‘Some misguided people find me unbending, but that doesn’t bother me in the slightest. It serves my purposes. My one aim has been to raise standards of conduct and thought, not just between these four walls, but in the world beyond. I’ve always tried to set an example.’
‘That’s the bloody problem,’ said Spilkin. ‘You think people need correcting. Your obsession with raising us up to your level shows exactly how little you think of us. It’s the measure of your disdain.’
Then an ’Enry said I was a misanthrope, and Wessels said I hated him, and Darlene said I hated her even more. No matter what I said in reply, they just shouted me down with mock arguments about which of them I disliked the most. They were ganging up on me. I saw it now. At the eleventh hour, they had resolved to drive me out. The drumsticks rose and fell, beating a tattoo on the paper plates, the jaws went on grinding. Darlene drew a wishbone through the gaps in her teeth, first one branch and then the other. ‘Make a wish, Tearle.’ She held the bone out to me.
My little finger twinged, but refused to pronate.
‘You see. He won’t even pull with me.’
‘He might get a bit of your gob on his precious pinkie.’
‘He thinks his arse is parsley.’
Another round of gibing about my hypocrisy, my stand-offishness, I was high and mighty, that was the word, I did not want to mix. Someone claimed that I used to lie about my address so that no one would visit me. I made a spirited defence of the virtue of keeping one’s private life private, of maintaining the proper balance between the private and the public – it was a European art, I said, by way of explanation. That caused an outcry.
‘Your European affectations were always nauseating,’ Spilkin said in a threatening tone, ‘going on about the difference between “ambience” and “atmosphere”, as if every pretentious little “bistro” didn’t lay claim to “ambience”. The estate agents cottoned on to it years ago. And picking on the Americans, as if it’s their fault there’s a Hamburger Hut on Piccadilly Circus.’
‘I just happen to prefer the European way of life. I find it civilized.’
‘They hell of a civilized … when they not killing each other.’
‘Ah yes, the Europeans, you’re very big on them. But when you meet one in the flesh, like Bogey, you can’t stand him.’
‘Bogey is a poor example. The man’s a drunkard.’
‘Hey, Bogue, did you hear this?’
Bogue?
‘You’re so churlish.’ I supposed Spilkin was referring to the way Wessels mangled my name, but he went on, ‘You never have a good word to say about anyone or anything. A real Jeremiah, that’s what you are.’
‘No, no, I might own up to being a Jonah, but never a Jeremiah.’
‘Do you remember when Darlene first came to the Café? You said she was a whore.’
‘Well, you did find her in a bordello.’
‘Your bum in a drum!’
‘How dare you! I met her at the Perm. She was a cashier.’
‘I’m telling you, she used to come in here with her clients. As bold a bit of brass as you’d find in a Szechuan kitchen. I saw her with a man once, sticking her tongue in his ear.’
‘She never set foot in this place until I brought her here myself!’
‘Impossible.’
‘You have a memory like a sieve. You shake out the bits that don’t suit you.’
‘There’s nothing cribriform about my memory.’
‘If you’d stop trying to be clever and listen to what we’re saying, you might learn something for once. We should have spoken up when you started with Evaristus. It shames me that we didn’t.’
‘When I started what?’
‘Calling him Eveready.’
‘That’s his name.’
‘Nonsense. You came up with it. You said he was a bright spark. It’s a nasty streak in you. Who else would have called Mevrouw Bonsma “Crêpe Suzanna” behind her back?’
‘Spilkijn!’ The word stuck out from between her lips like a toothpick.
‘Remember when he said the blacks should have their own crockery.’
‘He said it was unhealthy.’
‘That was the dog!’
‘You’ve got a short memory.’
‘I’ve got a memory like an elephant.’ Dumbo rose involuntarily to mind. ‘You’re all putting words in my mouth, inventing things I couldn’t possibly have said.’
‘You and your insinuendoes.’
‘He never learns neither. Even tonight he called Eugene a rat.’
In the middle of this farce, who should come into focus but Quim, from the Jumbo Liquor Market, smiling at me superciliously, despite my glaring back. Could he have put them up to this? Has he acquired what they call ‘clout’ in what they call ‘the new dispensation’?
