Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

People stole supermarket trolleys too, for their own intrinsic worth, or to transport their stolen goods in. And one of these trolleys was lying abandoned on the corner of O’Reilly and Fife. I had dragged the shopping-bags this far, but my bad elbow was beginning to act up. I dumped the bags in the trolley and righted it.

As I progressed along O’Reilly Road, pushing the trolley containing what Spilkin — so long ago now — had encouraged me to think of as my life’s work, I caught my breath and came to a more sober assessment of my situation: I, Aubrey Tearle, Proofreader Emeritus, was walking through the streets in broad daylight, in command of a stolen supermarket trolley. What was happening to me? What would become of me? If anyone enquired after the trolley’s provenance, I would say I was simply returning it to its lawful owners, the Checkers Corporation, the Okay Bazaars, Pick and Pay. The performance of my civic duty. That purpose had been at the back of my mind all along, and now took its proper place at the front. As for the trolley’s contents, culled from a thousand public fora but now indisputably private property … My precious papers! I had rushed out with the express intention of dumping them, but that was unthinkable. If someone tried to take them from me, I would defend them with my life. How horribly likely it was that I would be waylaid. It was years since I had ventured out with anything more substantial than the Pocket and a notebook. I should turn back. But that would make it harder to explain the trolley, if needs be. I must go on. And what if it rained? Then I would amount to nothing more than soggy paper, slimy and illegibly grey. I would boil down to: papier mâché. Moulded paper pulp made into solid objects. From the French for chewed paper. Chewed paper! Beset by ferocious doubts, by snaggle-toothed second and third thoughts, I pressed on into the concrete jungle.

Dumbo was on duty, chained in habitual servitude to a parking meter. Another misplaced source of security. I had seen meters beheaded, expiring in the gutters, or on kerbs spattered with five-cent pieces. Surprise, surprise: the missing ear was back. I stopped to examine the surgery. Someone had done a neat job with the welding torch — but the effect was odd … unhinged … untoward. Then it struck me why: the ear was not just back — it was back to front! Nincompoops. From the Latin non compos mentis , ‘no mental compost’ (Wessels). I was reminded of Noodler in Peter Pan . Naming all the pirates was Merle’s game. Captain Jas Hook, Bill Jukes, Skylights, Smee, I forget the others. My favourite was Gentleman Starkey — once an usher in a school. And hers was Noodler, whose hands were fixed on backwards. The only truly tragic figure in pantomime, she said.

Someone had better tell them. I steered my trolley into the shop, but a figure as broad as a nightclub bouncer rose to block my passage. It was Joaquim, he who had pressed the hooch upon me when I had brought back the ear. Rosa peered anxiously over his shoulder, mustachios aquiver. I addressed myself to her, but he flapped his hands in my face, as if to dispel an odour. What would they call it? … a ‘pong’. These people. I had to shout to be heard.

‘Wad dozy wunt, Quim?’ she asked. ‘Wad? Wad?’

Quim ( noun, coarse slang ) said, enunciated I should say, as if translating my words into an infinitely superior foreign tongue, ‘He sigh his yeah is beck tew frount.’

I could have blown my top, my lobes were liquefying, a magma of vitriol and vituperation boiled out of my spinal column, pressed up against my crusty dome — but I caught sight of myself in a mirrored pillar, like an Aborigine scribbled all over with Vat 69 and Castle Dumpies, R8.99 per dozen, in shoewhite on grey skin. I had espied myself there before, from time to time, but never in such a state of extremity. My hair was standing to attention in clumps, ragtag bands of desperate bristles whose company had been routed. My shirt was hanging out, and one tail of it was damp. My staring eyes, replete with scrutinizing, were afloat in my bifocals like melted cubes in the icy bottoms of shot-glasses. And then the trolley … I was stooped over it like a geriatric in a walking frame. I looked like a tramp — worse, like a hobo, one of the bag ladies and gentlemen, the collectors of old iron and empties, the perpetual window-shoppers, pushing their stolen trolleys through the streets as if the city were no more than a vast parking lot for supermarkets. These scavengers had turned the trolley into a symbol of want rather than plenty. Had I become one of them? I barely recognized myself.

But the light of recognition was dawning in Mrs Da Silva’s calculating eyes. Mention of the ear had jogged her memory. Before she could foist another bottle of Old Brown Ruin on me, I retreated. Down the length of Kotze Street, up and down kerbs at five robots, never mind the disabled, and not a soul would meet my eye.

The security guard at the Okay Bazaars, that merely satisfactory retailer, took his employer’s property into grateful, white-gloved hands: the gloves were a relic of the days of bomb threats, when they were meant to make more palatable the notion of a stranger’s hands upon one’s person. Frisking, they called it, as if there was pleasure to be had in being fondled by ‘Mickey’ Mouse paws, as if it were fun — and it probably was for some, it takes all kinds, and more’s the pity: a limited range of tried-and-tested kinds would simplify things immensely. It is with the wider world as it is with washing powders. I’d written a perspicuous letter or two on that very subject, carbon copies of which were adding their eloquent ounces to the shopping-bags as I lugged them across the road and up the escalator. An idolmonger from north of the border, one of the precursors of that entire race of Queequegs with which our pavements are now thronged, offered to lend a hand, but I wasn’t born yesterday and made shift.

My entrance created quite a stir. Tony and a crony actually forsook a poker game to establish what was in the bags. Paperwork, I said. That is all we know, and all we need to know.

The trek across town had upset me. I was a bundle of nerves, to tell the truth. What had possessed me? As much to celebrate having come through the streets unscathed as to settle my stomach, I ordered a whiskey, washed down one of my Valia, and fell to. Had to make the best of a Wessels-free environment. And despite the shaky start to the day, I made steady progress: by lunchtime I had ten fascicles of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ shipshape. In the bag, which is to say, out of the bag and in the book. A Strammer Max for lunch, in memoriam, the last surviving item of the original menu, from the heyday of Mrs Mavrokordatos. Strammer Max: a stout Bavarian ploughman. One of Moçes’ many cousins, recently appointed as Chief Cook and Bottlequaffer, didn’t make too bad a hash of it, either. The afternoon held out the promise of another ten fascicles.

But it was not to be.

I was still mopping up the cooking juices in the continental manner when Errol burst in with a duffel bag slung over one shoulder and a bulky object wrapped in an army greatcoat in his arms. A corpse, was my first startled thought. And why not? Some poor pedestrian to be disposed of, some victim of senseless violence gone stiff as a board. The empty arms of the coat waved for help, and an ashtray went flying as Errol hurried across the room. Then, as he passed through the archway into the pool room, one end of the package struck the wall with a clang. Must be stolen property after all, I thought, a parking meter or a lamp standard. That Tone should allow these petty criminals to fence their booty under his roof … it was unconscionable.

(I’d taken a good look at the Prospect Road corpse through my opera glasses: black male, fortyish, fifteen stone. But the next day the Star said it was a white man, burnt to a char.)