The Restless Supermarket

by Ivan Vladislavic

  Fleischer and Toyk are marginally better. Mervyn Toyk, as befits a son of the South-West, puts his money on the lasso. Helmut Fleischer sees half a percentage sign, and comments drily that it always summons up a missing something – ‘or rather a missing nothing’.

  I myself plump for nothing, plain and simple. Make it nothing, the mark insists. Plunge it in this white hole, where it will vanish for ever. Paint it the colour of this little swatch: paper-white on paper-white.Through this soap-bubble loop, this circus-lion hoop, this insatiable and unshuttable maw, an endless quantity of bad copy has passed and been voided. Spoilt material, repetitious and dull verbiage, misplaced stops, misspellings, solecisms, anacolutha. Throw them in, sear them, make them hop. Keep our country beautiful. Imagine, if you can, the mountain of delenda purged from the galleys of the world. Who would build on such a landfill?

  *

  Our accompanist fell silent. For three days, the piano stood in the corner as if Mevrouw Bonsma, bless her, had been packed away inside it on a bed of dry ice and crumpled sheet music. Then the removal men, not the brawny louts one would have preferred, but a cadaverous gang of body snatchers, came and carried it away. Urchins brandishing ceremonial bottles of glue made a guard of honour at the bottom of the escalator, but the piano would not fit through the front door. It went instead through the kitchen, like a deep-freeze, and out of the service entrance into the alley at the back of Meissner’s Building.

  Once Spilkin went looking for Mevrouw Bonsma to invite her for tea. But our humble servant, whom she remained, sent word that she could not face the Café ‘in her private capacity’. He came back in a mood and would not speak to me for a week, as if the absence of harmony were my fault.

  Without the tacking thread of her melodies, things felt disconnected and out of sorts. The television did not help. In place of Mevrouw Bonsma, we had music video films. The Balaam Box again: scraps from the cutting-room floor strung together in no discernible order. It was enough to make your hair curl. As it was, the so-called artists had the daftest hairdos. I recall one in particular, as bald as a stone except for a little pile of greasy brown curls like a dog’s dropping on the crown of his head. Claimed to be a doctor – a dentist, Darlene said – but a veterinarian was more likely.

  My fear had been that my nerves were dying back, like the branches of an old tree in winter. I had flattered myself that I was the pachydermatous one, Fowler be damned. But perhaps it was the very opposite. Was my skin not too thin, parched to a wash of lime-white over my bones, with the nerve-endings jangling in the noisy air, raw as the root hairs of an uptorn plant? Was the skin of the world not thickening, growing hard with calluses? Even Spilkin, with Darlene at his knee, clapping her hands delightedly every time they solved one of the straight clues on the two-speed puzzle, had grown deaf to the bedlam around him.

  *

  The new order? The new disorder is more like it. Mrs Mavrokordatos was right: television was educational. It taught the geography of conflict. In time, every lost soul with a goggle-box would know the way to Bosnia and Baghdad.

  And it taught the grammar of neglect. These were ungrammatical years. Could no one speak English properly any more? And would the solecists be the very ones who insisted on speaking the most? Suddenly everybody was talking to everybody else. Talks about talks. About talks about talks. And so unidiomatically on. I had the impression that no one understood a word anyone else said. I stopped watching. Lip-reading would no longer suffice. After Spilkin left, there was no one to see to my eyes. And, of course, his charts were always custom-made. I tried the eye clinic at the hospital once, but I had the chart down pat.

  The circle unravelled. Some invisible hand had found a loose thread, and tugged at it constantly. I kept a list of departures and destinations in my notebook, or I’m sure I should have lost track. I might have made this list available to Empty Wessels when he started planning the Goodbye Bash. But why should I stir that pot of mischief? Even the latecomers drifted off eventually, and I added them to the bottom of the list – until the exercise began to bore me. In the end, I was left with the Slob and Wessels. And then the Slob slouched away too – going home, he said, to fight in the war of independence, which I didn’t believe for a second – and one fine morning, it was just Wessels and me. Hopefully, I put his name on the list, but he refused to go.

