Negligible. The unhappiest of statistical terms.
Iris. Why did he find her flaws so appealing? On her left cheek was a tiny scar which the make-up department could not conceal. It was shaped like a boot and it reminded him of Italy. Everything about her made him think of Italy and the ocean. It was Tuscany, it was the sadly unconvincing atmosphere of Tuscany in which she had chosen to live. It brushed off on everything like cheap paint. When he asked her out to dinner, which he had resolved to do, he would suggest La Rusticana. He was sure she loved Italian food. Seafood.
Then he lay awake, clutching fistfuls of down into cumulus, suspended between the floor and the ceiling like a human sacrifice. The mattress felt to him like the soft edge of a bar graph. It rose and fell like liquid in a tube, and he floated on its yielding surface, rising and falling with it, growing more or less fortunate as his lifespan expanded and contracted, reacting to every variable – the levels of pollutants in the atmosphere, the radiation from the microwave, the radiation from the eight cellphone calls he had made that day, the possibilities for accidents raised by the three hundred kilometres he would travel the next day to see Constantinou, Masemola and distant Dijkstra, the limitations on injuries produced by the wearing of a seat belt and the provision of airbags in the doors of the Elantra, the risk of heart disease, the hedging of that risk by the eating of polyunsaturated margarine, by walking up stairs even when there were lifts, by going to the gym, by eating red meat no more than twice a week – his spirits rising and falling with all these considerations, while in his mind the thought came and went that he had just 28 per cent of his life left to live, if he was fortunate enough to be an average man.
The Perfumed City.
They had gone through the third draft of the revised questionnaire, lingering over the meaning of ‘population group’ – the question about race had been the most difficult one of all to formulate; and the definition of a household head – ‘The head or acting head of the household is the main decision-maker.’ He was in a daze, watching her hands on the paper, memorizing the shapes of her fingers, the lines on her knuckles. The coffee cups, which had looked so French to him at first, had been newly glazed with Italian. The dinner date. How would he leap to that topic across a river of sunlight? They had not exchanged a personal word. He should make small talk, introduce a few little touches about himself, create a profile. Perhaps Occupation (p-19c) and Hours worked (p-19d) would open a door? He could make a comment about the difficulties of working at night – they were in the same boat – and suggest lunch. This Sunday?
A cellphone rang. The theme from Mission Impossible.
‘Do you mind if I take this?’ She had traced the phone to an occasional table. ‘I’ll just be a minute.’ Withdrawing into the next room, closing the door behind her.
Is there a man in this household? he wondered. Is the absence of men as easy to detect as the absence of women? To a man. To a decision-maker.
He went to the window. In the cobbled courtyard below, he saw a rotary washing line, a gas braai, some bags of lawn clippings. No sign of a lawn mower. No sign of a lawn either. Perhaps it was just the grass-green of the plastic bags that had given him the idea. The people next door had a plunge pool that took up their entire yard. He gazed over rooftops of terracotta tile to the boundary wall laced with electric fencing, and then the sweep of veld beyond it and the freeway. You should be able to hear the traffic from here, but not a whisper. Double glazing. He turned back into the room and stood in front of the dresser. There were a dozen CDs on a rack and he ran his fingers down the spines. Sade, the soundtrack from Cats, Dance Krazy Volumes 1 and 2, Cole Porter. Framed photographs standing on the dresser. This one must have been taken at work, an office outing, the Christmas lunch. And on the wall a composite family portrait, a dozen snapshots framed in little oval and rectangular windows. Mom, Dad, sister. She spoke about staying over at her sister’s place. Who’s this? He looks very familiar. Undoubtedly famous for something, can’t remember what. Is he an actor? Or is he that fellow who got shot in a hijacking – the one they said would never walk again, who surprised them all by waltzing at someone or other’s wedding? He passed along the wall, gazing at the photographs like a gallery visitor, until he came to the foot of the stairs.
He went up the short flight to the bathroom and locked the door behind him.
