I’ll get the lights.” He doused the hurricane-lamp.

Afterwards, when he recalled his conduct in these unusual circumstances, Malgas allowed himself a flush of pride. It would have turned out badly for him had he followed Nieuwenhuizen’s lead and stooped to light the fire. In the heat of the moment, however, he was able to acquit himself with grace and composure. An image came into his mind – a match, like a tiny rocket, blazing an arc through space – and this godsend saved the day and impressed it on his memory as one of beauty and balance. His hand found exactly the gesture that was required to scrape the head of the match along the side of the box and propel it on its journey; the match, igniting as it entered the atmosphere and burning ever brighter as it flew, found precisely the triumphal trajectory that would bring it, when it was at its brightest, to the heap, which was by now embroiled in a miasma of volatile fumes; the heap sucked in its breath, soured with the smell of petrol, its tangled limbs shuddered, it gasped – and blurted out a tongue of flame so huge and incandescent that it turned night into day and extinguished the stars.

Nieuwenhuizen could not have been more astounded if Malgas himself had burst into flames. He pointed weakly at the stone next to him. Malgas lowered his bulk onto it and the two of them gaped in speechless wonder at the burning mountain.

At last the flames died down, the mountain began to collapse onto itself, squirting sparks into the insurgent darkness, and Nieuwenhuizen found his tongue.

“Pull your stone a bit closer and I’ll tell you a story.”

“Which reminds me,” said Malgas. He reached casually into the shadows and brought forth the beers. They were still icy. Nieuwenhuizen
punched Malgas’s arm and chose a Castle, Malgas followed suit, and they popped them open.

“Cheers!”

They drank.

Malgas wiped the froth from his lips lavishly with the back of his hand. “Tell me about the old place,” he prompted. “What made you tear up your roots and come all this way to start over? Do you have a dream? Tell me everything, don’t leave out a single detail, I’m an empty vessel waiting to be filled. Also, I need facts, to win over the doubting Mrs.”

These lines struck Malgas as among the finest he had ever uttered; there was no question that they were the most inspired he had addressed to Nieuwenhuizen so far. Nieuwenhuizen appreciated the speech too, and there was a touch of admiration in his expression as he tilted back his head, creating an oblique play of shadows across his features, stared into the fire, where a mass of twisted tongues were wagging, and murmured, “The Mrs.”

“My wife.”

“I remember.” Pause. “Where to begin … Yes.” He scuffed a burnt rib from the ashy edge of the fire with the toe of his boot. “Take this rib here, Malgas.”

Malgas spat on his fingers and picked up the bone.

At that moment lights blazed in Malgas’s lounge, a window burst open explosively, and Mrs Malgas was heard to shout, “Put out that fire at once! This is a smokeless zone! Give Him hell, Cooks!”

“She’s gone too far this time,” Malgas muttered, leapt to his feet and plunged into the darkness. As he fumed across the stubbled field,
pressing his beer tin to his sunburnt neck, a broth of angry phrases seethed up in his throat, but the mere sight of his wife’s trembling silhouette was enough to make him swallow it down. All he could manage as he hurried up to the wall was, “Put out that light! You’re spoiling the fire.”

“He’s getting soot all over everything,” she whined, and flustered like a paper cut-out against the window-pane. “The pool’s turned black as ink. Look at your clothes! What have you been doing?”

“Haven’t you done enough damage for one day?”

“This is a residential area.” But the hurt note in his voice had disarmed her, and she rustled away and put out the light.

“He’s coming out of his shell,” Mr whispered urgently to the open window, “but one more insensitive intrusion could drive him back in again for good. Is that what you want? By the way – are there any biscuits in the house?”

There was no answer.

“Marshmallows?”

Silence. She had deserted her post.

For want of something better to do, he meandered back to the camp. In the distance the crooked figure of Nieuwenhuizen lay like a black branch beside a mound of flickering embers.

