The Restless Supermarket (32 page)

His colleagues shared these frustrations. First Munnery, and then Figg, and then all the others began to create their own amusements
–
which they passed off as ‘improvements’. In certain areas of Alibian life, they said, there was simply no point in returning to the past. Levitas, for instance, redesigned the Alibian Alps to allow for more pleasant skiing in the foothills and more hazardous climbing on the peaks. He put the General Hospital up on the snowline where the air was more salubrious, and he put the Hotel Grande down on the beachfront, with its wings stacked one on top of the other, so that every room had a sea view, and he gave it a casino and a Ferris wheel and a miniature golf course, because he himself was fond of simple pleasures. The people of Alibia were so grateful for these alterations that Banes, intent on eclipsing the example of his colleague, embarked on a public-spirited campaign of his own. He reappropriated mansions for the homeless, he reassembled the Royal Alibian Golf Course in the wilderness (Munnery was allowed to keep the eighteenth), he reunited families who had been separated by the upheavals. These acts made Banes something of a hero to the lost and the loveless, to widows and orphans, to the homeless and the unemployed.

Experience taught them that nothing is perfect. They reconciled themselves to the errors of judgement and perception that beset the best-planned operations. It rained loafs from Buurman’s Bakery and fishes from the munchipal reservior. The streets were littered with crutchers, rhinocerous products, muslin fundamentalists, celeried employees and their pardners, bonsai boababs, dawgs.

When the waste material piled up, they called for Fluxman. It was enough to make him feel like a street sweeper.

*

In time, everything was returned to its proper place, which sometimes was not the place it had started out, but the place it deserved to
end.

Alibia basked in its imperfect glory. Even the Members of the Society
–
Fluxman aside
–
had come to consider one error in five pages acceptable. Who would notice the odd waterfall flowing upwards to its source, the icicles on the fronds of the palms, the gondolas marooned in a stream of concrete? Who would begrudge such flaws, or even perceive them, when there was a promenade beside the sea, a bandstand in the park made for old-fashioned melodies, a tavern at the end of a fogbound wynd? The bells of St Cloud’s rebuked the faithless on the hour, the waves kept beating against the quays, the metronome of a searchlight kept time in the absence of the
sun.

When peace had been restored, the City Fathers afforded the heroes a victory parade, the grandest that had ever been seen, proceeding now on foot through the streets in a blizzard of ticker-tape, now on barges down the river, and now on sleighs across the frozen canals, and arriving finally at the triumphal arch through which they all passed, first the heroes and then those who had come to honour them, vanishing as they went, drawing the offspring of error after them, and abandoning the city to a state of flawed completion.

All except Fluxman, that is, who came behind in his dignified way, sweeping the last of the delenda up from the gutters with his hoop and stuffing them into his bag. When the streets were clean, he went down to the white beach in front of the casino, where his coracle was moored, rowed out into the bay, and emptied the bag into the water.

–
St Matthew 23:24

Minute Print made me twelve photostatic copies of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’. For the Last Finger Supper. Cost me a packet, but one had to be prepared, one never knew what would happen. How many guests were we expecting? Wessels wouldn’t say. My budget stretched to a round dozen. I bound the copies with rubber bands and wrapped them in a plastic bag courtesy of the Okay Bazaars. Then I bore them to the Café Europa in my briefcase, pressed back into service specifically for this purpose.

In the bag I also carried the eighth edition of the
Concise Oxford Dictionary
,
‘the New Edition for the 1990s’, scarcely opened, edited by R.E. Allen, and proofread, hallelujah, honorifics in the original, by Mrs Deirdre Arnold, Mr Morris Carmichael, Mrs Jessica Harrison, Mr Keith Harrison, Ms Georgia Hole, Ms Helen Kemp, Ms E. McIlvanney, Dr Bernadette Paton, Mr Gerard O’Reilly, Ms J. Thompson, Dr Freda Thornton, Mr Anthony Toyne, and Mr George Tulloch, amongst others. (Thirteen, if you didn’t count the et alii. Was it wise, I wonder, to choose an unlucky number? Was it wise at all to employ a
team
?
And eight of them women.) The eighth edition of the
Concise
was the current one. I do not care much for currency, but something told me the night would hold surprises it might be useful to define. And if the opportunity to administer a sample of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ arose, if it actually came to that, I would present the volume as a prize. The floating trophy would have to wait for the first fully-fledged competition.

