* * *
—
When Louis was a lad of five he and his cousin Robert invented countries for themselves. Bob’s was called Nosingtonia; Louis’s was Encyclopaedia. He tells us, in “Memoirs of Himself,” that they were constantly drawing maps of these lands.
At the same time Louis’s Uncle David first quickened his interest in writing by organizing a literary competition for the Stevenson cousins. To enter you had to write a “History of Moses,” and the prize was £1.
* * *
—
Phoned the embassy and spoke to what seemed like a very nice Mr Campbell. I thought I’d establish how easy it would be to get hold of one of those Robert Louis Stevenson pounds through the usual foreign exchange channels. Mr Campbell said it shouldn’t be too difficult at all. In fact, he kindly offered to secure one for me personally on his next home leave. That would put the middlemen of Nairn up the burn without a paddle.
It turned out that Mr Campbell is a great lover of Stevenson himself. He was fascinated to hear all about the competition and the rules. I even tried out a few of my phrases on him. That set him going too – of course, it came quite naturally to him, being a Hielandman – and we had a braw old time muckling and mairing one another.
“Afore ye gang awa,” I said at one point – we’d been talking whisky and this was a joke – “might ye be so guid as to hearken to my tale?”
“Good heaven, man,” said he, “would I turn my back on you in your chief need?”
“Say nae mair,” said I, and began to explain my scheme for writing another chapter of Kidnapped.
At that he burst out laughing: “It’s already been done, laddie, by the author himsel’. And no just a wee bit chapter, but an unco thick book.”
Catriona! The sequel to Kidnapped! Being memoirs of the further adventures of David Balfour at home and abroad. It came back to me like a thunderclap and took the wind right out of my sails. The fact is that Catriona is the one novel by Stevenson I haven’t read. There was no point in lying about it.
“Ochone! Never read Catriona? A lover of Robert Louis Stevenson, such as yoursel’? Who would have owned it?”
I noticed he said “Lewis” this time instead of “Louie,” which is what I’d been saying, but let it pass.
“Fall to then, and be brisk,” said he, “or ye’ll bauchle it at the first off-go.”
“Ag, it’s too late,” said I.
“It pains me to say it,” said he, “but ye’re a man of small contrivance.”
* * *
—
I would cast all my plans for stories into the fire, if I had a fireplace; building a fire in the garden for that express purpose would be going too far, I suppose. When Fanny criticized the first draft of Jekyll and Hyde, Louis threw it into the fire and started over. If he could dispense with thirty thousand words so blithely, I could surely part with five or six. But I hate to think what that manuscript would have fetched today if she had kept it.
* * *
—
At the last, when the vein of stories in his mind burst, Stevenson demanded: “What’s that?” As if a stranger had entered. There was no answer. He turned to Fanny and asked, more urgently: “Do I look strange?” And then he fell into a coma, and died.
* * *
—
Give them their due, the chaps in Nairn let me know that the Kidnapped Short Story Competition was officially over. Did I want to subscribe to Writing Magazine? If I did, I would be able to read the winning entries. They said the response to the competition had been overwhelming. Stories poured in from lovers of Stevenson’s work everywhere. They said it was less a competition than an outpouring of love for one of Scotland’s, nay, for one of the world’s best-loved storytellers.
There was a list of all the winners, those who had won £506 and those who had won £6 in £1 notes. I saw that a chap from Braamfontein had made it to the finals. I said all along this competition was made for a South African. But I wonder if the blackguard appreciates those commemorative notes?
* * *
—
Well, I subscribed. It can’t harm, I thought, I might even pick up some tips. Also, I wanted to read the winning entries. And when I was finished I was sorry I’d bothered. Not a real story among them. Is it any wonder that writers today are no longer loved, that even the best of them are merely admired? They’ve lost the knack. They are fine fellows, it’s true, but they cannot write like Stevenson. You’ll get no yarns out of them, just a handful of junk; no living flesh, just skin and bone. Faith, they’re not even anatomists – they’re resurrection men.
The Firedogs
The registered item waiting for me at the post office was not the cheque from the Receiver I had been expecting but a large parcel wrapped in brown paper. It wouldn’t fit through the gap under the glass, and so the clerk opened a hatch between the windows and passed it to me through there. It was heavy, and plastered with rows of postage stamps like clips from a French film. There was a return address, an apartment in the Rue du Sabot, but no name.
At home I went straight to the dresser to fetch the kitchen scissors. There my eye was caught by the headline on the Sunday Times, under the cat’s milk dish: MEMBERS OF TRUTH COMMISSION ANNOUNCED. I’d read the report the day before and one of the nominees had stayed in my mind – a priest whose hands had been blown off by a parcel bomb. Now I was reminded of him again, and a half-forgotten fear suddenly seized me…the fear of bombs. There should be a word for it.
Once, walking down President Street, it occurred to me that the rubbish bin at the foot of the steps to the City Hall contained a bomb. I resisted the urge to run away, crossed the street calmly, only to find an even more suspicious bin in my path, attached to a signpost at a bus-stop. I turned left into Rissik and saw another bin up ahead, and another beyond that, all ticking with explosive potential. Then I began to run, but inconspicuously, like any businessman hurrying to an appointment, holding my briefcase in my right hand because the explosion would come from that side.
