At four o’clock, true to Nieuwenhuizen’s word, a delivery van bearing his goods drew up outside. The van was green, and on its side was a golden gonfalon held up by manikins in overalls, identical twins, and on the gonfalon were the words SPEEDY REMOVALS. You could tell by the hundreds of tapering brush-marks blurring their outlines what a hurry the little men were in.
Malgas was sitting on the doorstep with his head in his hands. Nieuwenhuizen perched on the edge of the stoep, resting his feet on the hobnailed lump which was all that remained of the plan. They had nothing to say to one another, although Nieuwenhuizen’s bobbing head spoke volumes. Two removers – the driver and an assistant – alighted from the cab and Nieuwenhuizen went to confer with them, shaking each one’s hand in turn and chatting away quite naturally, giving and taking counsel. Malgas was relieved to see that there were only two. There didn’t seem to be much furniture either, although what there was looked old and ugly. A lounge suite, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers; standing lamps and plants in pots; white goods. A dozen cardboard boxes. Malgas examined the boxes critically and found them wanting: second-rate materials, shoddily folded and half-heartedly sealed. The signs saying THIS SIDE UP were all upside-down.
Under Nieuwenhuizen’s direction the removers unloaded a settee from the van and carried it to the house. Malgas scrambled out of their way and inspected this item as it sailed past him. It was made of a dark and grainy wood, thickly varnished, barnacled with bubble gum and scratched by countless fingernails, knitting-needles and keys, branded by who knew what cigarette-ends and coffee mugs. It had muscular cabriole legs with ball and claw feet, but its arms were sadly wasted and terminated in arthritic talons. The stuffing was foaming out of the cushions, and springs spiralled out of the brocade. The removers, by contrast, were neatly dressed in spanking new tartan caps (in grass-green and lemon) and green overalls of a leafier shade with knife-edge creases in the legs and old-gold piping on the cuffs and turn-ups.
“Coincidence?” Malgas wanted to know.
In lieu of an answer Nieuwenhuizen walked through the front door without bothering to open it. The removers, clutching the settee like a battering-ram, stomped after him and smashed the door off its hinges. When Malgas saw these rude, unthinking strangers trampling the welcome mat underfoot and barging into the new house without even knocking or doffing their caps, his blood ran cold. Nieuwenhuizen rushed ahead, waving his arms flamboyantly, and the removers hurried after him, bashing down walls and uprooting fittings.
While they went in circles, looking for a place to put the settee down, Malgas stood on the grand staircase possessed by a glorious will to self-sacrifice. His eyes were popping, his throat was burning, his brow was baubled with lymph. Then his soles began to smoulder and he sank up to his knees through the boards. He was almost overcome. But in the nick of time a desperate will to self-preservation repossessed him and tumbled him headlong down the stairs. This dramatic re-entry went unnoticed by Nieuwenhuizen and his cohorts.
The removers brought in heaps of goods. Nieuwenhuizen flung himself around like a rag doll, inciting them to more and more reckless antics. They began to prance and pirouette in their camouflaged tackies, whirling the furnishings through space and weaving after them. They laughed uproariously, and whispered loudly when Nieuwenhuizen’s back was turned, and every time something came apart at the seams or fell into holes or went to pieces they threw their caps into the air and punched one another’s shoulders. They took no notice of Malgas at all. He was invisible.
For an hour on end Malgas dodged around them like a presentiment, opening doors and windows, moving ornaments and artefacts out of harm’s way, even going so far as to place his own soft body between the blunt instrument and the object of his affection. But all these efforts were in vain.
In the inevitable end, Nieuwenhuizen and the removers whipped themselves up into a cloud of dust and typography, and Malgas could no more marshal them than you or I. The cloud boiled and spilled out fists and feet, caps and hats, asterisks and ampersands, dollar signs and percentages, sharps and flats, ›, ‹, and =. Malgas submitted. He flopped down in an emaciated armchair. His hair was full of glass. His mouth was full of dust. His heart was out of order.
“On your feet, Lazy-bones!” Nieuwenhuizen cried, popping out of the mêlée all stuck with quotation marks and iron filings. He kicked the sole of Malgas’s shoe and beckoned him to follow.