  It became a labour of Hercules to sustain my interest in ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’. Not from a lack of material, of which there was a superabundance, but from a fatalistic certainty that it would do no good. Nonetheless, I persevered. Wessels was always taunting me that I would never finish it; and after a while, the urge to frustrate this ill-natured prediction was practically all that kept me going.

  From time to time, I managed a letter to the press. There was a particularly fine one on the absence of rubbish bins in the conurbation – the poor were stealing them, I’d heard, for brewing beer and doing the laundry. I won’t give the letter here, but it made an excellent companion piece to one from years before on the same subject – only then, the absence of bins had been put down to the war against terrorism. There was also a broadside on standard pronunciation, which I fired off the day after we finally saw the back of Darlene (with Spilkin in tow). Showed considerable sensitivity on my part, I thought – the very quality that Merle, of all people, declared I lacked. A Parthian shot over her cardiganed shoulder.

  ‘Where are you off to?’ I asked Spilkin.

  ‘We’ll be aestivating at the coast, in some ravaged urban area or other.’

  Smart Alec. It took me a week to figure it out. I left it off my list of destinations on purpose and sent a spineless question mark traipsing after him.

  *

  ‘You never told us you had a daughter! Or have you been hiding a young wife away from us all these years?’ There was a picture of this ‘relative’ of mine in the sports section, Wessels said. Tilde Tearle. A very athletic young woman, a marathon runner, who always found the energy to smile as she crossed the finishing line in yet another test of endurance.

  How had she come by such a beautiful name? I wondered. Perhaps her mother was Spanish.

  When I made enquiries, she turned out to be a Tilda. Short for Matilda, I presume, and nothing diacritical about it. I might have known it was too good to be true.

  *

  The theme of Merle’s valedictory address was fault-finding. ‘You’re always picking nits, Tearle,’ she said. She had never called me ‘Tearle’ before and I was touched, but she spoilt it by adding, ‘You’re like a dog with a bone, worrying and gnawing, trying to find the weak spot in everything you get your teeth into.’

  ‘It’s my training.’

  ‘But it upsets people so.’

  ‘An occupational hazard.’

  ‘You’ll do what you have to do.’ (As if she was talking to an old dog about new tricks.) ‘But I can’t help thinking you’re a bit of a round peg in a square hole here. You don’t fit in. You should go somewhere else, somewhere you belong. What’s the point of rattling about?’ (I puzzled over that round peg afterwards. Was it a slip of the tongue? Or did she mean that I was out of shape?) ‘If you really must stay to the bitter end, at least you could try not to make the people around you unhappy. Find a little compassion in that hard heart of yours.’ (Hard. Bitter. Dry. Variations on a theme.) ‘Look on the bright side. Open up. Try talking to people properly, instead of playing these silly games.’

  What, I might have asked, had become of the much-vaunted idea of fun? And if she was such an optimist, why was she abandoning ship? I’d have given long odds it was the dirt on the streets, the noise, the creeping decay. And I shouldn’t be surprised if she found the liaison between Spilkin and Darlene distasteful too. But I wasn’t going to pry.

  She gave me her telephone number and said I should ‘call’. Yoo-hoo. Not blinking likely. I did try to give her a peck on the cheek and dealt her instead a nasty blow on the nose with the frame of my spectacles.

  She
became tearful. I remember she opened her bag, which smelt of Zoo biscuits and Gee’s Linctus, and found a handkerchief. While she dabbed at her eyes, I considered the monogram. DG. That would be the late lamented Douglas. He seemed fascinating to me all of a sudden. I should have liked to know more about him. Did he have a moustache? Was he a golfer? What did he do for a living? But I could not pursue this line of questioning because Il Puce was panting foully in my face. She had been carried in especially to make her farewells.

  ‘Say goodbye to Benny.’

  I had to shake the dogsbody by the paw.

  ‘Keep in touch!’

  And that was that.

  With Merle gone, I should have been able to concentrate on my work. I’d always enjoyed her company too much (I don’t mind saying that I’d grown fond of her), and I welcomed the opportunity to find my own way again. But I had lost interest in ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’, the circumstances just weren’t conducive, I was listing on the tide of change, going under, and it was all I could do to send off the occasional letter to the editor, desperate notes that smelt tipsy from having been shut up in the sticky gourd of Wessels’s company, and got short shrift.

