The Folly (3 page)

He looked at the windows of the house behind the wall and tried to imagine what the occupants were doing. He saw Mrs at a wooden sideboard lighting a candle in a stainless-steel candlestick. He saw Mr, in slippers and gown, glass in hand, pipe in mouth, darkening a doorway. She fluttered at the wick. He stepped out of the door-frame into the warm embrace of the candle-light. He took two steps towards her, and paused. She looked over her shoulder, and smiled. He put one hand on the back of a chair and raised the other towards her hair. He stopped. He would go no further.

Nieuwenhuizen lanced the chop with his wire and flipped it over. He looked at the windows of the house and tried again.

Mr stepped out of the frame and took two steps towards Mrs. The ruby liquid in his glass glinted. She looked over her shoulder, which was sheathed in crimson taffeta, padded within and sequinned without, brought the match up to her mouth and blew out the flame. A puff of smoke drifted into his eyes. He blinked rapidly, put one hand on the back of the chair and raised the other towards her lips, which still held the softly rounded shape of her breath. His hand hung in the air, O! He would go no further.

Nieuwenhuizen ran the chop through and put it down on a ledge.
He levered the grille off the fireplace with his foot. He spat on his fingers, picked up the chop, chewed the fat off it and stared into the coals.

An ornate citadel, in which were many golden chambers, with corridors and staircases of copper and brass, and silver and lead, and bronze and pewter and aluminium foil, and other metals too numerous to mention, took shape in the heart of the fire, endured, and crumbled away.

The pockets of Mr’s trousers yielded up a screw, a one-cent piece, a receipt from the Buccaneer Steakhouse (1 × Dagwood, 1 × Chps, 1 × Gngr Beer), a soiled serviette, a fatty deposit slip from the United Building Society, a shirt button, a length of twine and a toothpick chewed at one end. Mrs stuffed the trousers into the washing-machine, jabbed a button to start the cycle and carried her finds to the lounge, where she arranged them on the coffee-table. She examined each of them in turn, as if each had a story to tell.

This exercise gave her an appetite for conversation. She went to her prize knick-knack cabinet and surveyed the exhibits. Budgie. Paper nautilus. Plastic troll. Worry-beads. Dinner-bell.

In the end it was a glass paperweight with a guineafowl feather aflutter in its heart that spoke to her.

Nieuwenhuizen was overcome by a great weariness. It drifted like spume from the tireless billows of veld and infiltrated the wide-open portals of his eyes, filling him slowly to the brim. His head listed, and the weariness slopped over and spilled down his cheeks. Mr Malgas
advanced towards him through the rainbowed mist, parting the grass with his muscular thighs, extending his right hand like a shifting-spanner and saying, “How do you do?”

“He was sitting there like a lump all day,” Mrs told Mr when he came in from work. “He was looking at our house as if there’s something wrong with it.”

“You shouldn’t take it personally,” said Mr. “He’s probably just tired from his journey.”

“What journey?” she demanded suspiciously. “Where did you get that?”

“I’m just supposing.”

“It’s not like you to suppose.”

“He must have come from somewhere. He didn’t sprout there like a bean.”

“Ha ha, that’s the spirit. Don’t worry about me. I’ll get used to being a prisoner in my own home.”

“What can a man do?”

“A man can find out what he wants. Go over there and ask him.”

Mr shrugged.

“He’d have to say something, if you asked. He couldn’t just sit there with a mouth full of teeth.”

M
r Malgas paused on the verge, in the twilight, to look over the plot. A thin melody mixed with the smell of cooked meat washed over him. He wasn’t sure what to do next: there was no gate to rattle, no doorbell to ring. After a while something came to him, a phrase he had heard in a film about the Wild West, and he tried it out: “Hail the camp!”

The singing ceased. Nieuwenhuizen loomed in the distance, wreathed in smoke, as tall as a tree struck by lightning. Mr Malgas was tempted to run away. But one twisted branch beckoned and the human gesture heartened him. He set out across the veld.

Nieuwenhuizen looked down on his settlement from the vantage-point of the oil drum. It was a dirty mess. He thought about tidying up, stirring the coals to enhance the atmosphere, even throwing on a log, but there wasn’t time. Mr Malgas drew near, breaking noisily through
the undergrowth. Nieuwenhuizen stuck out his hand and grasped the cold air experimentally. Firm but friendly.