*
Enough. This inquisition went on for what seemed like a lifetime. Until the plates, twice and thrice refilled, were empty but for wing-bones in smears of tomato sauce. Then they began to subside one by one into satiated silence, and would have forgotten all about me, casting me aside like another dented trophy – some of them were already nodding off – had Darlene not stoked them up again.
‘You worked for the regime,’ she said.
‘I proofread the telephone directory!’
‘Exactly. How do you think the cops found out where people lived? When they wanted to go harass them?’
I am not a coward. In those far-off days when the world was at war, I had itched to go up north, and I’d have gone too, young as I was, if it hadn’t been for my eyes. I’ve stood up to my share of bullies along the way. But my blood ran cold when I saw where this crooked line of reasoning was leading. I remembered looking down on the plot in Prospect Road, where something lay with sheets of newspaper fluttering around it like flames.
‘Terrible things have happened in this country,’ a young woman was saying. ‘And you are as much to blame for them as the men who did the dirty work.’
‘Ja, you’ve got to stop pointing fingers. You’ve got to take responsibility.’
‘It’s your fault.’
‘Ja, Churl or whatever the case may be, it’s all your fault.’
Another wave of resentment. But just as I was beginning to think that they would actually beat me with their fists, or cast me to the wolves from the balcony, things took an unexpected turn. And oddly enough, it was Darlene who started it. In the middle of this diatribe, she suddenly waved everyone to silence and declared:
‘But in spite of everything … everything … we forgive you.’
‘Don’t worry, be happy,’ Wessels said. I noticed that he was smoking a Peter Stuyvesant in anticipation of a hangover.
Now a chorus of drunken voices rose up, a chorus of forgiveness just as vehement and unreasonable as the chorus of condemnation it had displaced, and broke over my head. Some of them were close to tears, some on the verge of laughter, yet others irate or indignant. We forgive you. We forgive you. There was clearly no room for argument. Yes, Mr T! Stop pulling faces. You are forgiven. We forgive you.
I was relieved and grateful. It would have been uncharitable to feel otherwise. But I couldn’t see what it was all about. Why the blazes were they behaving like this?
Before I could frame the question in an inoffensive way, Hunky Dory, bless his copper terminals, burst out in a tarantelle.
*
I barely had time to slip the No. 2 sign into my pocket, before hands seized the tables and chairs and whirled them away into the corners. I saw it as the final sundering of the circle.
Dancing! Choreography by St Vitus. They lurched around, waving their arms as if they were trying to stop themselves from falling over, snatching at their clothing and barging into one another. The thickness of their soles had a practical purpose after all; no matter how much they tilted and swayed, they kept their balance in the currents of noise, like deep-sea divers on the ocean floor.
Mevrouw Bonsma and Hunky Dory played another
duet, ‘Shall We Dance?’ from The King and I, which may have been a reference to my head. Tit for tat, I supposed, for the crack about the crêpes.
My mind was full of the accusations that had been levelled at me. What an outpouring of ill feeling! I remembered Mrs Hay’s comment about the send-off I was going to receive. Was the whole evening an excuse to humiliate me? I could believe it. They wouldn’t let me alone to lick my wounds; they were insisting that I dance, to show that I was part of the gang, even after everything I’d done.
Nomsa, the chubby one, took my hands and dragged me onto the floor. ‘Spider! Come out of your web.’ Rolling her hips, trying to embarrass me. I stood my ground. I have the grace of a porpoise, a porcus-piscis, a pig with fins. If pigs can swim. Fly, I mean. I called for a bossa nova. No takers. I called for a lambda. The latest dance craze from Greece. Nothing doing. Nomsa went round like a schwarma machine. What did she mean by ‘Spider’? Daddy Longlegs? Stood on a fanatic’s foot, name of Arbuthnot, spelt it for him, letter-perfect, by way of an apology. Why did she remind me of vegetables? Eggplant. Her skin had a purple sheen I’d never observed on a colour chart. The sweat stood out like wampum along her hairline. Plastic pearls at the throat. Mouth improbably large, lips like segments of some sea-fruit, a creature that looked like a plant, but was really an animal, something that would snap if you touched it.
