The Restless Supermarket (20 page)

After several months, Bogey and his comrades discovered Benjamin Goldberg’s, the world’s largest ‘liquor supermarket’, and his faith in consumption found a shrine. He would ferry the new arrivals from Eastern Europe out there
–
more and more of them, as time went by
–
to introduce them to the mysterious abundance of the new world. Weekly pilgrimages were made. Sometimes they went merely to browse in the bottle-lined aisles, absorbing the atmosphere osmotically through their swarthy skins; more often, they returned with primitive forms of alcohol that the sober-minded could never have imagined and could scarcely pronounce, wines and brandies made from macerated fruits, beers as black as pitch, luminous vintages in oddly-shaped bottles with small animals suspended in them, liqueurs named after the leaders of obscure reformations, spirits so volatile the smokers had to stub out their cigarettes before the stoppers were drawn for fear of igniting a conflagration. They were always forcing their firewaters upon us, to win approval and friendship, when these were not freely given. Mrs Mavrokordatos let them keep their bottles behind the counter.

When the Bogeymen had had a few too many, which was often, one had to mind one’s tongue in their company. A single word
–
and not just the obvious tear-jerkers like ‘mother’ and ‘home’, but innocents like ‘football’ or ‘sausage’
–
would make them weep inconsolably or break glasses in their fists. Mrs Mavrokordatos, more fool her, paid for the breakages from her own pocket. And Mevrouw Bonsma would chip in as well. They were just boys, she said, far away from home, as if that justified their Bohemian excesses.

All the others, even Spilkin, found this hooliganism picturesque. When I dissented, the old accusations of ‘dryness’ resurfaced.

‘Any fool can see,’ I had occasion to remark, ‘that the problem is not dryness but wetness, a certain soaked quality, a sousedness.’ Souséd, I styled it, pointedly, by analogy with curséd.

*

Not all the newcomers were Bogeymen and Bohemians, although they were all Philistines. As the circle widened, so did the cracks, and some peculiar creatures came floating through. There was a Mrs Hay, for example, a clairvoyant adept at performing her own facelifts, by gathering up the slack and securing it to her skull along the hairline and behind the ears with tabs of sticking plaster, in different ways every week, so that she always looked subtly unfamiliar. For me she predicted a long and happy life, bless her, in the bottom of a cup of Joko made with a tea bag (a
round
tea bag, which flavoured more in the steeping than the square kind, the advertising insisted, but portended less in the dregs). Then there was a McAllister who had worked for the municipality reading meters, until he fell into a French drain and broke his hip. He was prone to quoting Rabbie Burns at us, especially ‘To a Mouse’; and very often prone full stop, from a surfeit of usquebaugh. Jimbo, we called him, just a vowel removed from a pink elephant. And there was Wessels, who struck me at first only because he said ‘Hull-ohs’ when he arrived and ‘Chow-chow’ when he departed.

Wessels. Of all people! Riddled with plurality, liverish, toothy, thatched, thick as two short planks.

I missed the days of intimate quadrilaterality. But I would be lying if I said that I was not sucked into the maelstrom of our growing circularity.

All these new acquaintances had one happy advantage for me at least, one ‘spin-off’
–
the perfectly apt Americanese, implying as it does that something is going round in circles rather too quickly and throwing off consequences like sparks. I had never before in my life been exposed to so much misuse and malapropism, so much sheer barbarism. I had stumbled upon a windfall in the least likely place. Even as I struggled to concentrate in the mounting babble, I began to keep lists of these bad apples for incorporation into ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’. It wouldn’t take long before the newest of the newcomers, in sub-standard English of one variety or another
–
we had ceased to attract the better sort of person
–
would stick a nose into my business and ask: ‘What are you scribbling in that notebook of yours?’

‘Oh, it’s just something you said.’ And I’d put the book quickly in my pocket, with a deliberately dusty chuckle. ‘Nothing important.’

Then they would insist, indefatigably, until at last I relented: ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you … You see, a moment ago you said: “My cousin’s a computer boff.” Well, it’s not “boff”
–
it’s “buff”. Or “boffin”. But never “boff” or “buffin”, which I’ve also heard more than once.’

