by Mark Winkler
She steps back and keeps her bony hands on my shoulders. Through the scrawniness and the sunken skin I can see the beauty she once was. “You may walk with me as long as you don’t ask how I am,” she says. She loops her arm into mine.
“How are you, Madge?” I ask.
She lifts a shoulder. Lets it drop. “Shit,” she says. “Truly, truly shit.” Then she brightens. “I got some new photographs in today. You should come around and see them.”
It’s hard not to like Madge.
I wake up before
I wake up before the alarm goes off. My head is clear. My brain is as sharp as the sun coming through the window. I don’t do curtains. I pull on my running gear. It’s manky enough. I take the stairs in case I meet another early riser in the lift. I stretch. I’m dying to get on the road. It’s worth stretching properly before a run. The first four Ks are always the hardest. They’re even harder if you haven’t loosened up.
I run up the short street behind my block and join Kloof Nek Road. I turn left up the steepness. Once I’m done with its zigging ascent I head left at the circle at the summit and run up past the cable station. Tafelberg Road takes me along the face of Table Mountain. I turn around at the ravine that divides the monolith of the mountain from Devil’s Peak. It’s already a February scorcher. The morning has the potential of an oven just turned on. In an hour or so it will be too hot to run.
When I get home I take the stairs again. I smell worse than before. I don’t want to stink up the lift. On the fourth-floor landing I promise promise promise myself a shower. The tiles are covered with crusty grey swirls. It’s revolting. I throw dishwashing liquid on it and scrub with the toilet brush. I let the scum rinse away while the water warms up. The tiles look better. The grouting remains black.
By the time I am out of the shower my fingers have wrinkled. I scrub at my hair with the towel. I should cut it some time. I pull on a T-shirt. My hair soaks the back of it down to my shoulder blades. The shower has made me feel lighter somehow. I take my running gear and two weeks’ worth of dirty laundry and stuff it into a duffel bag. I take the lift and walk down the hill. I drop the bag at the laundrette on Kloof Street. You can self-service if you want, or you can leave it with the attendant. She knows me. I dump my bag on the counter. Her shoulders slump. I wonder if her life is more or less interesting than mine. Across the road is one of those old cafés that sells everything from soft drinks and newspapers to spices and second-hand novels. Salie’s is one of the few shops to have survived petrol-station convenience stores and late-night 7-Elevens. I wait for Salie to warm my sausage roll in his microwave. There’s a smell of dust and curry and old fruit and paper. I breathe it in. It’s homely and familiar and almost edible. I pay for the sausage roll and the Sparberry that will help wash it down.
It’s past opening time when I get to Madge’s. The door to her shop is locked. Sometimes she’ll close it when she feels like a cup of tea. It’s time to bugger the customers, she says every time. It’s not even nine-thirty. It’s too early for her to have tea. I peer through the security bars. I try to make her out beyond the second-hand furniture that clutters the place. Antique, Madge calls her wares. By her own admission she wouldn’t know Regency from Bauhaus. I can’t see her through the security bars or beyond the shapes inside. I remember that she wasn’t well last evening. I remember that I’d walked with her a while. The memory tries to lead on to the next one. There’s nothing there. I’m certain I went home. The hangover I didn’t have this morning tells me I didn’t go back to Eric’s. I try to picture myself approaching Pansyshell Park in the gathering dark. I try to remember opening my door and putting on the TV. I suppose there’s nothing much worth remembering about my evening.
I can’t see Madge. Then I hear her. “Darling!” she sings. She is crossing St. George’s Mall. The Somalis and Nigerians are already at their stalls under the plane trees. She’s late. I wonder if she’s had a bad night. She has a bunch of keys in her hand and a fantastic pink hat on her head. A dress of bright florals swirls around her bones. She kisses the air with her red lips. She takes a tress of my hair in her hand and holds it to her nose. “So clean!” she says. “If I were still a lass, then who knows?” She fiddles with her keys. There are two locks to be undone. One on the shackle of the security gate and the other on the door of the shop. Why she has a bunch of twenty or so keys I wouldn’t know.