Malgas walked behind Nieuwenhuizen to the van. It was a relief to be out in the still air, in the moonlight. He looked back at the house as they walked: he could see the ribs of the rafters through the tiles. Now, more than ever, he wanted to say a few words, but his mind was a riot of capital letters and punctuation which his tongue could not manage. Nieuwenhuizen whistled a song and skipped, but he too said nothing.
They unloaded a freezer, carried it around to the east wing and squelched through the bottom of the moat. A fish out of water applauded flippantly. In a fit of abnegation Malgas steered them through a sliding door and smashed it into a pool of troubled light. He ground the sugary pieces with his heels; he dropped his end of the freezer on a teapoy; he kicked a terracotta statuette into the air. Nieuwenhuizen ignored all these attempts to communicate.
The house reeled around them, but it refused to fall. Malgas could only wonder at the obstinacy that kept it standing even as its chambers filled up with gloom.
Nieuwenhuizen became a child. He ripped open the cardboard boxes gleefully, and his playmates began to scatter his household effects in the topsy-turvy rooms. They propped pictures against the walls and lobbed ornaments onto ledges. They rolled his threadbare rugs over the floors. They piled his copper-bottomed pots and pans in leaning towers and shied them with shoes and table-legs. They threw toilet-rolls like streamers, and handfuls of pills and charcoal briquettes.
When they were finished Nieuwenhuizen gave them money, whisky and cardboard boxes, and they knocked off for the day and went to their van to relax.
Nieuwenhuizen himself prepared to go back to the camp. Before he left he took Malgas aside and said, “Mal, I’ve had a ball here today. I hope you have too.”
Malgas opened his mouth but no sound came out.
“What’s the matter with you?” Nieuwenhuizen asked. “Is your nose still out of joint?”
Malgas put a finger on Nieuwenhuizen’s lips to hush him and bundled him out into the night.
Malgas stood for an age in a canted doorway, watching, waiting, while Nieuwenhuizen gathered wood and built a fire, cooked a rabbit, ate it with relish, and sat on a stone nodding off and mumbling a camp-fire lullaby. Then he turned his back on the tableau and ranged wearily through the dim ruins, marvelling at the debris, the balanced bits and pieces, above all, the incongruous juxtapositions, which he listed thus quietly to himself: hat and hammer, rock and paper, headache pill and custard powder, book and trousers, pipe and key, sealing-wax and vacuum cleaner, + and – until he tired of the game. He started on a list of miraculous survivors: light-bulb … and left it there. He dared not go upstairs: the grand staircase hung by a thread and a nail. He went instead into his room and lay down on the rug, with his head against his toolbox. His hips ached. He shut his eyes, but sleep would not come.
Hip, the house was tossing and turning, its rooms were banging together in the dark. A button sprang off the belly of an armchair and ricocheted, hip, hip, louder and louder, hurrah. Threads unravelled noisily. Whirlwinds swirled out of teacups and ripped through paper bags. Hooray! Portraits of Nieuwenhuizen’s ancestors fell from the walls. Hip, hip, joints disjointed and screws unscrewed, plugs unplugged and locks unlocked, and so on and so forth, hubba hubba, the whole place was coming unstuck. Malgas tossed and turned with the tide en nog ’n piep.
The grand staircase slipped sideways and vanished in a chattering flight of planks and nails. Malgas crept under the scraps of the rug and pulled them tight around him, while fragments of house rained down on him and rebounded into the void. He heard voices whispering, wind
howling, machinery clanking. He saw the familiar silhouette of his old rooftop, and Mrs in a frame of amber light, impossibly distant.
Then the house began to flicker and flare, and parts of it flapped away into the night, and parts of it crumpled up like sheets of paper. Malgas was scrunched up and folded flat, and pressed down into the ground with the house.
Time passed.
When the dead hand of the night lay on the small hours of the morning, Malgas lunged into a state of brilliant wakefulness. The air was roaring. It sounded like a torrent of voices, but it was coming from his blood and the heaving walls. The house was trying to pull itself together. Malgas struggled to his feet in the flow. He grunted and groaned with the house, and it breathed him in and out, and it sweated him and bled him and made him ache. Then the air turned to dish-water, as if the dawn had sprung a leak. Colour blazed up in the walls, swept through the ruins, and filled the creased spaces with sunshine.
