People stole supermarket trolleys too, for their own intrinsic worth, or to transport their stolen goods in. And one of these trolleys was lying abandoned on the corner of O’Reilly and Fife. I had dragged the shopping-bags this far, but my bad elbow was beginning to act up. I dumped the bags in the trolley and righted it.
As I progressed along O’Reilly Road, pushing the trolley containing what Spilkin – so long ago now – had encouraged me to think of as my life’s work, I caught my breath and came to a more sober assessment of my situation: I, Aubrey Tearle, Proofreader Emeritus, was walking through the streets in broad daylight, in command of a stolen supermarket trolley. What was happening to me? What would become of me? If anyone enquired after the trolley’s provenance, I would say I was simply returning it to its lawful owners, the Checkers Corporation, the Okay Bazaars, Pick and Pay. The performance of my civic duty. That purpose had been at the back of my mind all along, and now took its proper place at the front. As for the trolley’s contents, culled from a thousand public fora but now indisputably private property … My precious papers! I had rushed out with the express intention of dumping them, but that was unthinkable. If someone tried to take them from me, I would defend them with my life. How horribly likely it was that I would be waylaid. It was years since I had ventured out with anything more substantial than the Pocket and a notebook. I should turn back. But that would make it harder to explain the trolley, if needs be. I must go on. And what if it rained? Then I would amount to nothing more than soggy paper, slimy and illegibly grey. I would boil down to: papier mâché. Moulded paper pulp made into solid objects. From the French for chewed paper. Chewed paper! Beset by ferocious doubts, by snaggle-toothed second and third thoughts, I pressed on into the concrete jungle.
Dumbo was on duty, chained in habitual servitude to a parking meter. Another misplaced source of security. I had seen meters beheaded, expiring in the gutters, or on kerbs spattered with five-cent pieces. Surprise, surprise: the missing ear was back. I stopped to examine the surgery. Someone had done a neat job with the welding torch – but the effect was odd … unhinged … untoward. Then it struck me why: the ear was not just back – it was back to front! Nincompoops. From the Latin non compos mentis, ‘no mental compost’ (Wessels). I was reminded of Noodler in Peter Pan. Naming all the pirates was Merle’s game. Captain Jas Hook, Bill Jukes, Skylights, Smee, I forget the others. My favourite was Gentleman Starkey – once an usher in a school. And hers was Noodler, whose hands were fixed on backwards. The only truly tragic figure in pantomime, she said.
Someone had better tell them. I steered my trolley into the shop, but a figure as broad as a nightclub bouncer rose to block my passage. It was Joaquim, he who had pressed the hooch upon me when I had brought back the ear. Rosa peered anxiously over his shoulder, mustachios aquiver. I addressed myself to her, but he flapped his hands in my face, as if to dispel an odour. What would they call it? … a ‘pong’. These people. I had to shout to be heard.
‘Wad dozy wunt, Quim?’ she asked. ‘Wad? Wad?’
Quim (noun, coarse slang) said, enunciated I should say, as if translating my words into an infinitely superior foreign tongue, ‘He sigh his yeah is beck tew frount.’
I could have blown my top, my lobes were liquefying, a magma of vitriol and vituperation boiled out of my spinal column, pressed up against my crusty dome – but I caught sight of myself in a mirrored pillar, like an Aborigine scribbled all over with Vat 69 and Castle Dumpies, R8.99 per dozen, in shoewhite on grey skin. I had espied myself there before, from time to time, but never in such a state of extremity. My hair was standing to attention in clumps, ragtag bands of desperate bristles whose company had been routed. My shirt was hanging out, and one tail of it was damp. My staring eyes, replete with scrutinizing, were afloat in my bifocals like melted cubes in the icy bottoms of shot-glasses. And then the trolley … I was stooped over it like a geriatric in a walking frame. I looked like a tramp – worse, like a hobo, one of the bag ladies and gentlemen, the collectors of old iron and empties, the perpetual window-shoppers, pushing their stolen trolleys through the streets as if the city were no more than a vast parking lot for supermarkets. These scavengers had turned the trolley into a symbol of want rather than plenty. Had I become one of them? I barely recognized myself.