The New Management was amusing itself in the pool room, stringing crinkle-paper decorations of its own manufacture, and I was able to march straight into the Gentlemen’s room and lock the door behind me. The little window opened onto a dirty grey well, veined with pipes for power and plumbing. I secured the plastic bag to a downpipe on the outside wall and closed the window again. The
Concise
I secreted on top of the cistern in the cubicle. Then I went home to freshen
up.

*

When I set out for the Goodbye Bash a few hours later, I carried in the pockets of my blazer the original copy of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’, twelve sharpened pencils (pointing due south in the interests of safety), a sharpener, my current notebook and the
Pocket Oxford Dictionary
,
in its berth over my heart. The particoloured tops of the Faber-Castells jutting from my breast pocket made me feel like a general.

I once read a newspaper article in which some so-called celebrities were asked what book they would take with them to a desert island. A surprising number, given the godless times we live in, said the Holy Bible. And several, including a star of pornographic films, chose the complete works of the Bard. But not one had the
Condensed Oxford Dictionary
,
which was my choice, doubly sealed by the little magnifying glass in its velvet pouch, so useful for making fire. Much has changed since then. What would I choose today? My bosom friend the
Pocket
.

As I made my way to the Café Europa for the last time, I turned a few heads, I think I can say without exaggeration. A smartly pressed pair of flannels is not an everyday sight on the streets of the Golden City
–
Grubbier Johannesburg, to quote my pal Wessels.

There was an air of expectancy in the dusk, along with the volatile essence of newsprint and exhaust fumes. Luminous dabs of tail-lights glimmered and died on the smoky canvas of the street. Shop windows frosted with shoewhite and dusted with detergent snowflakes were aglow like nativities in the cathedral of the gathering darkness: the ruins of our grey Christmas. The new year in the offing was black as pitch. It made one want to hurry on to some place bursting with light.

Who should totter out of the shadows but Mrs Hay. The first of the old bodies. I knew her at once by the sticking-plaster sutures: keeping up appearances. She tried to clasp me to her breast, like a long-lost missal or a pint of gin, but I fended her off with my elbows.

‘So, what are the portents?’ I asked, being friendly.

‘Excellent, Aubrey. We’re going to give you a wonderful send-off.’

Silly old bat. You’d think it was a farewell do for
me.

We ascended in Indian file, nostalgically and irritably respectively. The Café Europa was dark. I could barely make out the sign on the door: Private Function
–
Members Only. We stepped into the coffee-stained hush. Paper chains strung from the ceiling, and looped over one another, sketched a series of vaults upon the twilight above. A red light winking in the far corner indicated Hunky Dory’s laboratory; the pink glow in the chapel came from the ‘fruit machines’ (when Mrs Mavrokordatos first mentioned these, I thought she meant the juice dispensers one finds in cinema foyers). Washes of cherry skin and strawberry juice. Otherwise dark and empty. Never be the first to arrive or the last to leave.

Mrs Hay headed for the Ladies’ room to fix her face. I went towards table No. 2. But as I drew closer, I saw that it was already occupied. Pipped at the post again … by Spilkin and Darlene! What with his suntan and her natural shade, which had always tended to powdery shale, they were almost invisible against the Alibian sandstone.

*

‘Care to join
us?’

I drew up my usual
seat.

