The Restless Supermarket (26 page)

I would have shared this with Errol and Co, but it was too grandiose an analogy for pool. I elaborated another instead; it is possible to play the perfect game of pool, to ‘clear the table’, as they say, but it is seldom done because two things get in the way: chance and human error. And it is just the same with proofreading. I never got round to sharing this idea with them either, I never really broke the ice. If I had, all the nastiness that followed might have been averted.

As for Wessels, he was always too busy watching the proceedings at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa to talk. It was all a bit above his fireplace, he said, but he liked to keep in touch with developments, to be part of history in the making. Giving himself
airs.

‘I hear they’re thrashing out the future,’ I told him. ‘And I’m behind them all the way. They should not spare the
rod.’

I could see them beating one another senseless with their olive branches.

‘Just a sec, Aubs-ss. I’m watching this.’

Joseph Slovo dancing. A man of his age. And in the
Oxford
,
too.

I have a high regard for furniture and its place in the scheme of things. But the negotiators, as the talkers were called, were obsessed with it. Specifically with the table. With the comings and goings around it
–
no one cared a fig for its shape
–
with coming to it, sitting around it, laying things upon it, leaving it in a huff. They had a thing about the chair too: occupying it, addressing it, rotating it. And then the window! I made a vow: if one more person opens a window of opportunity, I’ll heave a brick through
it.

The New Management, not to be outdone, started tinkering with the furnishings. Our décor declined relentlessly. Pictures of footballers were tacked to the walls. Oilskin tablecloths were flung over the chequerboards: half the chessmen had been stolen and no one played any more. The chairs were covered in a garish new material and a layer of plastic. Plastic upholstery. The New Management defended it on economic grounds, but it was indecent. I still recall the sucking sound the backs of Nomsa’s thighs made on the plastic when she crossed and uncrossed her legs. It was like the smacking of lips. I was compelled to stare at her scarlet mouth, while the word ‘labia’ resounded in my head, with that ‘b’ smack in the middle of it, tight-lipped and pressing.

‘This place won’t last,’ I said to myself. And to Wessels as well. And he parroted back at me, through that sticky beak, those fly-paper lips, where a word was always stuck, waving its feelers: ‘This place won’t last.’

When the news got out that the Café Europa was closing down, no one was less surprised than
I.

*

One day, I overheard Floyd teaching Nomsa the mysteries of chess with the stragglers from that fighting army. ‘This is a lighthouse,’ he said, ‘and it ducks both ways. And this is a horse and it’s just a lightie.’

*

It was neither the black Christmas the trade unions had promised us, nor the white one of Bing Crosby’s dreams. Our Christmas-tide was
grey.

*

On Boxing Day, Wessels was quizzing me, in his sly way, about my plans for New Year’s Eve. What would I be doing? he wanted to know. Dinner-dancing at the Ambassador? I would be at the Goodbye Bash, I replied warily, like everyone else. He corrected me: the Goodbye Bash wasn’t on Friday, which was the last day of the year, but the evening before. ‘We all got better things to do on Old Year’s. Hunky’s got a gig at the Dev
…’

Was he trying to trick me? They’d said all along the Café was closing down at the end of the month. I could not have been mistaken. But the New Management confirmed it: the Bash was on Thursday. Friday night he would be tucking into a ‘slap-up graze’ at the Clay
Oven.

To tell the truth, I was relieved. The rowdiness always reached a crescendo on New Year’s Eve, when I would be more than pleased to stay indoors. On the other hand, I now had one day less in which to finish ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’.

*

The corrective surgery had not been entirely successful. Dumbo’s ear was now facing in the right direction, but flying at half mast. He was looking a little down in the mouth, under that crooked trunk. While Wessels hobbled on into the shop, I paused on the pavement to commiserate.

