The Restless Supermarket (6 page)

‘What kind of music do you like smark, Mr T[earle]? Sakkie sakkie? Long arm?’ She looked at my unbarbered crown. ‘Classics?’

‘Sherbet is good,’ said Wessels. ‘And Schoeman.’

‘I’d have thought Brahms and Liszt were more in your line,’ I countered.

‘No really,’ said the girl. ‘What are you into?’

‘Into? I’ll tell you what I’m
out of
:
the Talking Heads, the Simple Minds and the Exploding Pumpkins.’

That was bound to raise a laugh. Errol guffawed and slapped his better half’s knee. I noticed, with a start, because I had never seen it before, the word ‘Raylene’ tattooed on his forearm in that mouldy verdigris so beloved of tattoo artists and meat inspectors. Perhaps he’d just had it done. It solved the identity crisis, anyway.

‘How come you know this stuff?’

‘He’s a walking encyclopaedia,’ said Errol. ‘A seedy rom.’ Don’t ask me where they pick these things
up.

‘He makes a study of everythink,’ said Wessels proudly.

A few more came back to me: ‘Snoopy Doggy Dog. Prefabricated Sprouts. Animals.’ Another guffaw. They might laugh, but they bought the records that made these jokers rich. The names were so ludicrous, you’d think the public was being challenged not to take them seriously. They might as well all call themselves The Charlatans and be done with it. I had a list of them in my notebook, which I was tempted to consult, but it was more telling to know them by heart. I’d made the list a few months before in the Look and Listen Record Bar, where I had gone to disprove Wessels’s claim that there was a famous ‘jazz’ musician called Felonious Monk. As it turned out, I was right on a mere technicality
–
his name was
Th
elonious
–
but I discovered something even more remarkable: his middle name was Sphere. Merle would have loved it. He was a rotund little figure too, a fully formed semibreve.

In the course of my researches, I wandered into the popular music section, and was soon as engrossed as one could be, given the din issuing from the loudspeakers ranged on all sides. The orchestras had the queerest names, fruit and vegetables, things like the Sweaty Lettuces and the Mango Grooves. By comparison, the ‘Beatles’ seemed rather innocuous, and felicitous too, when one recalled those neat young men in their suits and ties and their coleopterous hairdos. Michael and the Mechanics. Extraordinary. You never knew when such things might come in useful. I’d taken out my notebook to jot them down: absurd nomenclature, popular orchestras. (Absurd, from the Latin
surdus
,
deaf, dull.) Pretty soon a sallow youth with a ponytail and a horsey set of teeth was hovering, looking over my shoulder, pretending that he could read. Probably thought I was acting suspiciously; by then, I was quite groggy from the noise as it
was.

‘Do you have any Status Quos?’ I asked. Heard that one on the radio.

‘Of course,’ with a snort. I was surprised he didn’t tap three times with his
foot.

‘Well I wouldn’t listen to them if you paid
me.’

Floyd and Nomsa came back from the kitchen with bottles of beer and a girl I hadn’t seen before. There are more of them every day, and I confess that they all look rather alike to me. It’s probably the colouring. The new girl struck me only because she seemed much too young to be drinking liquor. She had her fingers curled around the neck of a bottle like a child with a ‘cooldrink’. A small hand glittering with plastic rings that might have come out of a lucky packet. Floyd was wearing a new playsuit with Donald Ducks on it: long shorts down to the knees and a matching shirt, many sizes too big for him. Not hand-me-downs, mind you, from an older brother: they all wore their clothes too big. Errol himself had an immense pair of trunks, in ecru canvas with red piping, of the sort that servants used to favour. The two of them looked like toddlers, very much enlarged. They even had oversized bootees on their feet, excessively padded baby shoes with their tongues lolling, but no laces. Quantities of silver buckles instead, which their clumsy fingers might manipulate more easily than bows. It would cost a fortune to bronze one of
them.

These brawny, stubbled men in their rompers looked even stranger next to the girls, who were dressed for the beach, in stretchy pants and tops that were no more than singlets or brassières. Raylene’s slim body was like a teenage boy’s
–
a boy with a love for physical culture, I might add, for twirling Indian clubs or leaping over hurdles. Even the brown hairs on her arms were too thick and glossy for down. At least Nomsa had some flesh on her. Wessels was prodding that flesh now with a forefinger like a pestle. He had discovered a tattoo of a rose on her shoulder.

