Mr Malgas sat on the proffered stone, with his knees sticking up like anthills and his hands hanging down between them like spades, looking at Nieuwenhuizen’s unlikely limbs and listening to the pot as it bubbled and squeaked.
Nieuwenhuizen said nothing, so Mr Malgas cleared his throat and said too loudly, “I’ll come straight to the point: Why are you here?”
“I’m building a new house,” said Nieuwenhuizen.
Mr Malgas looked over his shoulder.
“I haven’t actually started yet,” said Nieuwenhuizen with a crackly laugh. “It’s still in the planning stages.”
“You’re a builder then. I’m in hardware myself.” Mr Malgas wished he had a business card to present, but he hadn’t thought to bring his wallet. He was wearing a Mr Hardware T-shirt under his track-suit top, as always, but showing that would surely be improper. So he made the following conversation instead: “What brings you to our part of the world?”
“It’s a long story. Have you eaten?”
“No thanks.”
Nieuwenhuizen wiped his stirrer meticulously on the rim of the pot and laid it on a ledge made for that purpose. Mr Malgas saw from the protuberances at either end that what he had taken for a stick was in fact a bone. While he was inspecting it surreptitiously in an effort to determine its ancestry, Nieuwenhuizen took up a jagged bottle-neck and ladled some of his stew into a tin, plucked a plastic fork from his instep and began to eat.
“Where do you hail from?” asked Mr Malgas, rousing himself from his reverie.
“To cut a long story short: I left my home far away and came here to start over. It was a comfortable old place, give it its due, with one and a half bathrooms, but it had served its time. It was falling apart, to tell the truth. Full of maggots and tripe. The stuffing was coming out of the sofa, for example, the pipes leaked, the boards under the bath were green. I could see myself falling through them tub and all, up to my neck in hot water. The earth around there was quite rotten, and soft, a bit like cheese. I’d sink through it one day – that was my nightmare – I’d keep on going down to the centre of the planet, which is molten I’m told. Sss! Gone up in steam like a gob in a frying-pan. Can you imagine?”
Mr Malgas examined the soles of Nieuwenhuizen’s boots, which were stretched out towards the heat. The rubber bore a mysterious pattern of crosses and arrows. He also looked at Nieuwenhuizen’s oversized head, which bobbed constantly as if to keep its balance on his stalk of a neck; the proportions of this head no longer reassured him.
“Excuse me?”
“Are you sure you won’t have a little something?” Nieuwenhuizen repeated, pointing to the pot and smacking his lips. He observed with approval the inquisitive look on his guest’s face.
“That reminds me: I must be getting back.”
“You’ve just arrived.” Nieuwenhuizen lifted a leaf-green mass on the end of his fork and blew on it. He turned his eyes on Malgas’s face, noting that the putty-coloured cheeks were now tinged with a rare shade of pink, and then allowed his attention to wander, over his guest’s beefy shoulder, to the wall, with its unsettling combination of wagon-wheels and suns. “Now that I’ve got you here, perhaps you can clear up a little question for me. That wall of yours, with the suns – are they rising or setting?”
Mr Malgas stood up very slowly, as if his belly weighed too much, and gazed across the desolate savannah. The light from his lounge window glowed comfortingly in the wedges between spokes and rays. No matter how hard he looked at them, the suns didn’t budge – but he did notice a curtain twitching. Now he remembered building the wall. Mrs said, “Wheels and suns in one wall? What will people think?” And he explained about discontinued lines, the principle of odds and ends, and discounts that were never to be repeated. It was simple. But rising or setting? Who could have foreseen such a poser? He sat down again. Nieuwenhuizen’s eyes were shining.
“I must be going now. Mrs will be wondering what’s become of me.”
Nieuwenhuizen raised his shoulders in a resigned shrug and said, “You must drop in again, and bring the Mrs with you. I must say I’ve enjoyed exchanging words with you. It passed the time very pleasantly.”
Mr Malgas pushed back his stone. He felt compelled to say: “If you need anything – bricks, cement, timber, you name it – just yell. Mr Hardware, Helpmekaar Centre. I’m in the Yellow Pages.”