And from there it was a short step to telling them all about ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’, and a whole lot of other things besides. My ‘topics’ (Merle). Things they didn’t necessarily want to hear. Not one in ten had the foggiest idea what I meant; but they were impressed with me anyway, and proud to be part of my research. It was the index cards that did it, and the lever-arch files with the granite finish.

As far as my letters to the press were concerned, I believe the admiration was sincere. I had long since learnt to lay the newspaper down on the table in such a way that Merle would realize one of my letters had been published, and share it with the others. None of them in all that time ever earned the distinction, although several followed my example and tried their hand at it. What thrilled them most was seeing my name in print. ‘A. Tearle,’ they would mutter, turning it over in their mouths like so much melanzano or what-have-you, savouring the unexpected taste of it, while the living embodiment sat before them, sipping a tea, twirling a pencil. ‘A. Tearle.’ I served as a basic English lesson.

Once, when I’d included a covering note to explain a complicated layout and unthinkingly appended my full name, the editor took it upon himself to add it to my letter. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the imbecile rendered it
Audrey
Tearle. I hoped no one would notice, but the fool with the echolalia did, illiterate as he was, and started cracking jokes about ‘Little Audrey’. He was full of jokes. It reminded me of the mania for joke-telling that had seized Spilkin when Mevrouw Bonsma first settled among us, and I prayed it was just a ‘phase’ this one was going through, a nervous habit perhaps, brought on by the strain of being in more sophisticated company than he was accustomed to. But the condition proved to be chronic.

‘Who is that dolt?’ I asked Merle, when he had gone to the Gentlemen’s room, which he did at regular intervals, seeing that Mrs Mavrokordatos was plying him with
beer.

‘Wessels,’ she said. ‘Martinus Theodosius Wessels.’

Perhaps that was when ‘Empty’ first occurred to
me.

*

For two whole weeks, Mevrouw Bonsma poured out nothing but dirges, long draughts of ‘Galway Bay’ and ‘The Mountains of Mourne’ that had the Bohemians weeping as if they were Irishmen themselves, which they very nearly were. I said it was homesickness; the Wessels character insisted it was ‘dronkverdriet’
We pleaded for jollier melodies
–
‘Loch Lomond’ was a favourite with McAllister, I recall, to restore the geographical balance
–
but Mevrouw would not comply.

‘I remain your humble servant, but I cannot. I feel so sad, and so does the piano. It hurts here.’ She stroked a tender spot on the keyboard and sucked a föhn off the Alibian Alps through the gaps in her teeth.

‘I feel it too,’ said Merle. ‘I feel it in my bones. Something terrible is about to happen.’

‘What do you say, Mrs
Hay?’

Our clairvoyant just hitched up a region of her fallen face with her thumb and kept silent.

Whether or not the tragedy had been foretold in bone and ivory, it came to pass. Mrs Mavrokordatos acquired for the Café Europa two television sets. They were hoisted aloft on pivoting platforms attached to the walls, one over the door to the kitchen and the other over Mevrouw Bonsma’s head. Once again, I had to alert our proprietress to the perils of the course she was pursuing.

‘This will bring in the wrong crowd.’

‘You mean blacks?’

People had Africans on the brain.

‘I mean television watchers. “Viewers” as they want to be called. And sports enthusiasts in particular,
fanatics
of hockey, cricket, and especially football.’

I was right. The television sets brought in a lot of noisy immigrants from Glasgow and Manchester and Leeds, whose greatest joy was to watch the football teams from their old home towns, turnipy manikins with bulging legs and rosy cheeks, rushing around on lawns of the unnatural lushness usually reserved for botanical gardens. The clubs had the quaintest names, Rangers and Hearts, Tottenham Hotspurs and Crystal Palace. Occasionally there were local fixtures too, played by teams out of the Christmas pantomime, such as the Chiefs and the Pirates. I half expected poor old Noodler to take the pitch. One of the players, by the name of Khumalo, claimed to be a doctor. Probably struck off the roll for misconduct. The football fanatics were all diminutives: Robby and Freddy, Bobby and Teddy, a whole dynasty of Harries. Clientele, Mrs Mavrokordatos insisted, so long as their money is good. The phrase that came to my mind was ‘paying customers’. When they gave the attendance figures at sports stadia, that was the term they always used, as if there were bound to be gatecrashers and cheats too, who should not be counted.

