The Restless Supermarket (7 page)

The stranger Spilkin, a person whose name I did not even know, finished tearing, crumpled the scrap into a ball and tossed it into the ashtray, where it immediately began to unfold, blossoming like a desert bloom in a time-phase film. He smoothed the page flat, propped it on his knee in the beam of the searchlight and took a pen from his pocket. It was a beautiful pen, a fountain pen with a marbled barrel, a Waterman I would have said (and I would have been right). The sort of pen advertising copywriters liked to call a ‘writing instrument’. This pen, reclining elegantly on the soft cushion of his forefinger, with its nib as sleek as a ballet slipper, made me proof him more thoroughly, from the open-neck shirt down to the white slip-ons. His clothes were pastel and sporty, casual but expensive; they would have been perfectly at home on the greens, under a blue sky, but looked flashy in this dim brown interior.

He began to fill out the clues with remarkable facility.

How long would it take him? Half an hour was considered ‘good’. I consulted my records: that day’s puzzle had taken me twenty-three minutes to solve. Now that my notebook lay open on the table, on the inlaid chequerboard I’d always fondly wished might be transformed one day into a crossword grid, I suddenly resolved to take up the matter of the inconvenient new format of the clues with the editor of the
Star
.
I had been putting it off for months, but watching Spilkin’s contortions had made me aware that the problem was not just my own. A whole community of people were being inconvenienced by some lowly editorial whim. I took up the cudgels on their behalf.

The letter was a good
one.

18 July
1987

Dear
Sir,

Until recently, the cryptic and the straight clues to your two-speed crossword puzzle appeared above and below the grid respectively, and appropriately so. This enabled the proponents of the higher method to obscure the evidence of the lower by the simple expedient of folding the page in
half.

Since the two sets of clues now appear alongside the grid, this procedure is no longer possible. Your puzzles editor can verify this in an instant.

Some of your readers may be accustomed to a diet of chalk and cheese, but my constitution will not bear it. This new format will improve neither your circulation nor mine. I urge you to revert to the time-honoured
one.

Yours faithfully, etcetera

The letters editor thought my letter had merit too, for he published it in this shortened version. One never takes excision lightly, but at least the blade was true. (The present incumbent, by contrast, uses a rusty hacksaw or the blunderbuss of the delete button.) The casualties? A mot on origami that I had been in two minds about all along
–
‘your puzzles editor,
unless he be an expert in origami, the Japanese art of folding paper into decorative shapes and figures
’;
and a postscript suggesting that the type used for the clues be increased from 10 point to 12. ‘
The eyesight of many of our citizens, especially the senior ones
,’
I wrote, ‘
is more likely to be
SO-SO
than
20-20
, I should imagine
.’
Dispatched to File 13, now restored to their rightful place.

So engrossed was I in the composition of this letter that I forgot to stop the clock, and when I glanced his way again, the man at No. 3 had turned to the business pages and was doodling on the lists of share prices. Then Mrs Mavrokordatos came in and greeted him warmly
–
Ronald, I thought she called him
–
welcoming him back and saying she had missed him, and he said he was delighted to be back, he had missed her too. His voice was small and mild too, if a little nasal, and his grammar seemed presentable. I gathered from what passed between them that he was a former customer, recently retired like myself, that he had been away for some time on the south coast of Natal (KwaZulu-Natal, as he called it, quite properly) staying with a son, but that the arrangement had not ‘panned
out’.

‘I’m not cut out for living in a granny flat,’ he said, and they both laughed. ‘But tell me, who’s that?’

For a moment I thought he was referring to me
–
I had just risen to leave
–
but he meant Mevrouw Bonsma. She was playing ‘Never on Sunday’, which served me rather well as an exit march.

When I returned to the Café a few days later, and then at regular intervals thereafter, I found him sitting at the same table, under the light, ‘ensconced’ as I thought of it. A creature of habit. Good for him. (How wrong one can be about people.) Habit maketh the manners and all the rest that maketh the man. Predictable behaviour is what makes people tolerable, and obviates a risky reliance on goodwill and other misnomers. Every day he turned to the crossword, painstakingly removed the straight clues, and went on with the puzzle. So I had the opportunity to measure his skill against my own after all. I discovered that he was a very good crossword solver indeed. Almost superhuman. He usually finished the puzzle in under fifteen minutes! At least, I assumed that he finished it, although I could not tell at that distance.