I make tea in the alcove behind the veneered bookshelves. At the end of the alcove is a door. I open it to allow some of the mustiness and mildew to escape. Madge keeps it closed for security reasons. It opens onto a gated alley. I’ve told her often enough that it’s safe to have it open.
Madge puts out two bone china cups. They are mismatched and chipped and so are the saucers. She bends slowly to scrabble in a cupboard. “Ooh, cookies,” she says and takes out a box of Romany Creams. I wonder how long they’ve been in there. Antiques themselves. She goes into the shop ahead of me. Her neck is craned forward. At the top of her spine, the beginnings of a hump. I can see her vertebrae lined up like knuckles in her neck.
We sit. She’s in a Quaker-style rocking chair. I’m on a tall bar stool with a leatherette seat and tarnished chrome legs. One of the little rubber feet is missing. She raises her cup towards the stool. “Twenties,” she says, “Art Deco. Very rare.”
We drink our tea. I take a biscuit to be polite. It is soft and gently rancid. She bitches about her nephew who has just lost his business. Again. She tells me she is feeling a little better this morning. After a long day, who knows how she’ll be feeling? She can’t tell whether it’s the cancer or the drugs that make her feel so ill. Then she switches to drama mode.
“Goodness!” she shrieks. “I nearly forgot why you’re here.” She struggles from her chair and tries to pick up an old photo album from the counter.
“Here, let me.”
I put it on my lap and turn its stiff leaves. Either the weight on my groin or the contents give me the beginnings of a hard-on. I don’t know. I buy all my photographs from Madge. Long ago I tried to buy the framed image of a young man on her desk. His weaselly look made him interesting. The perfect black sheep for my family. The picture was of her nephew. NFS. Not For Sale. The frame didn’t have a stand and leant against an old clothing iron. It’s called an “iron” because originally they were made of iron. You had to put live embers into it to heat it up. The nephew is still there, leering out of the frame like a pimp or a car salesman.
Looking through the album is not like flicking through a magazine at the dentist’s. Every image on every page carries its own fraction of the weight of the world. The weight of births and unions and deaths. Pain and love and hope and failure. Each portrait gives the subject a sense of purpose. Proclaiming that they’re here because they’re meant to be. That their drawing of breath and their dropping of faeces and their opinions and ideas and prejudices were preordained. Important. That their footfalls and elbow-nudges as they made their way across the great spinning earth would make a difference. That thing we all think, that we’re significant, that we matter. When in reality we’re forgotten before we’re born. When our footprints are so shallow they disappear long before we die. Still we believe we mean something. Madge’s album is the album of every person who ever lived. Even though it barely covers half a century. Each face, each pose tells a wordless story. The sum of untold details. What’s really important is the end result. There are many ways to lose a leg. Hundreds of reasons to wear a frown. A thousand ways to win a medal. Even more to get married. What’s important is where we end up. Who we end up.
That’s what we think. It’s not, really.
I never buy photos that are annotated. The comments ruin the story. They mean it’s already half-told. I need to start my stories from scratch. Tabula rasa. I can smell shampoo in my hair. I comb it behind my ears with my fingers. The album starts off Edwardian, stretches into the twenties, the thirties. It begins t
o thin out in the forties. Only a few of the pictures were taken in the fifties. As if libidos had waned. Or a slow plague had taken hold. The photos are sepia, black and white, scalloped at the edges, some of them. Small white triangles at the corners fix the photos to the black pages. There are couples and singles and families and priests and soldiers and dowagers and patriarchs. Hardly anyone smiles. The women are sexless. The men have laughable moustaches. Unhygienic, probably. Soaked with soup and hung with bits of lunch. The album has not a word written in it, not a single date.
It’s perfect.
I close it and a photograph falls to the floor. A young woman. In colour. She’s wearing sunglasses and a sleeveless dress and is leaning against the fender of a car. The hair says sixties, early seventies perhaps. Some colour has leached from the print and the red of her dress has a blue tinge as does the green of the car. The sky is flat and thin. Jutting into the image is the tail of a light aircraft. A Cessna or a Piper or something. Only half of the registration code is visible. The woman is looking slightly to the left. In spite of the big sunglasses, I know there’s sadness in her eyes. She is posing and the pose is tense. She doesn’t want to be photographed. She looks out at something that’s not really there. She could be looking into a past of indecision. Into a future that’s the consequence. The wind is blowing her hair back. I think she should be wearing a Princess Grace scarf. She isn’t. Beyond the aeroplane tail, there’s the blur of a windsock. I’m looking at her from the precise perspective of a handsome young man holding his new Leica. Pilots, both. Flying was the sport of the young and rich back then.
