*
‘All this was mantled,’ Herr Toppelmann said sadly, wagging a pimply pickle at the four walls, ‘and now also dismantled shall be.’
*
They came shouting ‘Viva!’ and dancing the highveld fling. A mob. Capering about like baboons. From the Latin babewynus: an Old World monkey with naked callosities on its buttocks. To think that the Café Europa had once been a haven in an urban jungle, and now the jungle was in here too, on our side of the pale. I looked for a fist waving an apple as a credible excuse, but found no such comfort. Hunky Dory ran away. The hurdy-gurdy soldiered on without him. Patronymić flung Bogey down in a corner and lay on top of him. I hadn’t realized he was a bodyguard. Why should Bogey require the services of a bodyguard? There was a rushing to and fro the likes of which had never been seen before under that roof. The proofreader’s motto came back to me (in the illuminated version that hung on the wall behind Erasmus’s desk): ‘Widows and orphans first.’ So I stayed where I was, in my proper place, a model of dignified restraint.
‘Kill the bull, kill the farmer!’ I’d heard it on the radio. A native folk song. Obviously, if one kills the bull, one kills the farmer, figuratively speaking, by depriving him of his livelihood. Why make a song and dance about it?
In the green meadows of Alibia, the lion was not lying down with the lamb, exactly, but Frieslands were chewing the cud alongside Jerseys and Aberdeen Anguses. Not an Afrikander in sight. I was there, under a willow-pattern thorn tree, flat on my back in the sweet grass, in clover. The sward beneath, succulent and overgrown, the sky above. One could never lie down in the veld as such, it was too scratchy. A stile over a bony hedgerow. A humpbacked bridge over a babbling brook, running off at the mouth. Can the ocean keep from rushing to the shore? It’s just impossible. Mevrouw Bonsma, give the devil her due, had taken over the keyboard and was trying to restore order – If I had you, could I ever ask for more? It’s just impossible – but it seemed to have no effect. Her spotlit face was as soft and wan as a ripened Camembert. A full moon stooped over Alibia, broadening the daylight. In the market place, the grocers were crying the last shipments of bottled beer. On the canals, the boatmen were singing. Children were climbing trees and rolling hoops. Men were shaving boards and twisting nails, tilling the earth and reaping the harvest. A busy human noise burbled up. But it was not the music of the Alibian masses gathered to honour the champions of order: it was the invaders in our midst, clamouring for blood. One beggar at the banquet might be tolerated – but a whole crowd of them? Then a voice rose above the din, like an ark on the deluge. Spilkin. Screaming blue murder. It was enough to give a chicken goose-flesh. There he was fleeing, leaping over the furniture, scattering paper plates and bones. They ran him to ground in the corner by the Gentlemen’s room. I was shocked to see Darlene among the pursuers, grinning maniacally, her turban unravelling like a winding-sheet. They crowded in on him. I saw his mouth contorted, his eyes streaming. What were they doing to him? Their shoulders shook, their heads bobbed, their buttocks squirmed. Then the crowd scattered abruptly. There seemed to be more of them than ever. Spilkin had vanished. Had they consumed him?
I might have escaped their attention, had I remained frozen in my seat. But I must have risen spontaneously, meaning to intervene in Spilkin’s defence, despite everything.
‘Fuddy old barley!’
The strangers set upon me like a pack of wolves. Many hands seized me roughly. I wasn’t going to submit without a fight. I let them have it with a few epithets, the sorts of things that would ring in the ears for days afterwards. I kept my eyes peeled, too, in case there was ever an identity parade. As I fell, I saw Mevrouw Bonsma stoking up the boilers, and then ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ poured forth over the babewyni. Familiar faces, but trampled out of shape, tossed like leaves in the far reaches of the room, stuck to the wallpaper. Glory! Glory! Huge with the lid of the trophy on his head. Wessels – brandishing the crutch – ‘Boonzaaier!’ Raylene.