I hadn’t wanted to go shopping at all, never mind at the Jumbo Liquor Market. Rosie Woods might cause a scene. ‘Let’s walk over to Solomon Kramer’s in Yeoville. They’ve got as fine an array of bottles as you could hope to find, to judge by the window display. Or take a bus out to Benjamin Goldberg’s and see the attraction for ourselves
…’

But Wessels insisted. The booze for the Goodbye Bash had to come from the Jumbo. Something about the free ice. In Hebcoolers. Heb? From the Greek
hepta
,
seven. Refrigeration seven days a week. Or short for Hebrew?

‘The New Management’s got plenty of alcohol anyway. Why should we buy more?’

‘Bring your own booze. It was your idea.’

‘Where from!’

‘We’ll just get a few special things. I’m sure Tone’ll chip in with some
mix.’

I peered over the curvature of the ear, trying to gauge the mood of Rosie. Just my luck: the Queen of Sheba, nodding unremarked in the shadows of the doorway to Hypermeat, roused herself at the sight of me and shuffled out into the sunlight. She had lost most of her clothing, and what remained was sackcloth and ashes. Head bound up in a citrus pocket. Grubby brassière. Hessian boots. My worst nightmare lurched into motion: she began groping at Dumbo’s rear. Was it starting all over again? Would we be treated to the Queen’s impression of Darryl darrylling? I could see her scrambling up on the invalid’s back, overbalancing, grabbing for the tender ear. It might well have happened. But before she could get a leg over, Quim dashed out of the shop and began lashing her alliteratively with a quirt. New acquisition. Sent her packing to a decent distance.

I emerged from cover and hailed my rescuer. My idea was to clarify the matter of his origins
–
‘He also talks pork and cheese,’ Wessels had said, ‘probably a cousin of Moçes’
–
but he was in no mood for conversation. He marched back into the shop, and when Rosie raised her muscular button-punching arm like a boom to let him in, I slipped in too. Fired off an ‘
Obrigado
’
just to shake her up a bit. What in God’s name had she been spraying in her armpits?
Doom?

Wessels was blundering around like a bull in a china shop. I could imagine him moseying along Kotze Street, waving his crutch at the throng as if he were trying to part the Red Sea, with your humble servant, A. Tearle, following in his wake, as laden down as a Bactrian camel.

He handed me the plastic basket and began sniffing out purchases with the end of his crutch. Mainstay. Klipdrift. Störtebeker Apfelschnaps. Little plastic sachets of whisky and gin. Count Pushkin. Lord Nelson. Coffin varnish. I thought he would want Paarl Perlé just to wound me, but instead it was Fifth Avenue Cold
Duck.

‘Champagne,’ he
said.

‘In inverted commas.’

*

I was up all night, typing out the fair foul copy of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’.

When I sat down to work, there spilled from one of the files an index card, on which I had written, all those years ago: National Proofreading Champion. And in smaller letters: Floating Trophy presented by A. Tearle. The words I had meant to have engraved on the trophy. I propped the good intention against the glass of the window and it kept me going in the wee hours.

Somewhere near dawn, I was gazing through the window at the lights of the south spread out to the horizon, when I became aware of my reflection in the glass, my cheeks stubbled, my nose throbbing, my excrescences, occipital and cranial, pulsating, my hair crying out to be cut, rampant, quaquaversal,
awry.

I laboured on. Then at last, as the sun cast its bloodshot eye over the penultimate day of the year, I was done. For the first time in years, I felt at peace with myself and the world.

For Merle Graaff

–
William Hazlitt

Fluxman was lying awake in his bed, leafing through the coming day’s work in his mind, when water began to run beyond his window. It was not the patter of a garden sprinkler on a lawn or the spurt of a hose in a bucket, the usual suburban backdrop to his Saturday mornings. It was a river rushing in a gorge, breakers rolling against a shore. But it began as abruptly as if an enormous tap had been opened wide. He clenched his fists beneath the blankets and held his breath, listening, expecting the worst. He thought he heard people crying out, footsteps pounding on his stoep, the rasping of rushes against the hull of a wicker basket.

