The Folly (12 page)

“You choose.”

“The cottage pie is also known as a shepherd’s pie, for some reason now lost to us. It consists of minced meat baked under a shroud of mashed potatoes. Or it will when I’ve put it in the microwave.”

“I don’t care. Just do it.”

“I know! It was made with mutton, once upon a time, sheep would die of exposure, bad shepherds, and potatoes are cheap and freely available.”

Nieuwenhuizen burst from his chair like a jack-in-the-box and writhed out of the room. The old volume, launched carelessly from his lap, flapped through the air and crash-landed in the fire. Malgas leapt to the rescue with the tongs, then thought better of it and left it to burn.

“I’ll bake you both and we’ll go halves,” he said to the dinners and hurried them back to the kitchen.

Mr Malgas stopped going to work. He lost weight and he began to smell, because he wouldn’t eat and he wouldn’t bath. All he would do was keep Nieuwenhuizen company.

And Mrs, despite her better intentions, found that she could do nothing but observe. Her loneliness and lack of self-esteem pressed in upon her and her health declined. She wasn’t allowed to do the ironing anymore. She wouldn’t dust. The Hoover had given up the ghost. Day after day, week after week, she had to watch them going through the motions.

On a typical morning Mr went next door at dawn. He looked in
the letter-box.
BEWARE OF THE DOG
! He marched boldly towards the plan, which sad to say was now a pale and tatty shadow of its former self, and stepped into it. He waved his hands around, shuffled sideways, walked, knocked, buzzed, tweaked, fiddled with the air, opened it and went inside.

“Otto!”

“Cooee!”

“Cookalooks!” Mrs cried, and bit her tongue so hard it bled.

Nieuwenhuizen turned over in the ashes, stretched, rose, opened the door under the stairs and shook Mr’s hand. Side by side they began to walk. They walked up and down and on the spot. They went in circles and seated themselves on the ground. They spoke briefly. Three times Nieuwenhuizen got to his feet, threw himself into the air, and allowed his limbs to rattle down like pick-up sticks. Mr followed his example, laughing good-naturedly even while he was bruising himself and spraining various parts of his body.

Then Nieuwenhuizen excused himself and sloped away to a corner of the plan, where he leant on the air and stared into space. Mr took off his clothes. He rubbed sand and ash all over his skin and scraped it off with sticks and stones. He danced around. He put on his clothes again and went and stood next to Nieuwenhuizen, staring out. They walked together, arm in arm, and stopped, walked apart and waved to each other, lay down on the ground like a pair of brackets, and went to sleep.

Malgas dreamt that he and Nieuwenhuizen were flying at a great height (side by side).

When they awoke they sat together again in a triangle of string, like toddlers in a play-pen, staring and talking. Then they stood up, patted themselves, and walked all over the show, each according to his own inclinations, careful to avoid the camp, going in circles, hopping, turning left and right, until they were reunited at the front door, whereupon they shook hands and shouted out greetings.

“Farewell!”

“Sweet dreams!”

Mr stepped out of the plan and walked to the street. He looked in the letter-box and came home.

“Your food’s in the warming-drawer,” Mrs said. “Probably spoilt.”

“I’m not hungry,” said Mr with a wan smile. “I couldn’t eat a horse. Not even a pony.”

“You should put something in your stomach. Your clothes are hanging on you.”

“I’ve eaten.”

“You look like death warmed up,” she said, trying to wipe the smile off his face, “and you smell like bonemeal. We’ll be digging you into the flower-beds one of these fine days. For the phlox.”

But Mr was too happy for words. He drifted through his house as if it wasn’t there. He lay down in a dark corner of the pantry and fell asleep with a smile on his lips.

Mrs wanted to describe what he’d been up to, but she couldn’t get a word in edgeways.

On an evening like this, a fairly typical evening when all is said and done, as Mrs Malgas lay alone in the clutches of the La-Z-Boy, the unrest report finally delivered up, as an item of news, the film of a woman being burnt alive.

A woman suspected of being a spy, the unrest reporter declared, was set alight today by an angry mob.

There was a warning that sensitive viewers might find the following scenes distressing, and Mrs shut her eyes responsibly. But when the screen cast its light upon her lids, it came to her that she had been waiting for nothing so much as this moment, and she felt obliged to open her eyes again, and saw the burning woman running down a road between matchbox houses.

A burning woman!

A woman suspected of being a spy.

I spy something beginning with a B. A burning.

The people who had set the woman alight, beginning with an L, the one who had struck the match and the curious others drawn to the flames, and furious others afraid of the dark, ran after the woman and breathed the smoke. She leapt into the air. One of her shoes flew off. She fell and crumpled into a ball, and her tattered red frock settled over her. The others, delirious fools, appalled arrangements of dots, gathered and by their watching fuelled, the woman curled, the woman unfurled and stood up again on two legs. A shoe.

