Ivan Vladislavic - Double Negative

My mother was reminded of the shenanigans at body corporate meetings, which she attends purely for the theatre. Now the members were at war over the redecoration. ‘That old queen Paul Meagher wants lilac tiles in the lobby!’ she said. ‘It will look like a bathhouse, which is where he got the idea, I think.’

In the parking lot at the Garden City, as I was about to get out of the car, she put her hand on my arm and said, ‘Is everything all right?’

‘I’ve been out of sorts,’ I said. ‘This place gets to me sometimes.’

‘What is it now?’

‘Nothing specific, a succession of small irritations with the way things work, or don’t work, as the case may be.’

‘Tell me, before we go in.’

‘Here’s an example. I was at Home Affairs in Randburg last week to renew my passport. I hadn’t been out that way for ages. First I couldn’t find the place because I was looking for Hans Strijdom and the name has changed. I’ve heard Malibongwe Drive on the traffic report a hundred times and I didn’t put it together. Then there was a queue a mile long. You’d think it was an election. When I finally got to the counter, they wanted a copy of my old passport, but they didn’t have a photocopier, it was broken. The clerk sent me into the parking lot and there was a guy out there with a photocopier rigged to a 12 volt battery. He made me a copy for five rand.

‘The whole transaction was so half-baked, so underdeveloped. And there was a backscratching tone to it, the photocopy guy must be a cousin of the guy behind the counter, he probably takes a cut. They have a little business going on the side, they’re in the photocopy racket. The machine in the office, the proper machine, probably isn’t even broken. And if it is, why don’t they bloody well get it fixed?

‘The photocopy guy was eating a chicken breast. He wiped his fingers carefully on a rag, took my passport and hunkered down between two cars. The device was in a tatty cardboard box held together with packaging tape, and he flipped open the lid and got the copy going. My glum, official face edged out of the slot into the sunshine, burnt out, overexposed. This process shouldn’t be happening outdoors, I thought, it belongs in a quiet, dust-free, well-lit office. I looked across the street and there behind a palisade fence was some hi-tech head office where people behind cool grey glass were working at terminals in air-conditioned quiet. That’s where I should be doing this, I thought again, in a carpeted open-plan office with a water cooler, in an American space, not on a dusty, potholed patch of tar with the sun burning the back of my neck and the smell of fried chicken in the air.

‘I paid the guy and went inside with my photocopy. I’d been on the point of complaining about the quality of the print, which made me look like a ghost, but when I got it out of the sunlight it wasn’t too bad.’

‘So it all worked out in the end.’

‘Well, that’s what Leora said. When I told her the story, how the whole thing made me feel depressed and anxious about the future, she said it all depends on your perspective. It sounded quite hopeful to her, quite efficient and convenient. My photocopy guy is the African entrepreneur in action. He’s found a niche, he’s providing an ingenious solution to a problem and making an honest living. It’s a sign that things are working. They’re just working in a different way.

‘And I said, sure, I see that things can work this way — but I don’t think they should .’

‘You’ll have to get used to it, Nev.’

‘Or not. For the first time in years, I’ve been thinking I might be better off in England, somewhere the world meets my expectations more closely. But I’m not even sure about that. Everything seems harder to manage these days, and stranger. Perhaps it’s part of getting old.’

‘Wait till you’re my age,’ she said. ‘I can hardly follow what people are saying any more. My ears are nearly as bad as my eyes. I was watching telly the other night and I thought I’d flipped over to the wrong channel. It looked like a quiz show from Bulgaria or something. And then I recognized that chappie from Strictly Come Dancing and I realized they were speaking English.’

I’m growing into my father’s language: it will fit me eventually like his old overcoat that was once two sizes too big.

We went inside. An aide came with a wheelchair, but she wanted to walk. ‘Arrive in one of those and God knows what you’ll leave in.’ The lobby had a low, subtly shadowed ceiling, bloated sofas in private corners and paintings steeped in lukewarm pools of light. The wrought-iron tables and chairs belonged to the coffee shop. It felt more like a hotel than a clinic. We made for the lifts in baby steps. I realized again how much she’s shrunk over the years, she barely reaches my shoulder. Clinging to my arm, and blinking in wonder as she looked around, she seemed like a delicate child being taken on an outing to cheer her up.

Dr Jacobson had his own waiting room. There were pot plants with enormous leaves, which proved to be real, and posters showing the human eye in cross section. It brought back bits and pieces of my long-forgotten school Biology, the rods and cones, the blind spot, the aqueous humour.

I looked at the man on the cover of Longevity . His age was a mystery to me.

‘Do you ever do popcorn?’ my mother asked earnestly. ‘In the microwave?’

The nurse behind the counter tensed.

‘No …’

‘Good, because it’s making people sick. Popcorn lung.’

‘Popcorn lung!’

‘You get it from exposure to microwaved popcorn, the artificial butter flavour, to be precise. It’s a completely new affliction.’

‘Talk about death, disability and dread disease! The insurers must be reeling.’

‘You can laugh, but it’s the scourge of our times, every bit as horrible as consumption.’

Janie emailed to say she’d posted her first impressions on her blog. As soon as the article was done, she’d let me know. She’d looked again at my thresholders — they were more like gatekeepers, to be frank, just a thought — and for all the lack of drama in the pictures, found them engaging. They had a cumulative effect.

Had I heard of gate trauma? A dozen South Africans are killed by electronic gates every year. Closing gates cause a third of the fatalities, while falling gates account for the rest.

Some thoughts about the dead letters, btw: ‘You’re making them up. Heard it on the grapevine. So the ethical question — Whose letters? — yields to an aesthetic one — How convincing are they? Well done on clearing that hurdle. I picture you bent over your bench like a monk, with a stack of antique stationery under your fist and an old airmail sticker on the tip of your tongue, stuff you’ve been hoarding for ever and at last have a use for. Pretending to be someone you’re not, inventing signatures for your alter egos, making up weird handwritings and breaking English into little pieces.’

The digital grapevine: now there’s a poisoned plant. I wrote back: ‘Would hate to be accused of authenticity, but don’t believe everything you hear in the whispering galleries of the internet. No one knows about the dead letters except you and Leora, whose lips are sealed.’ It didn’t seem appropriate to mention my mother.

The first impressions were cut to a pop song, perhaps one of her own. The tune burbled along like a cellphone ringing underwater. Small animated shrieks zipped out and faded like rockets, while larger groans thumped in the bottom of the pot like root vegetables. Antoine K’s shanty town and Aurelia Mashilo’s palazzo. Street corners, flyovers rushing closer, bursting into the slipstream like surf, letterboxes, shrubbery, an ejaculation of soapsuds across a dirty windscreen, a braid coiled on the pavement like a house snake, capering children, here and there against a scudding backdrop my solemn profile, my double chin, my hands on the steering wheel, steering. The designated driver. Neville the Navigator.