“Hello Father!” Malgas was pleased at how naturally the name flew from his lips. If Nieuwenhuizen was also pleased he did not show it, but merely waved a pair of pliers in the direction of a stone and went on with his work.
“This is coming along nicely,” said Malgas, turning in an appreciative circle. “Mind if I look around?”
Taking a shrug as permission, Mr Malgas made a tour of the camp and its environs, allowing the rudimentary footpaths that had appeared with time to guide his steps. He took a childlike delight in the signs he found everywhere that the plot had become lived in, that the newcomer had made himself at home. “A dwelling-place carved out of the veld,” Malgas thought happily, examining the bare, compacted soil around the hearth. A soothing smell rising up from below notified him that the earth had been sprinkled with water to settle the dust.
“Where the hell is my hammer?” Nieuwenhuizen asked himself.
Malgas hunted obligingly for a hammer at the foot of the tree, and discovered instead a pile of firewood and fence-posts, which he took to be the raw materials of fortifications that had yet to be constructed; next to that was a leather portmanteau, sturdily made but a little the worse for wear, probably imitation, plastered with name-tags, illegible, every one of them, and stickers – exotic destinations: Bordeaux, Florida, Eldorado Park – and spilling various items of clothing; then a metal drum, lipping with green water, and a tin ladle displaying in its bowl the label of a popular soft drink. On an impulse he scooped a ladleful of water and poured it over his head, and although there was a nip in the air and he was required to suppress the lip-smacking, hair-tossing display of pleasure he associated with the gesture, he nevertheless felt invigorated.
“Here it is!” Nieuwenhuizen said. “I’ve been sitting on it all along.”
Malgas circumnavigated the tree and the tent, noting with approval the prudent depth of the moat and testing the tension of the guy-ropes. Some bulky objects hung in plastic bags from the lower branches of the tree. Malgas, who prided himself on his knowledge of packaging and its relationship to contents, could not resist the challenge. After an inquiring glance at the back of Nieuwenhuizen’s grizzled head he palpated one of the bags thoroughly, but to his surprise could not determine what it contained. Never mind, he moved on. Behind the tent he found some implements that were more readily identifiable: a row of rough-hewn wooden spoons dangling from a length of string (the stirring-bone was nowhere to be seen), a stack of misshapen plates and saucers, a tin of creosote with a brush resting across it, a hurricane-lamp, a slab of discoloured slate supporting a grey liver. He prodded this dismal organ with a blunt forefinger and found it firm. But in a cove under the hedge were yet other gadgets whose functions he could not divine, despite his many years of experience in Hardware.
“You’ve got some fascinating things here,” Malgas exclaimed. “What’s this?” He held up a contraption consisting of a luminous orange traffic-beacon mounted upside-down in a cardboard box and bound with copper wire.
Nieuwenhuizen’s head spun round. He looked at the eager expression on Malgas’s face and at his thick fingers gripping the gadget. “Bush rain-gauge,” he said sadly, “calibrated, measures rainfall. Horn also works.”
“Useful … And this?”
“Mousetrap. Field-mice.”
“This?”
“Cookie cutter.”
Nieuwenhuizen found the questions tiresome.
“What’s that you’re making there?” Malgas asked, though he was not insensitive to Nieuwenhuizen’s tone. As he spoke he rolled a stone closer and sat down on it. He was disappointed to find that Nieuwenhuizen’s torso blocked his view of the tent’s interior.
“This is a teacup,” said Nieuwenhuizen, holding up a dented tin and turning it from side to side so that Malgas could admire it. “Almost finished. Just got to round off the handle here.” He perked up suddenly, shooting out one leg like a railway signal. “Let’s make a pot of tea and you may have the honour of testing out my cup.”
The coals in the fireplace were warm. Under Nieuwenhuizen’s attentive gaze, Malgas fetched kindling from the woodpile, built up a fire, ladled water into the pot, noting with relief that it had three legs after all, and, following instructions, measured the requisite quantity of dried leaves from a plastic bag. “What is this stuff?” he asked as he sprinkled the leaves onto the bubbling water.
“Herbaceous infusion,” Nieuwenhuizen replied. “Tisane, excuse the jargon. Very good for you. Purifies the blood and builds you up.”
