As the months passed, the Test’s purpose became clearer to me, even if the laws of its composition did not. I began to see it as the centrepiece of an event, a championship if you like. When the Test was finished, and I had no inkling when that might be, it would be administered. There would be entrants, and they would pay a fee, and the one with the best results would receive a prize. A dictionary might be apt; say the seventh edition of the Concise – something newly revised would appeal to the youngsters – paid for out of the entry monies. I would have to decide on the winner myself. Merle’s notion that the Test be allowed to enter the world without correction was indefensible. I would prepare a corrected version, and hold it back until such time as the Test had been administered, so that everyone might have the ‘fun’ that meant so much to them. But then the corrected version would be made available too, as an antidote and an objective corroboration of my adjudication. If the inaugural event had to be delayed, well, so be it. It was essential, at any rate, that I myself adjudicate, that I retain control at least in the beginning. Later on, should the event become too popular for one person to manage, I might consider employing an administrator. Start small, I told myself. But how small was that? How many people would be interested in entering a proofreading competition? It would depend, among other things, on how well it was publicized. Would one advertise in the papers? What if people responded in ‘droves’, as the drudges put it? Who would foot the bill for a venue and for duplicating copies of the Test itself? Then again, if the entry fees were fixed at the right level, the whole undertaking might become profitable and eke out my pension. While these thoughts went round in my head, the Test continued to grow, and with it, my grand plans for the inaugural competition. Think big, I told myself. Instead of a dozen boozy subeditors cooped up in the ping-pong room at the Hillbrow Recreation Centre, why not the cream of the publishing world, possibly a few international figures – hardly celebrities, but prominent people, a Hugh Blythorne, a Dr Kate Babcock (if she was still with us) – all comfortably settled in the Selborne Hall? Competing not for a used copy of Peter Mark Roget’s Thesaurus, but for the Oxford English Dictionary in twenty volumes. The Proofreader of the Year Competition. The Aubrey Tearle Proofreader of the Year Competition. The First Annual etcetera.
I wrote in turn, and at mounting expense, to the Publishers’ Association, the larger publishing houses, the Printers’ Association, the larger printing houses, the smaller publishers and printers, the chains of bookshops, my former employers at Posts and Telecommunications, setting out the details of my project and requesting a meeting to discuss sponsorship. Disgracefully, I had not a single reply. Then I sent an abridged version of my letter to the Star.
17 May 1988
Dear Sir,
The late edition of your newspaper of 10 May asks: ‘How real is the threat of Muslin fundamentalism?’ In my view, it threatens the very fabric of society.
I am a retired proofreader with forty years’ practical experience involving a wide range of publications, notably telephone directories. In the course of my career, I came to believe that a standardized Test of proofreading ability would go a long way towards ensuring that qualified personnel are employed and standards maintained in this all-important but undervalued department.
I have devoted the years of my retirement to devising such a Test, drawing on Records kept during a lifetime of work, and this undertaking is now nearing completion. Besides its obvious value as a means of grading our own abilities, the Test may have wider applications in commerce and entertainment, which would serve to publicize the profession and draw young school-leavers into its ranks.
I am approaching your newspaper first because you fly the blue peter of the profession from your masthead, so to speak, in the Greater Johannesburg area. (Many of my letters, including several on orthographical subjects, have been published in your columns, and so we are not strangers to one another.) I would be happy to discuss the ways in which you might become involved in my venture at your convenience. A representative extract from the Test, an ‘appetizer’, will be forwarded on request.
Yours faithfully, etcetera
Breaking with tradition, I let Merle and Spilkin read the letter before I mailed it. Spilkin had me change ‘practical’ to ‘hands-on’, ‘our own’ to ‘in-house’ and ‘first’ to ‘up-front’. He said this prepositional largesse would show that I was clued up on current usage. Merle had me change ‘at your convenience’ to ‘as soon as possible’ – ‘Or they’ll think you want to meet them in the lavatory.’ I made the changes against my better judgement, which is why I present the original here, without meaning to suggest that it would have provoked a more satisfactory response than the tardy one I duly received.
10 June 1988
Dear Mr Tearl,
Thank you for your letter of the 17th inst.
