Again and again, Nieuwenhuizen stooped, looped and knotted, and Mr Malgas, catching glimpses of grand columns and entablatures between the lines, muttered, “Yes! Yes!” and struck his palm with his fist.
But then, without warning, Nieuwenhuizen sundered the beautiful line between A and B (Obs) as if it had no more substance than a shadow. The components of the new house that Mr Malgas had been building up, all labelled clearly with letters of the alphabet, disengaged their joints with doleful popping noises (oompah) and drifted deliberately apart.
“Use your imagination, Malgas!” he rebuked himself. “Don’t be so bloody literal.”
Nieuwenhuizen went from nail to nail, stooping and looping. From time to time, when he stood back to observe the emerging plan, Mr Malgas studied it too, climbing up on his stool and peeping from under the pelmet in the hope that added elevation would bring greater insight. Nothing worthy of being called a new house suggested itself, neither rising above the ground nor sinking below. Something resembling a room would appear, a string-bound rectangle of the appropriate dimensions, but soon enough Nieuwenhuizen would put a cross through it, or deface it with a diagonal. By some stretch of the imagination a passage would become viable, only to be obliterated a moment later by a drunken zigzag. An unmistakable corner, a perfect right angle, survived for close on an hour. Mr Malgas became convinced that it was the extremity of the rumpus room Nieuwenhuizen had once referred to. But, without blinking, Nieuwenhuizen allowed it to spin out an ugly slash that traversed the entire plan and dislocated every element of it.
“Mrs! Peanuts!”
As the geometry of string proliferated, a disturbing potential arose: with every move Nieuwenhuizen made, some portion of a new house became possible. Mr Malgas would clap his hands and give vent to his gratitude. At last, a keystone! From that he could elaborate a bathroom, say, and then a door, necessarily, and, it follows, another room. . But sooner or later his house, rising reasonably, wall by wall, would tumble down as Nieuwenhuizen backed into it in his big boots, unreeling his string, and crossed it off the plan.
Mr Malgas was relieved when Nieuwenhuizen called it a day, and he resolved to put the plan from his mind entirely until his participation was invited once more. This looking on from the sidelines was too stressful.
The ball of string remained unbroken on the edge of the unfinished plan, wrapped in a plastic bag and weighted with stones.
“Up and down, up and down all day, busy as a butcher,” Mrs told Mr the following evening when he came in from work. “Making loops and tying knots, knit one, purl one, sling two together and drop the whole caboodle.”
She was ready to demonstrate the procedure with a ball of wool and some tins from the grocery cupboard, but he said gruffly, “Never mind that, I get the picture. Just tell me: Does this plan make sense? Can you see the new house? Is it taking shape?”
“Don’t ask me. I’m not interested in Him and His house. I just happened to glance that way once or twice when I was making a pot of tea.”
A car chase followed by a gun battle and a bomb blast, which shook the Malgases’ house to its foundations, gave Nieuwenhuizen a welcome respite from prying eyes. He took what was left of the ball of string out of its protective covering, unwound the tail-end and tossed the cardboard tube into the fire on the edge of the ash-heap. It had taken him three days of back-breaking toil to finish the plan. All this movement, backwards, forwards, even sideways when necessary, had spilled ash over the secret nail. He stooped into the clearing in the ashes and blew the head clean, deposited a blob of spittle on it and polished it with his forefinger. Then he looped the remnant of string around the nail, pulled it tight and knotted the end. It fitted perfectly.
Shortly afterwards he flicked a pebble against the lounge window to attract Malgas’s attention, Malgas chuffed out into the garden and they conferred through the spokes of a wagon-wheel.
The plan was finished! Malgas was willing to be delighted, until he was informed that the official unveiling was scheduled for the very next day.“Congrats!” he gulped. “I really mean it. But can’t the ceremony wait for the weekend? It’ll keep. Some of us have to work you know.”
“Out of the question. It’s now or never. You’ll have to take the day off.”
Malgas’s mind was racing. “Mrs will give me a mouthful if I don’t go to work.”
“That’s neither here nor there.”
“In any case, I’m not ready for the plan. I won’t understand it.”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Nieuwenhuizen said, reading Malgas’s thoughts in the open book of his face.
While Mr was explaining why he had to take the day off, Mrs absentmindedly picked up her china shoe, the one with the gilt buckle and the wineglass heel. She fogged the buckle with her breath and buffed it with the sleeve of her cardigan. She was about to return the shoe to its place on the mantelpiece when without warning it hiccuped and spat dust over her knuckles.
”It’s an omen,” she said. “We haven’t had one of those for ages.” “What’s it say?”
“It says you’re going too far with this new house thing and one ofthese days you’ll be sorry.”
Nieuwenhuizen was waiting for Malgas at his front gate the next morning. Malgas was surprised to see him there, as he seldom — if ever — ventured beyond the borders of his own territory. Before he could remark on it (“Surprise, surprise,” he was going to say) Nieuwenhuizen took him by the hand and issued instructions (“Close your eyes and shut your mouth,” he said). Malgas was tingling with the novelty of playing truant and itching for an adventure. He offered his own monogrammed handkerchief (ems and aitches interwoven) as a blindfold, just to be on the safe side, but it was courteously declined. So, screwing up his eyes until they watered, he let himself be led next door, and had many little mishaps on the way, stumbled over the kerb and twisted his ankle, but not too badly, it didn’t hurt any more, thanks, rubbed it vigorously and was tempted to peek, overcame temptation, stubbed his toe on a rocky outcrop there had not been reason to mention before, let alone curse to high heaven, goose-stepped over the string, felt less foolish than he might have because it was all in a good cause, was propped like an effigy in the middle of the plan.
Despite his misgivings of the night before, a spark of hope had kindled in his breast while he slept. He had woken with an inkling that the plan would be loud and clear after all and reveal the new house to him in all its splendour. Now, as his guide’s footsteps receded and he waited anxiously for further instructions, with the incense of the breakfast fire in his nostrils and the morning sun inflaming his sealed eyelids, his little hope flared up into a burning desire for revelation.
From a distance, Nieuwenhuizen commanded him to see. He opened his eyes.
All hope was snuffed out in an instant. He found himself in the
midst of an immense, tattered net full of holes and knots and twisted threads, more holes than threads, as a matter of fact, but for all that utterly impenetrable. To call it a plan was to grant it a semblance of purpose and order it evidently did not deserve. It was a shambles. It was so unremittingly drunken and disorderly that tears started from Malgas’s eyes.
Distantly, from the peripheries of his sight, Nieuwenhuizen invited him to explore.
Malgas remembered the web Nieuwenhuizen had woven once of transparent stuff as smooth as silk (or was it satin?) and as sweet as candy-floss. He tried to transform the bristly macramé scattered around him into that dreamy substance, but it remained stubbornly itself. Then he tried to recall the grid system, Roman numerals down one side and capitals down the other, A, I, E, A, E, E, E, but the wild and woolly scribblings made it impossible to sustain his cross-hatching. He called to mind a helpful hint: varnishes and veneers. Vrnshs ’n vnrs. Nonsense. He shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot, and the brittle crust of the earth broke into mosaic pieces and Scrabble tiles. “House,” he mumbled, as if he was praying, and the verb itself shattered into spillikins against his palate.
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