“That’s kind of you, thanks. Good night then, Malgas.”
“Good night … Father.”
Mr Malgas walked purposefully away. “Fancy me calling him ‘Father’,” he thought, “he’s my age if he’s a day.”
Mr Hardware, Nieuwenhuizen thought as Malgas disappeared from sight. Blow me down.
Through a crack in the curtains Mrs watched Mr tiptoeing towards the camp, as if he was afraid of making a sound, and bowing into the light. He sat awkwardly on a stone, like a scolded child. His behaviour embarrassed her and she blushed, alone as she was, and turned away.
Quickly, in order of appearance: Doily. Dust-cover. Double boiler. Decanter. Doom. Découpage. Dicky-bird.
The incantation failed: she could not keep her distance. She returned to the window and was just in time to watch Mr bowing out of the light and blundering back the way he had come, or rather, the way he had gone, looking fearfully around him as if he was afraid of the dark.
In alphabetical order then, slowly: Decanter. Découpage. Dicky-bird. Hum.
“If you ask me, he’s in real estate,” Mr said. “Property development, renovations, restorations, upgrading, that sort of thing.”
“I ask you,” Mrs said archly and crooked one tatty eyebrow into a question mark.
“A jack of all trades, but retired now and living off the proceeds. He didn’t say it in so many words, mind, I’m making deductions, so don’t quote me.”
“That doesn’t answer my question. What does he want?”
“He doesn’t want anything. He’s building a house.”
“A house?”
“A new one. Probably a double-storey.”
“A double-storey? Bang goes our privacy!”
“Never mind that. In this day and age it’s security that counts. You can’t afford to have an empty plot on your doorstep. Ask anyone. It attracts the wrong elements.”
“Building operations, I can just see it, noise and nuisance, generators, compressors, pneumatic hammers, concrete-mixers going day and night, strange men – builders. Dust all over my ornaments. It’s terrible. I’ll complain.”
“It’ll all be worth it in the end. He’s going to put up a mansion here, if I know him, a magnificent place. Raise the tone of the neighbourhood, not to mention the property values. There may even be a bit of business in it for us.”
“Count me out. You can deal with him all on your own.”
Mrs turned up the volume. The minimum and maximum temperatures forecast for the following day by the Weather Bureau scrolled solemnly upwards against a backdrop of violins and autumn leaves. Mrs inhaled noisily through her teeth, drew her cardigan around her shoulders and turned the sound down again.
“I never should have bricked up the fireplace,” Mr said. “It would be homely to sit around the hearth with one’s feet propped on the fender.”
“And then where would we put the TV?”
They both looked at the set, which stood on a trolley on the old hearthstone. A man spoke silently to them, they could tell he was speaking by the movement of his moustache. Then the economic indicators appeared against a backdrop of trumpets (which they could not hear) and paper money.
“So what was he doing with himself? I don’t suppose he was watching television, like a normal human being.”
“He was cooking his dinner, actually, in one of those two-legged pots.”
“Come again.”
“In one of those pots with legs, you know the ones I mean.”
“I heard that. You know as well as I do those pots have three legs.”
“I know,” said Mr with feeling,
“but this one looked for all the world as if it had two.”
“Are you nuts?”
“The third was obscured, no doubt.”
“Of course it was. How could a pot stand up on two legs?”
“True.”
“So what was in this pot?”
“God knows. He offered me some, he was very hospitable, but with dinner waiting for me here at home, I naturally declined.”
“I’d give my right arm to know what was in that pot …”
“It was some sort of stew. It didn’t smell too bad either, out in the open, under the stars. Fresh air always gives me an appetite.”
“Probably some poor domestic animal.”
They both watched an advertisement for life insurance, which they knew by heart even without the sound. It was about facing up to death.
“I wasn’t going to mention it, it’s not important, but he asked me the strangest question, with a straight face too. You know the wall? You know the wagon-wheels?” Mrs prepared a triumphant expression but Mr cut her short with, “Well, not them. You know the suns?… He wanted to know whether they were rising or setting.”
“Now I’ve heard everything,” said Mrs. “Any fool can see that they’re setting.”