No washing over the bath this time. He lifted the lid of the wicker laundry bin and saw a plastic bag full of clothes pegs in the bottom. Charlady must have come yesterday. No, if that was the case, yesterday’s clothing would be in the bin. This morning then. A towelling dressing-gown on a hook behind the door. Just one bottle of shampoo on the rack in the shower. He flipped up the top and sniffed it, but it was not the scent she carried about with her.
He turned to the counter beside the washbasin. This was what had drawn him back here, he realized. He had never seen such a mass of cosmetics. An immense feminine clutter of bottles, jars and tubes, doubled in the mirror behind. Sample sachets of moisturizer and eye make-up remover, cotton-wool balls in marshmallow colours, tubes of mascara, brushes and wands. Tortoiseshell clips, stretchy hair bands with scribbles of black hair caught in them, combs, tongs. A pink plastic razor, the flimsy kind of thing a woman would use. Emery boards, nail varnish, acetone.
A dim memory from his childhood came back, like a stranger into a shadowed doorway, and went away again without speaking: baking with the girl next door, with Melanie, mixing up a concoction from the kitchen cupboards while her mother was at work, a bit of everything, cornflour, salt, sugar, cinnamon, cochineal, olive oil, yeast, making a putrid batter that got more and more revolting with every ingredient they added, until they had to pour it from the mixing bowl into a hole in the back garden.
On the shelf above the basin was a little Manhattan of perfume bottles. There were bottles of every shape and size, crystal and smoked, corseted and shoulder-padded, pinched into feminine shapes or squarely masculine. He opened a tapering glass pyramid with a shiny top. Too sweet. Smelt of overripe oranges. The slim tower was Dolce & Gabbana. He unscrewed the bright-red cap. Also unfamiliar. Why does she have all these things if she doesn’t use them? Dozens of miniatures, which he supposed were samples. Presumably she was always receiving such things as gifts in her line of work. Romance. He ran his fingers over the glass with its Beardsley curves and bevels. He was about to unscrew the cap when there were footsteps on the stairs. He put the bottle back in its place and flushed the toilet. The footsteps receded sharply on the white tiles, were absorbed briefly into Chinese silk in the hallway, and tapped again more quietly into the lounge.
He could not leave, although he wanted to.
He went on with the survey. The next sample stood alone on the end of the shelf, a little round red box with a fez tassel dangling from its gold-rimmed lid, and inside it a bottle shaped like a skittle made of fluted glass, with a round stopper, just like a miniature brandy decanter, and another silky tassel tied around its neck. Valentino. He pulled out the stopper and the liquid splashed over his hands. In an instant this smell was everywhere, there was no need to breathe it into his lungs off his fingertips, it had poured into the air around him, fruity, over-elaborate, suffocating. He put the bottle away. The dots on the taps were in the Italian colours, as always. He opened them and let them run until the one on the left began to get warm, and then he soaped his hands and rinsed them. But the scent lingered. If anything it seemed to intensify, as if he had left the stopper off the bottle.
‘Are you all right?’
He hadn’t heard her coming back. Or had he been mistaken about the footsteps? Perhaps she had been listening outside the door all this time. Not that there was anything to overhear. Could she smell the scent seeping out through the cracks?
‘Mr Budlender?’ She would not call him Les. ‘Is there a problem?’
‘I’m fine. I’ll be out in a minute.’
Probably thought he was trying to steal something. What would she make of
him? Did it matter? He washed his hands again, stuffed them in his pockets and went back to the lounge. She was standing behind the sofa with one arm across her chest, the cellphone raised halfway to her head.
When they said goodbye, she held her smile too long. He recognized the look: it was the one the continuity announcers got on their faces when the camera failed to cut away at the end of a segment.
In the blue vase on the window sill there were tulips, shame-faced and round-shouldered. The sunflower must have been real after all.
On the way out to Jimmy Dijkstra’s a little later, he realized that there could not be a man in Iris du Plooy’s life, if she was being honest on her questionnaire. But why should she be? It was just an exercise, after all. She might have made up a new persona for herself. She could be anyone she chose.