Malgas gambolled in the light and gulped it down in greedy mouthfuls. The light foamed in his blood, and spangled it, and his veins were filled with sparkling music. Then the sweetness curdled as the house began to crack open and drift apart. Malgas called out to the parts that were precious to him, and grasped them lightly by their names, cradled them on his tongue for a moment and rolled them over his taste-buds for old times’ sake, before they slipped from his lips, losing their colours, fading into forgetfulness.
The house was full of holes and the night poured in. The rafters turned to charcoal, the roof crashed down onto the observation deck, and that crashed down onto the floor below. Flocks of nails flew up into the sky. Storey after storey, amid clouds of dust and laughter, the house fell in on itself. The walls flared up and faded, and died down, now flaring up again – guttering –
The world drained out of Malgas. On an empty screen a single nail revolved into an exquisitely formed full stop.
Malgas was struck dumb. He fell down in a stupor, and the new house fell down with him, at last. Crash.
Mrs Malgas spent the night at the window.
The arrival of the removers annoyed her (she felt left out, of course) and she considered phoning the police. But watching the four of them stumbling around, breaking things and tripping over one another, and listening to their chorus of thuds and curses, had a surprising effect on her: she began to find them amusing. It’s not funny, she told herself, and stifled a giggle. Just then Nieuwenhuizen dropped a barbell on his foot, and although he laughed it off and said he felt no pain, Mr started whimpering on his behalf. The removers tittered behind their caps. It’s laughable, Mrs corrected herself, and laughed out loud. She laughed and laughed; she hadn’t laughed so much in years.
Later, when the removers sat on the pavement warming themselves at a brazier and drinking, while Mr rose and fell in a delirium of terror and remorse, she tasted bubbles of laughter in the back of her throat again. But when cars began to coast up with their headlights off, and figures were gathering themselves into groups, their voices coming and going, their eyes turning in, the lenses of their glasses flashing secret messages through the grainy air, her throat dried up.
People are beginning to stare, she thought, and waited grimly for morning.
The puckered eaves of the Malgases’ house lent an inquisitive expression to its normally bored face. This slight transformation irked Nieuwenhuizen, who was preparing to retire and looking forward to an uneventful sleep.
He thought he saw Mrs backing away from the lounge window looking over her shoulder, but it seemed to him that she was no more than a mote in a blind eye. He saw Mr too, closer to home, and found him for the moment incomprehensible, like a joke without a punch line.
Under the malignant influence of these thoughts Nieuwenhuizen concluded with a world-weary sonority that got on his own nerves: “We are condemned to renounce and repeat, the head and the tail, the one barking and the other wagging, with the body of the same old dog between them.”
And fell fast asleep.
Mr Malgas lay like a victim of the ongoing violence in a shallow grave. Words trickled through him and seeped away into the sand. The night held a hand on the nape of his neck, and whenever he was buoyed up by a familiar intonation or an inspiring turn of phrase, that hand pressed him down again.
Conspiracy. Consanguinity. Contrariety. Confundity. Conundrumbrage.
He thought he felt boots treading the small of his back and the tops of his thighs, embossing him with algebra and etymology. Footsteps thundered in his chest cavity. Later, fingers of light brushed over him and he rose to the surface and knocked against the earth’s meniscus. As he floated there a voice began to call him insistently, Malgas, Malgas, caught its sibilant hooks in the fabric of his skin, and reeled him, thrashing, upwards. His head, which was bloated with stuffy air and numbed by the echoes of his name, cracked through the crust. He looked at the foreign landscape under his nose.
Daybreak. His head rolled over. A cruet-stand came into view – salt and pepper tom-toms and a mustard-pot in the shape of a mud hut. Behind the hut the legs of a lectern rose like three slender tree trunks; and behind the trees, dwarfing them, the mirrored face of a wardrobe as tall as a skyscraper. Behind the tower block, against the grey sky, far-away mountains assumed the shape of his house. In that instant of recognition, his whole body solidified in a rush of blood and he crashed into the air.