Mrs turned the
TV
set on and sat down in Mr’s La-Z-Boy. The chair smelt of aftershave. It embraced her and made her feel small. The violet light from the screen, on which two men were swilling Richelieu brandy while they discussed money matters, lent the room the atmosphere of a butchery at night, glimpsed from a moving car. Pleased to
meet you. She studied her thin forearms: her flesh looked bloodless and cold. “The pallor of death,” was the phrase that came to mind, and it occurred to her to shout it out of the window.

“She sends her apologies, it won’t happen again,” said Malgas, seating himself on his stone and holding up the rib. “You were saying …”

“I was saying —”

“The pallor of death!”

“Then He danced around on the top, as if He was trying to trample the juice out of it, and He doused it with petrol, as if it was a tipsy-tart.”

“For crying in a bucket, will you please stop telling me what he did! I was there, you know.”

“Of course you were. I just thought you’d like a fresh perspective on events.”

“I wouldn’t. I’d like to forget the whole thing … I’ve never been so ashamed.”

“You’re still cross with me.”

“We were getting on famously. He was opening up!”

Whether or not Mrs was to blame, Nieuwenhuizen lost his sense of purpose once again and went back to mooching on the plot.

His indolence did not bother Mr at all. “He’s taking a well-earned break. He’s in training for Phase Two: the actual building of the new house.”

Mrs scoffed. “Break my eye. He’s turned the environment into a wasteland, and now He’s beating it senseless, pacing up and down in
His clodhoppers. You may think that nothing’s happening, but I tell you, He’s busy. Nothing will ever grow there again.”

“Unless we want it to.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.”

Even so, her allegations came back to him the next evening when he saw the huge heap of ashes left over from the bonfire and the flat earth signposted everywhere with crosses and arrows by Nieuwenhuizen’s soles.

Every night Malgas joined Nieuwenhuizen at his modest new fireplace on the edge of the ash-heap; he no longer found it necessary to manufacture excuses for his visits, but he sometimes brought a small gift – a bracket or a hinge, a packet of screws or a brass lug, a plastic grommet or a fibreglass flange – as a token of his desire for constructive effort. Nieuwenhuizen stowed each one away with a smile.

Whenever Malgas inquired about the building operations, which was often, Nieuwenhuizen would chide him for his impatience. “All of this has been surveyed and subdued,” he said, flinging out his arms to encompass his territory. “That in itself is no small thing. I’m not as young as I used to be. I need time to regain my strength.”

“For Phase Two?”

“Of course.”

It was after one of these routine exchanges that Nieuwenhuizen decided the time was ripe.

T
hey were waiting for the pot to boil when Nieuwenhuizen went into action. He raked a red-hot nail as long as a pencil from the coals, elevated it with a pair of wire tongs, dunked it in his water drum, waved it to disperse the steam, inspected it meticulously, approved of it, and held it up by its sharp point. “Do you stock these?”

A tremor of foreboding ran through Malgas. He knew at once that a critical moment had been reached and he rose to the occasion like a fish to the bait. He narrowed his eyes professionally, took the nail, weighed it in one palm and then the other, tapped it on his thumb-nail and held it up to his ear, sniffed its grooved shank and pressed its flat head to the tip of his tongue. “Unusual. I could requisition them for you … but surely you won’t be needing such giants? If you were laying down railway lines or building an ark I could see the point of
it, but for laths and joists and stuff like that something half this size would be twice as good.”

“Don’t give me a thousand words,” Nieuwenhuizen said with a flicker of irritation. “I want three hundred of these, and so help me if they’re not exactly like this one I’ll send them back.”

“I’ll do it, relax. We have a saying at Mr Hardware: ‘The Customer is always right.’ But don’t blame me —”

Just then the pot boiled, Nieuwenhuizen jumped up to wrest it from the coals, and Malgas swallowed the meat of his sentence, which was “— when your place doesn’t have the professional finish, because the horns of these monsters are sticking out all over the show.”

