The Distance

by Ivan Vladislavic

  I feel vulnerable out in the street. The last time Rita and I were here for dinner someone broke into our car. When she told Joe off about the crappy suburb he’d chosen to live in, he had the nerve to defend the thieves, as if we drove a decent car just to provoke them. I swore I’d never set foot here again and I’ve kept my word. Until now.

  I’m about to get back in my car when I hear the alarm beep. He’s switched off the beams in the garden. Yet another last-ditch defence after the latest burglary. Then he appears with the phone still pressed to his ear by one shoulder, opens the padlock on the inside of the gate, hands me the keys through the bars and leaves me to it.

  He’s installed a Heath Robinson system of folding mesh panels on the bottom of the gate to prevent thieves from creeping through the gap. It’s like a metallic version of the origami in his scrapbooks and it takes me five minutes to figure out how it works. Finally I’m inside with the gate closed behind me.

  When I get into the house I find him pacing up and down in the lounge, but he waggles the phone again, points to a bottle of sherry on the mantelpiece, then slopes off into his study and pulls the door shut behind him. The usual drama, no doubt: missed deadline, lost income, passive aggression. There’s a fire burning in the grate, coal in the scuttle and logs in a stack against the wall. An immense axe is propped against the fire screen and the carpet is covered with pine splinters. But the place is pretty tidy, almost too tidy for my liking. He was always like this, keeping a grip. Orderly decrepitude. I used to say he was like the custodian of some provincial museum, sweeping the threadbare carpets, dusting the sagging shelves. Some of the furniture looks like it belongs on the woodpile. He’s still using a packing case as a footstool! Why does Em put up with it? Unless it bothers her as little as it bothers him.

  I wander through to the dining room. In here it’s chaos. Columns of books are crumbling to rubble against the walls. The Ali papers are spread out on the table and for a moment it looks like a ravaged landscape in a chief of staff ’s war room. At least he’s telling the truth about this: he’s actually working. Scrapbooks, cardboard folders, envelopes, cuttings, foolscap sheets. It would never all fit in the Pres Les box, which is gaping on a chair.

  I sit down at the head of the table. Facing me is the big Eclipse scrapbook titled ALI II. There’s the sticker of Goofy the Slugger. I remember the scene in Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me where the boys are talking about Disney characters. ‘Mickey’s a mouse. Donald’s a duck. Pluto’s a dog. But what the hell is Goofy?’ I turn the pages, lifting the layered newsprint carefully against the tracing paper as I’ve seen him do, struck again by the obsessive order in this clutter, the carefully folded cuttings, the pencilled numbers and headline quotes to show which dog-eared scrap was stuck to which yellowed page, the stubby columns attached to larger items with paperclips.

  A smokescreen, that’s what it is. The illusion of order in these papers is meant to mask the absence of order in his mind. That’s why he can’t make anything of this stuff, why he needs my help after all these years. Any editor will do, even a sound hack. Perhaps a lifetime of boozing has caught up with him: the folders in his memory bank are out of order and he can’t remember what goes where. But as long as he can marshal this pathetic jumble of paper, he can pretend that he’s in charge.

  A story on the back of a cutting catches my eye. It’s about two mineworkers who died in a rockfall at the Westonaria Gold Mine. I’m reading that when he appears.

  You look like shit, I say. I mean it.

  Thanks very much. It’s kind of you to notice.

  I’m serious. You look like Joe Bugner after Ali got hold of him. I’ve just caught sight of poor Joe on a cutting. Where’s Em?

  Neighbourhood Watch meeting.

  I should have guessed.

  Everyone’s in a flap again. They broke in up the road here. One guy was hiding behind a tree outside, that oak over there. Em looked out of the window and the bastard was busy on his cellphone. Keeping cave. He saw her and drew a finger across his throat. Scared the hell out of her, of course. Now she wants to move.

  It’s not a bad idea, Joe.

  Suppose so. I just can’t bear the thought of packing up all this crap. I always say they’ll carry me out of here in a box.

  We laugh about that.

  So, he says, pulling a chair up to the table. What have you got for me?

  What do you mean?

