Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

‘Are we in danger, then?’ The question made Munnery anxious. He gulped his drink and began to pace up and down in the channels between the papers. ‘What do you think?’

Fluxman was tempted to say: ‘Open your eyes, man. Take a good look around you.’ Instead he said: ‘Let’s say I’ve seen signs of dissolution. Surely you’ve seen them too?’

‘Minor disorders, yes.’

‘In yourself?’

‘Not really, but I have noticed worrying signs in others.’

‘It’s to be expected that we proofreaders should hold out to the last, that we should be more resistant than the man in the street.’ The mugger on the fairway came into his mind, and he shivered. ‘Which is all the more reason to act now, in concert, while we still have our wits about us.’

Munnery had grown more agitated as they spoke, marching up and down over the pages on the floor, which stuck to the soles of his shoes in untidy wads. Several times he muttered, ‘Patsy …’ For a while, there was nothing but the rustle of his feet. Then he halted before Fluxman and asked: ‘What do you propose?’

‘To begin with, an emergency meeting of the Society. We must come up with a strategy. Late as it is, I believe we can beat back the plague.’

The mugger stumbled into Fluxman’s mind again, and so he told Munnery about him, and also about the bobber he had fished from the water. That reminded him in turn of the Wetland Ramble. ‘I’m afraid my house will be flooded while I’m gone. Would you mind putting the water feature somewhere else? I haven’t had much practice with such things lately … and it’s been a long day.’

With trembling fingers, Munnery unpinned some pages from the back of the door. Fluxman couldn’t help noticing that he left the leaves to float up to the ceiling while the pins spiralled slowly to the floor. There was an ordinance survey map beneath, and he studied it.

‘It can’t go back to the Zoo,’ he said with a worried face. ‘The Stoute Kabouter nursery school’s been squashed in there.’

‘That was probably Banes’s doing.’

In the end, Munnery earmarked a bit of virgin woodland on the escarpment and relocated the Wetland Ramble there among the trees. Constructive effort calmed his nerves at once. He fetched a canal, which was gathering slime behind the gasworks, and put that down in the reeds to make a sort of weir, and rounded everything off with some concrete tables and chairs from a picnic site and a circle of caravans from a roadworkers’ camp (long since abandoned). The effect was bound to be pleasing, as Fluxman remarked.

‘Let’s start looking ahead,’ said Munnery hopefully, ‘to the day when Alibia takes its place among the tourist destinations of the world.’

Dinner was a ratatouille, a veritable drumroll of pepper and aubergine, and a sirloin of beef. Dessert was more of the whiskey dashed over ice cream.

Then Fluxman, exhausted by the exertions of the day, bedded down in the lounge with the Phone Book under his head, while his host withdrew to his study to contact the other Members of the Society. Fluxman listened to the murmuring voice behind the door, and watched the searchlight beams toppling like gargantuan spillikins across the sky behind the window, until he fell asleep. And then it was just the rumble and clash of suburbs and streets under the cover to which his ear was pressed, a sound he had long ago grown used to, and was hardly able to dream without.

*

The next morning in Munnery’s lounge, the Proofreaders’ Society achieved a quorum for the first time in nearly a year. Fluxman had imagined that the others might be awkward in his presence, that his ‘betrayal’ would still rankle, but to his relief the atmosphere was businesslike and bellicose. Munnery had primed the Members and several were dressed for battle — Levitas in his broadcloth waistcoat, Banes in his worsted boilersuit. Wiederkehr was wearing his stetson. Consensus was reached before Mrs Munnery even had time to serve the tea. Those present reaffirmed that they themselves were all that stood between Alibia and its ruination, and that duty called them to make one last effort at restoring law and order. This initiative they resolved to pursue ‘jointly and severally’ (as Banes worded it): they would work as a team, coordinating their actions and lending one another support; but each would also take primary responsibility for a particular sphere of correction, and focus on applying those skills at which he was most adept.

