‘There’ll be no silverware for you,’ I said, ‘if you don’t know your Onions.’ I’d been saving the joke for later, during my speech, but it slipped out now, as if Wessels had poked me in the ribs.
No one laughed.
Once when Spilkin was doing the crossword, he’d got stuck on: O--o--. Authority on English language (6). Naturally I suggested Onions, thinking they had Charles Talbut in mind. Talk about throwing a spilkin in the works. They were looking for ‘Oxford’!
Excuse me, back in a tick.
My legs felt wobbly. What a scrape I’d got myself into. And even though I’d managed to come out of it with my dignity unsullied, I saw afterwards that it was the turning point of the evening. From that moment on, it was downhill all the way. It was as if they’d sensed some weakness in my character, caught a whiff of blood on the breeze, and that gave them the courage to turn on me. Like the herd on the old bull elephant.
*
The Gentlemen’s room smelt of Jeyes Fluid. I took off my spectacles and splashed water over my head. My excrescences were acting up – the eight o’clock occipital had begun to throb and its companion at nine was itching sympathetically. In the frosted glass of the window, behind which my precious copies dangled over the abyss, the familiar pattern of light appeared, like a pelt stretched to dry. Tan me hide when I’m dead, Fred. The paper-towel dispenser was empty and I had to mop my head with my handkerchief. So we tanned his hide when he died, Clyde. What do you call a boy who’s been mauled by a lion? Claude. One of Merle’s games. I felt queasy. I went into the cubicle to suck a mint. The lock had been jemmied, and I wedged the door closed with a cigarette box from the floor. On the back of the door was a childish drawing of genitalia, male and female, labelled ‘Supply’ and ‘Demand’. I could imagine them as two painted signs: Adam and Eve, Jack and Jill, Mickey and Minnie. Or pinned to the notice boards in the public library. What do you call a boy with a car on his head? Jack.
A scrap of melody with its agmas in tatters bowled along the horizon of hearing … tumblin’ along, like a tumblin’ tumbleweed … and disappeared into a merciful silence.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to take a short break. We’ll see you in ten minutes.’
Machines must be weary.
I sat down on the throne to compose myself. The King of the Elves. Glancing to one side, I saw that someone had bored a hole clean through the chipboard panelling. What would the vandals think of next? Putting my tireless right to the hole, I discovered that it afforded nothing but an unobstructed view of the urinal. Honestly, I was thinking to myself, of all the senseless – when Hunky Dory came in to relieve himself and made the purpose of the hole apparent. Thank God he didn’t see me.
*
Once the neck oil had been broached, there was no stopping them. They wanted to sample every bottle on the shelves. BYOB went by the board. Put it on the tab, they said, devil-may-care, and Tone obliged hopelessly. Errol made his selections with the tip of his pool cue and potted the stoppers off the end of the counter into the waste-paper basket to demonstrate that they would not be needed again. Bokma. Gestookt, it said. Bärenjäger honey liqueur, with a plastic bee stuck to the label. Moringué. Made of peanuts.
Wessels came hobbling at the first pop and pronounced the Friesian genever the best thing he’d ever tasted. It wasn’t long before everyone wanted to join in. Mevrouw Bonsma ordered Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and Errol made it a round for the company. The stuff tasted of chocolate.
Tone put a brave face on it. He unsealed concoctions even the Bogeymen had declined to consume and mixed up a cocktail called an Exploding Rainbow. Like a chameleon in a paintbox (punchlines, Wessels). Errol drank it down in a gulp.
I’d never seen such drinking in all my days. It was inhuman. And they would keep forcing one to join in, practically pouring the liquor down one’s throat. When one was upset too, what with the shock of Merle’s death and the closing down of the Café to deal with.
*
‘Howzit Phil.’ It was Huge, in the vernacular. ‘What you got there?’
‘This is a dictionary. The Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English. The words of a language with their meaning and usage. Mausoleum ~ mean ~ mean ~ mechanical.’
‘Come again?’
‘Do you know that you’re in here?’ I asked, thumbing. ‘See: Huge. Adjective. Very large. Huge mountain, rat, difference.’
‘It’s not “Huge”, man, it’s “Eug”. E-U-G. For Eugene. How’s your mind?’