A storm of blows rained down on me. Fists, foreheads, kneecaps, elbows, heels. Hard bone under soft flesh. My spectacles, knocked sideways on my cheek, reduced my assailants to a blur. Yet by a fatal twist of optics, one lens was turned into a magnifying glass, and a single face came into focus within its frame: Darlene. They had wrestled me to the ground, and she was sitting on top of me. The bones in my chest cracked and splintered. I put out my hands to ward her off and clasped instead the swollen yellow bulb of her belly. Great with child. Spilkin? Impossible! And now, in all likelihood, gone for ever. Widows and orphans. But they were not even married. Before I could pursue this train of thought any further, my spectacles were plucked from my face and the world flew away. Climb every mountain … Ford every stream … Follow every rainbow … Hands were kneading my cheeks, pinching my chin, tweaking me, buffing me. My face felt cold. Then it went completely black before my eyes.
*
Merle.
*
My breath came back. I listened to its roar, to the buckled ribs squeaking, the throat rattling. Extraordinarily, I was still alive. The black gave way to grey, shot through with red. Blood in my eyes. I wiped them clear. I patted my head for gashes. Nothing gapingly obvious. One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock … Excrescences all present and accounted for. Pockets? Ditto. I felt around on the floor for my spectacles. A fuzzy teddy bear appeared out of the mist, weeping hysterically, and put them in my hand. Somehow they had come through intact.
The world fell back into focus. A circle of people around me, but keeping their distance, like onlookers at the scene of an accident, chattering among themselves, pointing, pulling faces. I got to my feet. An odd little man stood before me, a black man, some faithful old servant perhaps, who had witnessed the massacre. He was wearing one of the caps with ‘Boy’ written on it, and weeping inconsolably. He wanted to speak to me, but every time he caught his breath, he was racked by a fresh outpouring. I considered slapping him across the face – it was the recommended remedy – but he had something wrong with his skin. It was as thick as paste. Scar tissue. Wattles of mortified flesh at the neck. Had he been burnt?
Despite the disfigurement, there was something familiar about him. Could it be Eveready? No, he was taller. I studied the features, the gasping maw, the eyes brimming with tears, the dripping nose. And then it came to me in a flash that made me reel. It was Spilkin. And in the glare of that recognition, I saw something else: he wasn’t weeping at all. He was laughing.
I looked in disbelief at the wider circle. Then I pushed the spectacles up on my forehead with a numb index finger and let the lenses fall in front of my eyes again like guillotine blades. Mustering my spent energies, I put each face to the proof. There was Huge, as black as pitch. Nomsa with her wig on sideways, a few shades lighter, but black nevertheless. McAllister, an ’Enry, and a brace of Eddies. And they were black too.
I touched my own face and looked at my fingers.
Black.
*
I scrutinized without blinking. The Café was barely recognizable. They had turned it upside down. Nothing but black faces on every side. Who were the invaders? The newcomers? The old regulars? One couldn’t work out who was who any more. I felt abandoned by friend and foe alike.
The sea was spilling over the breakwater in the Bay of Alibia. The other walls were streaming too. What was this liquid? Some frightful solvent in which all things would float and dissolve, gradually losing their shape and running into one another. A solution of error. It was striking up through the carpet, I was soaking it up like blotting paper. Sharp little objects pierced through my soles, and my shoes filled with a prickly sludge of delenda.
I bloated and swelled. The trembling in my innards, which I had taken for fear, revealed itself as rage. A rage to disgorge this superabundance of error, to get rid of it once and for all, to blow my stack.
I erupted. I gave them a mouthful, the Amadoda and Abafazi, the shithouses (excuse my Anglo-Saxon) of the holey city of Joburg, the Ro
tary Anns, the Pump-action Bradleys, Mr Frosty and Mrs Sauce, the Bushbuck Rangers and the Crystal Brains, the bobbers, the peddlers, the stinkers. I poured it out upon them, the printer’s pie, the liquid lunch, the hasty pudding, the swill of tittles and jots, the gaudy Gouda, the Infamous Grouse, the Jiffywrap, the Oatso Easy, the Buddywipes, the Wunderbuddels. Items, one-eared: Vincent van Gogh … John Paul Getty III … Dumbo … innumerable teacups and coffee mugs. I was not in the habit of speaking in this fashion, of seeing, of saying disorder, of chaos, of coarseness, but I had lost my tone. Where were my cadences, my measures? My pages were out of order. To be Papenfus or not to be Papenfus? What do you call a man under a shroud? Paul. Names for dogs, should I ever acquire one: Riley … Puccini … Houdini. Down ~ down ~ down ~ down. The beast would outlive me. It was past my bedtime.
