Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

As I’ve said, games hold the barest interest for me at the best of times. But games without rules? Then again, there might be some etymological capital to be gained. I called for another example.

She blew on her tea, stirring up a little tempest, said pensively, ‘Mae West in a macintosh,’ and then laughed so uproariously that Spilkin came over to see what he was missing. Mevrouw Bonsma let him have a ditty for his trip across the room. He had to stop at a couple of tables along the way to exchange a friendly word or two — as if he were the manager rather than Mrs Mavrokordatos — and that gave Merle a chance to sip and ponder.

I racked my brain for eponyms. But my moisture content was lower then than it is now, although I am a good few years older and brittler in the bone, as you would expect. All that would come into my mind was Boycott! Boycott! Boycott! The newspapers were full of it.

Spilkin took to it like a bufflehead to water. ‘No bloomers in the jacuzzi. By order.’ It came out of him just like that.

‘Leotards are fine,’ Merle countered.

Watching the pair of them giggling like teenagers, I couldn’t help thinking that the joke was on me. I tried to laugh along in self-defence, but my face was stuck. It had gone all stiff around the mouth, as if my risorii had seized up, and I tried massaging them from the inside with my tongue.

‘What a long face,’ Merle said. She had taken off her spectacles and her eyes were streaming, making furrows down her powdered cheeks. I have always found the notion of laughing until one cries repugnant. One wants to preserve the boundaries between emotions, I think, or they lose their value.

‘Sandwich …’ Spilkin began.

‘This has gone far enough.’

‘… with sideburns!’

‘Not allowed.’

‘Stop being so silly.’

‘A bit of silliness never harmed anyone — except a stuffy old cardigan like you.’

Monsoons of laughter. Enough. I marched out and didn’t slacken my pace until I had shut my own front door behind me. To think that she would speak to me like that. Stuffy? Sinuses were clear. Lungs as capacious as ever. I’ve never smoked — a dirty habit for an untidy mind — and always walked. I went out onto the balcony to breathe some night air. The lights of the city stretched away to the south. No diamonds and velvet here, but wampum and brushed nylon. Strings of cheap yellow beads showed where the motorways ran, while those blocks of tawdry marcasite, marred by empty sockets, were the South Western Townships (‘Soweto’), or so Gideon, the Lenmar’s nightwatchman, assured me. The black holes belonged to the mines. Some people thought the most cosmopolitan touch on our skyline was the Hillbrow Tower: the flats that offered a view of it were actually more expensive. When I was flat-hunting, the caretaker at Milrita Heights had presented it as a feature, flinging back the curtains in the lounge with a theatrical gesture to show the smooth grey shaft plunging past the window. How was she to know I found it vulgar? Like an enormous parking meter. I’d settled for a place on the south side of Lenmar Mansions, with a view of the southern suburbs.

I went back inside and sat down at the dining-room table, where my notebooks were piled. The tips of my fingers felt dry. I had to keep licking them to turn the pages. Was I as dry as all that? A bent old stick, a twig, a broken reed. Perhaps Merle was right: I had no sense of fun. What were all these facts for? I had lists of every description: street names, buildings, shops, taxis, T-shirt slogans, books, sandwiches, orchestras, species of violence. I even had lists of lists. Here was my list of portmanteaus for residential blocks: Lenmar, Milrita, Norbeth, Ethelinda. It was clear enough what it captured. But what had I hoped it would reveal ? Merle might turn the whole thing into a game. Test your knowledge of the city: match the constituent part in Column A (Len) with its mate in Column B (Mar). I would never have thought of that. Was setting an example enough? Or did one also have to enjoy oneself? Perhaps it was time I cultivated the sense of fun I seemed to be lacking.

When I arrived at the Café the next day, I had in my briefcase a notebook containing a peace offering. It was one of my lists. ‘Mr’ prefix, commercial enterprises. I showed it to Merle and Spilkin at once.

Spilkin’s eyes glittered. ‘Mr Bathroom, Mr Cupboard, Mr Juice … Mr Propshaft … Mr Spare Parts! Who are these people, Tearle? Friends of yours? Or family?’

‘Businesses. Culled from the telephone directories when I was employed by Posts and Telecommunications. I thought you might find the phenomenon interesting.’

‘I do.’

‘As I recall, the mania was started by a Mr X-haust, as they chose to spell it, back in the seventies. There was a logo too: a little man in overalls with a stethoscope around his neck for auscultating the Wankel engine.’ The eponym, skilfully inserted into the flow of the conversation, went unremarked. ‘Dr Exhaust, then, strictly speaking.’

‘Perhaps he was a surgeon.’

‘Mr X-haust,’ said Merle. ‘It’s quaintly polite. If he got into the newspapers these days, they’d call him plain old X-haust.’

‘Well, it struck me as odd at the time. As if the title alone rendered the enterprise reliable. Not Bertie X-haust, or X-haust and Co, but Mr X-haust. An exhaust man of the old school, someone you could trust to tinker with your manifold.’

‘It’s better than Uncle,’ said Spilkin.

‘You’ve got an uncle in the furniture business.’

‘Or “Oom”, which one also comes across.’

‘The extraordinary thing is how it caught on. The next year there were half a dozen copycats in the directory: Mr Frosty — an ice-cream maker — Mr Ladder, Mr Plastic, Mr Sweets. And more and more every year — a full column within five editions. Then a couple of Doctors, a brace of Sirs — Sir Juice and Sir Rubble — and even a Missus or two. I haven’t updated my list for a while, but it shouldn’t surprise me if they ran to a page by now.’

Eveready brought us the 1987 directory from behind the counter.

‘More than a page,’ Merle said. ‘They should form an organization.’

‘A union.’

‘A support group. Mr Furniture would be chairman.’

‘Chairperson,’ Spilkin corrected her. ‘And I propose Mr Cash and Carry for Treasurer.’

‘What about this Mr Spare Parts …’

‘He could do the catering.’

‘A resurrection man,’ I should have said, ‘or a muti murderer.’ One could joke about such things in those days, people saw the funny side of it, and understood that one meant no harm. But I just sat there with a mouth full of false teeth. Frosty ~ fugleman ~ fugle ~ fumigate. The wrong associations. Anyway, I could hardly have got a word in edgeways. They went at it hammer and tongs, just as I’d hoped they might, for a good twenty minutes. Unashamedly light-hearted fun. When Mevrouw Bonsma joined us, Spilkin dubbed her Mrs Tuning Fork and she was tickled. Then Merle said I was in the Book too, and pointed to Mr Crusty. A jest, but wounding nevertheless, given the unavoidable connotations of ‘dryness’. Crusty: irritable, curt, says the Concise . Also crust-like, hard — a veiled reference, perhaps, to my excrescences. It was then, in an attempt to crack off my crustiness with levity, that I suggested we boil the last half-hour’s shenanigans down into something for the Reader’s Digest , under the rubric of ‘Towards More Picturesque Speech’ or ‘Life’s Like That’. They pooh-poohed the idea (to be picturesque for a moment).

But when Merle went to the Ladies’ room, Spilkin leant over — Mrs Mavrokordatos had ouzoed him again, to judge by his liquorish, little-boy breath — and whispered in my ear, ‘You were made for each other: Mr and Mrs Dictionary.’