*
Wessels had crept closer to eavesdrop on my discussion with Bogey. I could practically hear his ears flapping.
‘Apartheid is yesterday,’ Bogey was saying. ‘But things of apartheid is today. Many things, rememborabilia … benches, papers, houses.’
He pressed a business card into my hand. Dan Boguslavić. Apartheid memorabilia. Import/export. The postal address was in Rndbrg. He made me look at his catalogue, eight glossy pages smelling of fresh ink. Ostrich eggs with paintings on them: Sharpeville Massacre. District Six, Forced Removals. Student Uprising, 1976. Stephen Bantu Biko. I thought ‘Bantu’ was outré? It didn’t end with eggs, either. There were all sorts of things for sale. Benches, whites only. Easy to assemble. Blankets, prison, grey. Books, reference.
‘People will hardly be interested in this old junk.’
‘Wakey-wakey, Aubrey. Is same in Germany now. Uniforms and hats is coming very strong.’
‘It’ll be Yugoslavia next.’
‘Bingo. Is exactly so. Major turnover is rubble.’
As if I couldn’t see the fresh produce sprouting from his pockets.
‘What’s with the veggies?’ Wessels said, sotto voce, the voice of the sot, canny as ever.
‘Is help for keep mout’ busy. I am give up smoking an’ stress like mad.’
In the pool room, Raylene was dabbing the end of her cue with a block of chalk. She must have felt my eyes upon her, because she glanced up and showed me the blue-smudged tip of her finger. Quite friendly, despite the muscles. There was Errol, bent over the table, with his bottom lip almost touching the cue. Full of himself, slopping over, dripping from that fleshy spout. And there was the improvable girl, drinking beer again and blowing smoke through her nose as awkwardly as a child who has stolen a cigarette from her mother’s handbag.
‘Quite a jôl, hey Aubs? And you said it would be a damp squid.’
Empty Wessels, the echo chamber, my incontinent, uncontinental china. He should be in Bogey’s catalogue amongst the novelty items.
‘You’ve certainly invited a crowd.’
The place was filling up. People who’d never set foot in the Café Europa before, by the look of them. You’d have thought it was a free-for-all. I’d half expected this to happen: chaos had been let loose everywhere and it was even worse during the festive season. Why should tonight be any different? And yet I’d hoped against hope for something fitting.
‘Maybe they coming for the cham-poing-ships.’
‘Buzz off, you jamjar. You urn.’
‘Come, Mr Tearle,’ said Hunky. ‘You mustn’t let him push your buttons.’
*
‘What you call this spot again?’
‘Alibia.’
‘Isn’t that where old Gadaffi hangs out?’
‘You’re thinking of Libya, Floyd. This is A-libia.’
‘Pull the other one, Mr T. I can check it’s only Cape Town.’
‘What an absurd idea.’
‘Look. Here’s Khayelitsha.’
*
Elements, quinary. The digits: thumb and fingers (fore, middle, ring and little). Away with pinkie! To the market with him! To the nursery! The excrescences: occipital (three o’clock, eight o’clock, nine) and cranial (half past five and twelve on the dot). The vowels: a, e, i, o and u. The violences: train, bus, taxi, car and pedestrian.
From the balcony, we watched people gathering in the streets, clustering and parting, drinking from bottles and whooping like Red Ind
ians, rushing this way and that as firecrackers went off at their feet. Some of the fireworks were as loud as bombs. ‘Thunderflashes,’ Wessels said. ‘Used them on manoeuvres at the Battle School in Luhatla.’
A beer bottle exploded on the tar. One of the tribe of Merope had lobbed it from a window in the High Point Centre.
‘This is nothing,’ Floyd said. ‘Just wait till tomorrow night, then you’ll see sports. Last Old Year’s, someone chucked a fridge from the top of Ponte. It was cool. It landed on a minibus.’
The most dangerous missile that had been launched inside the Café Europa so far was a Cheese Snack.
The taxis: PNK497T To Gether As One … NGV275T The White Eagle … HJS046T Step by Step … MNN391T My Business Is My Parent … LTT843T The Young and the Restless.
A window shattered high above in the darkness and guillotines of glass sheared down. Some of the rabble-rousers swaggered around in the dangerous air, others dashed for the shelter of the verandahs. More and more of them came up the escalator. Errol didn’t seem to be taking his duties as commissionaire too seriously.