‘It’s a Bert Middler,’ Nomsa explained. Whoever he
is.

‘No ways. More like a Naas Botha,’ Wessels said. He was chafing away at the tattoo with a rubbery forefinger. ‘Ask Mr T. He knows all about
it.’

I’d been reading about rose cultivation in the paper a few weeks before: some rugby-lover had named a bloom after Botha, the fly-half.

I took refuge as usual behind the
news.

Then Wessels wanted Nomsa to draw a replica of the rose on his plaster cast and they asked to borrow my pen. I refused. No ways, so to speak. They got one from Moçes instead. He was tiddly. Of no use as a waiter.

I should try to like them, I thought, despite their broken English. In fact, I should try to like them
for
that, I should find a place for them, not a soft spot, not in my heart, but a well-worn, callused spot, something pachydermatous and scarred, where their shrillness, their abrasiveness, their rough edges might be accommodated without tearing any tissue. I made resolutions to that effect. But they came to nothing, watching the girl Nomsa, a deracinated Xhosa as I recall, crouched over Wessels’s plaster cast, with his stubby toes wriggling like newborn puppies, blindly delighted to be alive. The way she held the pen! It was worse than Wessels himself. You would have thought it was a vegetable peeler.

*

-rama suffix, commercial enterprises: Hyperama … Meatarama … Cupboard-a-rama … Veg-a-rama … Leatherama … Motorama … Computerama
…

*

Having once discovered the Café Europa, in the days before Wessels and Errol and everyone else, I made it my haunt. I steeped in its European ambience, in a mild dilution of pleasantly polite strangers, for half a year before I found companionship.

One afternoon, the stranger I would come to know as Spilkin entered the Café and sat at table No. 3, which was identical to mine, a small distance away and also ranged against Alibia. On the wall above that particular table was a sconce, which the muralist had cleverly appropriated as a beacon on one of the city’s rounded hills. The cone of light that the beacon played upon the water
–
or rather upon the place where the water would have been if the sea in the foreground had spilled out over the wooden dado that hemmed it in like a breakwater
–
gave that quarter of the city a wartime air, a mood of siege quite at odds with the [George] Ferris wheel and the festive lights on the terraces at the Hotel Grande. The stranger shifted his chair and crossed his legs, so that the searchlight’s beam, I imagined, would drop over his shoulder and illuminate the newspaper that he was about to prop against his
knee.

He turned straight away to the page of the
Star
that carried the cartoons and puzzles, the chess problem, the bridge hand, the crossword. (Never played chess myself.) Then, cocking his head to one side, holding the paper at arm’s length and squinting at it out of the corner of his eye, he began to tear a square out of the page. The action was so awkward and silly, and yet so familiar, that I felt a pang of sympathy for him, as one might for an old friend observed in an unguarded moment. This feeling was so intense that I had to examine him more carefully, smoothing vanishing cream into his wrinkled brow, putting curls back on his crown, trimming the exuberant eyebrows, to see if there was not some more youthful incarnation I would recognize, some immature pentimento. Proofreading him, if you like, for familiar flaws. He looked soft, small and mild, but inquisitive too, almost saucy, like a worldly cherub.

I had been doing the cryptic version of the
Star
’s
two-speed crossword since my days as a junior proofreader in the Department of Posts and Telecommunications. For as long as I could remember, the cryptic clues had been printed above the grid and the straight ones below. Very sensible. All one had to do to obscure the straight clues, and thus remove the temptation to glance at them, was to fold the page in half. And it
was
a temptation. So long as the simple clues were visible, hovering on the periphery of vision, the eye was drawn to them, seeking the easy way out, despite the mind’s attraction to the difficult problem. There was something wilful in the human eye that made it impossible to discipline. It
would
look. I had had the same problem in the old days when I reached the last page of a book. I would have to obscure the final paragraph with my hand or a bookmark to prevent my cheating eye from leaping to it at once. To think of coming all that way by the specified route, step by step, word by word, only to throw away whatever satisfaction there was to be gained, by skipping the last few paragraphs and arriving at the goal ahead of schedule. It was like taking a short cut in the last mile of a marathon.