I was feeling queasy, should have had more sleep last night, should have eaten a proper dinner beforehand, should have tried the buffalo wings, resisted the whirligig. The liquor had gone to my head. Or had one of them slipped me something? Wessels, I’ll wager, spiking the whiskey with that coffin varnish of his. Flight of the Bumblebee. It was one of his life’s ambitions to see me drunk. He couldn’t bear my self-control, precisely because his own was so sadly lacking.
Nomsa was going round in circles. Nail her other foot to the floor. Showed me her back. Not to mention her backside. Bang! Bang! Allowed me to escape to the table. I wasn’t even sure if this was No. 2, now that all the furniture had been jumbled together, but quite by chance I found my old chair. Ah! In its supportive grasp, I regained my definition.
Four glasses of chocolate-brown liquor were lined up in front of Floyd. He shoved one of them at me. ‘Blowjob?’
Now what.
With a sly grin, he picked up a straw and drew its paper wrapper down to one end, crumpling it up tightly. He put this worm down on the table. Then he raised a small quantity of liquor up in the straw and spilled it out over the worm’s tail. At once, the thing stirred into life and began to stretch itself out on the table top. While I watched this phenomenon, frankly amazed, Floyd burst out laughing. The cartoon characters on his clothing winked with their human eyes and jerked their waggish hindquarters in time to the music.
I drank the brown stuff. Mocha.
*
‘Why you so black?’ Wessels said to the girl with the silver boater in an effort to charm her, trying to press his ear to her chest. ‘Are you sick?’
*
‘Eugene. Got a minute? l thought you’d want to know that you’re in the Concise under your proper name. At Jeep. Unfortunately I don’t have a copy to hand, but I do have a citation in my notebook here. “Eugene the Jeep. An animal in a comic strip.” Shall I write it down for you? No, that won’t do. Never smoked myself, but you’re bound to throw it away. Pass me that serviette.’
‘What’s this about a animal?’ Raylene sidled closer. ‘You better come right, before I tell Huge to bliksem you.’ To strike, as with a bolt of lightning.
‘You’re in questionable company, son. Slovo’s in there somewhere, at Slovene … and Smuts at blight … and Tutu plain and simple. Interested in sport? Here’s Borg, the tennis player, at borrow … Senna, the racing driver, unkindly defined as a laxative … Roux, a mixture of fat and flour used in making sauces …
‘On the back of your hand? I suppose so, if someone has a pen.’
*
‘Punt up the Volga!’ Don’t ask me. The music was so loud, one had to shout to make oneself heard. Without my lip-reading, I shouldn’t have followed a word anyone said.
For the umpteenth time that night I headed for the Gentlemen’s room, to relieve myself of nothing more than unwelcome company. But Mevrouw Bonsma spotted me, returned the keyboard to its owner, and dragged me back onto the dance floor. I was powerless to resist. Her hand on my arm was like a manacle, although her mobile surface was soft and moist. She kept bumping against me like a deflating weather balloon, leaving powdery smudges on my blazer. She was listing from foot to foot, rocking from tiptoe to heel, punching holes in the floor with her stilettos. A dotted line appeared in the puff pastry underfoot, and the floor gave beneath me. I saw myself plunging through into the kitchen of the Haifa Hebrew Restaurant down below, sprawled among the cabbage rolls.
After strenuous bouts of proofreading, the pages would cloud into negative, and I would see the solid space around the empty printed word, as if hot lead had been put down on the paper, burnt its way through, and plummeted into the void on the other side. The blocks of type drifted downwards in slow motion, with undeserved majesty, like commodities in television advertisements, like spacecraft or bombs.
Without warning, Mevrouw Bonsma pinned me in her arms and started gnawing at my ear. No amount of squirming could free me. The baked goods of my head. Plunge in the skewer. Something wet dripped onto my hand. Had the toothy tiara drawn blood? Or was the hairdo melting around her ears like a mousse? Then I felt her chest heaving, thrusting into mine.
‘I beg your pardon, Tearle,’ she sobbed, ‘in this instance, I am emotional.’
‘So are we all, Mevrouw.’