“The horns,” said Mr to Mrs, “the
horns
of the
monsters
. That was what did it. He finally saw my point of view. If he builds that house of his one day he’ll have me to thank.”

particoloured. Castanets, chromium-plated, Clackerjack (regd.
T.M.
). Willow-pattern Frisbee. Mickey and Minnie, blessed by Pope (Pius). Pine-cone. Crucifix, commemorative, balsa-wood and papier-mâché, 255mm × 140mm. Calendar, Solly Kramer’s, Troyeville, indigenous fauna painted with the mouth, 1991. Clock, Ginza, broken (
T
oc
H
?)

It turned out that the factory couldn’t deliver before the weekend because of a strike (living wage, benefits, maternity leave) and so Malgas made a detour through Industria on his way home from work and picked up the nails himself. Two hundred and eighty-eight of them
came pre-packed snugly in two wooden boxes designed to hold a gross each, and the remaining dozen had been taped into a bundle and wrapped in brown paper.

Everything about this example of the packager’s craft reassured Malgas. The grainy deal boards and ropy handles spoke of concern for safety in transit and overall effect; but there was attention to detail too, in the countersunk screw-heads and the spacing of the stencilled lettering:
THIS SIDE UP
. Rush-hour traffic gave him pause, and by the time he arrived at the site he was almost convinced that the gigantic nails would be perfect for the construction that lay ahead.

He loaded the boxes from the back of the bakkie into the barrow and wheeled them to the camp. Nieuwenhuizen had excused himself from this activity so that he could rummage through his portmanteau; Malgas therefore took the initiative and stored the boxes in a cool, dry place under the tree. Then he went back for the package containing the surplus dozen – the Twelve, as he thought of them. No sooner had he returned with those under his arm than Nieuwenhuizen found what he was looking for: a leather bandoleer, well loved but little used, to judge by the patina of dried Brasso on its buckle and the marrow of congealed dubbin and fluff clogging its many loops.

While Nieuwenhuizen strapped the bandoleer over his shoulder, Malgas took the initiative again and prised open the first box. He found a thick layer of shredded paper the colour of straw. Excellent. He threw the paper out and there they were: one hundred and forty-four of the finest nails money could buy, neatly stacked in rows of twelve, with the direction of the heads alternating stratum by stratum
to compensate for the taper of the shanks. Even his exceptional sensitivity to packaging had not prepared him for this fastidious arrangement, and his admiration for the nails redoubled.

“Now that I see them here like this, in their proper context, I begin to see what you’re driving at,” Malgas mused. “There’s something about them, I can’t quite put my finger on it …”

Nieuwenhuizen looked into the box and smiled. He extracted one of the nails, blew a wisp of paper off it and slipped it into a leather loop. It fitted.

“Ah,” said Malgas.

“Fill me up,” Nieuwenhuizen commanded, spreading his feet and raising his arms as if Malgas was his tailor. He continued to smile benignly while Malgas loaded the bandoleer.

Malgas found it a satisfying task, punching out the dubbin marrow with the sharp point of each nail, wiping the goo off on his pants, and tugging the shank through until the head rested securely against the loop. Progressively, he was careful to research and develop an energy-conserving rhythm. There were thirty-six loops. Nieuwenhuizen bounced up and down on his toes, discovering his new equilibrium. Malgas was surprised his skinny legs didn’t snap under the load.

“My hat.”

Malgas unhooked the hat from a thorn, beat the dust out of it against his thigh, punched its crown into shape and placed it on Nieuwenhuizen’s head. Nieuwenhuizen cocked it rakishly and asked, “How do I look?”

“Striking. What’s the word … debonair.”

“I like that. I feel debonair.”