I went further than most. The habit of years, the respect for rules and regulations, the dedication to matter in its proper order, front and back, that kept me reading steadily from A to B to ‘The End’, also made me read past it, through Appendices and Indices and Advertisements, through Bibliographies and Endnotes and Glossaries, until the endpapers loomed in their blank finality. And even then, nothing was more satisfying than to turn the final page of a tome, thinking that the race was run, and find a colophon, a ‘finishing touch’. A meaningful fragment of the whole, put there to be read, but which no one, perhaps, had ever bothered to read, by which I mean to scan deliberately, to pass the eye over in full and conscious awareness of these particular shapes, impressed upon paper, now impressing themselves upon the retina and the cortex, and thus upon the soft surface of time itself.

About a year earlier, in the final months of my gainfully employed life, the editor of the puzzles page, as he was probably known, and almost certainly a new appointment, some wallah kicked upstairs at the behest of the nabobs of the tricameral parliament, had taken it upon himself to change the tried-and-tested format of the crossword. The two sets of clues, cryptic and straight, now appeared one below the other alongside the grid (with the straight ones on top!). The reasons for the change were never explained
–
they were always tinkering with the newspaper these days, moving things around, making them bigger or smaller or doing away with them altogether, in the scramble for what they called ‘market share’
–
but the upshot was that one could no longer fold the paper to obscure the straight clues without folding the grid itself in half. Just one fleeting glance at the straight clues could take the difficult pleasure out of half a dozen cryptic ones. Even as one began to puzzle pleasantly over ‘Races Thomas ran badly’, the disobedient eye would leap with infuriating precision to ‘Long-distance running races’ in the straight column. It was dispiriting. The only solution was to remove the straight clues from eyeshot entirely by tearing them out, resisting all the while the desire to look at them: I had resorted to exactly the cock-eyed procedure the stranger was now performing, and my heart went out to him, alone as he was, and with no one to turn
to.

I had kept to myself at the Café Europa in the beginning, but in time I did establish a nodding acquaintance with Mevrouw Bonsma, our pianist, and Mrs Mavrokordatos, our proprietor. To Mevrouw Bonsma I occasionally sent politely worded notes, requesting an old favourite. She knew everything. She was an immense reservoir of melodies, endlessly seeping, flowing one into the other, always brimming. It was a fullness I found a little disconcerting. I tried to trip her up a few times by asking for chestnuts such as ‘The Isle of Capri’ or ‘Arrivederci Roma’, but she played them all without missing a beat. I had hopes of making her open her leather portfolio, which she stowed in the cross-stitched seat of her stool every day, and which I assumed contained sheet music, although I had never seen her consult it. Finally, in a spirit of curiosity, for I am not in the habit of playing practical jokes, I made something up. Then Mevrouw approached my table and asked me to hum the beastly thing. I had to refuse. I had never hummed in my life, I told her, and certainly not for a pianist, and I saw no reason to start
now.

My acquaintance with Mrs Mavrokordatos, circumscribed by the more dependable bounds of reciprocation between proprietor and customer (custom, like costume, from the
ME
and
OF
custume
,
from the Latin
consuetudo
),
was both more formal and more at ease. It was through the kind offices of Mrs Mavrokordatos that I found a neater, less bothersome solution to my dilemma with the crossword than the wretched ripping I had been reduced to. When I arrived at the Café in the afternoon, I would hand her the newspaper and she would snip out the straight clues with a pair of scissors, giving me the little patch of newsprint, considerately folded clue-side-in, to store in my wallet. This arrangement had a couple of advantages, in addition to the embarrassment it spared me. If there was some important information on the reverse side of the page, some damaged article I would only discover later that evening or the next morning when I was trawling for typographical errors, I could easily restore the excision, snug as a jigsaw piece. This very thing happened on more than one occasion. And in the unlikely event of my not being able to complete the puzzle, I could consult the straight clues. In my opinion, it was better to finish the puzzle with the aid of the simple clues than not to finish it at all. This proved to be one of the matters on which Spilkin and I held diametrically opposed views. (Dress sense was another. Not to mention … no, let me not mention it.) It wasn’t that we differed on the status of the straight clues themselves: in his book, as in mine, the straight clues were for simple minds. But we did not attach the same importance to completion, to finalization. He was quite happy (although it very seldom came to this) to leave a puzzle unfinished; whereas I could not get to sleep at night if a clue eluded
me.