“I could find out what they want.”
“Thanks, but that won’t be necessary. I’ll just pack a few things, and then we can have one for the road and a little chat.”
Nieuwenhuizen unearthed the portmanteau from under a pile of driftwood, gathered up a few items – the hurricane-lamp, the two-legged pot, the nail – and crept back into the tent.
The crowd lapped at the barriers and fell back with a collective sigh.
Mrs ate her cornflakes in front of the TV set. She saw Nieuwenhuizen and Mr on the news update, sitting on stones in front of the tent, staring into the ashes and talking. There were close-ups of their mouths moving, and she wished that she could lip-read. There were shots of their faces – His was full of bruised shadows and dotted lines – and their hands, clutching crooked knives and forks, dented mugs and paper plates, all empty.
Then the camera withdrew to a discreet distance and panned over the site, fingering Nieuwenhuizen’s broken-down furniture and personal possessions. His household effects looked pathetic out in the open, covered with frost, in the public eye. Where had all these people come from? What did they want? The camera read her mind, and showed her the eager expressions of the crowd, and then His old-fashioned ornaments trampled into the ground. There was a china shoe that looked familiar, a five and a half, a vase in the shape of a swan, a pretty tea-set, a porcelain figurine of a woman caught in the rain, a matchbox-holder with the crest of a seaside municipality on it. What were these trifles doing on the news?
“Why are we waiting? Why are we waiting?”
Mrs turned away from the tiny spectacle, walked to the window, and looked at the real-life drama. There you are.
Bucket, two-litre, red, plastic. Starfish (echinoderm), five-legged (six?), pink, dormant. Spade, blue, plastic. Ex unitate vires.
Then Mrs Malgas went down the garden path carrying a tray loaded with two plates of bacon, crispy, and eggs, sunny side up, two mugs (I ♥ DIY for Mr and the frog-mug for Him), tea-bags, a sugar-bowl, a thermos flask full of hot water, knives and forks, salt and pepper, tomato sauce in a plastic tomato, Worcester sauce in a plastic tower of Babel, and a sheaf of serviettes. In a shopping-basket over her shoulder were chocolate bars and packets of boiled sweets, waterproof sachets of Toppers and Smash, wads of cotton wool, a tube of Guronsan C, a bottle of disinfectant and a box of plasters (26 strips, 8 patches and 16 spots).
“Why are we waiting? It’s getting irritating!” The crowd struck up a slow handclap to accompany the chant. She plunged in, the crowd parted miraculously in front of the steaming plates, and she came up against the barrier. A policeman tried to stop her from going further by pinching her arm, but she told him sternly, he was young enough to be her son, “That’s my husband Mr and his chum Otto. Make way.”
She ducked under the barrier and advanced towards the camp. A ripple of excitement washed through the crowd and the chanting quickened. It was all she could do not to break into a run. The ground underfoot had the consistency of a ripe Brie and it clung to her woolly slippers. She picked her way through a minefield of knick-knacks, and as she passed she tried to remember where the duck was, the pottery mallard, and the guineafowl with sunflower-seed feathers, and the pine-cone owl and the ostrich-egg representation of the Golden City.
Mrs Malgas’s entry onto the plot was a model of dignity and restraint: she walked cautiously but purposefully, with her head held high and her shoulders thrust back. Her sequinned gown rippled like sunlit water. Mr Malgas got to his feet and looked at her in amazement. She went on steadily, bringing to bear on her trembling limbs every precept of self-defence in dangerous neighbourhoods. Yet all the human dignity she could muster mattered not a jot to the crowd, who took her long-overdue appearance as a signal that the forbidden territory was no longer out of bounds. They rose up in a foment of curiosity and acquisitiveness, and surged forward, carrying the barriers and the policemen along with them.
Mrs looked over her shoulder and froze in an attitude of disbelief as the crowd swept down upon her. Mr himself stood rooted to the spot, with Nieuwenhuizen’s last words drumming in his ears. Nieuwenhuizen, on the other hand, got calmly to his feet in the face of the flood, as if he had done it all before, seized his portmanteau and executed a death-defying leap into the branches of the tree. He forked his limbs, spread his fingers, and in the twinkling of an eye was lost to sight.
The onrushing crowd fell upon the scene and carried off what they could. Mrs was knocked flat. At the last moment Mr came to life. He began scooping up gadgets, with a half-formed notion in his mind that they were of historical significance. Unfortunately this ill-considered action drew attention to these objects, which might otherwise have escaped notice, and endowed them with a special importance, and the crowd set upon him to rob him of his loot.
When it was all over, when the camp had been stripped of everything of value and a lot of rubbish besides, the crowd receded, bearing away its own wounded, and leaving behind a little wreckage, rags and kindling. Mr too remained behind, marooned, under a scrap of canvas fluttering from a wooden post.
Mrs found him there. “I’ve saved some of the doodads,” she said, to cheer him up.
“No, no,” he said, taking her basket from her and emptying the dead birds out on the ground. “He’s lost everything, but he’s resigned to it, and so am I.”
She took the flag from him and laid it aside. She took his soft, ungiving hand in her own and led him home, and bathed him, and dried him and powdered him, and put him to bed like a baby.
“It’s good to lie in my own bed again.” He touched her salty cheek and dropped off.
Mr sniffed. Wood-smoke? He went to the window. Nieuwenhuizen was picking through the jetsam and tossing things into the fire. Mr willed him to look up, and wave, but he would not.
“Come away from the window,” said Mrs, spooning two eggs into a pot of boiling water and inverting the egg-timer.
Mr sat down at the table and sighed heavily. “I’m sorry Mrs. There, I’ve said it.”
“There’s no need to apologize. I’m just grateful you’ve come to your senses while we’ve still got a roof over our heads and food on the table. Thank heavens everything’s back to normal.”
“We’re back where we started … but let’s not pretend that things are the same.”
“Words, words, words,” said Mrs, misunderstanding him. “Let’s not pretend at all. It doesn’t suit us. Let’s just get on with our lives.”
“Fine by me.”
“Shame. You’ll get over it. One day we’ll look back on all this and discover that we can laugh about it.”
“I can laugh about it already.” He produced a hollow belly-laugh as proof.
“Me too. Now eat your egg before it gets cold.”
“He was walking up and down all day like a vacuum cleaner,” Mrs told Mr that evening when he came in from work. “First he picked up all his bits and pieces, and he put some of them into his suitcase and he put the rest on a pile. Then he broke the big bits he didn’t want into smaller bits and burned them. The smell! He dug a big hole with that spade you lent him, which he never had the decency to return, and he buried all the bits that wouldn’t burn. Everything fitted. But he tamped it down anyway with a wooden post, and then he threw the post over the hedge. He filled in the hole with the ashes and the sand he’d dug out to begin with. He beat the sand down, so that it was flat and smooth. He sprinkled more sand and small stones. Then he walked backwards, from one end to the other, brushing the earth with a branch and sowing handfuls of twigs no larger than ladyfingers. When he was finished there was no sign of him left.”
“He’s still there,” said Mr, wiping a porthole in the misted glass.
“No he’s not. He left long ago.”
Mr and Mrs thought there would be something about him on the news, but they were mistaken.
“It’s too early.”
“It’s too late.”
The sun sank. Nieuwenhuizen looked at the wal
l and at the house. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but even as the sun dropped behind the Malgases’ roof, the suns in their wall sent out a host of lack-lustre rays, which got longer and longer, so that they appeared to be rising.
Nieuwenhuizen picked up the portmanteau and found his way to the edge of the plot. He sat on the verge, in the fallen darkness, holding up one finger, looking down the street.
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The Folly Page 14