Nieuwenhuizen struck a few carefree poses and this gave Malgas a chance to examine his outfit more closely. He cut a fine figure. The only item that jarred was the bandoleer. In Malgas’s opinion it was excessive. The longer he looked at it, the less he liked it. It was pretentious. A plain pouch on a leather belt would have served just as well. Now that he’d conjured up a pouch, he couldn’t prevent a stream of plain images from gliding through his mind – the open face of a ball-peen hammer … a sturdy clod crumbling between a strong finger and thumb … a sap-stained scythe … a gush of chlorinated water from a hose … a sjambok … ploughshares … hessian pantaloons … hieroglyphs of mud dropping from the treads of a workmanlike boot. These uncalled-for images – who had summoned them? – and their stately passage – who was beating the drum? – gave him the creeps.

“You’ve got your nails,” he said, rolling back the tide, “and rather too big than too small, I suppose. But, forgive me for pointing it out, you’ve got nothing to nail together. Forward planning is becoming more and more urgent. It’s high time you ordered your materials: bricks, cement —”

“Enough is enough in any man’s language!” Nieuwenhuizen said crossly. The fellow was already getting too big for his boots.

“Timber and allied products —”

“Shut up.”

“Pardon?”

“Be still. I can’t take this obsession with brass tacks a minute longer.”

“Tacks?”

“You’ve got hardware on the brain, my friend, and it leaves you no room for speculation.”

This outburst offended Malgas deeply. He had made a substantial contribution to recent developments, and Nieuwenhuizen knew it. Why was he distorting the facts? Nevertheless Malgas stammered an apology. “I’m just trying to be practical.”

“You’re so
practical
,” said Nieuwenhuizen, who had not anticipated a defence, and repeated, “
You’re
so practical,” while he thought of what to say next. Then, without emphasis at all, “If you’re as practical as you say you are, answer me this: Have you ever given a moment’s thought to the shape and size of the new house?” By “ever” he meant since Malgas had been privy to his plans; and it must be said that this was exactly what Malgas understood him to mean. He went on regardless. “No you haven’t, there’s no need to state it. But let me tell you that I, for one, have to think about the new house all the time. Hardly a moment goes by that I don’t think about it. I can see it before me as clear as daylight this very instant, even as I’m speaking to you. Can you see it? Hey? Can you name one little nook of it? Is it on a rack up here in the warehouse?” And he emphasized this final question rather crudely by rapping on Malgas’s skull with his knuckles.

Such cruelty was out of character, and Malgas shrank from it in confusion and disappointment. “Not really …”

“There you are. That’s what I’m talking about. No conception of the new house, but you’re worrying yourself sick over what it’s made of! You’d better sort out your priorities, man, or we won’t be able to carry on collaborating on this project.”

“I’m sorry Father,” Malgas mumbled. “Collaborating,” spoken in anger, had pierced him to the quick and the hurt was written all over his face. “I’m a simple soul, as you know. Now that you mention it, I’d love to see the new place. I’d give my eye-teeth to see it (as Mrs would say). But I’m not sure I can. You haven’t given me clues. Shall I try anyway? Let’s see … Is it a double-storey by any chance?”

“There-there, say no more.” Just as suddenly as it had flared up, Nieuwenhuizen’s rage died down again. “I’m the one who should apologize. I’ve expected too much of you, I thought you’d pick things up on your own, without guidance, and now we’re both suffering because of my presumption. Perhaps it’s not too late to make amends.”

They sat on their stones with their knees almost touching. Both of them were suddenly apprehensive. Nieuwenhuizen opened and shut his mouth three and a half times, as if he wasn’t sure where to begin, but at last took Malgas’s hands in his own, kneaded them into one lump of clay, and said carefully, “Do you remember the old place I was telling you about on the night we met?”

Mere mention of that historic encounter, vividly evoked by the brambly clutches of Nieuwenhuizen’s fingers, was enough to make Malgas throb with longing for days gone by, but he mastered his emotions and said matter-of-factly, “It was beyond repair. The plumbing was shot. If my memory serves me correctly, the boards under the bath were a shade of … green.”