Munnery was put in charge of transposition. The others were encouraged to place their personal collections of maps and plans at his disposal for the duration of the campaign. He would work closely with Figg on insertions and Levitas on alignment. Banes was assigned to reappropriation and given leave to commandeer statute books and municipal records, title deeds and carbon-copy invoices, and to take over and take back at his discretion. The director of restoration was Wiederkehr. It was surmised, rightly as it turned out, that his services would prove invaluable if any of his colleagues applied themselves too zealously to their own tasks. No one appreciated this more than Fluxman, who was responsible for deletions and removals, the most sensitive portfolio of all.

When the toasts had been drunk and the farewells made, when the last of the Members had gone off down the hill, each carrying a little tub of Mrs Munnery’s linguine, Fluxman was left alone to pack his bag. He stood at the window, where a clutch of stray proofs fluttered against the blinds, and looked out onto the sunlit green. Junior lay on his stomach on the grass, with his feet jutting over the bunker and a bucket of golf balls at his shoulder. He held one of the balls in both hands and rested his chin on it. Then, with a flick of his wrists, he sent the ball speeding towards the hole.

*

Fluxman took his leave. He meant to go straight home and set to, but now that his thoughts had turned to the work at hand, he found himself drawn from the path again and again to tinker at the wayside. Little things to begin with, minor repairs to an unhyphenated split pole fence, a badly spaced milestone, a broken win-dow pane … but in the end, an italicized townhouse complex detained him for the better part of the afternoon. The place was an eyesore, nothing but curlecues of stucco and folderols of wrought iron. It took him half an hour to introduce some Roman columns of a plain, upright kind, and another to summon a vine-leaf screen to hide the whole thing from view. He should have referred the matter to one of the others, he thought afterwards, as he went wearily on his way, Figg or Banes would have made light work of it. Or he should have stuck to what he knew best: Strike it out! Away with it!

The effort had exhausted him. He felt uncomfortably disordered. Twice he had to fetch a wandering eye back from the crook of his arm and reattach a limb with conjunctive sinew. And in this agitated state of mind and body, he thought of Ms Georgina Hole, his former fiancée. It was half a year since she had broken off their engagement, and a quarter since she had entered his mind. He went towards her flat.

No one answered his knock. Was she still manning the charity kiosk at St Cloud’s on weekday afternoons? He could wait. He sat down on the doorstep and looked around. The place was getting tatty. When she came in, he would have to tell her to take better care of herself, and offer to lend a hand. He made a few emergency repairs to pass the time, but his thoughts kept drifting. Soon he fell asleep.

He dreamt of Georgina. He dreamt that she had stopped at the Good Cockatoo on her way back from work to share a meal with Bibliotheker, a fund-raiser and friend, whose advances she had been stubbornly resisting till now. On this day of all days. It was ten before she arrived home, and then she found her old flame slumped asleep against the doorpost. He half-opened his mouth, not to accuse her, but to explain that he had come to seek her blessing, even if he had lost her affection. But his tongue was as thick as blotting-paper in his mouth. She prised the rucksack from his embrace and led him inside, made him stretch out on the settee among the ungrammatical scatter cushions and overstuffed pouffes. She unlaced his hiking boots and loosened his bandanna. As she drew a blanket over him, his hands rose of their own accord and held her. To his surprise, she did not rebuff him. He measured the columns of her thighs with the upsilons of his outstretched fingers and thumbs. Then his hands slid over the parenthetical curves of her hips, smoothed a shiver out along the ridges of her ribs and the rounds of her breasts, paused for breath at the full stops of her nipples, rose again over her shoulders, felt the flutter of lashes against their palms and fell away from her flesh in amazement, as she drew back and receded, plunging him into an exclamatory darkness. He reached for a page of her in his mind. Not a jot, not an iota must be lost. Then his eyes and hands moved over her surface, proofing the metrical skeleton concealed in her warming limbs, reconnecting joint to joint, easing the flow of words like water over skin, making her fluent, feeling the prickle of his own gaze on the backs of his hands, tracing with the crumbling nib every pore and fold, every tendon and sinew, the popliteal hollow, the pillowed lips, the pressed ear, the whorled navel, delete and close up, wound and heal, the wet whisper of the font, the long alliteration of her throat, the elliptical flesh of her face, the bone beneath, the tongue between, the mouth, composing every square word of her into a perfectly ordered meaning, into a sentence that meant exactly what it said. Yet when he awoke, dishevelled and alone, this meaning had escaped him.