She is beautiful.
“I’ll buy her,” I tell Madge.
Madge takes a slightly used tissue from under her watch strap and hands it to me. I dab at my eyes.
“You know the deal,” Madge says. “All for one, one for all.” We agreed long ago never to split families of photographs. We agreed that nothing would be sadder. There’s no guarantee that the woman at the airfield belongs to the album at all. I know that at some time there will be space for the rest of them among the family on my wall. Man with Beard and Sour Woman, who begat Son in Uniform, who begat Swaddled Babe with Young Nurse the day before he left for Tripoli. Pouch-eyed Priest and Plump Marm, Playboy with Racehorse, the Bastard Triplets in their crib, crying as Mannequin in Polka Dot Blouse smiles over them. At the end of them, Woman in the Red Dress. And then me, starting all over again.
I get into the lift and it fills up
I get into the lift and it fills up with the smell of shampoo and deodorant and soap. It’s me. I’m not used to it. The album is under my arm. The woman in the red dress is in my top pocket. I don’t want her to fall out and blow away. I step out of the lift. Mrs. du Toit’s butt is pointed at me. She’s only just moved in. Her name must be Mrs. du Toit. It’s what it says on her postbox.
Her butt is a good size and a good shape. She is bent over and trying to push something big and white towards her flat. It looks like a washing machine. The bubble wrap makes it hard to tell. Mrs. du Toit is wearing tight white leggings that end halfway down her calves. Her calves are pale and strong. Her white top has a streak of sweat down the spine. Her pushing hardly moves the thing. The white high heels aren’t helping. She stands up and takes a big breath. Her shoulders droop. For a moment her hands are on her hips. She puts them on the white thing. Her head droops too. It’s not hard to see she has no idea of how to get the thing into her flat.
“Let me help you with that,” I say. She hasn’t heard me approach and jerks around. Her eyes are wet with frustration. I don’t really want to help her. I want to get inside and explore my new photographs. I can hardly step around her without offering.
“Thank you,” she says. “They just left it here and disappeared.” She sniffs damply. She turns away and wipes her eyes with the heel of a hand. Leaves a smear of mascara at the corners, Cleopatra style.
“I’ll just put this down,” I say. I open the door of my flat a crack and slip in sideways. I close it behind me. I don’t want Mrs. du Toit to see inside. Nobody has ever been in here. Other than me, of course. There’s no reason to change that now. I put the album on my couch. I take the woman in the red dress from my pocket and slip her under the front cover. It’s all I can do not to close the door on Mrs. Du Toit and her white machine. There is far more important stuff to do.
We wrestle the thing into her flat. I still don’t know if it’s a washing machine or a tumble dryer or a dishwasher or whatever. I’m sweating. So is Mrs. du Toit. I’m going to have to have another shower soon. Droplets are clinging to the hairs on Mrs. du Toit’s top lip. She wipes them away, with the back of her wrist this time. The white thing is standing in the middle of her flat. It’s a bigger flat than mine. There’s a doorway I don’t have, and no bed in the middle of the space.
“Shoo,” she says. She would probably have spelt it sjoe. “Can I get you something to drink?”
I’m in a quandary. Mrs. Du Toit wants to reward me for my help. My best reward would be to be released to my flat.
I’m parched.
“I’m good, thanks,” I say.
Mrs. Du Toit goes to her fridge and takes a plastic water bottle from a shelf. She unscrews it and drinks from it. The mouth of the bottle is wide. Water runs down her chin. It streaks her neck and wets her top at the collarbones. It’s like the start of a porn movie. The housewife and the plumber.
“Actually, some of that water would be great.”
You never know.
She reaches for a glass in a cupboard. Her top is sleeveless. I can see that it’s been a while since she’s shaved. She fills the glass from the bottle.