  Haven’t you been writing? I thought that’s why you came.

  No, I was just in the neighbourhood.

  Crap man, Branks. You haven’t been south of Louis Botha in five years.

  That’s funny too. We laugh again.

  Actually, I have been putting a few things down on paper.

  Really?

  On disk I should say. I’m not wedded to the ancient technologies like you. He doesn’t believe me, I can tell.

  What kind of things?

  Little stories of ordinary life. Just what you ordered.

  Like?

  Well, I remembered how we used to drive all over town on a Saturday afternoon to book exchanges so you could buy some paperback or other. The old man was quite good about it, you know. He looks pleased with this so I press on. And how you used to start reading them in the back of the car before we were even home. Should I mention that I’ve been reading Charteris myself? Better not. He’ll think I’m muscling in on his turf.

  You’ve written this down?

  Ja.

  I’d like to read it.

  No, I’m not ready yet. You taught me that: to play things close to my chest.

  Giving him a taste of his own medicine. But he looks quite pleased with this too.

  That’s great, he says. So long as you’re getting it down on paper. That’s the hardest part, from the blank page to the first draft. Once you’ve got through that nightmare, anything can happen. Take your time. Just shout when you’re ready.

  I’ve heard your advice, I say. Now can I give you some?

  Sure.

  Do some laundry.

  Jesus Branko.

  I can smell that T-shirt from here.

  This is my fire-building outfit, you self-righteous prick. I chop wood in this and haul coal. Some of us don’t have underfloor heating. Let me know the next time you’re coming and I’ll put on my tux.

  Doesn’t Em look after you?

  You know she does. I’d have been in my grave by now if it wasn’t for that woman. But I’ve been chained to my desk doing battle with this bloody book. I’m going to finish it this time even if it kills me.

  The serial-killer laugh. Haven’t heard that for a while.

  Don’t take this the wrong way, I say.

  And he interrupts: Then don’t start by saying that.

  Just listen. If you’re battling with all this stuff, the cuttings and everything, maybe you should change your approach. Stop keeping order and start paying attention.

  That’s good. Really. Where did you get that?

  I’ve been working with other people’s stories for a long time and I’ve learnt a few things. I know you don’t think much of the medium I work in, but some things are exactly the same. Forget the story you want to tell: look for the one that’s already there. Listen to the material.

  That’s great, he says, excellent advice. And he really does seem to be taking it in.

  You need to eat, I say. Let me buy you a meal. You look like you could do with a plate of prawns from the Troyeville Hotel. Better still, let me buy you a steak at the Grill House. You should get out of this scummy neighbourhood. We’ll leave a note for Em and she can join us later.

  But he says he has work to finish, a catalogue piece. Deadlines. They’ve ruined his life. That was Matty on the phone laying down the law.

  Then I’ll get going, I say. You’d better let me out. My mind turns to my car in the
dark street outside. If it gets broken into again, Rita will never let me live it down.

  No no, he says, you’ve just arrived. Let’s have a drink. I’ve got some sherry you should taste.

  He goes to the lounge and then I hear him cursing and banging. The fucking fire’s gone out.

  He drags one of the broken leather armchairs closer to the fire and makes me sit, pours me a shot of sherry and starts telling me all about the solera process, how they tap the sherry from one barrel to another, high to low. It’s like a metaphor, he says, for how culture works. Also, it’s not really sherry, it’s better than that. It’s amontillado. In a butt of which the body of Admiral Nelson was preserved. No wait, that was rum. As Mom always said: You can preserve many things in alcohol – even a dead admiral – but your dignity isn’t one of them. Quoting Poe. Running off at the mouth: always a sure sign he’s in trouble. Meanwhile he’s kneeling in front of the fireplace and holding a sheet of newspaper over the opening. Do you know this trick? It makes the chimney draw. While he’s looking over his shoulder, a black spot appears through the newsprint, like the burn mark on a strip of film just before it melts in front of the globe, and then the paper catches fire. And it’s a big hullabaloo, he’s dancing around on the hearth stamping out the curling paper in his dog-eaten slippers, and we could be boys again, laughing like crazy on the edge of calamity.

