My thoughts exactly.
The history of exercise – this is how his boxing story usually began – someone should write a book about it. Chances are, someone has; you name it, there’s a book about it. Probably a long shelf in the library by now.
I’ve seen most of it, starting with Jane Fonda. Seen batons, balls and weights, elastic bands and slippery boards. Dancing, stretching, skipping, stepping and twisting. Spinning on stationary bicycles. Whenever Sylvia embarks on some new fad to keep fit and stay trim, I find an excuse to pop in at the gym and see it for myself. In the beginning, it was youthful jealousy: I needed to make sure she was really there, where she said she was. Now I just like to have an image in my head of what she’s up to for an hour a day, five days a week.
But boxing? I should have left well enough alone.
It was my father’s idea that I should box: now that I was going to school I had to learn to ‘take care’ of myself, I had to be ‘useful’ with my fists, it was the only language a playground bully understood. So I was enrolled in Louis Moller’s Boxing Academy for Boys in the gym behind the scout hall. We were taught the basics of punching and blocking. Mainly, we were made to run around the playing fields of the high school next door, to skip and do push-ups, and take cold showers.
Just a month after joining the club, I’m in my first public bout at the Golden Gloves Tournament. It’s part of the annual fête organized by the Caledonian Sport and Recreation Club. A ring has been put up on the football field in front of the main grandstand and a few spectators are sitting on the benches under the corrugated-iron roof, bemused or bored. Mostly, they’re strolling among the stalls and tents on the field, taking tickets at the tombola, eating pancakes and drinking beer, turning their attention to the ring only when a cheer or a jeer goes up. Many are waiting for the long afternoon of junior bouts to wear away before the serious boxing begins under floodlights in the evening. Until then, there are other diversions: Highland dancing, skydiving – the target X in whitewash on the hockey field – police dogs jumping through fiery hoops and sniffing out stolen property. In a corner near the beer garden, a black man, a bag-snatcher, is putting on a hessian overcoat with long, thickly padded arms.
The gloves are hot and soft, and slick inside with the sweat of the last boy, who’s just had his nose bloodied. They cover my fists like huge wilted red peppers. The cuffs are too wide to draw tight around my wrists and so Mr Moller wraps the laces around a few times and ties a bow. A length of blue ribbon is tucked into the band of my shorts. Then Mr Moller lifts me up into the ring.
Wilkie Pieterse is no taller than me, but his limbs look hard and wiry. A pale round head, newly shaven, with a blond tuft on the forehead. He smells of wintergreen and mealie leaves.
When we spar at Moller’s, we bat one another with the gloves and it’s hardly worse than being hit with a pillow. But Wilkie is not one of Moller’s boys: he’s learned to box in some city club, a place near the station, up a green stairway that reeks of beer and cigarettes from the snooker saloon on the floor above. The bell has hardly sounded, we’ve hardly touched gloves, sportingly, as we’re required to do, when Wilkie Pieterse hits me square in the mouth. Everything I’ve learned about defending is knocked out of my head by that blow. Someone is yelling at me to keep my gloves up, but I can’t see, and Wilkie is punching away on the other side of the big red barrier, knocking it back into my face. After the first panic-stricken minute, I find my balance and try to make a fight of it. But I simply cannot hit him: he’s too fast. He’s actually dancing, doing the light-footed shuffle you’re supposed to do, and flinging out punches, lefts and rights, hooks and jabs, he’s got the whole vocabulary down pat. The blows he’s landing on me aren’t all that painful, the gloves are so thickly padded, but by the time the bell rings at the end of the first round, I could cry from frustration and shame.
In the break, I sit on a stool in the corner while Anton de Melker, one of the club’s real prospects and no relation of the famous murderess, sponges my face and gives me advice. A teenager playing the big-time trainer. My eyes wander away, through the ropes, to the men dotted about on the stands, lounging with hands behind heads, legs flung over the backs of the benches in front, laughing and chatting. There’s my father, waggling his head as if to communicate a strategy.