Proofreaders (one may retire from the post but not the profession) generally have suspicious minds and long memories. The
Reader’s Digest,
to which I subscribed in the days when my word power still needed improving, once published an anecdote (if you’ll pardon the contradiction in terms, etymologically speaking) in the ‘Life’s Like That’ feature, about a commuter, a mediocre crossword puzzler, who watched enviously every evening for many months as a fellow-traveller completed the cryptic puzzle in ten minutes flat. Until one day the master left his paper behind him in the train compartment when he disembarked, and the other, taking it up to marvel, discovered that the grid was filled with nonsense that bore no relation to the clues. Looking at the slim gold strap of Spilkin’s watch and the chubby fingers of his hands (surgeons and cardsharps have long thin fingers only in films), I became convinced that he was up to the same trick. One afternoon, when he left the paper unattended for a moment to visit the Gentlemen’s room, I actually rose and approached his table, meaning to snatch a glance at the puzzle, but he reappeared in a trice and nearly caught me red-handed. I avoided an embarrassing situation only by stooping to tie a shoelace. It was time to put a stop to this ridiculous behaviour.

It so happened that my letter on the new crossword format had been published that day and I now saw that it would provide the perfect excuse for making his acquaintance
–
and a rather impressive introduction,
too.

Once he had returned to his puzzle, I opened my newspaper to the letters page and prepared to accost him. But my opening gambit
–
‘Your troubles are over, Mr …?’
–
died on my lips. My impending approach had transmitted itself to him as a receptivity to communication, for as I opened my mouth he cocked his head, rested the end of the fountain pen against his greying temple, and asked:

‘Clam for a solitary sailor?’

For a moment I was utterly nonplussed. The idiom, the rakish air, the slightly nautical plimsolls he was sporting that day, the voice which was rummier than the one he used with Eveready and Mrs Mavrokordatos, all of this took me aback. Was he making an indecent proposal? It was unthinkable. While I blanched, he snapped his fingers
–
an accomplishment I have never been able to master, even with the application of lubricating spittle to the relevant forefinger and opposable thumb
–
and exclaimed:

‘Abalone!’

Click. I clattered through my newspaper and scanned the clues. There it was: fifteen
down.

‘Three across: Mabel out for a stroll? Five-letter word,’ I countered. And before he had time to reply, supplied the answer myself: ‘Amble.’

And so, swapping clues and offering tips, we began to hold a conversation.

He said he was a Spilkin. I knew the name: a dozen or so in the Johannesburg directory, with concentrations in Melrose and Cyrildene. Spilkin. It suited him, this combination of soft and sharp, lip and bodkin, wet flesh and dry glass. He said he was a retired optician.

‘By a stroke of luck,’ I said, ‘you have met the only person in the Café Europa who knows the difference between an optician and an optometrist.’

‘And an ophthalmologist?’

Easy as pie, I said. I could even spell it. Apophthegm and phthisical too, which were in the same orthographical league. I was a retired proofreader, I said, by way of explanation, and my name was Tearle. (Just the surname, to match his ‘Spilkin’. To tell the truth, deep down where the roots of language coil about the bones, I have never really felt like an Aubrey. Meaning a ruler of elves. Never had the slightest ambition in that direction. As for Aub, the inevitable diminutive
–
it’s nearly as bad as Sphere.)

‘How do you spell it?’ he asked.

Well really. ‘
O-P-H-
’

‘I mean Tearle.’

‘Oh. With two
e’s.’

‘Spilkin has two i’s. Which was a distinct advantage in my chosen profession. I trust that having two e’s didn’t harm yours?’

‘Not at
all.’