  Joe

  At my cousins’ place in town there was a mouldering khaya in the yard for the girl. We Blahavićes, by contrast, lived in the new world, in a ranch-style house in the suburbs, and we called the cold, cobwebby building in our yard the servants’ quarters, never the khaya or the girl’s room. It was a facebrick room with a cement floor and a gun slot of a window, and it looked a bit like the ablution block in the caravan park at Orient Beach. There was a toilet attached to one end, screened off, along with the door to the room itself, by an L-shaped wall. There was no bathroom. Perhaps the servant was meant to use the concrete trough in the laundry room at the opposite end of the block.

  The servants’ quarters acted as a screen behind which Dad could store building materials and equipment, things like scaffolding pipes and window frames, trestles and boards. Some of this material was covered by a tarp; most of it was left to warp and rust in the rain and the sun.

  The room, in which no maid or gardener ever lived, caught the household’s odds and ends: three-legged chairs, stained mattresses, a leaking washing machine with an immense mangle attached to it. Also camping equipment, fishing tackle, gardening tools. And then a mass of bottles and newspapers. We found it difficult to throw out a newspaper. The dailies stayed on a pile next to Dad’s chair in the lounge for a week or so, just in case he needed to cross-check something, a story whose details had become clear, or unclear, a price that had gone up, or down, a sports result. Then they went onto a stack next to the dog’s bowls by the back door. And when that stack began to teeter, they travelled in cascading armfuls out to the servants’ quarters and were piled on top of old appliances or against the walls. Once the room was full, there was always the trailer under the mulberry tree, a battered yellow box on wheels that came from a road camp and was too heavy to be towed by the Zodiac. That filled up too, eventually, and the paper turned to pulp when it rained.

  The servants’ quarters was a place where stray cats had kittens and wounded swallows came to die. Mice made nests in the damp paper and spiders trampolined on webs in the corners. When things got bad enough, when a rat was spotted sunning itself on the lid of the dustbin, Mom had a cadenza. Then Dad brought a van home from work and Branko and I spent the whole of Saturday clearing everything out and carting it to the municipal dump. Only the good junk stayed behind, the furniture someone with a will might repair, the boards and pipes that might still come in useful.

  After one of these clearing-out sessions, Sylvie decided she needed a rumpus room, like Betty Cooper in the Archie comics whom she fancied she resembled (actually she was more like Veronica Lodge). The servants’ room was swept clean and a threadbare rug that once belonged to Uncle Eddie was rolled out and vacuumed. Two pod chairs covered in blue nylon were given a new life: they had snapped off their chrome bases but they worked well enough flat on the floor. Everyone wanted to be down low in those years, on cushions and beanbags, in conversation pits.

  The next time Sylvie’s friend Geraldine came over, the two of them went to the rumpus room with the transistor and mugs of milky coffee. Music and laughter drifted out. Geraldine’s broad shoulders and bronzed eyelids always unnerved me and I steered clear of her, but now my curiosity got the better of me. When I climbed up on the bin and looked through the window, hoping to see them getting up to something, they were just lounging there in the Space Age chairs, chewing gum and paging idly through magazines, which is what they always did in the lounge. And actually it was more comfortable to lie on the carpet in the house where there was a kettle and a telephone and a usable toilet than out here in this cold room with its bare lightbulb. The rumpusing soon came to an end and the tide of yesterday’s news swept back in.

  In the school holidays after the Norton rematch, when the novelty of having no homework wore off, I became restless. I was sure there was an article in the newspapers I’d missed, some scrap of a story about Ali. Mom was in the lounge drinking tea with Mrs Mitchell, so I was free to ferret around in her knitting bag. No sign of the scissors. I turned to the sewing box where they were sometimes kept. There was a mass of stuff in there I wasn’t supposed to touch, crochet hooks, bales of ecru cotton, limp hourglasses of embroidery silk. The pinking shears. The scissors themselves. Especially those. Long use had worn their black enamelled handles down to bright Sheffield steel. Cutting paper with them was strictly forbidden.