Dijkstra would keep, he decided, and headed for home. All the way he kept an eye on the crack, expecting it to fork out through the glass.
She was on television again that evening. Alone, in a blue dress that left her shoulders bare and showed him, for the first time, the fullness of her breasts. A microphone clung to the fabric like a scarab. Earlier that day, under Tuscan skies, her skin had looked darkly tanned, but now she seemed unnaturally pale. An effect of the light.
Tonight she was speaking English. Her Afrikaans accent lay on the words like dust from a country road. It charmed him, as always, but the script she had to parrot was so banal he could not listen. It would be better in silence. He would be free to watch the planes of her face, to consider the way she was assembled, to extrapolate from the curves of her breasts to her belly, her thighs.
He reached for the remote control, and in that instant she was gone and an American music programme began. The Top Forty. He turned the volume down anyway and slumped on the sofa, with a tumbler of whisky resting on his stomach, watching the silent play of images on the screen. A man in an office, at the window, against the glass, looking out on a skyline, New York perhaps, although he could not see the landmarks. A man in white in a black space. The man moved from one empty room to another, running his image like a soft cloth over reflective surfaces, over the glass and steel housings of devices, unidentifiable racks of equipment, hi-tech machines that might be made for processing information or meat, he kept walking through the empty rooms, which made up an office or an apartment. The camera followed him from above, a small white ideogram crawling across a shiny black floor. Images on the walls, things in frames, photographs or windows into other rooms where colour was permissible. The camera went outside into the night. It was warm out there, you could feel the air rising up from the pavements below, with something sugary in it that set your teeth on edge. New York, he was sure of it now. You felt the heat around the camera by the longing way it looked through the windows of the apartment or the office into the spaces beyond, which were undoubtedly cool, into the cool spaces you had already walked through, where the man in white was still walking now, with the soles of his feet and the black tiles whispering together, appearing in one window after another, like a sequence of photographs.
He must have dozed off, because now credits were speeding upwards on the screen. His eye picked out a name here and there – best boys and grips, standby painters and casting agents, a Waiter in Restaurant, an Old Woman in Laundry – held these words on the surface of memory for a moment, let them flit back into forgetfulness. Why did these particular names attract his attention? What was the physiology of it, the sociology? The dance of the eye across the information.
Iris reappeared. The satin drapes in the background had changed colour and were now crimson instead of blue. Perhaps they were not made of satin at all but of mere light, lamps trained on a wall or a screen, distressed surfaces. Or they might be projections like the maps and charts behind the weatherman, combinations of colours and textures chosen off a menu with a click of the mouse. He had no idea. Just as he had no idea, when he watched the news, whether the pillars were really made of marble or the desktops of granite. Common sense told him they could not be real. But how could he be sure? Perhaps all the people he saw on television, the newsreaders, the pop singers, the talk-show hosts and the continuity announcers, were suspended in empty space, waiting for an appropriate world to embrace them.
He reached for the remote but it had slipped down between the cushions, and so he lay back and watched Iris in silence.
He became aware of a strange agitation in her body. Her hands were out of sight, severed at the wrists by the bottom of the screen, but he could tell that they were moving. Perhaps she was fiddling with a pen? Her shoulders were dipping and twitching too, her upper arms quivering. You would have thought she was sobbing, although her face suggested the opposite. The smile never left her lips for a moment, she spoke through it, like an actor speaking through a mask. He scrabbled again for the remote, and as his fingers closed on it, she glanced down into the corner of the screen, as if the movement of his hand had caught her attention, gazed out intently with the smile fixed on her face, and disappeared.
How strange it is, he thought, that the continuity people, that they especially, should lead such discontinuous lives.
Budlender’s fifth and last trip to Tuscany had no professional purpose to begin with – a dinner invitation could scarcely be considered professional – and predictably came to nothing.