When he reached the outskirts of the camp, where the grass had been trampled flat, Mr Malgas was relieved to see that the stranger owed at least some of his height to the fact that he was standing on something. As Mr Malgas broke into the pale ring of lamplight he leapt down and came forward with his hand raised. “Hail yourself, neighbour! I’ve been expecting you.”

“Malgas,” said Mr Malgas, fixing his eyes so earnestly on the gaunt face that its features blurred, and enclosing a thorny hand in his own. It weighed next to nothing and it pricked his palm.

“Father,” said the stranger.

“Pardon?”

“Father. Pleased to meet you.”

“Malgas,” Mr Malgas repeated slowly. “Did you say ‘Father’?”

“It’s odd, isn’t it? Everyone says so.”

“I’ve never come across it before.” Mr Malgas sneaked a glance at the fireplace, where a blackened pot was squatting over the coals. “It seems improbable, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

“Be my guest. I’m used to it. And you’ll get used to it too, believe me. People will get used to anything.”

In the silence that followed, Nieuwenhuizen noted Malgas’s Hush Puppies and his long socks bristling with blackjacks, his hairy, bulbous thighs, and a belly he tried to conceal, like a stolen melon, under the elasticized band of his shorts. Mr Malgas, while he watched Nieuwenhuizen
watching him, heard the pot pass a wind and smelt singed hair, leaves, burning rubber and incense.

“Are you a priest?”

“Heavens no.”

The silence sizzled.

“Pull up a stone,” said Nieuwenhuizen, suddenly jovial. “Take the weight off your feet.” He dragged his drum to the fireside, seated himself on it, gave his visitor a toothy grin and stirred the pot vigorously with a stick.

Mr Malgas sat on the proffered stone, with his knees sticking up like anthills and his hands hanging down between them like spades, looking at Nieuwenhuizen’s unlikely limbs and listening to the pot as it bubbled and squeaked.

Nieuwenhuizen said nothing, so Mr Malgas cleared his throat and said too loudly, “I’ll come straight to the point: Why are you here?”

“I’m building a new house,” said Nieuwenhuizen.

Mr Malgas looked over his shoulder.

“I haven’t actually started yet,” said Nieuwenhuizen with a crackly laugh. “It’s still in the planning stages.”

“You’re a builder then. I’m in hardware myself.” Mr Malgas wished he had a business card to present, but he hadn’t thought to bring his wallet. He was wearing a Mr Hardware
T
-shirt under his track-suit top, as always, but showing that would surely be improper. So he made the following conversation instead: “What brings you to our part of the world?”

“It’s a long story. Have you eaten?”

“No thanks.”

Nieuwenhuizen wiped his stirrer meticulously on the rim of the pot and laid it on a ledge made for that purpose. Mr Malgas saw from the protuberances at either end that what he had taken for a stick was in fact a bone. While he was inspecting it surreptitiously in an effort to determine its ancestry, Nieuwenhuizen took up a jagged bottle-neck and ladled some of his stew into a tin, plucked a plastic fork from his instep and began to eat.

“Where do you hail from?” asked Mr Malgas, rousing himself from his reverie.

“To cut a long story short: I left my home far away and came here to start over. It was a comfortable old place, give it its due, with one and a half bathrooms, but it had served its time. It was falling apart, to tell the truth. Full of maggots and tripe. The stuffing was coming out of the sofa, for example, the pipes leaked, the boards under the bath were green. I could see myself falling through them tub and all, up to my neck in hot water. The earth around there was quite rotten, and soft, a bit like cheese. I’d sink through it one day – that was my nightmare – I’d keep on going down to the centre of the planet, which is molten I’m told. Sss! Gone up in steam like a gob in a frying-pan. Can you imagine?”

Mr Malgas examined the soles of Nieuwenhuizen’s boots, which were stretched out towards the heat. The rubber bore a mysterious pattern of crosses and arrows. He also looked at Nieuwenhuizen’s oversized
head, which bobbed constantly as if to keep its balance on his stalk of a neck; the proportions of this head no longer reassured him.

“Excuse me?”