  When we lived in town, a man used to come around once a year to sharpen all the edges in the house; he carried his journeyman’s box from the delivery trike to the stoep and Mom took out the knives and scissors. The suburbs were beyond the knife-grinder’s range. Now Dad had to take the scissors to a shop in Bosman Street.

  Ah, the sewing scissors. They lay on a patch of velvet like a museum exhibit. Handicrafts of the ancients. The compartment alongside held a spill of buttons like unearthed treasure. I took the scissors out to the servants’ room, propped a broken chair on a stack of papers at the kitchen table to which it had once belonged, and sat there like the night editor leafing through one old newspaper after another. Some of them had been pissed on by mice or dripped on by rainwater, but under the yellowed and crumpled front pages the sheets were crisply white.

  On one such sheet was a single paragraph about Ali’s fight against Rudi Lubbers, which had taken place on 20 October 1973 and passed me by. Under the headline ‘Too Darned Hot!’ it was recorded that Ali had strolled to a points victory over a plodding Lubbers in the steamy heat of Jakarta. The match ended farcically when Ali trapped the hapless Dutchman in a corner and pummelled him without mercy.

  Branko

  Ferdi Kouters is a Dutchman, an actual Dutchman, whose parents come from Utrecht. In Holland, not Natal. He’s a tall boy with buck teeth and knobbly knees and a tuft of blond hair as thick as a paintbrush. He pastes his kuif to his head with Brylcreem but it springs up again in greasy clumps. He always wears khaki shorts and shirts. It looks as if he’s wearing his school uniform all the time, but after school he changes into his regular clothes, which happen to be his big brother’s old school uniforms. This brother also happens to be dead. He went on a holiday camp with the Seventh-day Adventists where he fell off a foefie slide and broke his neck.

  Ferdi is the undisputed marbles king of Clubview and everywhere else. He’s mastered all the games and beaten every boy his age, including me. Trouble is, most of us have stopped playing marbles now that we’re in high school. Ferdi has no one to play with – until he discovers that the world is full of younger boys and it’s easy to beat them. Like taking candy. A boy your age will give you a run for your money an
d quit when he knows he’s beaten. But a pipsqueak is full of pride. He’ll go on playing until his last marble is gone.

  I’m not home the afternoon Ferdi comes over to play marbles with Joe. The deal was struck down at the shops. Mom sent Joe to Funchal Caffie for Hubbard squash or something, and on the way he had to pass the Kouters’ place which is right next door, and that was when Ferdi challenged him. So Ferdi comes over and they start to play ringer in the back yard. Ferdi snaps a twig off the plum tree and draws a circle in the sand. They set up shy after shy and he wins them all. Joe has his marbles in a leather pouch that once held Grandpa Reilly’s tobacco (you can still smell the rum and maple). His beauts are in a Mills cigarette tin (also Grandpa’s) in his pocket. He has a glass ghoen and a special ironie, a three-quarter-inch ball bearing with a flat spot that fits snugly on the second joint of his forefinger when he gets ready to shoot and stops the ghoen from rolling when it hits the ground. This iron ghoen has never failed him, but the magic goes out of it today. He keeps missing. The ghoen drops down in the dirt like a meteor striking an uninhabited planet. Ferdi never misses. He has an ironie the size of a billiard ball. The story is it’s a ball bearing he got from a train driver. With this massive ghoen he can blast five glassies out of the ring at a time. Sometimes glass chips go flying or a marble cracks clean through like a cough sweet, but it doesn’t matter because there are so many others for the taking.

  Joe’s stock dwindles away. It’s taken years of birthday presents, hundreds of games and hard-fought swaps to accumulate these marbles, but it only takes an hour and a half to lose them all. Every time he puts his hand in the pouch, lets the marbles roll over his knuckles, he wants to stop. But he can’t because Ferdi is setting up the next shy. You can’t stop in the middle of a game, he says. It’s not fair. As the pouch gets lighter, Joe starts putting in more marbles, like a gambler who can’t believe his luck won’t turn. But luck has nothing to do with it. Ferdi’s eye is perfect. It’s less like a game than a procedure. Joe could just hand over the nearly empty pouch, but they have to go through the motions of competition.