Nieuwenhuizen emptied the remains of his stew into a gourd, sealed its neck with a wad of masticated wax-paper, slipped it into a cradle made from a wire coat-hanger and hung it on a branch of the tree beyond the claws of nocturnal scavengers. He scraped the burnt rind from the inside of the pot into the coals, where it produced a lot of acrid smoke, filled the pot with water and left it to soak. Then he unpacked a leather bandoleer and a tin of dubbin from the portmanteau and set to work.
“Mrs!… I said, Mrs!”
“Ja.”
There was whittling to be done, there was twisting, there was hammering, and of course there was drowsing. When he was not pottering on his property, learning the lie of the land, Nieuwenhuizen sat under his tree, keeping his hands busy and nodding off.
Mrs Malgas observed all his doings, secretly at first, and then more openly as it became apparent that her presence made no impression on him. She took to perching on a stool behind the net curtain in the lounge, knitting, flipping through a magazine, turning questions about his motives over in her mind as if they were cards. She didn’t like him. Specifically, she didn’t like the way he jiggled his head and the way he hitched up his pants with his thumbs, which he stuck into his pockets, fanning out his fingers as if he didn’t want to dirty the cloth. She didn’t like his jaunty gait and his drifting off and staring into space. More generally, she didn’t like to think that he had come for no other purpose than to upset her and turn things upside-down. She didn’t like to think about him at all.
So she distracted herself by making inventories of her knickknacks: copper ashtray, Weltevreden coat of arms (wildebeest rampant). Wicker basket, yellow, a-tisket. Figurines, viz. cobbler, gypsy, ballerina, plumber, horologist, Smurf. Paperweight, guineafowl feather. Paperweight, rose. Paperweight, Merry Pebbles Holiday Chalets. Cake-lifter, Continental China, coronation centenary crockery, crenate, crumbs. However. Spatula. Just as things were starting to become interesting. Mug. As day followed day. Doll. As day follows night. Puppy-dog. As night follows day, sure enough, she found herself drawn back to the window.
Nieuwenhuizen’s wanderings over the veld, as much as they annoyed her, reassured her too by their aimlessness. They made him seem indecisive, ineffectual and itinerant. But when he settled down under the tree to hammer beer tins into soup-plates, to tinker with fragments of pottery and polystyrene, to plait ribbons of plastic into ropes, to carve and whittle and twist, to hammer holes through and bind together, it seemed that he was practising for something bigger, it became conceivable that he really would build a house next door, a house in the contemporary style made entirely of recycled material, a disposable, three-bedroomed family home held together by the dowels of his own ramshackle purpose, and that he would occupy it, permanently – and this prospect made her feel utterly despondent.
“We have to be realistic about this,” Mrs said to Mr on a Friday evening when the conversation turned inevitably to Nieuwenhuizen. “We have to act like responsible adults and stop thinking about ourselves alone. He’s dangerous. Ask yourself: Where does he go? Does he dig a hole and squat over it like a dog?”
“A cat,” said Mr irritably.
“I’m talking about the principle. Where does he get his water from? He’s got a drumful there, for washing and cooking and all his household needs. Probably siphons it out of our pool in the dead of night, when normal people are sleeping.”
“We could offer to supply him with a drop of water. We’ve got plenty. I could run a hose over to his place easily enough.”
“What does he eat? What’s cooking in that two-legged pot of his? Four-legged chickens? Pigeons? Cockatoos and budgerigars?”
“There’s another neighbourly thing we could do – if you didn’t dislike him so: we could give him a square meal from time to time.”
“Where does he get his money? He’s got money, surely?”
“Sigh!”
“How many times must I ask you not to say that? You know how much it annoys me!”
“It’s just an expression.”
“Why can’t you sigh like everybody else? How would you like it if I said ‘Laugh’ all the time instead of laughing?”