“Adele,” she says as she hands me the glass. For a moment I think it’s some kind of toast.
“Nathan,” I say.
“Next-door Nathan,” she says. I feel the blood draining from my face. She knows I listen to her. She tosses her head back and laughs. I can see the silver of fillings. Mercury makes you mad. Ask any hatter. Her black hair is heavy with sweat. It’s dyed, I’m sure. Up close she looks like there should be streaks of grey in it. With the makeup gone cats-eye she looks a tiny bit deranged. I don’t understand why she’s laughing. I put on my smiling face. “Let’s get this baby going,” she says and gives the white thing an affectionate kick. As if it were an old family dog.
It’s a tumble dryer and Adele du Toit wants it in the bathroom. We have to walk the machine through the doorway into her bedroom before we get to the bathroom. She hasn’t made the bed. The duvet is piled on one side. I can see the shape of her on the sheet. There’s no husband shape next to it. There’s a smell of a living thing in the room. The living thing is her. I suppose my bedroom has its own smell too. In fact I’m certain it has. A canine smell. Or worse, lupine. Hyena-ish. On the other side of the wall is my flat. The bedroom isn’t very big. First we have to push her bed against the window. Then we walk the dryer into the bathroom past the bed. The bathroom is ridiculously small. It’s ridiculously hot. We tear bubble wrap from the dryer. Then we have to wedge the dryer into a gap between the washing machine and the vanity stand. The gap looks too tight. It almost is. I have no idea of how to make the thing work. She finds the manual. It reads like it’s been translated from Korean to French to Swedish to English. From the diagrams it looks like I simply have to plug it in. I see straight off that we have to pull the dryer out again so that I can fiddle with the cord and the plug behind it. She laughs again, throws her head back. Sweaty drops fall from her onto my forearms, my legs. My face. I wonder if she does herself here or in the bedroom. Maybe both. The holes of the wall socket have rust in them. It’s not easy to force the plug in. She stops me when I want to turn the machine on to see if it works. She squats down to transfer wet items from the washing machine to the mouth of the dryer. I see clothes, towels, underwear. I can see down her crack as she squats. There’s pale hair at the base of her spine. She cl
oses the dryer. With a flourish, she invites me to switch it on. It works. It sounds like a jet as it churns her laundry into a slow kaleidoscope of colour.
“Celebration!” she bellows. She takes me by the arm and hurries me out of the bathroom. Through the bedroom. She opens the fridge and takes out a bottle of champagne. It’s not actually champagne. Real champagne comes from France. This is from Franschhoek. We drink it. The whole bottle in like twenty minutes. I could drink a lot more. Mrs. du Toit sits on the couch opposite me. Her shoes are on the floor. She’s swinging her glass from her fingers and looking at me. Swing, swing, look, look. I can’t make out what her face means. All I know is it’s making me horny. Then she rolls her eyes and her face goes back to normal. She gets up and puts her glass in the sink. She kind of just stands there. She crosses her arms and looks at her toes. They flex up and down. I realise what her face meant. By now it means something else.
I go to my flat. It’s really just a room with a bed, couch and kitchen all in one. I sniff the air and try to smell me in the air. I can’t. I open the album. The urgency has gone. And anyway I’m pretty fucking pissed off with myself. I close it again. Lie on the bed. Wrap myself in the doggy fug of the sheets. It’s time they were changed. Through the wall I hear Adel Du Toit’s tumble-dryer rumble like an oncoming train. I strain to hear something else from next door. There’s nothing.
I spend most of Sunday waiting
I spend most of Sunday waiting for Monday. Sometimes that’s all Sundays are good for.
On Monday I hear from Madge. She’s left a message on my phone. She wants me to drop in after work, her voice says. She wants to tell me something. The message came in at around two in the morning. Sonia is still sulking. It’s thirty degrees Celsius outside and she’s wearing some kind of military jacket. The jacket says that she means business. We have a standing meeting on Mondays. A review of who’s been selling what. It’s not looking good. Sonia glares at her sales team, me included. Hers is a classical passive-aggressive management style. I know she’ll smile sweetly before she berates us about our sales. Yumna enters the boardroom last. She’s late. She has a Vida coffee and a giant muffin in her hands.