Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

‘He chaffs you a cunt,’ Mbongeni said. This one’s claim to fame was the enormous knitted tea cosy he wore upon his head in place of a cap. Stuffed full of hair, unshorn for decades. A religious observance.

‘No man, he said you a “windgat”.’

‘You twit. You’ve got less gorm than a block of wood.’

Sheepish laughter. My barbs had struck mutton under their woolly hides. And they respected me for it.

‘He’s insulting you,’ said the girl called Nomsa.

‘I’ll add injury to insult in a minute. If I were ten years younger, or twenty for that matter, I’d give you an astragalus sandwich.’

‘I don’t smark aspragalus,’ said Errol.

‘Ag, loss the old tawpy. He doesn’t know what goes for what.’

And they shambled away to the pool table.

Erasmus, who has been in my thoughts lately, had a conceit about snooker, which influenced my own understanding of the game. The white ball, he said, did all the thinking. It was always pushing the other balls around, especially the red ones, which were not worth much, and making them do things they would not otherwise have done. Yet the most important ball on the table was the black one, which just sat there all day, waiting to get potted.

I would have shared this with Errol and Co, but it was too grandiose an analogy for pool. I elaborated another instead; it is possible to play the perfect game of pool, to ‘clear the table’, as they say, but it is seldom done because two things get in the way: chance and human error. And it is just the same with proofreading. I never got round to sharing this idea with them either, I never really broke the ice. If I had, all the nastiness that followed might have been averted.

As for Wessels, he was always too busy watching the proceedings at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa to talk. It was all a bit above his fireplace, he said, but he liked to keep in touch with developments, to be part of history in the making. Giving himself airs.

‘I hear they’re thrashing out the future,’ I told him. ‘And I’m behind them all the way. They should not spare the rod.’

I could see them beating one another senseless with their olive branches.

‘Just a sec, Aubs-ss. I’m watching this.’

Joseph Slovo dancing. A man of his age. And in the Oxford , too.

I have a high regard for furniture and its place in the scheme of things. But the negotiators, as the talkers were called, were obsessed with it. Specifically with the table. With the comings and goings around it — no one cared a fig for its shape — with coming to it, sitting around it, laying things upon it, leaving it in a huff. They had a thing about the chair too: occupying it, addressing it, rotating it. And then the window! I made a vow: if one more person opens a window of opportunity, I’ll heave a brick through it.

The New Management, not to be outdone, started tinkering with the furnishings. Our décor declined relentlessly. Pictures of footballers were tacked to the walls. Oilskin tablecloths were flung over the chequerboards: half the chessmen had been stolen and no one played any more. The chairs were covered in a garish new material and a layer of plastic. Plastic upholstery. The New Management defended it on economic grounds, but it was indecent. I still recall the sucking sound the backs of Nomsa’s thighs made on the plastic when she crossed and uncrossed her legs. It was like the smacking of lips. I was compelled to stare at her scarlet mouth, while the word ‘labia’ resounded in my head, with that ‘b’ smack in the middle of it, tight-lipped and pressing.

‘This place won’t last,’ I said to myself. And to Wessels as well. And he parroted back at me, through that sticky beak, those fly-paper lips, where a word was always stuck, waving its feelers: ‘This place won’t last.’

When the news got out that the Café Europa was closing down, no one was less surprised than I.

*

One day, I overheard Floyd teaching Nomsa the mysteries of chess with the stragglers from that fighting army. ‘This is a lighthouse,’ he said, ‘and it ducks both ways. And this is a horse and it’s just a lightie.’

*

It was neither the black Christmas the trade unions had promised us, nor the white one of Bing Crosby’s dreams. Our Christmas-tide was grey.

*

On Boxing Day, Wessels was quizzing me, in his sly way, about my plans for New Year’s Eve. What would I be doing? he wanted to know. Dinner-dancing at the Ambassador? I would be at the Goodbye Bash, I replied warily, like everyone else. He corrected me: the Goodbye Bash wasn’t on Friday, which was the last day of the year, but the evening before. ‘We all got better things to do on Old Year’s. Hunky’s got a gig at the Dev …’

Was he trying to trick me? They’d said all along the Café was closing down at the end of the month. I could not have been mistaken. But the New Management confirmed it: the Bash was on Thursday. Friday night he would be tucking into a ‘slap-up graze’ at the Clay Oven.

To tell the truth, I was relieved. The rowdiness always reached a crescendo on New Year’s Eve, when I would be more than pleased to stay indoors. On the other hand, I now had one day less in which to finish ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’.

*

The corrective surgery had not been entirely successful. Dumbo’s ear was now facing in the right direction, but flying at half mast. He was looking a little down in the mouth, under that crooked trunk. While Wessels hobbled on into the shop, I paused on the pavement to commiserate.

I hadn’t wanted to go shopping at all, never mind at the Jumbo Liquor Market. Rosie Woods might cause a scene. ‘Let’s walk over to Solomon Kramer’s in Yeoville. They’ve got as fine an array of bottles as you could hope to find, to judge by the window display. Or take a bus out to Benjamin Goldberg’s and see the attraction for ourselves …’

But Wessels insisted. The booze for the Goodbye Bash had to come from the Jumbo. Something about the free ice. In Hebcoolers. Heb? From the Greek hepta , seven. Refrigeration seven days a week. Or short for Hebrew?

‘The New Management’s got plenty of alcohol anyway. Why should we buy more?’

‘Bring your own booze. It was your idea.’

‘Where from!’

‘We’ll just get a few special things. I’m sure Tone’ll chip in with some mix.’

I peered over the curvature of the ear, trying to gauge the mood of Rosie. Just my luck: the Queen of Sheba, nodding unremarked in the shadows of the doorway to Hypermeat, roused herself at the sight of me and shuffled out into the sunlight. She had lost most of her clothing, and what remained was sackcloth and ashes. Head bound up in a citrus pocket. Grubby brassière. Hessian boots. My worst nightmare lurched into motion: she began groping at Dumbo’s rear. Was it starting all over again? Would we be treated to the Queen’s impression of Darryl darrylling? I could see her scrambling up on the invalid’s back, overbalancing, grabbing for the tender ear. It might well have happened. But before she could get a leg over, Quim dashed out of the shop and began lashing her alliteratively with a quirt. New acquisition. Sent her packing to a decent distance.

I emerged from cover and hailed my rescuer. My idea was to clarify the matter of his origins — ‘He also talks pork and cheese,’ Wessels had said, ‘probably a cousin of Moçes’ — but he was in no mood for conversation. He marched back into the shop, and when Rosie raised her muscular button-punching arm like a boom to let him in, I slipped in too. Fired off an ‘ Obrigado ’ just to shake her up a bit. What in God’s name had she been spraying in her armpits? Doom?

Wessels was blundering around like a bull in a china shop. I could imagine him moseying along Kotze Street, waving his crutch at the throng as if he were trying to part the Red Sea, with your humble servant, A. Tearle, following in his wake, as laden down as a Bactrian camel.