After a while, he stuck out his head and looked around. Everything in place. Slippers in alphabetical order on the carpet, papers drawn up in open file on the desk, curtains closed tight. Then his eyes widened to admit the watery play of light behind the brocade. He sat up in bed and tried to decipher this wash of colour and sound. Gingerly, he dipped a foot in the shallow pile of the carpet. Wall-to-wall had been known to hover, trembling over the abyss, long after the earth below had fallen away. Seemed solid enough. He stuffed his feet into the sheepskin slippers and went over to the window. He could sense the fluid pressure of water on the other side, and he paused, with his fingers brushing the edges of the two curtains where they met, afraid for the drowned world he might find beyond the glass. Then he took a deep breath and flung the curtains
open.

My gardening days are over, he thought.

Where his front lawn had been
–
just last night, as he shut the window before bed, he’d reminded himself that it needed mowing
–
lay a vast reach of mud-brown water, fringed to the left by bulrushes and the right by palms, and dammed up in the distance ahead by a sheer cement quay topped by a metal railing. There were several small islands scattered around, mounds of foliage trimmed with beach sand. The scene was idyllic, if somewhat contrived, and oddly familiar. Fluxman was sure he had seen it before somewhere on his travels, but for the life of him, he could not say where. He scrutinized it carefully from front to back. The water was lapping at his house: beneath the window-sill, small waves spilled over onto the slasto paving of his stoep. In the shallows, his letter box stuck out above the surface, with the newspaper wedged in its throat; further out, the roof of the carport showed where his driveway had been. Beyond that, where the water deepened, the curved brackets of the street lights mimicked the necks of the wading birds he saw stilting among the rushes.

People appeared on the quay, rushing up and down, shouting noiselessly and pointing with agitated gestures into the water below. The object of their attention came into sight, floating out from behind an island: a young girl, bedraggled and half-drowned, clinging to a spar of wood and paddling weakly against the dirty current.

Fluxman had resolved long ago not to busy himself with the affairs of the world, especially not through sleight of hand
–
but this was an emergency, and he reached instinctively for his blue pencil.

Before he could wield it, however, there was a commotion in the rushes. A small head with a glazed eye peered over the horizon, as if an enormous seabird had poked its head out of its nest to look around, and floated closer, revealing the sleek curve of a neck, the ominous fork of a wishbone. Then the rushes yielded before the thrusting breast, and a duck-billed pedalboat came crashing through the greenery and surged into open water. Although it was shaped like a Muscovy, it reminded Fluxman of a letter from the Greek alphabet: a plump, inflatable delta.

There were two men in the boat, a middle-aged one in a straw hat and a younger one who might have been his son, both pedalling away furiously. Head held high, parting the waves with its fibreglass sternum, the duck made quickly for the girl. The watchers on the quay clustered at the railing, waving with their caps, urging the rescuers on. The waves in the wake unrolled like scrolls of beaten metal.

Now Fluxman remembered where he had seen all this before: it was the Wetland Ramble from the Zoological Gardens. He had wandered there once, with Ms Georgina
Hole.

The duck bore down on the girl, then slewed to a halt and settled in the water. The younger man scrambled into the prow, where he might reach a helping hand down over an upswept wing. His companion, pedalling gently to hold the boat steady against the current, took up a canary-yellow camera and began to film the operation. A copybook rescue, Fluxman thought. He could imagine the gratitude in the girl’s eyes. Would she weep as her saviour hauled her aboard, streaming fresh water and wreathed with hyacinth? Would she cling to him as if she would never let him go? Would she fall in love with him, would she make him fall in love with her, fulfilling their destiny in the happy ending? Or would she overdo it, playing to the camera and weeping on cue, making him lose sympathy with
her?