But the light of recognition was dawning in Mrs Da Silva’s calculating eyes. Mention of the ear had jogged her memory. Before she could foist another bottle of Old Brown Ruin on me, I retreated. Down the length of Kotze Street, up and down kerbs at five robots, never mind the disabled, and not a soul would meet my eye.
The security guard at the Okay Bazaars, that merely satisfactory retailer, took his employer’s property into grateful, white-gloved hands: the gloves were a relic of the days of bomb threats, when they were meant to make more palatable the notion of a stranger’s hands upon one’s person. Frisking, they called it, as if there was pleasure to be had in being fondled by ‘Mickey’ Mouse paws, as if it were fun – and it probably was for some, it takes all kinds, and more’s the pity: a limited range of tried-and-tested kinds would simplify things immensely. It is with the wider world as it is with washing powders. I’d written a perspicuous letter or two on that very subject, carbon copies of which were adding their eloquent ounces to the shopping-bags as I lugged them across the road and up the escalator. An idolmonger from north of the border, one of the precursors of that entire race of Queequegs with which our pavements are now thronged, offered to lend a hand, but I wasn’t born yesterday and made shift.
My entrance created quite a stir. Tony and a crony actually forsook a poker game to establish what was in the bags. Paperwork, I said. That is all we know, and all we need to know.
The trek across town had upset me. I was a bundle of nerves, to tell the truth. What had possessed me? As much to celebrate having come through the streets unscathed as to settle my stomach, I ordered a whiskey, washed down one of my Valia, and fell to. Had to make the best of a Wessels-free environment. And despite the shaky start to the day, I made steady progress: by lunchtime I had ten fascicles of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ shipshape. In the bag, which is to say, out of the bag and in the book. A Strammer Max for lunch, in memoriam, the last surviving item of the original menu, from the heyday of Mrs Mavrokordatos. Strammer Max: a stout Bavarian ploughman. One of Moçes’ many cousins, recently appointed as Chief Cook and Bottlequaffer, didn’t make too bad a hash of it, either. The afternoon held out the promise of another ten fascicles.
But it was not to be.
I was still mopping up the cooking juices in the continental manner when Errol burst in with a duffel bag slung over one shoulder and a bulky object wrapped in an army greatcoat in his arms. A corpse, was my first startled thought. And why not? Some poor pedestrian to be disposed of, some victim of senseless violence gone stiff as a board. The empty arms of the coat waved for help, and an ashtray went flying as Errol hurried across the room. Then, as he passed through the archway into the pool room, one end of the package struck the wall with a clang. Must be stolen property after all, I thought, a parking meter or a lamp standard. That Tone should allow these petty criminals to fence their booty under his roof … it was unconscionable.
(I’d taken a good look at the Prospect Road corpse through my opera glasses: black male, fortyish, fifteen stone. But the next day the Star said it was a white man, burnt to a char.)
Errol’s buddies had been loafing in the shadows all morning in a state of inebriation, but his arrival was greeted by a lively uproar. Half the customers, the waiters, even Tone himself pressed through the archway to gape. So much raucous laughter and obscene banter ensued that there was simply no going on with my work.
I scrutinized and took stock. Errol and Floyd were down on the floor behind the pool tables, where the shadows were thickest, writhing in a tangle of arms and legs. The greatcoat sprawled in a pathetic attitude across the green baize, empty and abject, light blazing down on it, and the thought that it must belong to s
ome human being the boys were now trying to overpower or violate forced its way back into my mind. Dim faces studded with shiny teeth came and went in the glare and gloom like portraits on rocking walls. Demonic laughter. I advanced to intervene. But then Floyd scampered clear and vanished, as if through a trapdoor, and Errol stood up alone behind the central table. He raised one end of the object they had been wrestling over – my relief that it was an object after all was short-lived – and rested it against his crotch. The end of a cylinder of some kind, perhaps a broken pipe … a traffic light? Surely not! He bent over and wrapped both his arms around the pipe. Then he hauled it up, swivelling his hips as he did so, and slowly, in obscene mimicry of a gigantic male member, tumescent, from the Latin tumere, swell, the Hillbrow Tower rose into the light.