They were sitting with the armrests of their chairs pushed together, their temples touching. Her head in silhouette was swollen and empty at the same time, gaping over his own hard nut as if it were an ingestible morsel. On the table stood a bottle
–
I couldn’t make out the label in the gloom
–
and two glasses.

He looked older and wearier. The eyebrows were shrubby, the eyelids sagging. Subocular luggage (punchlines, Spilkin). I refused to focus on her, but even from the corner of my eye, I could see that she was just the same, and it made the change in him all the more regrettable.

‘Long time no see,’ he
said.

I would have expected the pidgin to come from her mouth rather than his. It struck me dumb. A nonsensical phrase sing-songed through my mind:
wena
something or other. Eveready had written it down for me one day, his contribution to my notebook, but I’d forgotten the translation. Was it Psalm 23 in the isiZulu? Spilkin’s hand felt puffy and damp. Chop-chop, chop-chop. I forced the melody to be quiet and enquired instead:

‘Still living in Durban?’

‘No, we’re up here again.’

‘Back at the Flamingo?’

‘No, in Bez Valley with the in-laws.’

‘How do you find it? I mean Johannesburg.’

‘Turn right at Vereeniging. No seriously, it’s dreadful. Full of madmen. They’ve gone and changed the typeface in the
Star
again to something illegible. How’re the peepers, by the
way?’

‘Like a hawk.’ I gave him a verse of the old rhyme
–
the
E
lephant variation.

‘Monoblepsia playing up at
all?’

‘No way, José.’ Mexican rhyming slang courtesy of Errol and Co. I thought he might appreciate
it.

It was almost like old times. If one paid no attention to the wardrobe, that is. Spilkin was wearing blue-denim breeches
–
Wessels would say ‘a jean’
–
and a turtleneck sweater. Pork dressed as piglet. Everybody’s Darling, coming insistently into focus as my eyes grew used to the light, was got up like the Rain Queen. Enough linen in her turban to make a yurt, a dress full of darts and flounces. The cloth was so loud it made my ears hurt, banana yellow, predominantly, and garish beadwork. I greeted her civilly, still prepared to let bygones be bygones, but she was as rude as ever. That bloody mouth of hers opened like a wound in the gloaming.

‘Talk about African time. They said six-thirty for seven, and it’s just us two. Or should I say three. Where is everyone?’

As if in answer to her question, the lights went on and the room leapt into view. Those must be the eats, under a shroud. Paper chains overhead. ‘Seasons Greetings’ on the wall by the Gentlemen’s
room.

Then a fuss at the door. It was Mevrouw Bonsma, in full costume, on the arm of the New Management. If Darlene was got up like a bedouin tent, Mevrouw Bonsma was a big top, extravagantly striped, sequinned and fringed. Several of her garments appeared to be inside out. On her thick coiffure lay a tinny tiara like a mislaid cookie cutter. What was happening to the women? You’d think Boswell Wilkie’s circus was in
town.

‘Look who’s here!’

‘Spilkijn!’

‘Mevrouw!’

‘What a surprising development!’

Mevrouw Bonsma billowed about in the doorway. The New Management dragged her over to our table, like a hot-air balloon harnessed to a pony, and wedged her in a chair. She began to
gush.

‘You don’t look a day older,’ I was able to say in all honesty (one reaches a point of decrepitude beyond which the day-to-day ravages are scarcely perceptible).

*

When the fuss had spent itself, Mevrouw Bonsma looked me over from toe to top. Her eyes came to rest on my summit. I was gazing at the confection, and so we remained for a moment in puzzled symmetry, transfixed by the tops of one another’s heads.

‘I like the new look, Tearle,’ she crackled.

I’d invented the hairstyle myself that morning, but I wasn’t sure whether to own up or not. Would it look cheap?