Mr thought about that as he slipped out into the garden. Only the night before he had chanced upon a picturesque view of Nieuwenhuizen’s camp, framed between two spokes of a wagon-wheel, and he was anxious to recapture it; with luck he would pick up a wholesome aroma and a snatch of some melody or other. A welcome breeze stirred a ripple of applause in the shrubbery. He smelt chlorine, creosote and mint. The swimming-pool’s Kreepy Krauly was silent, asleep in the depths below the diving-board, but the water echoed the slapping of his sandals against the soles of his feet as he made his way to the side of the house, along a Slasto pathway he had laid himself.
Mash through strainer da-da-da. Return pulp to stove, bring back to boil and simmer for 30 mins. Add seasoning.
Mrs Malgas shook Mixed Herbs into her palm and tipped them into the pot. She pinched salt and pepper, she dashed Tabasco, she squeezed lemon. She stirred and tasted. Bland. She spiked the mixture with a handful of cloves as piquant as upholstery tacks.
As the days had passed Mr Malgas had developed a conviction, which his wife was well aware of although he had not chosen to share it with her, that he was connected in some important way to Nieuwenhuizen – “Father,” as he named him to himself with difficulty. They had not spoken since their first meeting, which Mr Malgas rehearsed constantly in his mind, but when he left for work in the mornings and when he returned home in the evenings he would give a few cheerful blasts on his hooter and Nieuwenhuizen would invariably pop up somewhere on the plot and respond with a wave. Such simple reciprocal gestures struck Mr Malgas as a form of co-operation with his new neighbour, foreshadowing a more meaningful relationship, which presented itself as a series of words all starting with “c,” each one a node on a scale of intimacy: collaboration, coexistence, collusion.
Yet the distance which now prevailed between them, a distance familiarity was bound to bridge, seemed necessary, even desirable. Concealed behind his ambiguous wall on this unprepossessing evening, with the breeze bearing the woody tang of the great outdoors to his nostrils, Mr Malgas was shaken by a thrill of suppressed excitement the likes of which he had not experienced since he was a boy playing hide-and-seek.
Nieuwenhuizen’s head quivered, as if Mr Malgas’s greedy gaze had joggled it, and seemed about to swivel in his direction.
But a bowl of brazen light dropped suddenly over Mr as he knelt in the shadow of the wall. Mrs had slammed the curtains open like two sheets of metal and stood in the garish window-frame brandishing a serving-spoon and looking down on him disdainfully.
“You’re making a fool of us,” she said while
he was dusting the sand off his knees on the back step. “He pitches up out of nowhere and you, of all people, welcome him with open arms. You should be ashamed of yourself. We don’t have a clue who he is. He has no history. Are you listening to me? We don’t even know his name.”
“We know that,” said Mr, brushing past her and sagging down at the kitchen table. He watched her mangy slippers twitching impatiently. “He told me, when I was over there last week. Why don’t you dish, it’s getting cold.”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“I was going to.”
“Well?”
“It’s ‘Father’.”
“Father?”
One thing leads to another. Nieuwenhuizen, rolling on the ground, yelping in agony, clasping his left hand between his knees, cursing himself, landed up in the remains of the cooking-fire. Just moments before, he had brought his hammer down on his thumb-nail. That opposable pain was forgotten now as he tossed and turned to shake off the clinging coals. The hair on his head crackled, budded into flame, bloomed – but he crushed the petals with an oily chamois. When the crisis was over he composed himself once again in front of his tent, sucking his thumb and nursing his blistered elbow, and through his tears, which were two parts pain and one part embarrassment, saw Malgas on the horizon.
Mr Malgas found the approach to the camp more welcoming this time: a teetering fence-post, emitting a tang of fresh creosote and surmounted by a scuffed cement shoe with a little stable-door, two sash-windows and a slot in its toe-cap, marked the beginning of a path through the veld, and he took it gratefully. Several twists and turns dictated by the geography brought him to an anthill, where he rested and enjoyed the prospect. Then he went on, in two minds about whether to announce his arrival.
Nieuwenhuizen saw Malgas coming down the path fending off spider’s webs with his hands and hacking away at lianas with a rusty panga, and in the event it was he who called out a greeting. “Malgas!”
Nieuwenhuizen was sitting in the mouth of his tent, on the untidy pile of his own long legs, busy with some handiwork concealed in his lap.
The Folly Page 3