I regret to inforn you that we do not have vacancies for subs at this moment in time. However, we have placed your letter on file and you will be notified if a position opens up in the near future.
Computer literacy and a familiarity with Quark will be a big plus factor.
Yours faithfully,
Mr J.B. de Beer
(Personnel Manager)
Even as it confirmed my worst fears about declining standards, this dismissive missive brought me down to earth. I was a man of sober habits, and the first draughts of invention had gone straight to my head.
On Spilkin’s advice I turned, somewhat chastened, to Mrs Mavrokordatos. She immediately placed her establishment at my disposal for the inaugural championship. I had never intended to broach the question of sponsorship or exploit the special privileges I enjoyed as a regular customer, but to my delight she herself proposed a finger supper, for organizers and competitors, a simple spread that took my own conservative tastes into account: cubes of sweetmilk cheese on Salty Cracks, sandwiches in triangles, hard-boiled eggs. I was grateful. But I also made the point that I had become more adventurous in my eating habits over time. With Merle’s encouragement, my public-service proofreading had evolved into a field study of national cuisines, and I no longer thought of Mrs Mavrokordatos’s menu as a dyspeptic hotchpotch. I was dipping into it myself occasionally. A couple of dolmades and other delicacies, served up with a pinch of Attic salt, would therefore not go amiss at our event. Delighted in turn.
‘Mavrokordatos’ was singularly apt: she had a heart the size of a barn. (I must say I’m pleased she wasn’t a Mavrokephalos, of whom there are several in the Book, chiefly in the Emmarentia area.)
The name for my championship came to me soon after: ‘The Proofreader’s Derby.’ I liked the connotations: laurels contested fiercely in a sporting spirit and a homely setting.
*
I acquired the trophy – and I’m not ashamed to admit it – at Bernstein’s Second Time Lucky. Electroplated nickel silver, black with tarnish, and ‘Bernie’ gave it to me for a song, or I should not have managed. It was a magnificent specimen, a loving cup, all of three feet tall from the scuffed green baize on the bottom of the Bakelite drum to the slim fingertip of the figurine on the lid, a little woman en pointe, with one arm trailing behind her like a lame wing and the other gesturing heavenwards. More suited perhaps to holding the diaphanous shell of a reading-lamp, or to perching on the radiator of a vintage car, like a goddess on the entablature of a Roman temple, than to turning somersaults and doing backflips. The balancing-beam at a stretch. For she was a gymnast of the old school and suitably, if featurelessly, naked.
Two tins of Brasso (the Silvo isn’t nearly as good) later, I bore the trophy to the Café in a laundry bag. Caused quite a stir when I set it up on the table. ‘Ladies and gentlemen: the floating trophy for “The Proofreader’s Derby”.’
‘Breathtaking,’ said Spilkin. I had set the trophy down so that the engraving on the bowl was facing Merle, but he had an unerring eye for what he wasn’t supposed to see, as if years of gazing through optical instruments had taught him to see round corners. He h
ooked a little finger into one of the handles and turned the cup towards him. ‘Transvaal Gymnastics Union. Senior Ladies – Overall Champion.’
‘Bernie says it could be ground off. But it would cost more than the trophy’s worth.’
‘Keep it. It adds character. You can always put “National Proofreading Champion” or whatever on the other side. “Donated by Aubrey Tearle.”’
‘That’s what I thought. More or less.’ There was the link with lexical gymnastics too, but not everyone would see that.
‘What’s this?’ Spilkin had spotted the row of little holes at regular intervals around the drum. It had been encircled by thumbnail shields of silver engraved with the names of the winners, but I had clipped off the rivets with a pair of pliers the night before. The shields, still filigreed with oxide, were in a Gee’s Linctus tin in my pocket and now I tipped them out on the table top.
Lily, Rose, Myrtle. How had names so fragrant become so stale? Was it because girls were no longer named after flowers but chemical compounds, vitamins, large muscle groups?
Spilkin spread them out, and then chose one and drew it towards him with a godlike forefinger. ‘Daphne Willis ~ 1928.’ Whether it was that the gesture awakened in the bones of his hands some memory of all the games that had been played at this table, or that the shields spread out on the inlaid chequerboard were like tokens in a board game, or that the backgammon draughtsmen clicking on a neighbouring table sounded a familiar rhythm, he sensed an opportunity for play. ‘Willis. A learner among wilis.’