The second round is even worse. I flail at my opponent, trying to hit him rather than simply ward him off, actually aiming at him, at a point in the air behind him, trying to punch through him – as Anton said – and missing again and again, while the gloves bump into my face from one surprising angle and then another. Becoming enraged, growing wilder and wilder, desperate to make a fight of it, to land one blow that hurts him, and succeeding only in making myself look more and more ridiculous. Reeling, tottering, swaying. Years later, I’ll make a joke of it: and in the blue corner…Tottering.
In my dream, Wilkie Pieterse batters me into submission after heroic resistance, bloodies my nose and sends me crashing through the ropes. In fact, in the harsh, sunlit reality of a Highveld afternoon, while storm clouds gathered behind the oaks and the pipes skirled in the dressing rooms under the stand where the band was preparing for their show, I finally fell over my own feet, swinging yet another roundhouse that missed, and burst out crying.
Approaching the site along the old road through the plots, he saw the billboard image of Crocodile Lodge in the distance, illuminated against the mildly darkening sky. The lights he had spent the afternoon installing, four metal cowls on struts that overhung the billboard like a row of gallows, had come on automatically as the day began to drain from the air. Although he knew he should hurry on to take advantage of what light remained, he could not resist pulling over for a moment to look at the board on the horizon. It would be wonderful at night, as bright and animated as a drive-in screen; but now it was softly insistent, its colours heightened so gently you would have put the change down to some shift in your own state of mind rather than an artificial light source.
Crocodile Lodge as it was meant to be, a bulwark of robust stone rising against the sunset, a printed sky redder and hotter, more full of blood and gamy juices than the ash-grey heavens behind the screen, the fading backdrop of reality. Stone, wood and thatch. The upper apartments had little gazebos instead of conventional balconies, with conical thatched roofs supported by wooden beams that mimicked the forks and stubs of indigenous trees. In the foreground, flat-topped thorn trees and waterholes edged by rushes, where the crocodiles that had given the place its name might be supposed to lie hidden.
Once it had been customary to furnish such wishful images with a notice that said ‘Artist’s Impression’ – even though the place was an obvious imagining, a world of watercolour and stippled ink, where the trees along the avenues looked like scraps of sponge on toothpicks, and sketchy men and women went strolling on tapering, coffee-table legs. He wondered why the convention had lapsed. Now that the fanciful images were practically indistinguishable from the photographically real, were more vividly convincing in fact than the ordinary world, disclaimers were no longer required.
He drove on, looking for the gap where the fence had been taken down. And now that he was moving again, he saw clearly how such a place would come into its own in the dusk, in the burnt-out after hours of a working day. Whoever had designed the billboard must have seen it too. Leaving their offices, agencies, studios, showrooms, chambers in Sandton and Midrand, muted interiors full of cool surfaces, blinded and air-conditioned, and taking the freeways across the newly domesticated veld, the residents of Crocodile Lodge, the account executives, human resource managers, stockbrokers, dealmakers, consultants, representatives in their high-riding 4×4s and their vacuum-packed cabriolets, their BMWs and Audis, would see ahead of them not a town house but a game lodge, and their professional weariness would yield to the pleasurable anticipation of getting inside the gates before nightfall, drawing up a bar stool made of varnished logs to a counter cross-section of ancient yellowwood on a lam
plit stoep, taking a beer or a glass of single malt in hand, and gazing out into the gathering darkness, where the night creatures were stirring.
He lay on his bed with the sun on his back and the fuzz of the candlewick bedspread making his forearms itch, lost in his father’s America, leafing from the full-colour world on the cover of the magazine to the monochrome plans that folded out of the spine inside, from the seamless whole to the divided parts, every element named and numbered and accorded its god-given place, taking things apart in his head, putting them together again. In time, the wholes and the parts drew closer and closer together, infected with purpose, until they pressed up against one another, sometimes, and fused.