Lydia, my girlfriend at the time, my live-in lover as they’re called, had been sympathetic about the bins, but when my anxiety extended to letters and parcels she drew the line: What possible reason could anyone have for blowing you up? You’ve never been involved in anything in your life.
You never know, I would argue, with bombs floating around in the postal system. They make mistakes. I was the kind of person things happened to – she said so herself – as opposed to the kind who made things happen. I am still that kind of person, nearly ten years later. Nowadays some petty thief in the sorting office would probably blow himself up first, but one couldn’t be too careful.
I approached my surprise package from Paris, scissors cocked. How did a parcel bomb work anyway? Would the detonator be rigged to the string? Unlikely. What scared me most was being blinded. Losing a hand would be terrible of course, but with a prosthesis one might regain some sort of grip on the world. Your vision was another matter. I closed my eyes and snipped the string. Gingerly, turning the vital organs away from the force of the blast – not too far, one didn’t want to expose that other soft target, the spinal cord – I tore off a thick layer of paper and opened the cardboard box underneath. An object lay mangered in white polystyrene, and I lifted it out and set it upright on the table.
It was a devil, made of cast iron, nine or ten inches tall from fork-tip to cloot. He was a gloomy-looking Father of Lies, a trouper in a provincial melodrama, with a dusting of polystyrene straw on his shoulders and two blunt-ended, calfish little horns on his head. He was wielding an enormous toasting-fork in one hand, rather like the one I kept for flipping chops over on the braai. His devil suit – or was it meant to be mortified flesh – fitted him poorly: it was crumpled around the ankles and sagging in the seat of the pants, where the tail curved from an elasticized vent. A length of rope was looped around the
wrist of his free hand, and at the other end was a dog, a fluffy, button-nosed hound of hell with its tongue lolling.
I recognized the hand of the sculptor at once. It was perfectly predictable that Lydia would end up leading the artistic life in Paris. And that I would end up sitting here. She had probably left her name off the parcel deliberately, just to upset me. It must have cost her a fortune to mail. I plunged my hand into the polystyrene, searching for a card or a letter, and found instead the devil’s identical twin.
Then the penny dropped: they were firedogs. I could see them standing in the flames, shouldering their burden without complaint, like middle-aged brothers in a queue at the post office, and keeping their charred, long-suffering faces straight, while the archangels floated above on the warm air. As for the mongrels, these firedogs had dogs of their own! How literal could you get. And being destined for my hearth, the point was to show how literal I was, as if the idea had been mine rather than hers.
She was having a little joke at my expense. But then it was a private joke, just between the two of us, and it was almost touching that she felt the need, after all this time.
* * *
—
The fireplace was one of the reasons Lydia and I took the house. I had seen more beautiful fireplaces in other Johannesburg lounges, ornate constructs of black iron inlaid with Italian tiles in blues or greens as vivid as powder paints, but there was something comfortably homely about this one. The mantelpiece was plain and solid oak. The hearth was deep, wide and thickly crusted with soot, and framed by an arch of red brick, rising on each side from a platform of red tile. It had been built for use and it worked superbly. That first winter we made a fire almost every night.
But there was something missing, as if the fireplace was incomplete. From long nights at the fireside, gazing into the domestic drama of flames, I came to the conclusion that those tiled platforms at each end of the arch needed to be occupied. They were like empty rostra on a stage – the arch hinted at a proscenium – distracting the eye from the real action by their conspicuous emptiness. A kettle or a flat-iron might do the trick; they were nothing more than hobs, I supposed. To test the proposition I put my brandy snifter there to warm one night, but the glass got greasy and black from the smoke. Electricity seems to have estranged us from fire once and for all. No, it needed something sculptural. We were an arty family after all, on Lydia’s side.
I suggested figures, the keepers of the fire, stokers or smiths, one on either side like household gods.
You’re so literal, Lydia said. She said that kind of thing affectionately then, as if there was something endearing in a literal cast of mind. According to her, it wasn’t the platforms that needed to be filled, but the curve of the arch that should be echoed, an arc of action to link the one side with the other, some “conceptual leap” over the flames, so to speak. She would think of something.
I thought I saw what she was getting at. I said I would defer to her artistic judgement.
In the meantime, and to show that my imaginative effort had not gone unnoticed, she set upon the platforms two sullen stone heads which she had picked up in some craft shop, puny Easter Islanders to stand in for the keepers of the fire, and not exactly Promethean either. The heads did their job well enough until the night of the housewarming, which it took us a year to get round to, when one of the friends, the poetic Justin as it happened, tossing the dregs of his wine into the coals in an attempt at a Russian gesture, splashed the one on the left. Whereupon it “burst asunder,” as he himself put it when he had recovered his composure, like a graven image struck by a bolt from above. Someone might have been hurt, but it was worth the risk to see their faces. It’s remarkable how sensitive artistic people are about their physical safety (to be honest, I nearly jumped out of my skin myself). The repentant Russian was all for moving the surviving head with the tongs, to prevent another accident, but I told him to leave it where it bloody was. Lydia said afterwards I’d made a scene, they were just a couple of curios anyway, but I could see him dropping the thing and burning a hole in the kelim.