After the sports fanatics, came a variety of others: spinsters addicted to situation comedies, bachelors with a passion for news or weather reports, devotees of the quiz show or the courtroom drama.

As I’d anticipated, Mevrouw Bonsma’s reign was drawing to a close. Soon she was confined to a single shift between five o’clock and half past six, a period known with cavalier disregard for accuracy on every count as the ‘Happy Hour’. By arrangement with the proprietor of the Haifa, a noticeboard spangled with chalky Hebrew Magen Dovids was secured to the railings at the bottom of the escalator in the street outside, with a photograph of Mevrouw Bonsma signed ‘Yours, Suzanna’ sellotaped to it under plastic, as if she were a piece of cheap merchandise
–
a disposable watch or an overripe melon. I tried to get up a petition to have more of Mevrouw Bonsma and less of the television sets, but no one would sign it, apart from the old squares, and even they thought it was a losing battle.

It wasn’t long before the television sets were being left on even while Mevrouw Bonsma played. At five to five every day, as she settled herself at the piano, Eveready climbed up on a chair and turned the volume down, so that those with the urge could follow the silent sequence of events that flickered there.

One evening, a brief part of one evening, stands out in my mind now as a turning point. Not
the
turning point, not the spilkin that unlocks the whole puzzle, but a key nevertheless, as significant as the discovery of a Merope in High Point.

I had been detained that day at the General Hospital, queuing interminably for my pills, and darkness was falling by the time I alighted from my bus in Edith Cavell Street. Meissner’s Building rode at anchor in the traffic like an ocean-going liner. I remember glancing up at the windows of the Europa, aglow between the columns of brocade, and feeling a comforting sense of anticipation. It was winter and I was looking forward to the heaters and, dare I say it, the warmth of human fellowship.

But as I stepped onto the escalator, there was a commotion on the first floor. A drunkard, a young black man in a shiny suit, appeared at the top of the escalator, and with an unprintable curse, hurled himself down it. The stairs were going in the other direction, bearing him back ceaselessly to the top, where they should soon have deposited him in the mechanical course of events. But he applied himself to the task of plunging downwards with such maniacal energy that he managed to make headway and bore slowly down upon
me.

He seemed oblivious of me. As if I was invisible. There was nothing I could do, a man of my age, not exactly frail but necessarily careful, what with the blood pressure and the spastic colon (which pains me all the more acutely, thanks to my vocation); I could hardly be expected to flee. I did take a few precautionary steps backwards down the moving stairs, to no avail. I rose relentlessly.

A nightmare. Imagine: me, Aubrey Tearle, stepping calmly backwards, while rising swiftly and effortlessly into the air; and him, the nameless ruffian, panting and crying out in a fury of exertion, while sinking by painful degrees. Herr Toppelmann once had a clock whose hands sped backwards, trying in vain to erase the motto printed across its face:
Manchmal geht alles verkehrt
–
which Toppelmann did into English as ‘On several occasions, everything is going wrong’
–
and it alarmed me in quite the same way. Could there be a more disquieting concept, one more filled with dreadful fascination, than ‘anticlockwise’.

We converged, and despite the fact that he was the one doing the foolish thing, the machinery cast me as the aggressor. I gripped the moving handrails, jutted out my jaw in the shape of a cowcatcher, braced myself, and we collided with a thump and were swept up to the landing, all his efforts cancelled out in a headlong moment. I found myself immersed in his smell, which I recognized as an adulterated version of my own: Shield for Sportsmen. Improbably, for I had expected us to end up in a heap, with bruises and broken bones, he stumbled backwards and sprawled supine on the floor, and I took two steps along the length of his body, just as if he had been a log across a stream, stepping once on his belly and once on his chest, and then found solid ground beyond him. It was just as well for him, I thought, that I was wearing my Hush Puppies rather than my brogues.