It must have started with simple objects, he supposed, with salt cellars and push toys, but what came back to him always was the holiday house on the edge of the lake. The way its plywood panels filled up with colour, the way textured finishes – Kencork, Marlite, Novoply – goosefleshed the surface of blank paper, and metallic sheens slid over beadings and facings. Having consumed the technical drawing and its qualities, the lifelike image became manipulable.
The exploded view.
He closed his eyes and began to detach the components of the house one by one as if easing apart a delicate puzzle, finding the sketchy braille of the plans on the tips of his fingers, reading the bones concealed beneath the coloured skin. He separated board from board, stone from stone. He suspended every silvery nail and brassy screw in the familiar notches and hollows of the yellow air. When he was finished with the house, he moved on to the landscape, discerning the plans at the heart of everything, uncovering armatures and seams. Even the pines on the shore he exploded into their parts, so that each needle quivered beside a sheath in a stalk, each cone burst into separate scales, and each trunk shucked its bark like a coat. The world, disassembled as precisely as a diagram in a biology textbook, sucked in bracing breath and expanded. The universe was expanding, we were causing it to expand, by analysing it.
The knack had never left him, a surgical ability to see how things fitted together. Even now, after forty years, it sometimes came in useful when he had to resolve a mechanical problem or make a repair.
But, in truth, this skill seemed to him increasingly outmoded in the world he lived in. It was no longer clear even to the most insightful observer how things were made or how they worked. The simplest devices were full of components no one could see, processes no one could fathom.
A few months before, he had read a magazine article that speculated on the fragility of human knowledge. This was the millennial premise: what if the man-made world, along with its books and records, every repository of knowledge, were destroyed by some catastrophe, and only one hundred people could be saved as the bearers of all we know. How would we choose the survivors to seed a new civilization on the other side of the deluge? Which combination of talents and proficiencies would ensure that humankind was not hurled back into the Dark Ages, or beyond them, into an even more brutal state of savagery? What could be saved of our high-tech world? How many people knew what went into the manufacture of a fibre-optic cable, a compact disk, a silicon chip, a printing press, a sheet of paper? How was information coded digitally? People were always bandying about the notion of the ‘binary system’ – but how was such a thing put to a useful purpose? How was electricity generated? How was a human being placed under anaesthetic? Where did aspirin come from? PVA? Glass? What were the most important inventions of the past ten millennia? Everyone would start with the wheel. And then? If one could arrive at a list of the ten most significant inventions, would it be sufficient to nominate one expert, representing each invention, to make the voyage into the future? Were gadgets enough? There was a bias towards technology in the entire game. The invention of writing was surely more important than the wheel – as the premise of the game itself demonstrated. One would want artists in one’s ark too, and a person who could read music and play an instrument or two, a multi-instrumentalist. But would it make sense to take a pianist without a piano tuner, a piano builder, a timberman? One would want a linguist, a polyglot, to preserve as many languages as possible. But would it make sense to take a speaker of Finnish, Polish, Zulu if he or she had no one else to speak to? Noah’s principle, two by two, made sense. Or one could come at it from another angle entirely, aiming to preserve those abilities and inclinations, knacks and leanings, that might allow people – the descendants of the hundred – to rediscover what had been lost. Perhaps the individual language was less important than the ability to speak, the individual technology less important than the inclination to reason, the art form less important than the need to imagine. Just when that seemed resolved, a different set of priorities presented itself. Noah again. Healthy men and women, that’s what we need, a good spread of genes, and the desire and ability to procreate. How would one reconcile fecundity and experience? What sort of population would one hundred healthy, genetically diverse adults generate? What did one mean by ‘genetically diverse’?