‘Who are all these people?’ Wessels kept asking. ‘It’s only half past nine.’
‘You should know. You invited them.’
A horde of Olé ’Enries stampeded in. Mimicking the unsporting frenzy of exultation into which their heroes, the football players, would fly whenever one of them scored a goal, they hurled themselves to the floor between the tables and slid along on their bellies like toboggans, clearly as impervious to carpet as to grass burns. There must be new varieties of both, quite unlike those I knew in my youth.
The ‘Open Door Policy’ always gives me a chill – you can feel the draught blowing through. I’m for ‘Right of Admission Reserved’.
I should have stayed at home.
*
‘Don’t get me wrong, Hunky. I dig your sound. Reminds me of old Felonious Monk, the musical Rasputin. But take it from me, you would be more of a hit, you would be further in, if you had a daft hairstyle. Say a bun like the Bonsma. And you must write your name on the side of the big bass drum.’
‘Ja, but I don’t have a drum. I told you, my drummer left me.’
‘I’m sorry, I clean forgot.’
His drummer left him. Can you imagine anything more pathetic?
The brushcut, the moptop, and now these besoms and feather dusters. It’s no wonder they can’t find jobs.
*
‘He had his moments. I remember once he tried to persuade us that the word “robot” was pronounced “reau-beau”. Said it was from the French.’
‘Don’t go spreading lies about me among the rowdies. I know exactly where the word comes from. It was invented by a Czechoslovakian called Capek. Pronounced ’
It should have been easy to turn the tables on them. But even as I was speaking, I could hear that I sounded ridiculous.
Spilkin said: ‘Tsk tsk tsk. Pronounced cha-cha-cha.’
Hoots of laughter.
Next thing, he’d be introducing them to Conrad Mandela.
*
‘You’re on my spot,’ Mevrouw Bonsma said. ‘My piano used to stand right here, believe it or not.’
For old times’ sake, Hunky surrendered the keyboard to her. It could produce a sound reminiscent of the piano, had she wished to perform one of her old standards, but she plunged instead into a new repertoire. He adjusted the keyboard so that it twanged like a banjo, and she played one of the less maudlin Cape coloured folk songs – ‘Daar Kom die Ali Baba.’ Darlene put her up to it. The two of them were getting along like a shack on fire. Then it was some ‘soul’ music, which indeed made one want to give up the ghost, and a Croatian ballad left behind by the Bogeymen. Musical mayhem.
I was disappointed in Mevrouw Bonsma. She was cultivated in her own way, and what she lacked in sophistication she had always made good with a certain rustic charm. But this was uncalled for. Had my first impressions of her promiscuous excess been right after all? What did she hope to achieve by making a spectacle of herself? Some spurious popularity among hoi polloi? Did she miss the applause so much?
Someone called for a duet and Mevrouw Bonsma promptly assented. She played ‘The Bluebird of Happiness’ while Hunky twiddled the knobs to make the oscillator hum. She stood on her toes and swayed like a moored blimp. He waggled his head from side to side like a dog with a bone in its jaws. The machinery barked and bayed. I hardly wanted to think about the havoc this discord must be invoking in the spirits of the listeners. I myself was feeling strangely disconnected.
‘Anything from the bar?’
‘Whiskey please.’
‘With an e. As in Tearle.’
‘I’ll have a Flight of the Fish Eagle and Tab.’
‘Are you watching your cholesterol?’
Fish Eagle, Famous Grouse, Cold Duck. Birds of a feather. The Bluebird of Happiness alighted upon the ‘national anthem’. Everyone sang along and beat time on the furniture. Not that I cared. It was all bound for the auctioneers anyway.
‘We’re like the United Nations,’ Darlene said.
‘Amen.’ And then Spilkin’s distasteful joke about Eveready and Mevrouw Bonsma, which I had not thought about for years, came into my mind.
‘What a face,’ Nomsa said, jiggling on Wessels’s knee. ‘You’re so straight.’
‘I refute that. I’m as cryptic as the next man.’
‘He’s not straight at all,’ Wessels put in, ‘he’s completely bent.’
Spilkin came back with the drinks.