  Some time after Merle left, I came across Withering in the paper, I mean William, the botanist, the one who worked on the foxglove, and I had a mind to write to her about it. I looked up her address in the Book. Imagine my chagrin to find it listed as Slvmnte. I thought she’d gone to roost with the bad eggs of Illovo. But Slvmnte? Where the dckns was that?

  My eye roved over the next page or two: Lnehll. Hlfwy Hse. Where Wessels was thinking of retiring to. Qllrna. Sdrrd. Vgnvw. Properly Veganview. Overlooking the fruit and vegetable market, I’ll warrant.

  Where were the vowels? Was this what the drudges meant by ‘vowelence’? The city had been shot full of holes. It was turning into the sort of place a Boguslavić would feel at home in.

  *

  The story remains to be told of the losing battle Erasmus and I fought to keep the Book free of abbreviations. Bones with the marrow sucked out of them. ‘Leave out an “a” here and an “e” there,’ Erasmus warned the bigwigs at Posts and Telecommunications, ‘and you’ll be leaving out half the alphabet in the end.’ And he was right. Someone should find out the meaning of Brnnda and Rwltch, Slvmnte and Wst Prgs, and publish a list for use in emergencies.

  *

  Mrs Mavrokordatos, our oracle, told me to be happy in my misery and apologized about the Star. Subscription cancelled.

  The next morning, there was a sign on the door: Under New Management.

  ‘They should hang one of those on the Houses of Parliament,’ I told Wessels.

  That unstable epoch. Every day brought a new departure, and every other day a new arrival. There was so much coming and going, one could not always tell them apart.

  The New Management called itself Anthony. A manager? That dog in a manger (7)? Before you could whistle, he’d taken out the porcelain urinals and installed industrial troughs made of stainless steel, more fit for hospital laundries and army messes than a café. You’d think he was expecting a corrosive new strain of urine. Handfuls of solid disinfectant were always disintegrating in these troughs, and I made it my business, when I answered the call of nature, to shift the pellets aside hydraulically so that they would not clog the drainage pipes. He wanted to rename the cloakrooms, he already had the little signs – Amadoda and Abafazi – but I wouldn’t stand for it. ‘How on earth will people know which is which?’ I said. ‘We’ll be Ladies and Gentlemen here, thank you very much, so long as even one decent person remains among us.’

  God forbid a stone should be left unturned. The New Management embarked upon its alterations, knocking down walls and blinding windows. I had the devil’s own job saving Alibia. He would have sloshed some Portuguese colour scheme all over it. Our beautiful brocade ended up in the alley, and then on the backs of the Queen of Sheba and her entourage. I arrived one morning to find the door bolted against me: Closed for renovations. That’ll be the day! I banged until he let me in. Place was frightfully full of brick dust, but I took up my post regardless.

  In the new room through the archway, workmen were running wiring through plastic conduits and smoothing plaster with trowels. Wessels said that the New Management was putting in a [Candido] Jacuzzi, place was becoming a fully-fledged bordello, but I could see by the light fittings what was in store. Our numbered days flew apart, rushed to the four corners of a flat world, disappeared down holes.

  ‘Snooker, origins unknown,’ I told the New Management, ‘although one might speculate. In my day, snooker saloons were not frequented by gentlemen, who preferred billiards, from the French billette, diminutive of bille, a tree trunk. But I grant that a certain old-world charm has attached itself to the pastime over the years, what with bowties and embroidered waistcoats. And one does need an eye. In short, I’m prepared to put up with snooker tables.’

  ‘Not snooker, man, pool.’

  ‘Pool! That’s a different ball game altogether. Snooker by numbers. They trick the balls up with digits, for those who are incapable of remembering the value of a colour. That will attract the wrong crowd.’

  Which it did. A sort of gang. The doors had hardly opened on the refashioned Café Europa when Errol and Co ‘rolled up’ and ‘parked off’, as if they were motor vehicles.

  The first thing I noticed about them was their footwear. The boys were shod in tennis shoes with treads like tractors and oversized sandals with soles like the pontoons on a seaplane. The girls, on the other hand, went in for military surplus.