When the tea had steeped to Nieuwenhuizen’s satisfaction, Malgas was instructed to strain it through a shop-soiled oil-filter and sweeten it with honey from a jar.
Malgas reported that the new teacup served its purpose adequately – it certainly didn’t leak – but its serrated rim threatened his lip and its ear was too small to accommodate his forefinger.
“I’m afraid it’s made for a less substantial digit,” Nieuwenhuizen explained with a good-humoured cackle, holding up his own skinny forefinger to illustrate the point. “Oh my.”
Despite the honey the tea tasted of oil and rust.
“This is the life,” said Malgas, when they were both ensconced on stones with their teacups resting on their stomachs and their legs stretched out to catch the afternoon sun.
A silty silence descended upon them. Malgas savoured its meaningful elements: the rubbery squeaking of his host’s boots against a grease-spattered stone; the hissing of the sticks in the fireplace; insects scurrying in the grass; dry leaves rattling in the hedge; his cup hiccuping as its joints expanded; a distant roar of traffic.
Through half-closed lids Nieuwenhuizen charted the outstanding features of Malgas’s face, ear to ear and quiff to chin.
When they had drained their cups, Malgas sighed contentedly and said, “So. When does the building begin?”
“Patience, patience,” Nieuwenhuizen murmured sleepily, screwing his eyes shut to make Malgas disappear. “I’ve got all the time in the world.” The breathless pause that followed insisted that further explanation was called for. “You can’t rush the building of a new house. You’ve got to get the whole thing clear in the mind’s eye.” Another pause insisted. “Take it from me. I’ve been acclimatizing, building up my strength for the first phase: namely, the clearing of the virgin bushveld.”
“What do you consume, to build yourself up I mean?”
“Oh, birds, roots, that kind of thing. Berries. I’m living off the land. Naturally, I get my basics from the corner café, and the occasional luxury to keep me going. I’m especially fond of a chocolate digestive.”
The air thickened. Nieuwenhuizen kept his eyes closed. Minutes coalesced into hours, oozed by, and Malgas found himself dozing off. Perhaps it was the tea? Or was it Nieuwenhuizen’s husky voice, rising and falling like a wind through the treetop?
They discussed edible ground cover, drifted off, moulds, hydroponics, broccoli, market gardens, touched on barter (Nieuwenhuizen waved a bath mat woven from plastic bags), drifted off again, bumped against Hardware (Malgas revealed his T-shirt, which showed an overalled manikin, who bore a passing resemblance to Malgas himself, holding a huge spangled nail in one hand and a hammer in the other), hinges, handles, hafts, wallpaper, sandpaper, zinc, sink, sank, surfaced again into the niceties of skinning a cat, dropped off, slid in slow motion through spec housing and restaurant rubbish bins, recycled waste and domestic security gates, found themselves talking about the weather.
At length the sun dipped towards the red roof of Malgas’s house, which for some time had appeared to him through his eyelashes as a distant koppie. Then the elongated shadow of his wall touched his toes and he awoke to an uncomfortable recollection of the purpose of his visit.
“You find out what his real name is,” Mrs Malgas had announced bitterly, “or don’t even bother to come back.”
Mr Malgas looked into the swampy bottom of his teacup and assembled a question.
The house, when it was emptied o
f Mr’s absorbing presence, seemed more full of objects. They multiplied and grew in stature, their edges became sharper, their surfaces more reflective. Mrs Malgas moved among them, running a finger along the scalloped edges of display cabinets, stooping to blow dust off polished table-tops, pinching fluff off the velveteen shoulders of armchairs. She felt lonely. Mr had been gone for hours, and she could no longer bear the sight of him, reclining at the fireside with his hands behind his head and his feet up, as if he was in the privacy of his own home.
She took a bone-china shoe from the mantelpiece and turned it over in her hands. The shoe was slim and white, with a gilt buckle and a wineglass heel. It feels as if I’ve always had this, she thought, but that’s impossible. Always. Slipper. It must have come from somewhere? A gift from Mr? For some reason, it called to mind the day on which he’d bricked up the fireplace. She saw him, kneeling in front of the gaping hole, holding a trowel laden with wet cement in one hand and a brick in the other. His hair was standing on end and his shoulders were dandruffed with plaster chips and wood shavings. When she came in with the tea-tray he looked over one flaky shoulder and smiled woodenly, as if he was an advertisement for DIY products.