The hand of the rescuer closed around the girl’s wrist. A close-up was called for. Any cameraman worth his salt would capture it. Let his strong fingers slip on her goose-pimpled skin, let the grasp be almost broken, the girl be almost lost, before he drew her safely in
…

At that moment, the duck lurched forward in the water.

Here we go again, Fluxman said to himself. Will nothing ever run smoothly again? Can nothing go on steadily to its conclusion? Must it always be one crude disruption after another?

The man kneeling in the prow teetered. The one with the camera stuck resolutely to his task. The duck twitched again, as if it had flexed its wings to fly only to find them useless, and both men went tumbling. Then something immense bore up from below, ramming into the bird, tilting its tail feathers up into the air and driving its head below the water. A buckled undercarriage of rods and paddles churned the sky to froth. A mouth opened, the mouth of a hippopotamus, with weeds and splintered fibreglass between its teeth; the black rock of its back shuddered and sluiced water, sank again below the surface. A momentary calm. Then the rock rose irresistibly for a second time and threw the bird over on its side. The men fell into the water. The wounded duck subsided and began to circle around the compass point of its own broken neck, while the watchers clawed up the stones beneath their feet and hurled them over the edge to drive off the monster. Once the water had settled, the older of the two rescuers could be seen clinging to a broken wing, with the straw hat jammed down over his eyes. There was no sign of the other. The girl was gone as
well.

The rush of water, the roaring that had woken Fluxman that morning, continued unabated. He scanned the surface, looking as much for the source of this sound as for signs of survivors. Just beyond the carport, a stream of bubbles was boiling to the surface. Burst mains. Was the water level rising?

What difference did it make? Let the catastrophe go on without
him.

Tucking his pencil behind his ear, he turned away from the window and drew on his dressing-gown. He went from room to room in his house. Everything seemed to be in order. He scrutinized it all in passing, to make sure it stayed that way, as he worked his passage to the kitchen. Enough excitement for one day; he needed toast, and coffee, and quiet columns of print. He looked through the window into the backyard. That also seemed to be under control. A slight agitation in the swimming-pool water, perhaps, a sympathetic stirring, an excess of bubbles.

He switched on the kettle, and its hiss soon drowned out the faint cries skipping shorewards over the lake outside.

*

Breakfast had no bulk without the newspaper. Fluxman dusted the crumbs off his plate into the sink and ran the tap to wash them away. Suddenly, he remembered the long-handled net for skimming leaves from the pool, lying in its brackets against the garage wall. It might just reach the letter box. He fetched the net and carried it through the house.

The breath of the wetlands enveloped him as he opened the front door. The water had stopped running and the silence smelt sour. On the far shore, the capsized Muscovy had been grappled to the quay. A man in leather shorts and an alpine hat was preparing to abseil
down.

Fluxman weighed the net in his hand and measured the gap with his eye. He was still pondering his next step, when something stirred in the shallows and a body floated to the surface. For God’s sake! Would it never end? A filthy swell as green as soup ran over the slasto and swirled around his feet. He recoiled, but could not bring himself to withdraw. The body was floating face down in the water. He snared it with the net and dragged it in, until it bumped against the stoep, rising and falling with the wrack. He took a grip on one of the body’s rubber handles, felt the distasteful fret of it against his palm, waited for the swell to rise, and heaved it onto the slasto.

He was prepared for savaged flesh, for puncture holes and lacerations, but not for the chaos that met his practised eye, the jumble of sprockets and yellow vinyl and rubbery connective tissue, the ooze of blood and lubricating gels, the tangle of wiring beaded with solder. He rolled the bobber over, shuddering at the touch of gizzard flesh and bristles, the crab apple of the eye, the broken springs, the oily feathers, the webbed fingers, the shattered lenses, the sockets filled with ground glass and riverweeds. Beyond repair, he thought desperately. A cacophony of categories, a jumble of kinds, an elemental disorder, wanton and fatal. With the soggy end of his slipper, he thrust the body back into the water and watched it drift away. Beyond repair! Not once in all his long career had such an unholy perception entered his mind. His heart sank sickeningly and he willed it back into place with a cry. He felt peculiarly loose and disconnected. He gazed in alarm at the backs of his hands, at the palms and the wrists, at his arms, his chest, his thighs. Even as he was proofreading himself, he was walking back into the house, his knees and ankles buckling and squeaking like dislocated hinges. He shut the door behind him, stuffing newsprint into the crack beneath it, and walked again, leaving a trail of slimy footprints on the parquet
–
from the right foot only, like a one-legged man
–
to his study.