  ‘Bovver boots,’ Wessels said, when I drew his attention to them.

  ‘Bother.’ He also says Smiff. He had a friend of that name in the force, another lid, a Captain Keef Smiff.

  ‘Bovver,’ he insisted. ‘That’s what they calls them.’

  The man’s ineducable. You’d think he was one of the lost generation the television’s always rabbiting on about.

  The other thing one could not fail to notice about Errol and Co was that they were daubed all over with writing: slogans, labels, tattoos. I had made allowances for Bogey’s declamatory clothing because he came from a deprived society, where opportunities for expressing oneself were few and far between. But what excuse could one make for this lot?

  I’d been keeping a list of such things for decades, and trying to search out trends – the names of American colleges, the faces of popular stars, obscene humour – but the practice had become so anarchic, it defied understanding. Most of the slogans were nonsensical. Blue! for example, on a yellow shirt. Aqua. Factory. Sweat. Big shirts with ‘Big Shirt’ printed across them in 72 point Garamond. Baseball caps with ‘Boy’ written on them. Africans do not like being referred to as ‘Boy’, and so I supposed this to be a provocative gesture. But when the girls wore the caps, I wasn’t sure what to think. Is Raylene one of these newfangled ‘gender-blenders’?

  They tried to push me around in the beginning, but I stood up to them. I was never afraid of bullies, as Erasmus at Posts and Telecommunications could testify. I could always get the better of them with words: their nursery language didn’t stand a chance.

  ‘I’ll evaginate you, you over-inflated little windsock,’ I remember saying to Errol the day he tried to occupy table No. 2, whose little perspex signboard now seemed to state, with obvious pathos, that it was a table for two: Wessels and me.

  ‘He chaffs you a cunt,’ Mbongeni said. This one’s claim to fame was the enormous knitted tea cosy he wore upon his head in place of a cap. Stuffed full of hair, unshorn for decades. A religious observance.

  ‘No man, he said you a “windgat”.’

  ‘You twit. You’ve got less gorm than a block of wood.’

  Sheepish laughter. My barbs had struck mutton under their woolly hides. And they respected me for it.

  ‘He’s insulting you,’ said the girl called Nomsa.

  ‘I’ll add injury to insult in a minute. If I were ten years younger, or twenty for th
at matter, I’d give you an astragalus sandwich.’

  ‘I don’t smark aspragalus,’ said Errol.

  ‘Ag, loss the old tawpy. He doesn’t know what goes for what.’

  And they shambled away to the pool table.

  Erasmus, who has been in my thoughts lately, had a conceit about snooker, which influenced my own understanding of the game. The white ball, he said, did all the thinking. It was always pushing the other balls around, especially the red ones, which were not worth much, and making them do things they would not otherwise have done. Yet the most important ball on the table was the black one, which just sat there all day, waiting to get potted.

  I would have shared this with Errol and Co, but it was too grandiose an analogy for pool. I elaborated another instead; it is possible to play the perfect game of pool, to ‘clear the table’, as they say, but it is seldom done because two things get in the way: chance and human error. And it is just the same with proofreading. I never got round to sharing this idea with them either, I never really broke the ice. If I had, all the nastiness that followed might have been averted.

  As for Wessels, he was always too busy watching the proceedings at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa to talk. It was all a bit above his fireplace, he said, but he liked to keep in touch with developments, to be part of history in the making. Giving himself airs.

  ‘I hear they’re thrashing out the future,’ I told him. ‘And I’m behind them all the way. They should not spare the rod.’

  I could see them beating one another senseless with their olive branches.

  ‘Just a sec, Aubs-ss. I’m watching this.’

  Joseph Slovo dancing. A man of his age. And in the Oxford, too.

  I have a high regard for furniture and its place in the scheme of things. But the negotiators, as the talkers were called, were obsessed with it. Specifically with the table. With the comings and goings around it – no one cared a fig for its shape – with coming to it, sitting around it, laying things upon it, leaving it in a huff. They had a thing about the chair too: occupying it, addressing it, rotating it. And then the window! I made a vow: if one more person opens a window of opportunity, I’ll heave a brick through it.