* * *
—
In the early evening Annie called to say she was working late, she would be home after supper. I decided to surprise her with a welcoming fire. I wanted to initiate Beelzebub and his brother, of course, but the weather was perfect – the first chilly night of the winter. I had logs left over from last winter’s municipal pruning and half a bag of anthracite in the garage. I went out to fill the scuttle.
All summer the grate had been piled with pine-cones, put there by Annie in the spring as a scented promise of the next season’s fires. I emptied out the cones and cleaned away cobwebs and leaves that had drifted down the chimney. I like to start with a clean slate; I can’t understand how people can leave their hearths full of cinders and ash. Lydia used to say all that cleaning was wasted effort, like housework in general and other tidy habits of mind, which were suited to clerks and quantity surveyors and so on but irksome for everyone else. But God forbid one should call her Bohemian.
While I was about it I took a feather-duster to the archangels and rid the wings of cobwebs and the glorioles of dust. For the first time in years I had been reminded that they were not part of the furniture. Lydia fashioned these things, I thought, flicking at well-rounded rumps (a bit like her own) and thick-skinned feet. I wanted her to take them with her when she moved out, but she was adamant that they belonged where they were. Even if she could find a fireplace somewhere else with an arch like this one, of just this curve, which was highly unlikely, it wouldn’t be right to resettle the angels when she had made them for here. I believe she said they were “site-specific.” Exactly the sort of claptrap that made her impossible to live with.
I stood the devils on the hearth. You could see the family resemblance now with the angels above. They were created to the same scale, for one thing. But they were uglier, coarser, cheaper; poor relations, you could say. I speared a firelighter on each tine and rested a few logs between the two forks. The logs were a stroke of good fortune, much more aesthetically pleasing than splintery pine from the corner cafe. A couple of cones as a finishing touch, a sprinkling of anthracite, and the inferno was ready to blaze, just as soon as my supper came out of the microwave.
* * *
—
Although I had said I would defer to Lydia’s judgement in the matter of the “piece for hearth,” as it came to be known, I couldn’t stop my literal mind from making a few conceptual leaps of its own. I dreamed up some wonderful schemes, all full of moving parts, by which I mean that they were kinetic.
My favourite was probably the cannon. On one of the empty platforms at the side of my hearth would be an old-fashioned cannon, of the sort you might see at the circus, and on the other a target – perhaps a man in an armchair, reading a book of poems. Cannon and target would be linked by an arc of thin wire, following the graceful curve of the brickwork. But the idea was this: when the fire got hot enough it would ignite some charge in the cannon, propelling a cannonball along the wire track and onto the little man, who would fly into a dozen pieces.
When I imagined this I always pictured the fireside dozers – invariably Lydia’s friends, the movers and shakers – jolting in their chairs and spilling their sherry.
Then there was the tightrope walker. He would be standing on one of the platforms, and a high wire – which was actually a tube – would stretch to the other. This time the mechanism was hydraulic: the warmth of the fire would heat the liquid in the tube and bear the tightrope walker slowly aloft. It might take an hour for him to reach the apex, but then gravity would carry him headlong down the other side, and he would strike his skull against a gong. Consternation among the nodders!
There were others, variations on a theme, conversation pieces to kill conversation, all equally impractical: the runaway train, the test-your-strength machine, William Tell’s cousin Gottlieb.
That was another thing about Lydia: no sense of humour.
It needs something sculptural, she said seriously (as if I didn’t know), I’ve had a few ideas.
* * *
—
She wouldn’t let me see the “piece for hearth” until it was finished. Then a fellow sculptor – that sculptor fellow Barry, I called him – helped her to cart it over from the studio on the back of his bakkie and install it. There was an unveiling with a bath towel.
It was an arc of fairies.
Not fairies, she said crossly. Angels.
Angels were all the rage at the time, thanks to some film, I believe. You could get them on wrapping-paper and bathroom decorations and so on. The Christmas before, one of the painters had given Lydia a coffee-table book on the subject.
Lydia’s angels rose in a solid curving column, as if they had been sucked out of the ether by the breath of God (Justin said). A squirming mass of angel-flesh, I said. They were clinging to one another like soccer players after one of them has scored a goal. At either end of the arc was a puff of cumulus which doubled as a plinth and was secured to the tiles. Two very muscular angels supported the entire structure, like the anchormen in an acrobatic team, standing ankle-deep in the clouds. Most of the others were grappling one another, but here and there an individual, held in place by his fellows, had both hands free for clasping in prayer or playing the harp. Lydia insisted that they were dulcimers, although there was no sign of a hammer anywhere.
The friends were very complimentary. They said the angels seemed to be dancing over the flames, treading air, warming their soles. Frank, who was specializing in the history of art, said that the over-scaled feet were a marvellously parodic reference to the township style.
Flashback Hotel Page 28