I’ve been cutting my own hair in my retirement. Editing the end matter, as I think of it. I last tried the professionals some years ago, around the time I met Merle. ‘Hair Affair’ was up an escalator, which gave me false hopes of privacy. The ‘hairstylist’ was an extremely garrulous woman: while I waited for her to finish off the previous customer, I established that she was a Czechoslovak, a Jehovah’s Witness, a Free Marketeer. I should have made my escape at once, but morbid fascination kept me pinned. When my turn finally came, don’t think she didn’t want to shampoo me right there in front of the windows. I’d been worrying that she might nick one of my excrescences with her scissors while she was railing against the bolshie bigwigs of the home country, but this was an entirely unexpected threat. I made myself scarce, and I’ve been doing my own barbering ever since.

Mevrouw Bonsma’s bun looked harder and shinier than before. The sight of it reminded me how Spilkin and I had behaved when we first made her acquaintance. An unholy triangle, which Merle’s arrival had restored to equilibrium. Now there were four of us again
–
except that Darlene was in Merle’s place. It made a mockery of quadruplicity. I couldn’t wait for Merle to arrive
–
even a pentagon would be better than
this.

I enquired after Mevrouw Bonsma’s welfare to get the conversational ball rolling, but it trundled no further than the next sticky pause. She was doing a bit of teaching, she said, it was surprising how many of the underprivileged were interested in music. And playing a bit of bridge.

*

Punctuality is not the least of the devalued virtues. To pass the time, until the rest of the company ‘rocked up’ (Darlene), I suggested that Mevrouw Bonsma and I pay our respects to the buffet, which was lying in state under netting. We were welcome to look, but there would be no tasting until the New Management gave the signal. As he explained it, the success of the Bash hinged on the timing of the moment at which eating was introduced into the general course of drinking. Too early, and it would prevent the pot from coming to the boil; too late, and the pot might boil over and extinguish the fire. The bar was open, though. Any orders? Strictly cash. Or could he open a bottle on our behalf? Corkage waived.

What we could see of the feast through the camouflage net looked unbalanced, nutritionally speaking, and so unappetizing that safety measures hardly seemed necessary. The inevitable poultry, hacked into pieces, packets of Knick-Knacks, stacks of Sesamemates (apparently one needed to be on friendly terms with the food before one consumed it), swatches of sweat-beaded sweetmilk, jaundiced dips, lettuce.

‘And what are these?’

‘Buffalo wings.’

‘If buffaloes had wings, Mevrouw, they would certainly be a great deal bigger than this.’

‘If pigs had wings, they would taste like bacon.’

Where had she come by that? Sounded like a Wesselism. Could they have been seeing one another on the sly? He couldn’t possibly be taking piano lessons. Rummy more likely, or bumblepuppy.

I remembered fondly the spread Mrs Mavrokordatos had promised for the inaugural championships. ‘Mrs Mavrokordatos would have given us a good square meal. And if not that, then a smorgasbord.’ As it was, there was not a
smorgas
in sight, just these tubs of yellow margarine. Cheddar and Melrose wedges.

A rubbery nose nuzzled my hand. It proved to be Wessels, snuffling at me with the stopper on the end of his crutch. That fat nincompoop was so excited he could hardly contain himself.

‘Is everythink to taste?’ He poked the forbidden food with his finger. And then suddenly, improbably, as if she had been invisible until that moment: ‘Suzanna!’

‘Martinus!’

Such a quantity of hissing and steaming, you’d have thought they were a pair of Christmas puddings.

*

I am not easily discouraged. I returned to table No. 2. I meant to engage Spilkin in discussion this evening if it was the last thing I did. Mrs Hay had commandeered my chair, so I pulled another closer from the next table. The conversation was about salad dressings, knitting patterns, the declining fortunes of some soap-opera family or other, the ‘hit parade’
–
but I could raise the tone in a moment. There was a point about dictionaries I had been harbouring, a point that illuminated the age-old tussle between forging ahead and maintaining standards, and I intended to make it, come hell or high water.

They were talking about something called ‘Magic Johnson’. A popular group, no doubt. It was all the opening I needed.