Suddenly the air was infused with the smell of meat. Mrs Malgas turned to the TV set on the hearth. A pitchfork hoisted a slab of red meat the size of a doorstep and threw it down on a grille. A familiar anthem, all sticky-fingered strings and saucy brass, came to the boil as the meat rebounded in slow motion from the grille, splashing large drops of fat and marinade. The smell of meat, basted in the surging melody, was overpowering. Mrs Malgas shut her eyes and fumbled for the flames, she felt the hot screen against her palms, a tacky button, she pressed it. She swallowed her nausea and held the cool sole of the shoe to her burning cheek.
The set was still sizzling when Mr Malgas traipsed in and switched on the light. The startled planes of the room banged into one another and fell back into their accustomed order.
Mr sat down on his La-Z-Boy with his hands dangling.
Mrs looked at the damp shadows on his shirt. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” she said.
“What’s been going on now?” He looked at the blank screen.
“Nothing.”
She put the china shoe back in its place. The TV set felt warm against her belly. She said, “So.”
He cleaned one fingernail with another.
“You did ask him?”
“I did. ‘Father’ turns out to be a nickname of sorts.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“As luck would have it, his real name is ‘Nieuwenhuizen’.”
The name snapped in half in the air and the two pieces dropped like twigs into the shaggy carpet. Mr hunted for them under the pretext of tying his shoelaces until her shadow fell over him.
“That’s impossible,” she said. “It’s too much of a coincidence.”
Mr looked at her slippers. The sheepskin was the same colour as the carpet. He saw her glossy shins, sprouting from the bulbs of her feet like saplings, and his own hands burrowing in the tufted fibres as if he was trying to uproot her. The idea made him uncomfortable. He raised his eyes to her face. It was scrunched into a small, livid fruit. In the juicy pulp of the eyes the pupils glinted like pips.
“I ask you,” she said, hawking. “Nieuwenhuizen of all things.” Her tongue held the two parts of the name together precisely, as if she was waiting for the glue to dry. “Nieuwenhuizen! Obviously an alias. A stage name. Did you ask for ID?”
“Nieuwenhuizen is a common name,” he said, focusing on her mouth.
“A criminal,” the mouth said. “I knew it. A killer.”
“I was at school with one.”
“Please,” said Mrs, using an intonation she had acquired from American television programmes, as Mr walked out of the room with his laces dragging behind him like dropped reins.
“Please,” she said again, as he returned in his socks, carrying the telephone directory. He flung the directory open on the coffee-table and rummaged through it. “Here: Nieuwenhuizen, C. J. of Roosevelt Park. A midwife, it says. Nieuwenhuizen, D. L. of Malvern East, just down the road. Nieuwenhuizen, H. A. of Pine Park. Another Nieuwenhuizen, H. A. of Rndprkrf. Where’s that?”
Mrs knew, but she didn’t feel like telling.
“Never mind.” His finger cut a furrow down the page. “There must be twenty of them, thirty if you count the Nieuwhuises and the Nieuwhuyses and the Niehauses. There’s probably a Newhouse too.” He flipped. “What have we here? No. But there’s a Newburg, and a list of Newmans as long as my arm.”
“We live in the west,” she said, going over to the window, “but our name isn’t Van der Westhuizen.”
“That’s my argument exactly! We may not be called Van der Westhuizen – I’ll grant you that – but thousands of people are, at least, say, what … five thousand?… and many of them are to the west of something. See?” Her shoulders drooped, and he went on triumphantly, “There must be thousands of Nieuwenhuizens countrywide, and at any given moment I’ll bet a dozen of them are building new houses – or thinking about it, anyway. It’s the luck of the draw. No, that’s feeble. It’s the law of averages.”
“It’s too good to be true.”
Mr Malgas went to stand beside his wife. Nieuwenhuizen had built up the fire and was walking slowly round it, dragging his long shadow over the landscape.