‘Which Willie refers?’ Mevrouw Bonsma asked, deflating into a chair.
‘Villi, Mevrouw. The ghosts of girls abandoned by their lovers.’
‘Basta! Thank you, Tearle.’ She hummed an air from Puccini and performed a pas seul with two sturdy fingers.
Spilkin stirred the shields thoughtfully, unintentionally upstaging Mevrouw Bonsma. ‘You try one, Merle.’
‘You’re good with names,’ I put in.
‘What a lovely name. Almost an echo.’
‘That’s close.’ I looked over her shoulder. ‘She has left in a confusing echo. Five letters.’
‘Chloe,’ said Spilkin like a shot.
‘Chloe Mulrooney, to be precise, 1933.’
‘Biscuits?’
‘Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a Dymphna.’ Merle might have been turning over her own fragile girlhood in her fingers.
Erica. I care for her. Easy as pie.
‘My turn.’
‘Aubrey! What’s wrong with your finger?’
‘Brasso.’ It was black to the second joint. ‘I was up half the night cleaning this thing.’
‘Don’t go native on us, Tearle.’
‘You can’t walk around like that. People will think … I’m not sure what they’ll think.’
‘They’ll think he’s got a finger in the wrong pie,’ said Spilkin. ‘Mulrooney. Or mulberry.’
Macaroony. Macaroni. Merle was unpacking her handbag. Spilkin raked the shields over to his side of the table as if he had won them fair and square. A pair of bluntnosed scissors, made for the nursery. A season ticket for the bus. Where did she go by bus? She had a daughter in the northern suburbs somewhere, Illovo or thereabouts, and grandchildren she sometimes babysat. Jason (the leader of the Argonauts) and Kerry (a county in the Republic of Ireland). A packet of Romany Creams. A book of horoscopes. A cardboard box full of Johnson and Johnson earbuds: little blue and white dumb-bells. Tissues. And now finally what she was looking for: a bottle of acetone. She tipped some of it onto a pad of tissue paper and dabbed at my finger. It made no difference whatsoever. But it was so long since anyone had touched me tenderly that it brought a lump to my throat. What the rhinopharyngealists might call a tracheal clonus.
At Merle’s suggestion, Mrs Mavrokordatos put the trophy on a shelf behind the counter, in pride of place above the coffee cups, where it was to remain in anticipation of the joyous day when I would present it to the first deserving winner. It was a shame I wouldn’t be able to compete myself, but there seemed to be no way around it.
*
In its own way, governed by its own laws, ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ kept growing. Although I spent a good part of each day at home and each evening at the Europa working on it, I was no nearer finishing. As fast as I eliminated entries from the System of Records, new ones took their place. Standards were slipping. Where once one had been obliged to scour the world minutely for eligible corrigenda, now every printed surface was flyblown with them. My research assistants heaped fuel on the fire.
On top of all this, as I left the Café one night, I carelessly let fall from my file a page containing the following fascicle:
In the small hours of that bitter morning, Fluxman stood sleepless at the window of his penhouse, looking down on Alibia. Tutivillus Heights was the city’s only skyscarper – in Alibia, the top of a six-story block will brush the brow of heaven – and it made him feel immensely alert and far-seeing, and utterly detached from the earth. His eyes wandered from rooftop to rooftop, from street to street. He felt it. The building was swaying, a motion so gentle it would have escaped the notice of all but the most perceptive observer. It was not soothing at all; it filled him with foreboding. Then he recalled who he was and what he stood for. He erased his frowning mistgivings from the glass before him with an eraser shaped like an egg, but they came back again and again.
Eveready, it emerged afterwards, retrieved the page from under a table and passed it on to Spilkin, who thus had the good fortune of becoming the first person to lay eyes on a sustained passage of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ (even Merle had tasted no more than a line or two). Out of context, it was not at its best; I dare say it was like a scrap of canvas hacked from the frame with a pocket knife – and I give it here precisely to demonstrate that fact. But Spilkin seemed to understand perfectly. The following evening, I found the missing page on a plate by my chair, spindled and clasped by a serviette ring, along with a note in Spilkin’s sharply focused hand.
