Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

Mr M.T. Wessels

Mr Aubrie Tearle

Mevrou Anna Bonsma

Mr Dan Bogus—

Miss Merlé Graaff

Errol and Raylene

Vlooid en Nomsa

Bill and Pardner

Mrs Mav

Mrs Hay

Ernie and them (Harry, Eddie, Little Harry etc)

Carmelita and Pardner

Mr Everistus alius Eveready

One hardly knew where to start.

‘Partner has a “t” in it,’ I said. Boggled. ‘A pardner is someone who trots along beside you on a bobtailed mare.’

‘Have I missed anyone out?’

‘Mnr Vetsak.’

‘Ha, Aub. Jokes aside.’

‘You’ve been very thorough. I see the bottle-washer’s invited. You should ask him to bring the kitchen sink along.’

‘I reckoned you wouldn’t mind about Everistus. He was like family. And times have changed: if he pulled in here today, he could park off with us and have a fresh orange.’

First it was a club, now it’s a family.

‘How are you going to track everyone down?’ I had a list of names and addresses he would have found very useful, but I wasn’t going to help him with this nonsense.

‘I’ve got my ways. My contacts.’

‘What’s become of Spilkin?’

‘He was on first, but then I took him off again. I don’t want to stand on anyone’s feet.’

‘I ’d have thought Spilkin’s name should lead all the rest, like Abou Ben Adhem. Not that he loved his fellow man, especially, but he had an eye for the ladies. Anyway, it’s your party, invite who you please. Even the hooligans.’

Speak of the devil. Errol came sliding in from the balcony with Raylene in tow — or was it Maylene? they all sound like household cleaners to me — and then Floyd and Nomsa, who appears to wear wigs, and our very own Moçes bringing up the rear, with his waistcoat unbuttoned and his bowtie hanging down from one point of his collar. Errol pulled up a chair at our table — ‘Please won’t you join us,’ I said — and flung himself over it like a discarded overall. Raylene or Maylene sat on the armrest and crossed her long right leg, not on her own knee but on Errol’s! I couldn’t quite see how it was done. She turned her face up to the fan, flushed, sweaty from the sun. They do seem to perspire rather a lot (although I remember reading somewhere that it’s a sign of good health, except in the tropics). Floyd and Pardner went on into the kitchen. I believe Moçes was supplying them with drugs — or vice versa — although Wessels insisted he gave them food. Leftovers. They were undernourished, according to Wessels, who had developed an entirely misplaced social conscience. Undernourished! With those muscles?

‘Howzit Wessie, Mr T, how the tawpies?’ (I’ve recorded a few snippets of the argot over the months. A is an elderly person — from their youthful perspective, more often than not someone in the prime of life. I suspect there’s an element of the racial slur in it too. And ‘Mr T’, in case you were wondering, refers to me.) ‘Dop?’ Errol went on. ‘Brandy or whatever the case may be?’ His mouth hung open. Also characteristic. You’d think he was always hungry, like a baby bird or some sea-dweller browsing for plankton. Certainly, he was usually putting something in his mouth, a Chesterfield cigarette (when he scrounged ‘smokes’ from Wessels, he snapped off the filters before he lit them), or some Black Label beer straight from the bottle, or a luminous orange larva called a Cheesnak (sic). But it was more than hunger, it was lassitude, some slackness in his long dark face, in his whole lank body, as if the bones were too loosely jointed. Needed starch. The outsize clothing he favoured didn’t help either. ‘Slapgat’ Wessels called it, and the vulgar Afrikanerism was apt.

‘We was just wrapping about the closing-down jôl,’ said Raylene/Maylene, ‘and Err had one of his bright ideas. He schemes we should get Hunky Dory to play. Like he’s usually weekends only, but I reckon Tony could ask him to come on Thursday instead, specially for the party. For old time’s sake.’

Err. Tony. Hunky Dory. They sounded more like conditions than human beings. But even Hunky Dory was a person. Tone had employed him as the resident musician. He played on Saturday nights only, but his equipment lay in the corner all week, like a junior electronics set, handfuls of gauges and dials, tangles of cable and wire, chromium tubing and grey insulation tape. ‘Hunky Dory’ hung on a string above the rostrum that passed as the stage, in glittering letters with ragged fringes of the kind usually reserved for Seasons Greetings, stirring gently in the breeze from the overhead fans.

I had once heard him manufacture ‘music’ on these ‘instruments’, to my regret.

‘I would rather hear a tribe of cats quartered on a bandsaw, fortissimo and accelerando,’ I quipped, ‘than be subjected to Hocus Pocus and his engines.’

Errol’s lip drooped. ‘Come again?’

‘Rock and roll gives me a headache.’

‘Take a Grampa,’ said Errol.

‘You a funny old tawpy,’ said Raylene/Maylene, and jogged her foot on Errol’s knee. It was unnerving, as if they were one person, Siamese twins joined at the thigh, a single creature that didn’t know whether it was Arthur or Martha. The impression was strengthened by the girl’s muscular calf and rubber-toothed combat boot (Israeli army surplus, they claimed). To test the limits of my theory, Errol’s right hand, which had been asleep on her hip with a cigarette smouldering between its fingers, awoke and began to creep over her bare midriff. It traced circles around her navel with the tip of an index finger and then dropped off again. The damp end of the cigarette slipped into the omphalic whorl in her flesh like a jack into a socket. The girl’s belly rose and fell with her breathing, the cigarette fumed. It was perverse. It reminded me of something I had seen on television: a barber-shop quartet of ugly Mongolians, which turned out to be paunches with faces painted on them. Humor.

‘What kind of music do you like smark, Mr T[earle]? Sakkie sakkie? Long arm?’ She looked at my unbarbered crown. ‘Classics?’

‘Sherbet is good,’ said Wessels. ‘And Schoeman.’

‘I’d have thought Brahms and Liszt were more in your line,’ I countered.

‘No really,’ said the girl. ‘What are you into?’

‘Into? I’ll tell you what I’m out of : the Talking Heads, the Simple Minds and the Exploding Pumpkins.’

That was bound to raise a laugh. Errol guffawed and slapped his better half’s knee. I noticed, with a start, because I had never seen it before, the word ‘Raylene’ tattooed on his forearm in that mouldy verdigris so beloved of tattoo artists and meat inspectors. Perhaps he’d just had it done. It solved the identity crisis, anyway.

‘How come you know this stuff?’

‘He’s a walking encyclopaedia,’ said Errol. ‘A seedy rom.’ Don’t ask me where they pick these things up.

‘He makes a study of everythink,’ said Wessels proudly.

A few more came back to me: ‘Snoopy Doggy Dog. Prefabricated Sprouts. Animals.’ Another guffaw. They might laugh, but they bought the records that made these jokers rich. The names were so ludicrous, you’d think the public was being challenged not to take them seriously. They might as well all call themselves The Charlatans and be done with it. I had a list of them in my notebook, which I was tempted to consult, but it was more telling to know them by heart. I’d made the list a few months before in the Look and Listen Record Bar, where I had gone to disprove Wessels’s claim that there was a famous ‘jazz’ musician called Felonious Monk. As it turned out, I was right on a mere technicality — his name was Th elonious — but I discovered something even more remarkable: his middle name was Sphere. Merle would have loved it. He was a rotund little figure too, a fully formed semibreve.