For an hour he sat at his desk, gazing at his papers without seeing them, turning things over in his mind. Several times he picked up the jar of buttons he used as a paperweight and absently stirred the contents with his forefinger. Then he took down the last official street guide to Alibia and opened it to Astra Vista, where he lived. He put his finger down on his neighbourhood. The error glared out at him. Where once there had been neat and orderly rows of houses just like his own, there was the Zoological Gardens. Or a chunk of it anyway. Gar … the map said. Gar. The rest seemed to have been left behind on the other side of the city. He paged to the place in the book where the Zoo was supposed to be, and found it occupied by several blocks of Astra Vista. His old neighbours the Armstrongs, from Number 93 across the way, had come off badly: in its new position, their front door opened onto the elephants’ enclosure. What else had been carelessly left behind in the relocation? The penguin house, several rows of cages belonging to the smaller primates, aviaries. Parrots, parrots.

He should speak to Munnery. He picked up the telephone, but there was no dialling tone. Was he too late? Had Munnery finally been wiped off the map? He dared not think it. Through the window, he saw the telephone line from his roof slanting down into the water like an anchor chain. There was no time to lose; he had vacillated far too long as it was. He must go to Munnery at once. He fetched his rucksack from behind the bathroom door and began to pack: maps, spare pencils, sharpeners, the Phone Book, an apple or two, a packet of trail mix, a bag of pistachio nuts, a month’s supply of notepads, a torch, a flask of fresh water, a loaf of rye bread. He donned khakis and boots.

When he was finished, he gave his house the once-over, swiftly and thoroughly, focusing so intensely, his head began to throb. Then he took his alpenstock from the stand at the door and went out into the disjointed
city.

*

The golf course at the Royal Alibian Country Club had once been the pride of the sporting gentry, but there was not much left of it now: spite and neglect had scattered most of the links to the four corners of the city. On any outing, one was bound to stumble across a bit of it somewhere, and so Fluxman was hardly surprised when the service lane behind his house gave onto one of the more scenic sections of the front nine. Rather, he was delighted. He was not a sportsman himself (although he was often taken for one, with his youthful physique and fine head of hair), but he liked to walk, and in the old days, when the Alibian landscape was more set in its ways, he had always resented the hold the sports clubs had on the city’s scenic parkland. The
RACC
had been the main culprit. It was one of the rare delights of the new disorder, he reasoned now, that he should find the property of the Royal, the long dog-leg fairway of the fourth, to be precise, seen and envied so often on the television during the Alibian Open, flung down here in his own backyard. It was pleasing for this reason too: another bit of the Royal, the celebrated eighteenth no less, had wound up at Munnery’s place, which was his destination, and it would be an auspicious symmetry to begin and end his journey on the course.

He set off down the fairway with an unaccustomed spring in his step, swinging his alpenstock at the sprinkling of copper-bottomed pots and pans he espied in the rough. Up ahead, in the crook of the dog-leg, among the pale trunks of bluegum and beech, the sun glinted on sheet metal. The corner of an office block or a shanty town, he surmised. On the other side of the fairway, kudu cows stretched their necks between the palisades of an iron fence to reach the greener kikuyu and spicy dandelions, and dropped their steaming pats among the dewy kitchenware. A pastoral idyll. It was a long time since Fluxman had worked up a sweat. He gazed about him curiously and began to whistle.
I love to go a
-
wandering
…