After a while of looking straight through it, Mr Malgas became aware of his own face reflected in the glass. Then he saw that his whole body was there, floating in the chilly space beyond the burglar-bars, and his wife’s face too, with its body below, and their lounge and its familiar clutter, dangerously cantilevered, and Nieuwenhuizen’s fire blazing in the middle of the carpet where the coffee-table should be. Tenderly, Mr put his arm around Mrs’s shoulders and drew her to him, and watched his pale reflection in the other room mimic the gesture.
“You shouldn’t hate him,” he said, “and there’s no need to be afraid of him. Even if it turns out that he’s not who he says he is, and I’m not saying it will, he means no harm. Look at him, out there in the cold, while we’re here in our cosy home. I almost feel sorry for him – although that’s unnecessary, as he’d be quick to point out. He’s very resourceful. He’s got a tea-set made out of tins and everything.”
She shrugged her shoulders under his heavy arm. “It can only bring trouble … and insects,” she whispered. After a pause, during which Mr listened intently to the silence of the house but could discern no sign of life, she said firmly, “Go ahead and be his friend. You’ll do as you please anyway, I know. But don’t come crying to me when he lets you down. And don’t expect me to call him ‘Nieuwenhuizen’. It’s even worse than ‘Father’. If I have to refer to him at all, I’ll just say ‘Him’, and you’ll know why.”
What is it with this Malgas? Nieuwenhuizen asked himself. He seems eager to serve. But he’s full of questions, and so hard to convince.
Nieuwenhuizen! he’d exclaimed. Really? Are you serious?
For Pete’s sake.
The more persuasively Nieuwenhuizen laid claim to the word that was his name, the more detached he felt from it. It was a distressing experience, watching his personal noun drift away on the air.
But people will get used to almost anything.
By a circuitous process of reasoning, during which he walked round and round his fire until he was quite dizzy, Nieuwenhuizen reattached his name and decided that Malgas should be kept guessing.
The left foot of Mrs, which was daintily arched and pigeon-toed, stepped out of the bath, dripping soapy water, and stretched down to the floor, where it met with something cold and slimy. A plastic bath mat. She knew at once whose hideous creation it was.
Although she was loath to touch this gewgaw, she wanted to know more about it, as if that would teach her something important about Him.
She lifted the mat with the end of Mr’s toothbrush. Chkrs. It was woven, no, one really couldn’t call it weaving. It wa
s knitted, knotted, out of plastic shopping bags. She identified three major supermarket chains by the predominance of certain colours and fragments of lettering. Pick n Pay. There seemed to be a Mr Hardware packet in there somewhere, sandy lettering on a muddy ground, but she couldn’t be sure. The words were warped into the fabric of the thing and could not be unravelled.
She dropped the mat in the bin under the hand-wash basin and sat on the toilet seat, wrapped in her towel, trying to figure out when Mr had smuggled it into her house. He was becoming more devious by the day.
The next morning Nieuwenhuizen hailed Mr Malgas as he went out to buy the Sunday newspapers and hurried over to meet him on the verge. “Phase One is upon us, Malgas,” he said earnestly. “Last night, after our little man to man, I got to thinking about the future. I asked myself the question: ‘Is it time?’ And the answer came back, loud and clear, in a tell-tale itching of the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet: ‘You can bet your boots it is.’ ”
“To do what?”
“I was coming to that: To ‘clear the land’!” He threw his hands up in two V signs and scored quotation marks around the words with his fingernails. “May I borrow a spade?”
“Only with pleasure!”
Malgas was delighted that the action was about to begin at last. He was also secretly touched that Nieuwenhuizen had said “upon us” rather than “upon me.” He fetched a spade from his garage and gave expert instructions about its use. Then he rushed off to the café, promising to return in two ticks.
Nieuwenhuizen ran a finger over the blade. It was blunt. He began sharpening it on a kerbstone. Before long he heard Malgas huffing and puffing back, and he quickly retired to the inner reaches of the plot (block IVF) and threw himself into his task.
Malgas was not so easily put off. He craned his neck. “Need a hand there Father?”
“Thanks but no thanks,” Nieuwenhuizen responded without looking up. “I’ll give you a call when I need you. You go home and catch up on the news.”
The Folly Page 4