The Restless Supermarket (41 page)

How could one say, when there were so many contenders for the honour, whether this was the low point of the night or
not?

*

The golden fringes of the ‘Merry Xmas’ sign stirred like the filaments of a sea creature as we went through the turnstiles. Fish-eye mirrors hung at angles over the aisles, so that the cashiers could watch out for shoplifters. I saw the shelves reflected there, filled with pot-bellied bottles and jars, and myself, ashen-faced, with my head bulging hydrocephalically. Everything was out of shape.

The last time I’d set foot in here, it was to rebuke the manager for the menu’s
B-B-Q
chicken and cornish pastries. I saw him now, coming out of the office, and caught his eye. I thought he might come over for a chat, but he just raised a rascally eyebrow and went on towards the bakery.

We made our way to the fast-food counter. A whole flock of chickens lay spreadeagled on the grille, with their wings flung wide, as if they had died surrendering. We found a place at one of the toadstool tables. I have never been in favour of eating standing up. It does the digestion no good. Not that our scurvy fellow diners seemed overly concerned with their health. Most of them were eating bristly chicken legs in that beriberi sauce they’re so fond of. Shirlaine went to place our order.

While she was gone, a hag in a blue dustcoat came to clear away the papers and wipe the table tops with a damp rag, succeeding only in smudging the fingerprints in the animal fat and spreading a film of grease more evenly over everything. I remembered the dirty streets we had come through, the flotsam of beer tins, the curled and blackened scrapings of porridge pots, newspapers, food wrappers, mealie cobs, tripe ribbons. What would it take to wipe these surfaces clean?

Shirlaine brought a whole chicken on a sheet of waxed paper. It was savage, this obsession with fowl. Before I could say a word, she hooked her thumbs into the alimentary canal, gripped the carcase with both hands, and tore it in half with a great splintering of bone and splattering of grease. Good Lord. We ate. She used her fingers and I did my best with the plastic knife and
fork.

‘Make a wish, Tearle,’ she said, proffering the wishbone hooked into her little finger. ‘And don’t tell me what it is, or it won’t come true.’

As luck would have it, I won. I wished that I could pass this entire city through the eye of the proofreader’s needle.

*

Gazing into the chaotic interior of the Café Europa, I felt like Moses arrived at Canaan only to find that the day trippers with their wirelesses and their wine in boxes had got there first. Shirlaine rapped on the glass with a coin, hoping to rouse some drunken Charon from the ruins. Then I thought to give the door a shove, and it swung open. We went
in.

I lifted my eyes to Alibia. I expected a blank wall, a black wall, I thought the city would have been knocked down and carted away piece by piece. But it was still there, with its lights winking gaily in the dark. O happy Alibians, blessed citizens of elsewhere! In your bright rooms, before your clear mirrors, dressing for the Goodbye Bash. The big wheels are turning, the coloured lights are dancing on the esplanade, the band members are tuning their instruments in the park. On the football field behind the church, the warden keeps guard over the fireworks to make sure the schoolboys don’t steal them or let them off early. The nut-roasters on Opera House Square greet me cheerily as I go down the steps to the river to hail a punt. The champagne is on ice. I will have a long hot bath, and shave at the window, looking out on the lights.

The Café Europa had been trashed. That was the word for it. We picked our way through the debris of paper cups, monkey vines of coloured streamers and tinsel and toilet paper, tattered dollars, carrot tops, bottles of every shape and size, the jewelled shards of the stained glass. And Cheese Snacks everywhere, crunched into powder, like shed gilt. The newspapers lay scattered on the carpet, with their pages curling from the wooden spines, like moths that had flown too close to the chandeliers. I was tempted to take one of the staves as a keepsake
–
but that would reduce me to the level of the vandals. I would take nothing more than what was
mine.

They had used the base of the floating trophy as an ashtray. Filthy, stinking habit. I emptied the ash out in a potted palm. Were those Wessels’s tatty butts? Mevrouw Bonsma’s red-lipped little gaspers? Errol’s marijuana ‘zols’? The cup was full of slops. Cold duck and cold turkey. But at least no one had bled into it. I emptied the slops into the palm too. It really didn’t matter any more. Everything once mantled dismantled had been. My trophy had only one ear. The missing one lay on the carpet like an italicized question mark. I put it in my pocket.