Brth.

A woman on fire! Aflame.

The moths, ordinary people, the other poor mirrors, momentarily
scattered, gathered again. Mrs found herself in the smothering circle of onlookers, scattering and gathering, gazing upon, pull yourself together, their illuminated faces, as if, as if the naming of their expressions, by the light of the human torch, by its dying, its death, were the claiming of her own.

She switched off the set, belatedly, and the image died down into two coals under her eyelids. Remembers, embers, mbrs, mrs, s.

Mrs thought about the fact that she was sensitive. Was documentary proof required? Written evidence?

Then Mrs thought about Mr and how he was embarrassing himself. He was up to maggots and losing weight – even the spare tyre. His happiness was consuming him. And Nieuwenhuizen? There were bits and pieces of Him everywhere. What was left of Him? She rose and went towards the window, but the net curtain blew like smoke into her face and she was turned back gasping into her restless household.

N
ieuwenhuizen and Malgas sat down to pass the time of day in their easy chairs in the rumpus room. They had spent an active morning playing a version of snap thought up by Malgas, involving fixtures and features, and they were both pleasantly tuckered out.

They mulled over a comfortable silence.

Malgas looked once again at the bandoleer and the hunter’s hat, which Nieuwenhuizen had taken to wearing day and night. Malgas had always disapproved of the bandoleer, although it may have suited the rough and ready atmosphere of the camp. But in the new house it was totally out of place. As for the hat … did one really need protective headgear indoors? Had it come to that? He’d been meaning to say something all day, but held back for fear of spoiling the easy comradeship that had developed between them. Perhaps criticism was premature? Time had to pass, it had to be allowed to pass unmolested.
Or had the right moment arrived? Did the moment have to be challenged with an unpronounceable password? He formulated a question, edited it, and was about to come out with it when Nieuwenhuizen raised his right hand to hush him, kinked his eyebrows into kappies (circumflexes) and formed a perfect
O
with his lips, flexed his fingers, plunged his hand like a grapnel through the floorboards, fished, and hauled up a section of the plan.

Malgas couldn’t believe his eyes. He gazed in horror at the splintered boards and the string purling from the hole like a distended vein. Nieuwenhuizen stretched the string over his knuckles and snapped it. Both ends burst into tufts of throbbing fibres. He pinned one of the loose ends under an elephant-foot pouffe; he wound the other tightly around his fist and stood up. Not a moment too soon either, for the empty chair sank to its haunches even as he rose. He backed across the room, pulling the string up through the floor as he went. It sliced through the varnished pine like a knife through buttered gingerbread.

The house shivered.

Nieuwenhuizen disappeared through a doorway into the next room, coiling the plan on his left arm between thumb and elbow. Malgas stumbled after him, croaking and gesturing at the crumbly edges of the gash. His knees were shaking, and his hands were opening and closing on the air.

There was a fireplace in this room, which was a reception room of some description, there was a fire in the grate, and Nieuwenhuizen bore down on it unerringly. He reached into the flames, smashing the hearthstone to smithereens, and jerked up a nail in a tangle of
string. He extricated the nail, wiped some sticky flames off it on his thigh, puffed the heat out of it and pushed it through a loop in the bandoleer. It fitted.

Malgas found his voice, but now he couldn’t find anything to say with it. He hopped backwards and forwards over the gash and felt the house trembling as the shock set in. At last a sentence came to him – it wasn’t quite right but it would have to suffice – and he steeled himself and declaimed: “In the name of decency, stop this senseless destruction!”

Nieuwenhuizen glanced at him quizzically, snorted, picked a new thread out of the ashes in the broken hearth and walked through a wall, shattering masonry and woodwork. Malgas heard him in the next room, coughing and laughing. He made to follow him through the jagged hole, in which a storm of plaster dust and wood shavings still raged – but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He’d have to take the long way round. He ran out into the passage and plotted Nieuwenhuizen’s position as he went. I.

Nieuwenhuizen had come out in an unused
en suite
bathroom in the east wing. When Malgas caught up with him, he was standing coyly in the broken shell of the bathtub disengaging his nails from the plan, which had frothed into a clot on his left arm, and loading the bandoleer. He was powder-white and there were crumbs of brick and flakes of ceramic tile on the brim of his hat. A severed pipe gushed soapy water over his boots. He stepped out of the bath ever so daintily, flattened a screen and emerged in the bedroom. He began reeling in handfuls of string from under the bed.

Desperate measures were called for. Malgas filled his lungs with abrasive air and said, “What’s going on here Father – I mean Otto?”

“I’m getting rid of this old thing.”