“Whatever. Point is: The new place will be nothing like that. In fact, it will be the absolute antithesis. Ironic. Where that place was old, for instance, this will be new. Where that was falling to pieces, this will be holding together very nicely thank you. That was rambling and
draughty, this will be compact but comfortable. Spacious, mind, not poky, and double-storey …”

“I knew it!”

“… to raise us up above the mire of the everyday, to give us perspective, to enable surveillance of creeping dangers. Make that triple-storey, don’t want to cramp our style. Bathrooms
en suite
. Built-in bar. All tried and tested stuff, bricks and mortar and polished panels, the stuff of your dreams, none of this rotten canvas and scrap metal, transitional, all this, temporary, merely. Forward! Nothing tin-pot! Everything cast-iron! Bulletproof – we have to think of these things I’m afraid – with storage space for two years’ rations. And on top of that wall-to-wall carpets in a serviceable colour, maybe khaki, and skylights and Slasto in the rumpus room. Materials galore, Malgas, right up your street. Malgas?”

Malgas opened his eyes, which were unnaturally bright.

“Can you see it?”

“I can’t see
it
as such,” said Malgas, reshaping two hands for himself, one with the other, and packing them around the brambles, “but I can see that it will be a fantastic place! I’ve made a start. Thank you.”

“That’s much better. Now what do I owe you for the nails?”

“Forget it.”

“I insist.”

“I really couldn’t.”

particoloured. Boot, camouflage, combat. Chopper, Soviet-made, collapsible. Traditional weapon: assegai, knopkierie, panga, pike, pole,
stick, stone, brick, mortar-board, fountain-pen, paper-clip, rubber stamp, gavel, sickle, spade, rake, hoe, spoke, knitting-needle, crochet-hook, darning-egg, butter-knife, runcible spoon, pot, pan, gravy-boat, whisk

Nieuwenhuizen’s hat hung at an impudent angle in the thorn-tree and his boots stood side by side on the ground below with their tongues sticking out. Taken together hat and boots suggested nothing so much as an invisible man.

Nieuwenhuizen in person, the object of the invisible one’s scrutiny, stood at attention nearby – in the north-western corner of block
IF
– gazing candidly into the sunrise. Until this moment the sun had been rising irrecoverably like a child’s balloon, but now it stood still, surprisingly enough, as if a dangling string had caught in the branches of the hedge.

Although he appeared to be considering the implications of this earth-shattering improbability, Nieuwenhuizen’s thoughts were in fact on the top of his head and the soles of his feet, which were developing pins and needles. He furrowed his forehead and shimmied his eyebrows in an effort to flush some blood into his scalp. He stretched his toes. He flexed his left hand, which was in his pocket: that at least was in good condition and ready for the task that lay ahead. His right hand, by contrast, was frozen into a claw around his flint hammer, and felt numb and unwieldy. To crown it all, the bandoleer, with its freight of nails, began to hurt his shoulder.

He was on the point of conceding defeat and retreating to his tent,
when the sun escaped from the grasp of the hedge and bobbed up into the sky.

“Optical illusion,” he said with a sigh of relief, and sallied forth.

He stepped off with his right foot and took six stiff paces. The earth felt unusually firm and steady. When his left foot came down for the third time, in the middle of
IE
, he flung the hammer in his right hand forward with all his might, pivoted on his heel, toppled sideways, flew into the air, flapped after the hammer like a broken wing, went rigid as a statue in mid-air, hung motionless for a long, oblique instant, and crashed to earth with a cry of triumph. He levered himself up and located the impression of his heel on the ground; then the starch went out of him and he flopped down on all fours to get a good look at the mark. It was shaped like a comma, with a bloated head and a short, limp tail. He took a nail from the bandoleer and pressed its point into the comma. Then, swinging his right arm like a piece of broken furniture, he hammered the nail into the ground.