The one hundred. The chosen ones. A neat number for the calculation of percentages, for taking a census. The idea appalled him at first. How little he knew! If he were one of the lucky few, a volume in the human library, what could be learned from him? How to use a rivet gun. How to take it apart and put it back together again. How to renovate a swimming pool – but not how to chlorinate a glass of water. How to erect a billboard. How to drive a car. How to box.
Finally he’d found comfort in the idea, in the simplicities it demanded. There would have to be farmers in the group, and builders, and tailors and cooks. Neither artists nor scientists were necessary. Historians, perhaps. Priests. The catastrophe was a blessing in disguise, an opportunity to purge the social body, to cut away the fatty excess of the last few centuries and return to the bony basics. A global detox. The true image of our times: the bedridden obese. The bodies that could only be removed by smashing down walls and hauling in cranes.
A truck has broken down on the N1 South before the Hans Strijdom off-ramp. That’s in the right-hand lane. Traffic lights are out of order in the CBD at Market and Simmonds, at Market and Harrison, at Rissik and Bree. In Blackheath at Judges and Republic, in Florida at Beacon and Ontdekkers, in Westdene at Harmony and Perth. A car has broken down on the N3 opposite the PPC Cement Factory. A pedestrian is walking along the N12 in the Glenanda area. Please look out for a pedestrian in the emergency lane on the N12 going east.
He drew up in the sandy clearing beneath the Crocodile Lodge billboard, switched off the engine, ratcheted up the handbrake and got out. There was light in the air, but on the ground the struts of the hoarding and the lopped branches of bluegums cast a mess of long shadows. Leaning back into the cab, he switched on the headlights and flicked the lever on the steering column to bright.
Where to start? The four lights on the billboard, hanging down their heads to gaze intently at the ground, suggested that he start there. That’s where they were working most of the time. But he’d walked all over the site this afternoon and the phone might be lying in a distant corner, or he might have crushed it into the earth a minute ago under the treads of his tyres.
If only I had a phone to phone my phone.
Perhaps Sylvia will call! He tilted his wrist into the beam of the headlights. Ten past six. She should be home by now. She’d come in from gym, find his message, his non-committal message, and decide to call. And he’d hear the phone ringing, Mission Impossible, he’d hear it piping like a field mouse in the dark somewhere and blunder after it frantically, relieved, calling out to it like a pet, and find it. What a beautiful end to the story. He actually paused, afraid that he would miss it, and cocked an ear, and held the pose a little awkwardly, for too long, felt the expectant expression hardening on his face, like an actor in a play when someone else misses a cue. Heard nothing but the distant gravel-rush of traffic on the N3, and insect noises, and a sound that was oddly congruent with these – the tick-tocking of the engine as it cooled down.
&n
bsp; Search beneath the billboard. A grid-search of sorts. Use the pillars of the hoarding and these thick shadows to mark out territory. He went towards the pillars, and the headlights threw his shadow over Crocodile Lodge, the enormous grey blur of his head, and it reminded him of the irritating disruption of fantasy that occurs when a careless operator passes his hand in front of the lens in the projection room.
Company. He was still hunting at the foot of the hoarding when he became aware of an engine noise that was not as distant as the freeway, and a moving light, and, looking around for the source, saw a minibus coming across the plot, finding a way between heaps of sand and stone, dipping and swaying through gullies and dongas.
Run now, ask questions later. He dashed for the bakkie and slid in behind the wheel. With the ignition key between thumb and forefinger, he saw the vehicle swing round and face back in the direction it had come from, as if the driver had only just realized he’d lost his way. He hardly had time to feel relieved before reverse lights flared. The bus backed into the gap between a felled tree and a stack of bricks, where he had squeezed through earlier into this corner of the plot. They were parking him in.
Some men got out of the bus. Three of them, no, four. He heard doors bang, the rumble and thud of the sliding door at the side. The thieves who’d been filching bits and pieces off the site, no doubt. Probably after some scaffolding or a couple of bags of cement. His presence here must be an unwelcome surprise.
The Exploded View Page 12