The Restless Supermarket (24 page)

Naturally, there was more to it than her colour. She was
coarse
,
in a raw state, unrefined. She was one of those people who consider it amusing to sneak up behind you and clap their hands over your eyes
–
never mind the greasy fingerprints they leave all over your lenses
–
and you’re supposed to guess who the culprit is. I would not play the game, even though I recognized her at once by her smell: sweat, perfume and cigarette smoke. Always an unsettling combination.

She was barely literate. She kept saying pri-horrity and cre-hative, negoti-hation and reconcili-hation. Some of it was almost Dickensian. ‘I’s allus paid on the werry last Vens’day arternoon of the munt,’ she’d say, and you’d swear some gin-shop red-herring vendor was standing before you rather than a bank teller. She developed a passion for pasticchio nuts. She ordered expressos and blonk da blonks as if they were going out of fashion. And she never shut up for a minute.

I began to mine her, like all the others, for misuse. Considerately, when Spilkin wasn’t around. But she would go and tell him, pleased as punch, that she was going to be
in my book
.
He pretended to be proud of her, but that snout of his was out of joint.

Nevertheless, he chose to show me a ‘love letter’ she had written him on the back of a postcard from the Durban aquarium. Darling My, it began dyslectically. I had the foresight to reconstruct it for my notebook.

Darling
My,

Having a wonderfull time here in Durbs. The family is all fine. But
I can’t stop thinking about you, Sweetie. Its just a natural phenomena.
C U
soon.

PS
please pay the phone bill, I forgot!!!

Chow for
now,

Your darling Darlene

The telephone account was included. An address in Bezuidenhout Valley. I returned the card and the account to their envelope, and Spilkin put it away in a folder. He had some other papers there, which he rummaged through, and for a moment I thought he was going to inflict his reply upon me too. I could just imagine: My fuliginous darling, my sooty beauty, my dirty sweep. But he thought better of
it.

Her letter was the last straw. He found it charmingly innocent and endearing, but I was mortified. It was so tasteless. Not just the fact that she was taking advantage again, but the babyish hand, the tone, the excess of exclamation marks. It changed my opinion of Spilkin irrevocably. The forgivable weaknesses, the hairline cracks that had been there all along, suddenly yawned wide to swallow my good estimation of him. But I couldn’t help thinking that her coarseness had rubbed off on him, that close association had roughened him up, and so I refused to give
in.

I raised my concerns with him tactfully. Could he really afford the little wax-paper packets of nuts he was required to bring her every other day, as if she were a squirrel? Wasn’t it possible that she was using him? Couldn’t he see that they had different standards of behaviour, different systems of pronunciation, different grazing habits? (I never said a word about her colour.)

But none of it did any good. He was blind to her flaws, and my observations merely annoyed him. I knew from experience how an error that was glaringly obvious to everyone else could continue to evade the best of proofreaders. He would look past it again and again.

Spilkin and I ended up shouting at one another more than once, thanks to her sheer stupidity. Memorably when she tore half my crossword out of the newspaper on the back of a recipe for pickled fish. It reminded me, ironically, of something Spilkin used to say when we still saw eye to eye: ‘There was always a crossword between us, Tearle, but never a cross word.’

Spilkin across and Darlene down. Darlene across and Spilkin down? I still haven’t found the words.

*

Our Eveready was a waiter of the old school, trained in the beachfront hotels of Durban by a Hindu master. In his spare time, he had a church of his own, with headquarters at his kraal in Zululand, and he was the archbishop. He did not like bacon, although he would serve it up grudgingly. But he resolutely refused to tender alcohol. It was against the commandments of his church, which he himself had brought down from the top of a mine-dump on the East Rand. Seeing that the sale of alcoholic beverages made up a growing proportion of the Café’s earnings, it was not long before Eveready’s conscientious abstention proved inconvenient to Mrs Mavrokordatos.

Then there was a raid by the Hillbrow police, all the bottles on the premises were confiscated, and Eveready abruptly left Mrs Mavrokordatos’s employ. She said he had taken early retirement. But Wessels, who witnessed the sorry scene, said the poor fellow had been dismissed, protesting his innocence to the last, on suspicion of having tipped off the police about our proprietress’s liquor sales. After that, some of the policemen who had conducted the raid would pop in occasionally, and chat with Mrs Mavrokordatos in a corner, or drop a few coins in the fruit machines. Wessels recognized some of them from his days on the force, but did not let on because they were working undercover. Quote unquote.