My dear Tearle,
What a luck to enter the world of your imagination at last, even if it was through the back door, where there is no sign to reserve the right of admission. The whole thing breathes and sweats and so on. You should be in no great hurry to finish: the longer you spend on it the better, I think. It was very exciting looking for ‘corrigenda’. You’ll make a proofreader of me yet. You might even start a craze. I found
Line 2: ‘penhouse’ for penthouse
Line 3: ‘skyscarper’ for skyscraper
Line 10: ‘mistgivings’ for misgivings
You must let me know how I faired.
Sincerely,
Spilkin
I was disappointed to see that he’d missed ‘story’ for storey. But he hadn’t done too badly.
Then that ‘faired’ grabbed my attention. Automatically, my mind performed a flawless backflip from Spilkin to spillikin – one of the wooden or ivory slips thrown in a heap in the game of spillikins to be removed each without disturbing the rest – and then reeled off-balance into spell-I-can, into spell-I-can’t. I’d expected more of him.
Or was he having me on?
*
‘No great hurry’ … hasty advice on Spilkin’s part, hastily accepted on mine. Five years had slipped by since then, and I was still trying to finish ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’. Why did Empty Wessels have to start this Goodbye Bash business and go raking up the past? There was so much of it too, a mountain of bygones. And the bit that was mine, the bit I had to show was so paltry, a scant barrowload. Has my whole life come down to a pile of papers, I asked myself, and those riddled with corrigenda? Would I have to say, looking back, not ‘It was all one big mistake,’ but ‘It was an endless succession of little mistakes’? More than I care to remember, let alone to correct. There might be some saving grace in a great mistake, boldly made – but in an unbroken line of piffling errors?
I was losing faith, or had already lost it. God knows, the past
few years have given me cause.
The TO LET signs had gone up in the windows of the Café Europa. The Bash loomed. I had promised myself that I would finish ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ before then, by hook or by crook; that when the doors finally closed on the Café Europa, I would also close the book on this chapter of my life. I might even make something of the occasion, a little ceremony, a brief speech. But now I felt like taking my papers – files full of clippings, boxes of index cards, notebooks, typescripts of fascicles, the lot – and throwing them over the fence into the open plot in Prospect Road, scattering them among the green clumps of weeds where the body had lain that Sunday morning, obscured by the news, in the shadow of the sign that said No Dumping – By Order. Dumping was the done thing, to judge by the piles of rubbish already left there, another inexplicable mania. Perhaps the Queen of Sheba or one of her consorts, whose rotten kingdom this was, would find my disjecta membra useful to kindle fire when they cooked their tripe and tubers, to cover themselves at night when they slept like the dead, to wipe their illiterate backsides when they did their business.
Filled with despair, I packed every last scrap of paper connected with ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ into two enormous grey-paper shopping-bags with handles of gallows hemp and the ignominious stars and stripes all over them – two of the matching set of three that was Moçes’ unexpected gift to me the Christmas before – and went out into the street. I could hardly carry the blinking things. The nightwatchman Gideon offered to lend me a hand, and I had to give him the abridged version of my talk on his responsibilities, which were to open and shut the door for the tenants of Lenmar Mansions and to guard their fixed and moveable assets, indeed to frustrate the relentless efforts of criminals to transform the one kind into the other. What was fixed anyway? There were people, deprived creatures without garages, who resorted to chaining their cars to trees at night to secure them against car thieves. But that faith in growing, rooted things was misplaced: there were tree thieves as well, preying on the municipal flora. As fast as the Parks Department planted trees and shrubs on traffic islands and freeway embankments, thieves dug them up and carried them off, either to replant them in their own gardens or to resell them. Another species of thief stole manhole covers and sold them to scrap-metal dealers. Yet others specialized in bus-stop benches and kerbstones, street signs and fences, water pipes and electricity cables, milestones and monumental masonry. Material for building shacks. Entire houses had been stolen by these cannibals, even schools and factories.
The Restless Supermarket Page 12