‘What’s that?’ He looked for it in the pages.
‘It is the stomach of a sheep.’
‘Tripe.’
‘It will make you sick.’
‘I’ve eaten tripe before. My mother used to cook it quite often when I was a kid. Because it was cheap. I always thought it was delicious.’
‘Ulusu, ulusu.’ Marakabane seemed to be mulling over an entirely different foodstuff, something loosely coiled and heavy with blood.
‘You must have the beef,’ Bhengu said.
‘With the Afritude Sauce,’ Mazibuko added.
Egan looked for the Afritude Sauce on the menu. Again he wished he was in that faraway place, the future, looking back.
‘The Afritude Sauce is the speciality of the house,’ Bhengu was reading off the menu. ‘It is the flavour of the New South Africa, an exhilarating blend of earthy goodness and spicy sophistication.’ He waved to the waitress.
‘It is the real thing,’ said Marakabane.
‘In that case, I suppose I’ll try it.’
Bhengu smiled at him indulgently.
Miriam came with the drinks. There were two bottles of white wine in a plastic bucket, four quarts of Castle lager, two quarts of milk stout, and a clattering fistful of enamel mugs.
They ordered in Sotho. Bhengu ordered for Egan. The only two words in the entire exchange he understood were: Afritude Sauce.
Mazibuko uncapped the wine and filled their mugs. ‘Mr Bhengu would like to propose a toast.’
Bhengu looked at Egan and said, ‘To the Hani View Sewage System.’ He pronounced it ‘sea-wage’.
They raised their mugs and drank.
They began to speak about Hani View, the progress on the new houses, the problems with the substation, now mercifully resolved, the grading of the roads, the squatters from Hani View Extension 1 making a nuisance of themselves. The episode with Mrs Ntlaka and the photographer came back to Egan and he thought of bringing it up. But why bother when the mood was so light and cheerful? It was all water under the bridge, so to speak, and he was relieved to be back on common ground.
As they sat there in the middle of the room, the focus of attention, he, Egan, and the five black men, an equal among equals, he became conscious of their special status. They represented something important. They were the only racially mixed party in the place. Glancing around at the other tables, at the pale Danes and Poms, taking a quick census, he felt weirdly proud of himself. He was part of the new order, that part of it that did not need to be labelled ‘new’. It even tickled him that he might be part of an ‘arrangement’ of some kind, something vaguely disreputable. He had to wonder about the cosy relationship between the councillors and the men from the Residents’ Association. Who was the fifth man? Was it seemly that they should all be meeting like this? Who would be picking up the tab? But his questions lost their force in the face of a new certainty: this was the way the world worked and there was nothing to be ashamed of. It was all about connections, it was about who you knew, I’ll scratch your back, that kind of thing. How did anything ever get done but by such accommodations?
The conversation flowed along smoothly for an hour. They had all night, it went without saying, no reason why the kitchen should rush. They spoke in English, with pinches of Sotho, Zulu and Afrikaans. They deferred to Egan on technical questions. Were they getting their money’s worth from Rubicon? Was it true that the zoning laws prevented them from building on Saturday afternoons, but said nothing about surveying? Why could they not lay the pipes for the new houses down by the vlei underneath the existing road? Egan began to feel like one of the boys. He found himself referring to them as ‘gents’. He ordered another bottle of wine. The empties in the ice-water had sloughed their labels, so he didn’t know what they were drinking, but Ramaramela said he should ask for the poeswyn, it would do, and they all laughed.
When the wine came, Egan filled up their mugs. ‘Have another dop, gents.’
They had finished the new bottle before Miriam brought the food. Bhengu said it was time to move on to beer anyway. You couldn’t drink wine all evening.
The fifth man had ordered the tripe. It looked nothing like the dish Egan remembered from his childhood and he was glad he had been dissuaded from trying it. There were pieces of spongy tissue in it like something out of the pathology lab. The other four were eating the same big platters of roasted meat. No sign of a skewer, so it couldn’t be the Zulu kebabs. Looked like chops, your basic braaivleis. Was it even on the menu? You probably had to know someone in the kitchen. Perfect, he thought, the one thing everyone wants isn’t even mentioned in the small print.