‘I am reminded that I made beautiful music once upon a time. Now I must type to make ends meet.’ She held one of her hands up for inspection, a clump of red knuckles and fingertips bruised with carbon-copy blue. ‘The minutes of meetings. The essays of students. The application for a licence.’
Pressing against me and swaying from side to side, in a swirl of noise, light and fumes, she went on brokenly about the Dorchester and the rotation of the dinner menus and God knows what else.
‘Poor old Merle,’ I said when the machines paused for breath. ‘When was the last time you saw her?’
But she just clung to me more tightly, with long tears and face powder turning to batter on her cheeks, until the music went on again, and then she squeezed me into a new shape and dragged me after it.
Over her shoulder, I caught sight of the improvable girl. Why should improvement be a dirty word? Or was Spilkin joking? Her chest said: Get funky. I didn’t mean to stare, but there was no way round it if one wished to read the message. Funkily. Funkiness. Whenever I’d seen her before, her hair had been caught up in a faggot on the crown of her head. Now that she had let it down, it proved to be in braids, as thick as monkey-tails and as spiky as cacti. They reminded me of some species of fern whose name I have forgotten. She was tossing them wildly as she danced. ‘Corybantic’ was the word that leapt to mind. Her gyrations drew my eyes to her belly – a musk-melon slice of bared flesh – and her navel. It was a proofreader’s mark: . Delete and close up. Stick to and part from (6). Cleave.
Steffi Graf went waltzing by with Max Bygraves in her arms. Stepping on his toes in her tennis shoes. The bulge on her hip, under the grass-green sheath of the evening gown, showed where a ball was tucked into the band of her knickers.
‘Umpteen.’ It belongs in the nursery vocabulary. Is there no mature alternative?
*
With a deft twist of my torso, I broke free of Mevrouw Bonsma’s pruinose embrace and made for the balcony. There were a couple of questions I meant to ask Spilkin before I excised him from my life entirely, like a swollen appendix.
‘Don’t worry, be happy,’ Wessels shouted after me.
There were crowds outside as well. I pushed my way through to the railing. In the grisly shadow of Patronymić, Spilkin and Bogey were leaning. Spilkin’s hair was standing on end like
a clown’s, Bogey had a carrot jutting from his mouth like a cigar. Gifts and Novelties. He gave me an apple and suggested I throw it into the street. I looked over the railing at the people milling down below. How big a fool did he think I was? The missile was bound to enrage someone. I gave the apple to Errol, whom I found at my shoulder, and he let fly. Meanwhile, I took out a pencil and sharpener.
Bogey licked the end of the carrot and dipped it in Patronymić’s pocket. It came out sugar-coated. Crystalline ash.
‘Old Aubs-ss is quite a literati, when you get to know him,’ said Wessels at my side.
‘Literatus, you burr. Not that there’s a grain of truth in the accusation.’
‘He’s been working on that exam of his again. The other day he was telling me how you guys helped him with the papers and so on.’
‘Now that really takes me back,’ Spilkin mused. ‘“The Proofreader’s Derby.” I’ll never forget it. An utterly mad scheme. That’s when I thought: he’s a crank. Aubrey, I can’t tell you how pleased I was when you got that bee out of your bonnet.’
He had become a splinter in my flesh. What was it Wessels had once called him? … A chip off the old shoulder. To steady my nerves, I turned the pencil in the sharpener and watched the shavings carried away on the breeze.
‘As a matter of fact …’
Bee? A Cheese Snack buzzed out of the night and caromed off the side of my head.
‘Merle used to say that there was something almost Casaubonish about you and your “System of Records”. She thought you were never going to finish it. Not that one required special powers of perception to make that deduction.’
Spilkin’s expression drew me back to solid ground. ‘Of course not,’ I said, while ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ burnt a hole in my pocket.
*
My copies were still there, and so was the Concise. Funky. Presumably not ‘terrified, cowardly’ but ‘fashionable, unconventional’. Having a strong smell? Umpteen. Indefinitely many. How would one spell ‘Casaubonish’? Casualty department … catafalque … cat-and-dog … But I wasn’t dressed for fartlek. (I’ve since discovered who Edward Casaubon was, and it’s an injustice second to none that we should have been mentioned in the same breath.)
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