“This ‘old thing’ is our beloved plan, the apple of our eye. Do I have to remind you?”

“It’s fucked.”

“What!”

“Excuse my French. It’s had it. Kaput.”

“You haven’t consulted me. We can sit down and talk it over, by all means, I don’t even mind if we stand, but I must be consulted before the fact. I think you owe me an explanation for this unaccountable behaviour.”

“I don’t owe you anything, let’s face it. But if it gets your goat – and I can see it does, don’t ask me why – I can explain. It’s simple: the plan has served its purpose. We have no more use for it. Don’t just stand there, give me a hand with it. The sooner this is all over, the better.”

Nieuwenhuizen tugged at the ball of string and a volley of nails tore through the carpet in a cloud of desiccated underfelt. The room shuddered as if someone had walked over its grave. A crack ran opportunely through a wall. Malgas braced himself in the door-case; Nieuwenhuizen, by comparison, sat down on the bed to undo a knot. The wall behind him swayed, and a picture-rail and two landscapes in ornate gilt frames broke loose from it and floated down to the floor. They smashed spectacularly, with no sound effects, and a wave of fragments cascaded into the room, sluiced off Nieuwenhuizen’s hat and shoulders, and, subsiding, poured between Malgas’s legs. Malgas fell on his
knees and cupped his palms for the bobbing pieces, but they drained away into the swamp.

“Please stop!” Malgas gurgled, losing all self-respect. “I still need the plan. I won’t be able to see without it. I’ll go under.”

But Nieuwenhuizen was firm. “I’m sorry, it has to go. They’re bringing my stuff at four o’clock and I’ve got to be finished by then. I can’t keep them waiting. In any case, this place is a death-trap. Someone’s bound to trip and break something.”

“What stuff?”

“My goods.”

Malgas grovelled in his failure to understand.

“My furniture,” Nieuwenhuizen said in an exasperated, parental tone.

“You never said you had
furniture
 …”

“Of course I’ve got furniture! Use your head: a man of my age.”

“Well, let’s say you’ve got it, but we won’t be needing it. Why not? you interject. It’s obvious, I retort with finality: We’ve already got furniture. We don’t have space for more.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

“It’s not right.” Malgas was close to tears. “I won’t let you do it, we’ve been through too much together.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?” Nieuwenhuizen said angrily. “The architect? The landlord?”

Malgas sniffed and looked at his hands.

“This is my house,” Nieuwenhuizen went on. “My namesake. You’re just a visitor … not even that, some sort of janitor – a junior
one, with no qualifications and precious little experience, and damned lucky to have a broom cupboard all to yourself. What were you when I discovered you and took an interest in your welfare? A
DIY
good-for-nothing, that’s what, a tongue-tied nobody. What I say around here goes, is that clear? Look at me when I’m talking to you. Crumbs! To think that you’d turn on me like this, after all I’ve done for you. It hurts me, it really does.”

With that Nieuwenhuizen swung on his heel, bundling up nails and string in his arms, and walked through the cracked wall. He passed through an eye-level oven and a kitchen sink, upsetting a half-baked bread and butter pudding and a stack of dirty dishes in the process, and came out in the walk-in cupboard in the master bedroom. He walked out of that, he slid through two walls, he sank through a floor and stood in Malgas’s room under the stairs with his head jutting through the ceiling.

Malgas jumped up and ran after him, choking in the confetti that gusted in his wake. Malgas took the long way round; Nieuwenhuizen took the short cuts. Malgas glimpsed him at the end of corridors, through archways and serving-hatches, moving fearlessly through space. At each new breach of its integrity, the house trembled more violently.

In his hurried descent of the grand staircase Malgas nearly tripped over Nieuwenhuizen’s head, resting like an over-dressed coconut against one of the risers. He hurdled over it to the foot of the stairs and snatched open the door to his room. He found Nieuwenhuizen standing to attention on the rug, with his heels together and his toes
apart. The space between his boots was an arrowhead that pointed precisely at the secret nail, nestling in the darkness below the floorboards. Flaccid lengths of string straggled from holes in the rug and led to the bundle of plan which swung nonchalantly in the hammock.

In a flash Malgas understood Nieuwenhuizen’s intention, but it was too late to stay his hand. Nieuwenhuizen reached down through the rug and seized the plan where it was secured to the secret nail. Sawdust and ash squirted up through the rents. He tugged. The nail held – but only for a moment. Then it shot out into the light with a screech that drowned out Malgas’s own cry of pain. The secret nail, secret no more, in an instant made unpardonably public, dangled in a cat’s cradle of string. It flew this way and that for no apparent reason. It was cold and grey. All the fire had gone out of it.