The Afritude Sauce came in a calabash propped in a wire stand. It was an unappetizing yellow and had bits of peanut and leafy green stuff floating in it. It looked lumpy, half-digested, stewed in its own juices. But when he tasted a bit on the end of his knife it turned out to be delicious. He spooned it over his steak.
They ate.
Slowly, peristaltically, Egan felt himself moving to the edge of the conversation. They were talking mainly in Sotho now, switching back into English occasionally to include him. The man with the scarred head mentioned the new houses (Egan guessed they were the ones he’d seen that morning). Ramaramela and Marakabane assured him that they were looking after their ‘constituency’. They said several times that they would ‘bring their people along’, as if they were talking about their families. Egan made a point about the floodline. Bhengu agreed with him. Then they slipped back into Sotho. What were they talking about? Leaning back in his chair to claim the first half metre of that distance he craved so much, studying their expressions, their gestures, their tones, the way their heads inclined towards one another as they spoke, he began to suspect that nothing important was being discussed with him. That the real purpose of the exchange, in which he appeared to be an equal partner, was in the sidelong chatter, the small talk he didn’t understand. It was possible, wasn’t it? That everything that mattered lay between the lines? There was something conspiratorial in the air; he would almost have said in the décor. But how to be sure? This unease he was feeling might just as well be insecurity, anxiety, even a guilty conscience. Why should he feel excluded? Wasn’t that a sign of weakness in itself?
A fantasy: if he could listen in patiently on everything they didn’t want him to know, he would be able to turn the tables. He remembered those stories about South Africans abroad speaking Afrikaans at a dinner party, secure in the knowledge that no one would understand them, being nasty about the company, passing comments about the food – only to find that their host had grown up in Potch and spoke Afrikaans perfectly. He imagined himself at the end of this evening, as they were parting in the soothingly lit lobby of the hotel, putting out a hand to Louis Bhengu and saying in perfect Sotho, ‘Well, gentlemen, thank you for a very entertaining evening.’ But he couldn’t even guess at the shape of the words in his mouth.
Miriam appeared. Everything all right?
‘Fine, fine.’
The steak was tough, he thought, but the sauce did wonders for it. He added another couple of spoonfuls.
Then he took a closer look at the décor. There was a bicycle with square wheels suspended over the bar counter, which was faced with corrugated iron. He had seen something similar in a pub once, one of those Irish chains, a McGinty’s or what have you. Perhaps they’d got the idea there. Barbed wire in the rafters. These wooden masks everywhere, with their poppy eyes and round surprised mouths that were just made to hold a blowpipe, their bulging foreheads and scarred cheeks. They gave him a peculiar sense of being watched, as if a crowd of hungry tribesmen were staring at him while he tried to eat, gawking as if they had never seen a white man before. The masks were nearly identical, yet each one had something individual about it, in addition to its ritual mutilations, as if they were all finally related, cousins, second cousins, the members of one intricate, impossibly extended family.
Perhaps it was not that different with Ram
aramela and Marakabane. Ramaramela yellow, Marakabane blue. Why did he find it so difficult to tell them apart? They both looked like gangsters to him, like those identikit portraits of heist suspects or hijackers. The same interchangeable features. No matter how hard the artist worked at giving each an identity, choosing carefully from among the hundreds of eyes and noses and mouths, they ended up resembling one another. They were faces that had never been lived in. They were always completely symmetrical and relentlessly typical. In their own way, they were flawless.
The Michael Jackson joke someone had circulated by email came back to him. How does Michael Jackson pick his nose? With a catalogue. He thought of telling it, decided against. What status would Michael Jackson have in this company? Would he be a figure of fun? A role model? He couldn’t say.
In any event, he could not interrupt their conversation to tell a joke. They were talking heatedly. He had the feeling that for the first time this evening he had ceased to matter to them. It made no difference that he was there. The thought had hardly crossed his mind when Bhengu leaned over without missing a beat and stuck his spoon in the Afritude Sauce. At first, Egan thought he was helping himself. Instead, he gave the contents of the little calabash a stir, tipped several spoonfuls over Egan’s steak, licked the spoon, raised his eyebrows appreciatively, and went on talking.