Now to retrieve my copies of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’. I went into the Gentlemen’s room and opened the window. A scrap of plastic fluttered from the pipe: the rest of the bag was gone. I climbed up on the washbasin and tried to stick my head out of the window so that I could see whether they had fallen into the well below, but it was impossible. My neck gave a warning twinge. Could someone have stolen them? Or had an ill wind scattered them to the four corners of the
city?

Into the cubicle to look for the
Concise
.
That was also gone. Someone must have needed it to prop up a table leg or weigh down a roof. To some people, a dictionary is no different to a breeze-block or a pumpkin. Perhaps it was just as well, with my neck acting up. No burden was too great, if one had bearers to do the donkey work; then one might carry all twenty volumes of the
Oxford
off to a desert island. But when you were responsible for the haulage yourself, it was a different story. My whole body had begun to
ache.

Do you remember the one about Speedy Gonzales and his chum Pedro, who were lost in the desert? I used to have it down pat, but now it’s gone like the rest, and all that comes back is the punchline: ‘Pull yourself together, Pedro.’

I must have looked shaken when I returned to the Café, because Shirlaine said: ‘I can’t believe you’re so upset this joint is closing down. It’s not the end of civilization, you know. There are new places for whites opening up in Rosebank.’

It dawned on me that it really was over. Somehow I had imagined that Wessels and I would be sitting here for ever, while the world ran down around us like an immense grandfather clock.

*

‘Do you want this?’

It was a little book with a floral binding, which she had picked up on the balcony. A rhyme had been inscribed on the flyleaf:

If this book should chance to roam,

Box its ears and send it home,

to Darlene Spilkin

33 3rd Avenue, Fez Valley

The first page was blank. The second and third pages contained a drawing of a wall, topped by the legend: ‘Be a brick. Help me to build a wall of friendship.’ There were a dozen bricks in the wall already
–
everyone from Hunky Dory to Henry the Eighth.

‘You keep
it.’

*

I kept a lookout for the Queen of Sheba, but the throne was vacant. Dumbo was in his cage, dumbfounded as ever, saucer-eyed. You’d think he’d been slurping the canned maroela beer. I addressed him fondly, exhorting him to revolt, to smash down the bars. Given half a chance, I would have taken up Quim’s quirt, with its beaded handle, hanging against the wall by the refrigerators, and thrashed that dumb beast to the point of rage. I had a vision of him on the rampage in Kotze Street, gathering his comrades about him, a herd of pink elephants, trampling down pedestrians, tossing urchins around like straws.

But he didn’t seem to recognize
me.

Hypermeat was flogging half a dead sheep @
R
16.95 a kilogram. On the tiled window-sill, behind the burglar-proofing, leaned a blackboard that read: Nice meat
–
Lekker vleis
–
Inyama enhle. Just a sample of the official languages, of which there were now dozens.

That @, which I had always regarded as the very omphalos of consumerism, reminded me of Shirlaine. I had expected some awkwardness when we said goodbye. She would try to give me a peck on the cheek, I would pat her shoulder and do my best not to wound her with my spectacles. But she had disappeared as if I didn’t exist.

*

The delete mark is the most individual of marks, as distinctive, some say, as a fingerprint or a signature. I worked with a Dixit whose delete mark was a floating balloon, filled to bursting with nullity; a Figg who had a sharp-tongued scythe for cutting a swathe through verbiage; a Walker who strung up a hangman’s noose; a Diallo who had a frying pan; a Munnery with a magnifying glass.

And I knew a Rosenbaum once (he was never a colleague), whose delete mark silhouetted his own Semitic nose, complete with a connoisseur’s nostril for sniffing out error
–
although you had to turn the page upside down to see
it.

As for me, when I started out at Posts and Telecommunications, I modelled my mark on a monocle; somewhat old-fashioned but elegant and unwavering. I regarded that lens as the echo of my proofreader’s eye. But as I grew older, it began to change. A gap opened up, an unpardonable gap, where the lens was attached to its handle. It was probably my weakening eyesight. Yet it wasn’t until the Café Europa’s days had been numbered that it began to remind me of an unravelling bond, a broken circle with a loose end dangling from
it.