My cry of protest was drowned out by drunken hooting and gleeful applause. Thrusting, lurching from step to step, Errol advanced upon Raylene, who fled shrieking in make-believe terror to the other side of the room. He turned his attention to the new girl, the youngster who still looked like a child to me, never mind the combat boots. She was too awestruck to do anything but gaze at him. He staggered towards her, phallus towering. Would no one defend her honour?
‘Where did you get that?’ My voice was indignant and authoritative. I knew perfectly well where he’d ‘found’ it: recognized it at once.
‘In his pants!’
‘It followed him home.’
‘It’s stolen property. Stolen from decent people with charity in their hearts. Not to mention your poor countrymen afflicted with tuberculosis. I’ve a good mind to call the police.’
Titters and jeers. Let them, I thought, as Errol butted the air with the broken tower. ‘You have no sense of responsibility. In fact, you have an overdeveloped sense of irresponsibility. There’s a destructive streak in you. Vandals, that’s what you are, it’s the sack of Rome all over again.’
‘A sack of what?’
‘Not that kind of sack, you blockhead, it’s from the …’ And then the derivation slipped unaccountably from my mind. The drama of it! Silence had fallen. A circle of dim faces, gazing now at me, now at the hooligan with the tower jutting from his loins. I became aware of the dictionary clasped in my right hand: I must have taken it up intuitively, like a sword. By a stroke of good fortune it was not my precious Pocket, but the eighth edition of the Concise, published in 1990, carried to the Café that morning in one of the shopping-bags. An altogether weightier tome, somewhat too replete with Yankee-Doodlisms for its own good. What a shame I hadn’t brought along the Shorter, which I could still heft like a man half my age on a good day. All the same, I must have looked like a prophet in a den of iniquity. Like Moses – the original, with the serpent rather than the sickle in his bosom – come down off the mountain, clutching his tablets. I opened the dictionary. Verses of lemmata whirled in a sortilege of sorts – rub ~ rudder ~ ruddle ~ rule … ruler ~ run ~ run ~ runcinate – and as it sometimes happens, once in a thousand consultations, it fell open at the very page I sought – saccharin ~ sacring. Perhaps in this heightened atmosphere my fingers had been guided by some extrasensory urgency, as my eyes now were, to sack2. (Of victorious army or its commander) plunder, give over to plunder (a captured town etc.). (Of burglar etc.) carry off valuable contents of. From the French in the phrase mettre à sac, put to sack. From the Italian sacco sack1. My eye performed a backward roll to sack1: large usually oblong bag for storing and conveying goods, usually open at one end and made of coarse flax or hemp. A jog would bring me to hessian, strong coarse cloth of hemp or jute, of Hesse in Germany. Foreign geography: Venetian blinds. Angostura bitters. Gin. But this was neither the time nor the place for the finer points. I focused again. Put to the sack: put in the sack. It was that literal. I opened my mouth to speak into the silence – and who knows what the effects would have been? These were surely moments in which lives might have been changed. But just then Wessels burst in, hopping on his good foot and waving his crutch, and with a swashbuckling ‘Bonsai!’, brought the crutch crashing down on the tower. Errol swung away, the end of the tower (where the revolving nightclub used to be) smashed into the neon tubes of the overhead light, and the room went dark in a shower of breaking glass.
In the rush for the exit that followed, I was knocked sideways, and heaven only knows what injuries I might have sustained had not Moçes, of all people, caught me up in his arms, as he had seen it done on television, practically shielding me with his own body, and marshalled me to safety. It was just as well I was wearing a chain on my glasses. When I found myself at my table again, I felt like some storm-tossed craft back at its moorings.
