Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

Minute Print made me twelve photostatic copies of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’. For the Last Finger Supper. Cost me a packet, but one had to be prepared, one never knew what would happen. How many guests were we expecting? Wessels wouldn’t say. My budget stretched to a round dozen. I bound the copies with rubber bands and wrapped them in a plastic bag courtesy of the Okay Bazaars. Then I bore them to the Café Europa in my briefcase, pressed back into service specifically for this purpose.

In the bag I also carried the eighth edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary , ‘the New Edition for the 1990s’, scarcely opened, edited by R.E. Allen, and proofread, hallelujah, honorifics in the original, by Mrs Deirdre Arnold, Mr Morris Carmichael, Mrs Jessica Harrison, Mr Keith Harrison, Ms Georgia Hole, Ms Helen Kemp, Ms E. McIlvanney, Dr Bernadette Paton, Mr Gerard O’Reilly, Ms J. Thompson, Dr Freda Thornton, Mr Anthony Toyne, and Mr George Tulloch, amongst others. (Thirteen, if you didn’t count the et alii. Was it wise, I wonder, to choose an unlucky number? Was it wise at all to employ a team ? And eight of them women.) The eighth edition of the Concise was the current one. I do not care much for currency, but something told me the night would hold surprises it might be useful to define. And if the opportunity to administer a sample of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ arose, if it actually came to that, I would present the volume as a prize. The floating trophy would have to wait for the first fully-fledged competition.

The New Management was amusing itself in the pool room, stringing crinkle-paper decorations of its own manufacture, and I was able to march straight into the Gentlemen’s room and lock the door behind me. The little window opened onto a dirty grey well, veined with pipes for power and plumbing. I secured the plastic bag to a downpipe on the outside wall and closed the window again. The Concise I secreted on top of the cistern in the cubicle. Then I went home to freshen up.

*

When I set out for the Goodbye Bash a few hours later, I carried in the pockets of my blazer the original copy of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’, twelve sharpened pencils (pointing due south in the interests of safety), a sharpener, my current notebook and the Pocket Oxford Dictionary , in its berth over my heart. The particoloured tops of the Faber-Castells jutting from my breast pocket made me feel like a general.

I once read a newspaper article in which some so-called celebrities were asked what book they would take with them to a desert island. A surprising number, given the godless times we live in, said the Holy Bible. And several, including a star of pornographic films, chose the complete works of the Bard. But not one had the Condensed Oxford Dictionary , which was my choice, doubly sealed by the little magnifying glass in its velvet pouch, so useful for making fire. Much has changed since then. What would I choose today? My bosom friend the Pocket .

As I made my way to the Café Europa for the last time, I turned a few heads, I think I can say without exaggeration. A smartly pressed pair of flannels is not an everyday sight on the streets of the Golden City — Grubbier Johannesburg, to quote my pal Wessels.

There was an air of expectancy in the dusk, along with the volatile essence of newsprint and exhaust fumes. Luminous dabs of tail-lights glimmered and died on the smoky canvas of the street. Shop windows frosted with shoewhite and dusted with detergent snowflakes were aglow like nativities in the cathedral of the gathering darkness: the ruins of our grey Christmas. The new year in the offing was black as pitch. It made one want to hurry on to some place bursting with light.

Who should totter out of the shadows but Mrs Hay. The first of the old bodies. I knew her at once by the sticking-plaster sutures: keeping up appearances. She tried to clasp me to her breast, like a long-lost missal or a pint of gin, but I fended her off with my elbows.

‘So, what are the portents?’ I asked, being friendly.

‘Excellent, Aubrey. We’re going to give you a wonderful send-off.’

Silly old bat. You’d think it was a farewell do for me.

We ascended in Indian file, nostalgically and irritably respectively. The Café Europa was dark. I could barely make out the sign on the door: Private Function — Members Only. We stepped into the coffee-stained hush. Paper chains strung from the ceiling, and looped over one another, sketched a series of vaults upon the twilight above. A red light winking in the far corner indicated Hunky Dory’s laboratory; the pink glow in the chapel came from the ‘fruit machines’ (when Mrs Mavrokordatos first mentioned these, I thought she meant the juice dispensers one finds in cinema foyers). Washes of cherry skin and strawberry juice. Otherwise dark and empty. Never be the first to arrive or the last to leave.

Mrs Hay headed for the Ladies’ room to fix her face. I went towards table No. 2. But as I drew closer, I saw that it was already occupied. Pipped at the post again … by Spilkin and Darlene! What with his suntan and her natural shade, which had always tended to powdery shale, they were almost invisible against the Alibian sandstone.

*

‘Care to join us?’

I drew up my usual seat.

They were sitting with the armrests of their chairs pushed together, their temples touching. Her head in silhouette was swollen and empty at the same time, gaping over his own hard nut as if it were an ingestible morsel. On the table stood a bottle — I couldn’t make out the label in the gloom — and two glasses.

He looked older and wearier. The eyebrows were shrubby, the eyelids sagging. Subocular luggage (punchlines, Spilkin). I refused to focus on her, but even from the corner of my eye, I could see that she was just the same, and it made the change in him all the more regrettable.

‘Long time no see,’ he said.

I would have expected the pidgin to come from her mouth rather than his. It struck me dumb. A nonsensical phrase sing-songed through my mind: wena something or other. Eveready had written it down for me one day, his contribution to my notebook, but I’d forgotten the translation. Was it Psalm 23 in the isiZulu? Spilkin’s hand felt puffy and damp. Chop-chop, chop-chop. I forced the melody to be quiet and enquired instead:

‘Still living in Durban?’

‘No, we’re up here again.’

‘Back at the Flamingo?’

‘No, in Bez Valley with the in-laws.’

‘How do you find it? I mean Johannesburg.’

‘Turn right at Vereeniging. No seriously, it’s dreadful. Full of madmen. They’ve gone and changed the typeface in the Star again to something illegible. How’re the peepers, by the way?’

‘Like a hawk.’ I gave him a verse of the old rhyme — the Elephant variation.

‘Monoblepsia playing up at all?’

‘No way, José.’ Mexican rhyming slang courtesy of Errol and Co. I thought he might appreciate it.

It was almost like old times. If one paid no attention to the wardrobe, that is. Spilkin was wearing blue-denim breeches — Wessels would say ‘a jean’ — and a turtleneck sweater. Pork dressed as piglet. Everybody’s Darling, coming insistently into focus as my eyes grew used to the light, was got up like the Rain Queen. Enough linen in her turban to make a yurt, a dress full of darts and flounces. The cloth was so loud it made my ears hurt, banana yellow, predominantly, and garish beadwork. I greeted her civilly, still prepared to let bygones be bygones, but she was as rude as ever. That bloody mouth of hers opened like a wound in the gloaming.