He had invented an excuse to see her. He phoned. Would she be prepared to check the final revision of the questionnaire? He found her comments particularly valuable.
‘I’m really busy. Can you fax it?’
But he insisted on bringing it over in person.
In the event, the guard would not let him through the gate. Mr Budlender? Miss Du Plooy was out. She had left instructions that the package should be entrusted to him. Mister – for a second Budlender heard ‘Master’ – could see for himself, she had written it down. The guard came out of the hut and shoved the clipboard through the window. As he read the message in her familiar hand, he noticed that the guard had acquired a stick with a carved handle: a creature with many heads, an enormous version of the idol on the end of his pen, glowering in every direction.
Villa Toscana, seen from the N3 as he drove back to the office, was less convincing than ever. You might have thought it was made of cardboard and paper, as if the building contractor had taken the architect’s model too literally. The stand of bluegums on the plot next door looked like shabby old men, irritable and disapproving.
A few days later, she returned the questionnaire by post. There was a note attached, on a yellow sticker, to say that it was perfect just as it was and she now considered her part in the project at an end. As he smoothed the form out on his desk, he imagined her folding it in thirds, flattening each crease between the nails of her thumb and middle finger, with her little finger crooked in the air.
One night not long afterwards, he dreamt that he was walking in a foreign city, down avenues lined with skyscrapers. The buildings were like bars in a gigantic graph, but they were also perfume bottles, glass towers filled with liquids coloured like honey and brandy. The air was so thickly scented he could hardly breathe. He began to run, over tiles of tortoiseshell and pewter, gathering momentum painfully, step by step, until his feet detached from the earth and he found himself falling, horizontally, through the perfumed streets.
AFRITUDE SAUCE
A long day dusted with talcum powder, chilli powder, paprika. Egan shut the door on it and breathed the recycled air of his hotel room gratefully. While he was out to dinner, the chambermaid had come in to draw the curtains, switch on the bedside light and turn back the covers. On the freshly plumped pillow a chocolate in golden foil rested like a coronet.
How much importance should he attach to these details? They were hardly personal touches – although management would want to think of them that way – they were merely steps in a routine, the writing paper, the matchbook opened like an easel in the ashtray, the ragged carnation in a vase on the dresser. Special effect
s, produced and directed by the hospitality industry. Yet he felt warm inside, he felt welcomed, despite himself. The booze at Bra Zama’s African Eatery had softened him up. Not to mention an afternoon in Hani View. And then, admittedly, it was a better hotel than he was accustomed to. On his Joburg trips, he usually ended up in some sub-economic chain near the airport, a Formula One or a City Lodge, bland places in which software salesmen and retail buyers were propped like cardboard cut-outs advertising beer. Economizing. Egan, Gessing and Malan doing their bit for reconstruction.
He switched on the TV and sat on the end of the bed. When he bent to unlace his shoes, he noticed that he had dribbled gravy down the leg of his trousers, all the way from knee to turnup. The trickle-down effect. Afritude Sauce. What would his dinner companions think? But would they have noticed? Not bloody likely. Half-cut, all of them, like himself. Foolishly, he began to count the yellow stains, moving his forefinger from one island to another, lost count, started again. He leaned closer. Babyshit yellow. No wonder he’d started out thinking the stuff was inedible. Although it had turned out to be delicious. Was it indelible?
He emptied his pockets onto the dresser and stepped out of his pants. What should he use on the stains? Something that wouldn’t make them set. Janine would know, with her files full of ‘household hints’. She was a stain specialist too, everything from getting red wine out of the carpet to getting bubblegum out of the kids’ hair. But it was too late to phone home now, he would have to improvise.
In the bathroom, he tore the corner off a sachet of shampoo between his teeth, squeezed a blob of orange gel onto the stain and worked it into a lather, rinsed it out under the tap. Apparently the Afritude Sauce did not come out as easily as it went down. There was something yellow in it. Turmeric. What had the menu called it? Borrie.
The Exploded View Page 3