Bouncing up and down on the furniture had given Nomsa the idea for musical chairs. In a moment, a space had been cleared and some chairs arranged in ranks (I clung to mine like a leech). It was all just an excuse to be loud and reckless, to laugh like striped hyenas, to bump their bodies together. Wessels loved every minute of it; he always managed to fling himself down so that one of the girls would sit on him. The chairs would soon have been reduced to matchwood, had the New Management not pulled the plug. They gave Mevrouw Bonsma a special hand. Scattered applause, like chapters closing. Hunky Dory announced that he would be taking a slightly longer break than usual to eat his dinner. Once fortified, he promised, he would ‘rock on’ into the small hours. I saw no reason why the machines should not keep themselves occupied in his absence, but it was a welcome respite.
With that, the New Management unveiled the eats.
*
‘Five-finger exercises, that’s what the doctor ordered, digital gymnastics.’ I was working my way round to the lexical version.
‘Hip hop like sucks.’
‘English please, Dory.’
‘Later, man. I’m trying to chow, if you don’t mind.’
So I was unable to discuss the etymologies of ‘woofer’ and ‘tweeter’, which his performance had revealed to me.
Chow. For now. In the scramble at the buffet table, I bumped into Herr Toppelmann, another gatecrasher. He had brought a barrel of dill pickles as a donation, and urged me to try them. But by the time I got to the front, there was nothing left but buffalo wings and tinker toys. Blocks of Gouda, cross-sections of red-skinned wiener sausages and green cocktail onions, skewered on toothpicks like little models of traffic lights. Reau-beaus.
*
Chairs had been dragged to tables and a few ragged circles constituted. The old faces and old bodies jumbled up with Errol and Co, higgledy-piggledy. ‘In utter confusion.’ Probably with reference to the irregular herding together of pigs, from the Latin porcus. With their snouts in their paper plates. I’d expected someone to turn on the telly, so that the silence might be filled up with chatter, but they were all too busy stuffing themselves. For a while you could hear nothing in the Café but an oceanic murmur of snorting and snuffling, in which the sounds from the street – hooters, curses, catcalls, explosions, drunken choruses – were presently submerged.
I looked in on Alibia, where it was still broad daylight, where this evening had not yet begun, and made straight for St Cloud’s Squa
re to buy a buttonhole for the long-awaited dinner. Perhaps I should splash out on a bottle of champagne, I was thinking, and pop the question along with the cork? My old friend Munnery hailed me from the other side of the canal: ‘Big night tonight, Tearle. Don’t forget the chestnuts.’
Should I present ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ now? As a prelude to my announcement, I cleaned my spectacles. When I put them back on again, I noticed the plastic No. 2 still standing to attention beside the sugar pot, and it brought a lump to my throat. I am generally a tough customer. As if to remind me of this fact, a girl with a silver boater on the back of her head took one of the sugar sachets from the pot, opened it with her teeth, and poured the contents into the pocket of Patronymić’s jacket.
The gobbling rose, and fell, and ebbed away. As the plates emptied, and the realization that they were still hungry began to creep up on the grazers, the mood of disappointment grew. They were still hungry. It made them bloody-minded.
‘Just like old times, hey?’ Wessels smirked.
‘Not exactly. We were a quieter lot.’
‘You wouldn’t shut up for a minute,’ Darlene said.
I addressed Spilkin over her head. ‘We got on splendidly in the beginning, before all this other nonsense started.’
‘What nonsense would that be, Aubrey? Bad table manners? Talking with your mouth full?’
‘This perpetual discord.’
‘I think it’s quite peaceful around here, all things considered.’
‘Even you and I had our differences. But we always patched them up, because we had so much in common to start with.’
‘I wouldn’t say that. We shared a couple of interests, but we were worlds apart as people.’
‘Do you really think so?’
‘You’re totally verkramp, for one thing,’ Darlene put in her five cents’ worth.
I’d heard the Afrikanerism before. There was silence for a moment, a true silence, round and hollow, as her words sank in, and then the grunting and grinding rose up in it like backwash in a blowhole. Greasy lips, crumbs of food in the corners of mouths, flies and fever blisters, morsels spilled on the tables, gristle, grubs.
The Restless Supermarket Page 27