The details of that first conversation escape me now (this reconstructed sample is more or less representative), but we spoke, naturally enough, about optometry and proofreading, and the link between them: the eye. We discovered that we had much in common. I described, in lyrical fashion, the passage of the eye along a line of print; and he explained, with technical precision, the neurological fireworks and muscular gymnastics that made that movement possible. He admired my spectacles
–
horn-rims thirty years old and not to be bought for love or money
–
and gave a remarkably accurate account of my astigmatism and my lazy left by glancing through the lenses. This introduced a note of friendly competition. I recited seven verses of lemmata from the M section of the
Concise Oxford Dictionary
(my beloved fourth edition of 1951, reprinted with revised Addenda in 1956, boon companion of my heyday, well fingered and thumbed): Mauser ~ mazard ~ mazarine ~ measles … measly ~ medal ~ medallion ~ medium … medlar ~ melancholy ~ mélange ~ memento … memoir ~ menses ~ Menshevik ~ mercury … mercy ~ mesdames ~ meseems ~ metal … metallic ~ meteoric ~ meteorite ~ metropolitan … -metry ~ microscope ~ microscopic ~ mighty … He chimed in with the standard eye chart (the one devised by Professor Snellen) and an undergraduate mnemonic for recalling it:
E
ggheads
f
rom
P
aris,
t
he
o
melet
z
one, and so on. If only I’d had that by heart when I went before the Medical Board! I wrote it down in my notebook. Then we produced a facsimile chart on the back of an advertising flyer from the newspaper and made several suggestions for improving it. I felt, for instance, that an ‘s’ might be more useful on line 2 than an ‘o’, so that the mnemonic might read ‘
E
lephants
f
ind
P
retoria
t
he
s
uperior
z
oo’. We became quite light-hearted and boisterous. He secured the chart to a screw on the sconce to test my eyes and I passed with flying colours, having memorized the mnemonic while I transcribed it. ‘Thanks to you,’ I said, ‘I will never fail an eye test again.’

‘You could always ask them to turn it upside down.’

And that reminded me of the crossword. I showed him my letter and he was delighted with
it.

A few days later, the
Star
published a brace of readers’ letters supporting my views about the new format, from J.
Serebro of Wendywood and ‘Also Miffed’ of Germiston. The puzzles editor surrendered, the old format was restored. Tearle and Tradition had prevailed.

Spilkin had Mevrouw Bonsma play the theme from
The Longest Day
in my honour.

*

The ‘spilkin’: a crucial spillikin, in a game of that name, the retrieval of which renders a whole nest of others more immediately accessible.

By analogy: the key word in a crossword puzzle, whose vowels and consonants provide the newels and rails for whole flights of solutions.

And hence: a crucial aspect of any problem.

*

Passing down Kotze Street on my way to the Café, I found Dumbo at the end of his tether again, still minus an ear. I’d have thought Management would be anxious to restore their corpulent corporate image to its proper state. Surely it would be bad for business having this elephantine amputee loitering on the doorstep? I almost went in to put my case, but that Rosa was on duty, moustachioed and prickly, and no doubt itching to cross my palm with another bottle of plonk.

Hypermeat had a special on half a lambkin. Heads or tails? Baa or Baa? A black sheep of the two-legged variety pressed a handbill on me: Hillbrow Hyperpawn was buying old coins, jewellery, watches. Any old iron? Endless irony. The shop was in Kapteijn Street, with piles of cheap loot in its dusty window. I had made a few purchases there myself, years back, when it was still Bernstein’s Second Time Lucky. Slightly shop-soiled goods and antiques, direct from the factory to the public.

Another new butchery: Hack’s Meat Superette. Something new every week. Men’s outfitters folding up and chicken grillers hatching. Why this obsession with poultry? Was it a tribal thing? A cook in a tissue-paper toque and a grease-proof inquisitor’s gown flicked a cigarette butt into my path, and rows of skewered carcases, cranked round by a machine behind fat-spattered glass, applauded with flippery wings. And what were these? Charred bits and pieces, cartilaginous lumps, new species of offal. There were new varieties of dirt on the pavements too. Sticky black scabs on the cement flags, blotches, bumps, nodules that cleaved to the soles of my brogues. More of them all the time, like some skin disease. What is this stuff? Where on earth is it coming from? You never saw it falling from the sky or spilt by a human hand. It seemed to be
striking through
from beneath, like some subcutaneous festering. A less fastidious man than myself, a man more accustomed to taking specimens, an indigent geologist, say, a botanist, a pathologist, might have made a study of it to determine its origins. Animal or vegetable? Outside the Pink Cadillac, which only opened its doors after dark, a heap of children, messily corked, theatrically ragged, like urchin extras from a production of
Oliver
,
slept in black and white. A photograph from the archive of atrocities: a heap of corpses, with their big feet jutting out of blackened clothing, filthy as chimney sweeps. Perhaps they were pavement sweeps, responsible for spreading the dirt under the pretext of mopping it
up.