A chap named Niblo, who tasted copy for the Government Printer, once argued that the mark, my ‘fanciful’ derivations notwithstanding, was neither more nor less than a delta. Short for ‘delete’. But I see no reason to believe
him.

*

Gideon the watchman stared at me as if I’d risen from the dead. When I scrutinized myself in the mirror, under the full force of the neon light, I saw why. My face was a deathly grey, and edged all round in black, like a telegram full of bad
news.

Merle. I went to the stack of unread
Stars
on the corner of my desk. I saw that she had died on the second. The notices were in the newspapers of the third and fourth. The same wording in each of the three messages: Passed away after an illness. Lovingly remembered and always missed by Jason, Kim, Liam and Jessie. By her daughter Kerry, son-in-law Fred, and granddaughters Bianca and Katherine. And by her cousin Louella. An entire family conjured up. By some miracle, there was not a single corrigendum. But it was a pity about that repeated refrain, which revealed that they hadn’t bothered to compose their own messages. Perhaps originality meant little in these circumstances. It had always struck me as ridiculous to apostrophize the departed, as if they took in a daily in the hereafter. What would I have
said?

But nothing would come to
me.

I emptied my pockets. The No. 2. The ear of the trophy. Pencil tinder. The
Pocket Oxford Dictionary
.
When I tried to page to the back, the leaves wouldn’t part. Still wedged together. In the depths of X, Y and Z, among the endpapers, I found the tip of the stranger’s knife, snapped off in the board. I prised it out with my staple remover: a little curved triangle of steel like a shark’s fin. I dropped it into the trophy, along with the plastic sign and the question
mark.

I put the trophy on the window-sill and propped the original of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ against it. It was a comfort to me, small, but comfort nevertheless, that I had been prevented
–
that I had prevented myself
–
from exposing this unfortunate construct to the public. But what had become of the photostatic copies? A dozen of them, riddled with corrigenda, had been let loose in the world. Things to be corrected; things corrected. Two sides of one coin. The urgency of preparing a corrected version pressed in on me. But the world was so full of error as it was. Surely it could wait for one night?

Then I collapsed on my bed and slept the sleep of the
dead.

*

I awoke in the dark with a word sounding in my ears. Avogadro! Avogadro! I couldn’t place it. Avogadro! Then my ears popped and I realized it was a dog barking. I’m beginning to think there’s a wire loose in my brain
–
not a screw, mind you
–
but some short circuit, some faulty connection. With all the upsets of the past weeks, starting with that damned bakery van, it would hardly be surprising if something had been shaken loose. Or perhaps it’s not the wiring so much as the plumbing; a small leak through a cracked wall, spreading insidiously, making everything damp. The barking was somewhere in the building. I made a note to tell Mrs Manashewitz. The contract was clear: No pets allowed.

What had become of Il Puce? Was she pining away in an empty room? Greyfriars Benny.

My watch showed nine o’clock. Post meridiem! I’d slept the day
away.

The previous day and night came back to
me.

I went through to the lounge and switched on the light. My dictionaries sprang to attention on the shelves. Who will marshal them when I’m gone? The floating trophy was on the window-sill, with its
one ear cocked for the sound of gunshots in the street outside. ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ lay face down on the carpet. On the curved lid of the trophy, the gymnast was pirouetting against a square of night, poised as ever, perfectly balanced.

All these trifles would endure, when their names, nestled now in the folds of my brain, were dead and
gone.

I must get on with the correction. There’s no rest for the wicked.

A fire rocket rose in the distance and burst in a rattle of explosions.

I crossed to the window and looked south, for want of another option. What was it Merle advised me to do? To look on the bright side … The lights of motor town lay before me, the highways coiled like cables on the matt black of the mining wasteland, and beyond them the southern suburbs, the buffer zones, filling up with informal settlements, and the townships. Movements were afoot in those dark spaces that would never be reflected in the telephone directories. Languages were spoken there that I would never put to the proof. As if they were aware of it themselves, the lights were not twinkling, as lights are supposed to do, they were squirming and wriggling and writhing, like maggots battening on the foul proof of the world.