Egan drained his mug and considered the gesture. What did it mean? Was it a sign of sharing, of hospitality? Like the good host topping up his guest’s glass. Or was he being ridiculed? Why did he even think this was a possibility? He could no longer tell the difference between kindness and cruelty. Every day he found himself wondering whether people were being nice to him or taking the mickey.
Suddenly he felt exhausted and drunk. Poeswyn and milk stout, not to mention a third of whisky in the afternoon. He should never have opened that bottle, he should have given it to Bhengu. He focused on the men across the table. Which one was Ramaramela? They had taken off their jackets and slung them over the backs of their chairs. Perhaps they’d changed places? They had all made several trips to the toilet. Ramaramela might have sat down in Marakabane’s chair. Ramaramela yellow, Marakabane blue. Or vice versa. He’d lost the rhythm of it. Which one was the caribou? Their names had detached themselves from their faces, from their clothes, from their colours, and he simply could not put them together again. Their voices kept slipping sideways too, like subtitles in a film. Marakabane – was it? – went on talking, his lips were moving, his eyebrows waggling, yet his words seemed to hover in front of Ramaramela’s mouth.
His eyes wandered from the faces of his companions to the masks on the walls. There seemed to be more and more of them. Multipliers. He felt surrounded. It was uncannily like a white South African nightmare, he thought. An old one. As if they were in a glass house, feasting, while the hordes outside pressed their hungry faces to the walls.
Margarine. He would just have to take a look at Ramaramela’s trousers. He stood up. As if that had been a signal, the lights dimmed, music blared and a troupe of gumboot dancers burst through the armour-plated doors of the kitchen. The one in front was the manager, the man in the bubu, who had shown them to their table.
There were masks in the men’s room too, suspended from the tiles above each urinal. While Egan pissed, he was compelled to gaze into a wooden face, which reflected exactly his own expression of glazed relief. Alongside each mask was a sign advertising condoms or hands-free telephones. There were more masks between the mirrors above the washbasins, all terribly scarred and battered, staring at him with disbelief. He looked ridiculous in this shirt. He looked like Denis fucking Beckett. He’d been tucking his shirt into his pants since he was a kid: now suddenly it was a sign that he was ‘uptight’. You were supposed to let it all hang out, starting with your shirt tails. Bugger that. Bugger them. He loosened his belt and tucked his shirt into the sides of his underpants, the way he’d always done it. That’s better.
When he got back to the table, the gumboot dancing was over and they were ordering dessert. Without even waiting for encouragement, he said he would have the rainbow cake, with ice cream.
When Miriam brought the bill, the fifth man insisted on paying and dropped a credit card on the saucer. Egan protested half-heartedly, accepted the offer, insisted on putting in for the tip.
While he picked through the change in his wallet, he was reminded of the joke about Van der Merwe visiting the Empire State Building. Looking down from the viewing platform at the top, he sees a quarter lying on the sidewalk. So he runs all the way down to the street to pick it up – and finds that it’s a manhole cover. He was full of jokes this evening. For a moment, he actually considered telling this one. Then he imagined Janine rolling her eyes: there was a certain kind of humour, she always said, and it wasn’t necessarily lavatorial, that was appreciated only by sanitary engineers.
Egan slid the metal clamp of the shower attachment up on the bar for the tenth time and fastened the screw. The thing wouldn’t stay put. He shut his eyes and thrust his face into the jet, letting the water sluice off him, washing away the dust and sweat of the day, rinsing off the insults, real and imagined, the glare of cheap publicity, the sea-wage, Mrs Ntlaka’s talcum powder, Bra Zama’s Afritude Sauce. He detached the shower from the clamp and played the jet idly over his balls. It was a pleasant feeling, the warm water prickling on his skin, but then the flow suddenly ran cold again. He reached through the curtain for his watch on the cistern. Twenty minutes before Raging Bull started. He turned off the taps and got out of the shower.
He went through to the room with a towel around his waist and switched on the TV. A filler of some kind, an infomercial, a muscular woman walking in an exercise machine. Close-ups of her ridged abdomen, her sinewy arms. Hardness. A quality that had not always been associated with women. Once they had cultivated softness; now they were for such hard-edged definitions. American women were leading the way. They even seemed to take pride in the precise lines at the sides of their mouths. He turned the sound down. He unwrapped the chocolate that he’d found on his pillow when he came in from dinner and ate it. He poured himself another whisky from Bhengu’s bottle, scaled it up to a double, a triple. Then he lay back on the bed to wait for the movie.