They fell silent. Ashamed of themselves. Mevrouw Bonsma stopped playing. Then there was nothing but the sound of my own voice. It made no sense to me, it was nothing but a long, fluent spewing, it made no more sense than water gushing from a hose. I watched the stream of sound, I saw bubbles breaking underwater. I looked harder. Words were floating to the surface, and I rose with them into the familiar air, and found my place. My ears popped and I could hear properly again. Could hear a new voice, which was really my old voice, replete with authority.
I put my hand in my breast pocket and grasped ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’, my logical conclusion. But prudence caught my wrist. What if they thought I was fetching out a weapon? Nowadays, every second person was carrying a firearm. So I reached instead for Errol’s pool cue, which was leaning against the wall beside me. How was I to know they use these things to beat one another?
*
I reached, as I said, for Errol’s pool cue, his Helmstetter. An object lesson. It was my intention to screw it apart, to present them with Helm and Stetter, to screw it together again. Not with the arrogant ease of its owner, but with authority.
Errol tugged at my sleeve like a child.
‘Keep your cretaceous little fingers off my blazer.’ I jerked my arm free. The moment had given me unnatural physical strength. Errol stumbled back as if I had punched him, and banged into one of the marauders, a brute with boot polish on his hands, wearing his jacket inside out. They grappled and clinched.
Was that all it took, one act of will, one assertion, to rouse them from their torpor? They claimed afterwards that I made to attack them with the pool cue. Can you credit it?
And then pandemonium. Errol rose up in the air with his loose-limbed body rattling, as if an almighty hand had pulled his strings, and flew backwards through the stained-glass windows. It’s a miracle he wasn’t hurt. He can thank the Jewish Benevolent for giving him that tuxedo. Chaos all around, a full-scale bar-room brawl. They were trying to get at me, to tear me limb from limb. And in their midst Spilkin, the lord of misrule, stirring them up against me. Against himself! He was pummelling his own face, as if he meant to blacken it further, inciting them to do their worst. Why should he side with the mob? Why should he tar himself with the same brush? Was it a sign of how low he had sunk, or had he always been this way, and I as blind to his faults as he to Darlene’s? She was there too, egging them on.
Then the bootboy, the one who had thrown Errol aside like a rag, stood in front of me. In his paw, the knife looked like a bodkin of the kind the compositors once used to winkle out type. He fell upon me. The blade struck my chest with a thud and went in. The force of the blow hurled me to the floor. I looked down and saw the hilt jutting from my rib cage. Pierced to the pith. I waited for the gush of bloody words. I felt no pain, but that was normal. I saw a crush of legs and enormous shoes with treads like teeth, and the plastered foot of Wessels, the toes squirming vermicularly, like the party snacks come to life. Then, in the thicket of combat boots and gymnasium shoes, I recognized a pair of winkle-pickers, with golden chains and black buttons. Moçes. He seized me under the arms and dragged me backwards into a corner.
Black and white and red all over.
‘You mustn’t pull it out,’ someone said. ‘That’s what they say at the St John’s.’
The fighting raged all around us.
I lay there, floating between life and death, waiting for the red river to carry me off into oblivion. It was a pleasant feeling, I wished it might endure. Then I opened my eyes and the spell was broken. I could not bear to look at the knife, lodged so improbably in my being, but I had an overwhelming urge to discover the extent of my injuries, to explore the split flesh, the intimate gore, while my life ebbed away. I reached my hand inside my jacket. And that was when I discovered that the blade had gone straight into the heart of the Pocket Oxford Dictionary.
*
I am not prone to theatrical gestures, but I made the most of this one. When they saw me walking calmly among them with the knife sticking out of my chest, the more superstitious invaders ran away, with Errol and Co in pursuit.
It was during this final skirmish that Floyd stabbed himself in the head. ‘They stuck the old tawpy,’ he said afterwards (meaning me), ‘so I schemed I’d stick them back. But I stuck my own self by mistake.’ I heard Floyd bellowing like a fatted calf and saw him fall by the glass doors. The others set upon him and began tearing at him greedily, like children opening presents under the Christmas tree. Were they ripping off his labels? No, it was worse, they were like scavengers at a carcase. A foot flew loose and landed near me. Not a foot, don’t be ridiculous, only a shoe, one of the oversized bootees. The tearing noises came from Velcro fasteners – the buckles were all false.