Eveready’s replacement was a native of Soweto. Name of Vest. Waistcoat, I dubbed him. He had none of his predecessor’s antipathy to alcohol. The more people drank, he told me, the more likely they were to make mistakes with their money or drop their change. He was a bad apple all right. Standards of service went into immediate decline. The waiters were always searching under the tables for some drunkard’s pennies
–
when they weren’t watching television, that
is.

The standards plumbed new depths (long since superseded) on the day Nelson ‘The Madiba’ Mandela was released from prison. You couldn’t get a pot of tea for love or money, because the waiters would not be dragged away from the screen. The kitchen staff, including several we had never seen before, trooped through in their aprons and shower-caps, and created quite a carnival atmosphere. The whole business went on for hours; it must have been four o’clock before he finally showed his face, and I had a feeling they’d been delaying deliberately, playing to the gallery. Now you see him, now you don’t. Some of the resident courtesans had been lifting their elbows all day, and when they finally clapped eyes on him, they began to weep, from sheer relief. Darlene, too. You never heard such a racket. Ululation and whatnot. Everyone wanted to get in on the act. Then they all stood to attention, waiters, cooks, bottle-washers, baggages, with their curled-up fists in the air, and sang the plaintive gobbledygook of their anthem. Vest had his pen in his fist and his order book under his arm. You could have waited till doomsday without attracting a waiter’s attention. In the end, Mrs Mavrokordatos had to fetch me a pot of tea herself, like a common serving girl. By which time I needed something stronger to steady my nerves.

*

First impressions? I was pleased to see that The Madiba was just another old party with spectacles, like myself, although he had rather more hair than was seemly. That aside, he was straight as a ruler, smart as a pin, not unreasonably black. The prison authorities had given him
a finely tailored suit to step out in
–
but they might have spent the money more profitably on an eye test.
D
ip
e
ach
f
rog,
p
our
o
ver
t
he
e
gg
c
ustard, and so on. He could hardly see with the spectacles he had, even after his
wife had huffed on the lenses as if she meant to make a meal of them. They kept sliding down on his nose when he tried to read his speech.

‘Needs a new prescription,’ Spilkin said. ‘Myopic.’

I wrote a letter about it afterwards to the
Star
,
starting with the etymology: from the Greek
muops
(
muo
shut +
ops
eye). Shut-eye. Then a little joke about needing forty winks. Presented my credentials as something of an expert on eyewear. Thought of giving Spilkin a nod, decided against. Didn’t deserve it. Took the opportunity to comment on the lack of vision displayed by Mr Etcetera during his first speech to the masses. Behind my jocular tone was a serious point. The Madiba had been out of circulation, so to speak, for nearly thirty years. He could scarcely have a clear-sighted view of world affairs. How much more important, then, that further obstacles not be put in his way. Surely people realized that the lack of appropriate lenses might lead to serious errors of judgement; a single word misread
–
‘suspicious’ for ‘auspicious’, say, or ‘congenital’ for ‘congenial’, or ‘treasonable’ for ‘reasonable’
–
might plunge the country into crisis. As it was, there were several elementary grammatical errors in the speech (which I was pleased to correct for the benefit of the newspaper’s readers).

My letter came back unread: I could tell by the crispness of the folds in the paper that it had not received due consideration. That short-sighted letters editor had decided criticism was premature. It was the first sign that people like us would no longer have a
say.

Why were standards falling fastest in those areas where examples should be set
–
in the public service, in the press, in broadcasting? It was thanks to shoddy pronunciation that I misapprehended The Madiba’s name. Spilkin had to set me right: not Conrad Mandela, but
Comrade
.
And then he went and told the story to everyone who would listen. Darlene, who would have been well-advised to keep her trap shut, said it was amazing how the very people who thought they knew everything about the world knew nothing about their own country. ‘You whites,’ she said, and it struck me as odd, with Spilkin sitting there as large as
life.

*

The most beautiful and mysterious of all the proofreader’s charms is the delete mark:
.

Its origins are obscure. Debra Nitsch traces it back to the scribes and clerks, which is not inconceivable. But she is surely being whimsical when she sees in the mark the little gilded halo, complete with handle, found in engravings of medieval morality plays. And her story about the snuffer is pure conjecture.

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.