In a while, a semblance of order was restored. Tony marched around with his hands on his hips, detailing the costs of fluorescent tubes and the resurfacing of pool tables, while Moçes was set to dabbing up the splinters with cotton wool dipped in cane spirits (a home remedy from Tony’s mother). Wessels sat down and stuck his grog blossom in my papers: ‘What you liaising there?’ I gave him what for. Who did he think he was, undermining my authority in front of these hooligans, and then carrying on as if nothing had happened? Sulkily, he produced the Mr Fatso/Mnr Vetsak pad and began to go through his invitation list, muttering names under his breath and ticking them off extravagantly.
‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ could not hold my attention. My eyes kept wandering to Alibia, and I saw myself there, in a houndstooth overcoat, bending my steps to a fogbound wynd. My coat was the very opposite of Errol’s, which looked as if it was made of flea-bitten underfelt, and gave you the urge to smother him under the nearest carpet. The heels of my brogues resounded like hammerblows on the cobbles, my breath puffed out in chubby bales of mist, my scarf waved behind me on an icy breeze, as if borne up by a cleverly concealed armature. In an even narrower close, I was drawn to a lighted window. Tucking a coat-cuff into my palm I wiped a hole in the rimed glass and peered through. I looked in on the Café Europa. At myself, in an inglenook, raising a toby jug brimming with porter to drink some congenial stranger’s health. And in a corner, sipping shrub: Merle.
Wessels interrupted this reverie to draw to my attention an article in the Star. Vandals strike at Miniland. As if I didn’t know. ‘For the second time in three months, vandals’ – my word exactly – ‘went on the rampage at Santarama Miniland, the miniature village that raises funds to fight the spread of TB, hurling entire buildings into the harbour and turning the Carlton Centre upside down.’
These days, the newspapers contained so little one might believe in. But here was an indisputable fact. The city belonged to these Goliaths now, the country belonged to them. I saw them stretched out on the runways at Jan Smuts, with their heads propped on the terminal buildings, taking a smoke break, going slow. Flagpoles and street lights were no more than toothpicks in their fists, which they were always raising. I saw them marching down into the Big Hole of Kimberley, with the cables of the bucket winches tangled about their ankles, crunching underfoot the little miners who had flocked to build the new South Africa. I saw them striding up to the Union Buildings, two terraces at a time, in their big running shoes with the tongues hanging out. Shout! said their T-shirts. No! said their trousers. Bang! Bang! Action! Noise!
That useless letters editor at the Star had still not seen fit to publish my letter of 7 December, concerning my close shave with an Atlas Bakery van.
Later that afternoon, Errol and Floyd slunk out with their booty. Floyd, the stouter of the two, had the tower under his arm, swathed in the greatcoat again. I couldn’t help thinking of resurrection men, the descendants of those infamous Williams, Burke and Hare, stalking my city in the wall, and I held my peace. But Errol in passing patted his duffel bag with his long fingers and said: ‘The sack of Johannesburg.’ One of his sleepy, soft-lidded eyes closed and opened in a parody of a wink. What Spilkin would have called a nictitation. What does he have in there? The Botanical Gardens? The Supreme Court? The War Memorial? Zoo Lake? Then again, why should it be landmarks he�
��s carrying off? Why not a jumble of street corners and parking garages – let’s say the north-east corner of Tudhope Avenue and Barnato Street in Berea, or the south-west corner of Rissik and Bree – paving-stones and bus-stop benches – say the bus stop in Louis Botha, opposite the Victory Theatre in Orange Grove, where you might wait all day for a smoke-filled double-decker to take you to the city – trees – the avenue of oaks in King George Street on the western edge of Joubert Park – why not municipal swimming pools, parks, skylines, lobbies, doorways, vistas – say the view from the gardens of the Civic Centre, from the first bench to the right of the path that slopes down to Loveday Street, looking along Jorissen into the sunset …
After a while, I turned my attention to the sack of Tearle, the sacks. I couldn’t possibly drag them through the streets again. I had Moçes summon me a taxi, one of Rose’s, a compulsory treat. Moçes carried my bags down for me – a ‘madala’, he said, shouldn’t have to stoop – and I felt moved to give him a small gratuity. He offered to wait with me at the kerbside, until the taxi came, to shoo away the artless dodgers who had gathered like mosquitoes, but I didn’t think it was necessary.
The Restless Supermarket Page 13