The knife was a comfort to me. It made me feel young and healthy, invincible and immortal. I did a circuit of the room, enjoying the feeling. Not to mention the holy terror in the eyes of all who beheld me.
Then I strolled onwards to the Gentlemen’s room to see what I looked like in extremis.
*
The mirror had been stolen, of course, and all I could see in the tiles was a swarthy smudge. I went into the cubicle for some paper to clean the muck off my face. And there in the corner stood the floating trophy. I sat on the toilet seat and rested the trophy on my knees. I looked at my image in its tarnished surface.
I wished I might cry, but my eyes were dry as newsprint. A lifetime of poring over galleys had done my tear-ducts no good. Just as damaging as breaking limestone, if not so dramatic. And now this boot polish on top of everything. Perhaps I would need an operation, like The Madiba, to restore my sense of sorrow.
Better assess the other damages. No broken bones, thank God, but my pencils reduced to tinder. I pulled the knife out of my chest. One perfectly good blazer ruined. As for the Pocket, the blade had gone right through the alphabet. There was a course to be plotted from A to Z in wounded words, but the exercise struck me as merely technical, a forensic parody of lexical gymnastics.
With the knife in my hand, I became fully aware of how narrowly I had escaped. A salto mortale, a double tearle with a twist, unfolded in my brain. Here was the double tearle: jot (small amount, whit) and iota (atom, jot), both from the Greek iota, which is the letter ‘i’ without the dot. A jot is an iota. And here was the twist: tittle (small written or printed stroke or dot). Ergo: an iota is a jot missing a tittle or a tittle missing a jot. By distinctions as fine as these, I had cheated death.
*
The Café looked like a battlefield. I picked my way between broken-backed chairs, over the shattered kaleidoscope that was all that remained of the chapel, to the boneyard of the buffet. I was famished – it is common in the aftermath of combat – but there was not so much as a crust left. Mrs Hay passed like a ghost behind the blinds. In the doorway, Floyd lay clutching a bag of ice from the Hebcoolers, with a knot of people around him. Spilkin had the bloodied head in his lap, Darlene the stockinged feet. She glanced up accusingly as I approached. ‘Are you satisfied?’
‘By no means.’
‘You’ve got a lot to answer for.’
I’d expected a chorus of mockery, but the l
evity of the early evening had been replaced by a sombre calm. All these faces masked in black. Even Darlene, the mustafina, was as black as night. It was no longer amusing to anyone.
Mbongeni had surrendered the tea cosy as a makeshift tampon and let his hair down. Cotton-waste wads as long as my arm, the kind of thing that would come in useful at the printing works for wiping down the presses. I showed him the skewered Pocket. The word quickly spread that I hadn’t been wearing a bulletproof vest after all. It dispersed some of my mystique.
‘You an incredibly lucky somebody.’
‘You could of died.’
‘But Floyd saved your life.’
‘I wouldn’t go that far.’
‘Ja, they would of come back to finish you off if it wasn’t for Floyd.’
It made no sense to me that he should have leapt to my defence after what had happened. But it seemed crystal clear to them. Errol, dusting a confetti of shiny glass from his padded shoulders, said: ‘You a puss, Churl – but you one of our boys. Leave it or lump it.’
Hunky Dory reappeared. ‘I called 911 and wah-wah-wah,’ he declared, which was his way of saying that he’d summoned an ambulance.
*
The ambulance men put Floyd on a breadboard, for the spine, they said, and wrapped him in aluminium foil like a garlic loaf, for the shock. He looked smaller than usual. They carried him out through the glass doors. Incongruously, I thought of Merle. I saw her packaged by the undertakers, stuffed into a fluffy brown bag with a zipper up the front, like an oversized slipper. The idea was suffocating.
There was a muddle on the landing outside as they bundled the stretcher onto the escalator. In the midst of it all stood Wessels, with the silver boater on his head, swinging his crutch imperatively and bawling out instructions. His face had been rather inexpertly polished, except for the chin, which was as shiny as a toecap. The sight of me seemed to enrage him.
The Restless Supermarket Page 29