The house grew pale. Malgas saw right through it, from one end to the other. He saw tumblers tumbling idly in locks, he saw doors opening and closing in endless succession, he saw filaments in light-bulbs crumpling into squiggles of ash, he saw the head of a match exploding. As a result he began to cry, and he called out pathetically, “The house! The house!”

“Stop that.”

“The house. It’s falling down around our ears.”

“Oh don’t be such a cry-baby. If I’d known you’d behave like this I never would have let you in.”

“All my hard work for nothing,” Malgas sobbed. “I had it by heart, and now you’re breaking it down.”

“It’s not in the heart, you clot, it’s in the head.” Nieuwenhuizen
tipped back his hat so that Malgas could see the bulge of his forehead. “This clinging to one thing is unseemly in a breadwinner. What’s in a house? There’s plenty more where this one came from.”

As he spoke he rifled a Moorish townhouse complex from his hatband, balanced it in his palm, scrunched it up, popped it into his mouth and swallowed it. He opened his mouth wide to show that it was indeed empty. This captured Malgas’s attention: he stared at the breakwater of yellow teeth and the pink tongue lapping against them. Now Nieuwenhuizen flourished his hand and one after the other half a dozen modest family homes blossomed between his fingers, rolled over his knuckles and vanished.

Malgas took a wad of cotton waste out of his sleeve and blew his nose.

“That’s better.”

To crown it all, Nieuwenhuizen plucked a mansion from behind Malgas’s ear. It was a cute miniature, complete with towers and battlements, a double garage and a carport, a flagpole and a drawbridge, a fibreglass swimming-pool with a Slasto surround and a Kreepy Krauly, a diving-board, a jungle gym and a putt-putt course. It was so much like the new house, which even then was creaking and swaying all around them, and so hopelessly out of proportion, that Malgas felt a sludge of inconsolable grief welling up in his chest. He would have burst out crying again, but Nieuwenhuizen tossed the little house up into the air, where it self-destructed with a thunderclap, and said cheerfully, “See? There’s no point in getting sentimental. Now give me a hand with this plan.”

“It’s all over,” Malgas thought. He felt tired and empty. He began to help Nieuwenhuizen with his unenviable task. Someone had to do it. Nieuwenhuizen discarded the bandoleer: he said they had lost too much time in pointless discussion to bother with salvaging the nails, so they rolled the string up nails and all. Malgas took no pleasure in this little victory.

As the plan came up, the house shivered convulsively and grew transparent; roof-tiles and chimney-pots clattered down over the gutters and plunged into the still waters of the moat; chunks of masonry cracked out of the walls and bounced across the floors like painted polystyrene.

Malgas tried not to look at the splintered boards and crumbling walls, or at Nieuwenhuizen’s clumsy boots and the crosses and arrows they were imprinting in drifts of sawdust and icing sugar. He held the familiar shapes of the rooms in his palms and tried to keep the new house whole, even though his heart was no longer in it.

At four o’clock, true to Nieuwenhuizen’s word, a delivery van bearing his goods drew up outside. The van was green, and on its side was a golden gonfalon held up by manikins in overalls, identical twins, and on the gonfalon were the words
SPEEDY REMOVALS
. You could tell by the hundreds of tapering brush-marks blurring their outlines what a hurry the little men were in.

Malgas was sitting on the doorstep with his head in his hands. Nieuwenhuizen perched on the edge of the stoep, resting his feet on the hobnailed lump which was all that remained of the plan. They had
nothing to say to one another, although Nieuwenhuizen’s bobbing head spoke volumes. Two removers – the driver and an assistant – alighted from the cab and Nieuwenhuizen went to confer with them, shaking each one’s hand in turn and chatting away quite naturally, giving and taking counsel. Malgas was relieved to see that there were only two. There didn’t seem to be much furniture either, although what there was looked old and ugly. A lounge suite, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers; standing lamps and plants in pots; white goods. A dozen cardboard boxes. Malgas examined the boxes critically and found them wanting: second-rate materials, shoddily folded and half-heartedly sealed. The signs saying
THIS SIDE UP
were all upside-down.

Under Nieuwenhuizen’s direction the removers unloaded a settee from the van and carried it to the house. Malgas scrambled out of their way and inspected this item as it sailed past him. It was made of a dark and grainy wood, thickly varnished, barnacled with bubble gum and scratched by countless fingernails, knitting-needles and keys, branded by who knew what cigarette-ends and coffee mugs. It had muscular cabriole legs with ball and claw feet, but its arms were sadly wasted and terminated in arthritic talons. The stuffing was foaming out of the cushions, and springs spiralled out of the brocade. The removers, by contrast, were neatly dressed in spanking new tartan caps (in grass-green and lemon) and green overalls of a leafier shade with knife-edge creases in the legs and old-gold piping on the cuffs and turn-ups.