He rolled over onto his back. Flopping his head from side to side, he took in the wreckage: furniture, clothing, bric-à-brac, kitchen-ware, toiletries. What was that sound? Water running. A broken pipe … no, never. “I imagined it all,” he told himself firmly. “None of it was real. Except for this jumble of junk and cheap packaging. I wonder what became of the removers? Not to mention Otto.”
Mr Malgas sat up, and the people gathered in the street on the edge of the plot burbled their approval. He wiped the sleep out of his eyes and focused on them. They were making a noise, babbling like water over stones, empty shells clacking together in the backwash.
When they felt the light touch of his attention upon them, the members of the crowd asserted their individual personalities and shapes by passing comments and thrusting out their chests to show the colourful labels and pithy slogans on their clothing, but they spoilt the effect by all speaking at the same time and pressing together in a mass, shoulder to shoulder and belly to back.
Malgas squinted. No doubt about it. There were hundreds of them, people, held back by festoons of candy-striped ribbon and paper-chains of policemen. Bright lights on tall tripods looked over their shoulders, and beyond them other lights winked on the roofs of cars and trucks, and glinted on scaffolds and catwalks.
Mr Malgas stared at the people. The people fell silent, in dribs and drabs, and stared back.
There were faces he knew, scattered among the popping flash bulbs, partly obscured by cameras. Mrs Dworkin, a couple of waitresses, one of the grillers, and Van As, the storeman. Bob and Alison Parker, also of the Helpmekaar – they had the stationery shop next to the escalators. Dinnerstein. The Greek from the corner café. Some relatives of Mrs from the coast. Venter, her gluttonous second cousin. There were friends and neighbours – Long time no see! – some stalwarts of the Civil Defence League, the Treasurer of the Ratepayers’ Association, what was his name?… De Lange. There were customers and clients, Benny Buys in his Mr Hardware T-shirt, children, grandchildren, nephews, nieces and sales representatives. The postman. The removers, surrounded by photographers (news and fashion). Doctors and nurses, lawyers, electrical engineers, interior decorators, miners, market gardeners, cashiers, taxi-drivers and supermarket packers (to name just a few). There were dozens of nodding acquaintances, they were smiling and nodding their heads, but their names escaped him. There were countless others, who were bound to be strangers. There were thousands lost to sight and millions – no, billions entirely absent! And beyond them all, the vast and silent majority of the dead and the yet to be conceived.
For some reason this speculative tr
ain of thought reassured Mr Malgas and, for reasons that were easier to grasp, reminded him of Nieuwenhuizen. He got to his feet. The crowd cheered his effort generously. He was aching from head to toe, and he winced and grumbled to himself as he picked his way through the debris to the camp. The cameras captured the tiniest twinge and magnified it; the microphones mopped up the softest groan and amplified it.
The tent was still standing, and Nieuwenhuizen was inside it sleeping like a log. His untroubled breathing rippled the canvas walls and enlivened the guy-ropes. Mr Malgas thought he would wake him with a cup of tea. He found the gas-bottle gizmo and the bottle itself among the clutter at the foot of the tree; he found the pot jammed into the hedge; but he couldn’t find water. The drum was empty. While he was checking the pots and jars for water, the zip grated open and Nieuwenhuizen stuck out his head.
The people responded with a breath-taking display of shimmering palms and flashing bulbs.
Nieuwenhuizen took in the situation at a glance. “Who are these people, Malgas?”
“It’s the wider society.”
“You don’t say.”
Nieuwenhuizen squirmed through the flap and clattered to his feet. The crowd cheered and surged against the barriers. Nieuwenhuizen dug up a pair of field-glasses and surveyed the crowd.
“Ridiculous,” Mr Malgas thought. “He can call them field-glasses if he likes. But I say it’s two brown beer bottles tied together with wire.”
“Hm, you’re right,” Nieuwenhuizen said. “It is them. The people. Office-bearers and ordinary ones. A good smear of thrill-seekers too, I should say. Motor cars. Must belong to them. Buses, yes, mini- and tour-. What’s this? Television aerials, roof-tops, steeples. It’s the outside world all right. I might have known they’d turn up eventually, and just in time to be too late.”
The Folly Page 13