The usual stack of cards and pamphlets was on the bedside table, and he flipped through them. The TV guide. The services – laundry, shoeshine, car rental. Wake-up calls. The room-service menu. At the bottom of the stack, mixed up with the writing paper, was a complaints questionnaire. Please take the time to complete this questionnaire before your departure, it said. It will help us to improve our service. Your needs are important to us. Strangely enough, someone had already taken up the challenge. Mr J. P. van der Haas of Rotterdam. He had covered the whole form in tiny print. Presumably the chambermaid should have taken it away for ‘processing’, but it had slipped in among the other papers and been overlooked.
Egan propped himself more comfortably against the pillows and considered the form. It was dated at the top: the night before. There was always something unsettling about hotel rooms, when you thought about it. A long line of strangers slouching about on the same furniture as if it belonged to them. Usually you did not know their names, every identifiable trace of them had been erased – the sweat, the cigarette smoke, the scuffing and scraping were unavoidable but generalized – and so it did not bother you much. This was too close for comfort. He could imagine Van der Haas lying here just twenty-four hours ago, exactly where he was lying now, with his spiky Dutch hair resting against the same spot on the plush headboard, his forehead postmarked with resentment, his stockinged ankles crossed, the big toe of one foot scratching the instep of the other, and the ballpoint clutched in his fist.
Apparently Van der Haas had not found much to his liking. Under General Condition of Room he had written: ‘Bedclothes and carpet worn. Not up to standard of 2 star hotel.’ Then there was an asterisk that guided Egan to a note at the bottom of the page, where Van der Haas’s signature
was coiled like a pubic hair in a bar of soap: ‘Decor itself is old-fashioned. Depressing. It is time to redecorate. One feels one to be back in 1978 in this room.’
He got up and switched on the central light. Took in the veneers, the floral lampshades, the reproduction of a bushveld scene over the TV set. Nightfall at the Waterhole. The slightly awkward positioning of the chair between the bathroom door and the bed now made sense: it had been put there deliberately to cover a threadbare patch. Suddenly he wished he had slippers. He should put on his socks, at least, to avoid the sticky prickle of the fibres on his bare soles. Extraordinary, he thought, the place is only a couple of years old. The finishes must have been very shoddy to start with or the volume of guests astounding. At the thought of all the strangers who had passed through this cramped space, breathing, dripping, shedding skin, spilling fluids, his stomach tightened. Involuntarily, he put his hand over his mouth.
He had folded the bedspread to the foot of the bed. Perhaps the chambermaid had turned it back in the first place to hide some flaw? Perhaps every homely touch was calculated to conceal something? He opened out the bedspread. Seemed fine. The sheet was a bit grey. He turned over one of the pillows and there, indeed, was a hole in the slip the size of an egg. He swapped it with the pillow on the second bed, which was in better shape.
He turned to the next item on Van der Haas’s list. ‘Bedside lamp broken.’ Must be the one attached to the second bed. He pressed the switch. Nothing. An intolerable pressure began to rise in him, as if every petty irritation he had endured in his life was repeating on him, trying to force its way to the surface. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Robert De Niro, a bloated black-and-white Robert De Niro, speaking to the camera. But Van der Haas was not finished with him. Under Bathroom facilities he had no fewer than five numbered complaints. ‘One. Shower curtains. Replace with glass.’ Egan remembered the way the limp plastic sheet had clung to his back, sucked in by the steam. ‘Two. Shower attachment broken. Three. Dots on taps wrong way round. Green = cold, Red = hot.’ No wonder he’d scalded himself. ‘Four. Plug doesn’t fit.’ He went through to the bathroom. The pants he had put in to soak lay damply in the bottom of the empty basin. Why on earth had he put them in water anyway? He should have taken them home to clean. Must have been drunk. He should stick them in the trouser press. In the Hosenbügler. If the bloody thing was working.
The Exploded View Page 6