“Are you sure you won’t have a little something?” Nieuwenhuizen repeated, pointing to the pot and smacking his lips. He observed with approval the inquisitive look on his guest’s face.

“That reminds me: I must be getting back.”

“You’ve just arrived.” Nieuwenhuizen lifted a leaf-green mass on the end of his fork and blew on it. He turned his eyes on Malgas’s face, noting that the putty-coloured cheeks were now tinged with a rare shade of pink, and then allowed his attention to wander, over his guest’s beefy shoulder, to the wall, with its unsettling combination of wagon-wheels and suns. “Now that I’ve got you here, perhaps you can clear up a little question for me. That wall of yours, with the suns – are they rising or setting?”

Mr Malgas stood up very slowly, as if his belly weighed too much, and gazed across the desolate savannah. The light from his lounge window glowed comfortingly in the wedges between spokes and rays. No matter how hard he looked at them, the suns didn’t budge – but he did notice a curtain twitching. Now he remembered building the wall. Mrs said, “Wheels and suns in one wall? What will people think?” And he explained about discontinued lines, the principle of odds and ends, and discounts that were never to be repeated. It was simple. But rising or setting? Who could have foreseen such a poser? He sat down again. Nieuwenhuizen’s eyes were shining.

“I must be going now. Mrs will be wondering what’s become of me.”

Nieuwenhuizen raised his shoulders in a resigned shrug and said, “You must drop in again, and bring the Mrs with you. I must say I’ve enjoyed exchanging words with you. It passed the time very pleasantly.”

Mr Malgas pushed back his stone. He felt compelled to say: “If you need anything – bricks, cement, timber, you name it – just yell. Mr Hardware, Helpmekaar Centre. I’m in the Yellow Pages.”

“That’s kind of you, thanks. Good night then, Malgas.”

“Good night … Father.”

Mr Malgas walked purposefully away. “Fancy me calling him ‘Father’,” he thought, “he’s my age if he’s a day.”

Mr Hardware, Nieuwenhuizen thought as Malgas disappeared from sight. Blow me down.

Through a crack in the curtains Mrs watched Mr tiptoeing towards the camp, as if he was afraid of making a sound, and bowing into the light. He sat awkwardly on a stone, like a scolded child. His behaviour embarrassed her and she blushed, alone as she was, and turned away.

Quickly, in order of appearance: Doily. Dust-cover. Double boiler. Decanter. Doom.
Découpage
. Dicky-bird.

The incantation failed: she could not keep her distance. She returned to the window and was just in time to watch Mr bowing out of the light and blundering back the way he had come, or rather, the
way he had
gone
, looking fearfully around him as if he was afraid of the dark.

In alphabetical order then, slowly: Decanter.
Découpage
. Dicky-bird. Hum.

“If you ask me, he’s in real estate,” Mr said. “Property development, renovations, restorations, upgrading, that sort of thing.”

“I ask you,” Mrs said archly and crooked one tatty eyebrow into a question mark.

“A jack of all trades, but retired now and living off the proceeds. He didn’t say it in so many words, mind, I’m making deductions, so don’t quote me.”

“That doesn’t answer my question. What does he want?”

“He doesn’t
want
anything. He’s building a house.”

“A house?”

“A new one. Probably a double-storey.”

“A double-storey? Bang goes our privacy!”

“Never mind that. In this day and age it’s security that counts. You can’t afford to have an empty plot on your doorstep. Ask anyone. It attracts the wrong elements.”

“Building operations, I can just see it, noise and nuisance, generators, compressors, pneumatic hammers, concrete-mixers going day and night, strange men – builders. Dust all over my ornaments. It’s terrible. I’ll complain.”

“It’ll all be worth it in the end. He’s going to put up a mansion here,
if I know him, a magnificent place. Raise the tone of the neighbourhood, not to mention the property values. There may even be a bit of business in it for us.”

“Count me out. You can deal with him all on your own.”

Mrs turned up the volume. The minimum and maximum temperatures forecast for the following day by the Weather Bureau scrolled solemnly upwards against a backdrop of violins and autumn leaves. Mrs inhaled noisily through her teeth, drew her cardigan around her shoulders and turned the sound down again.

“I never should have bricked up the fireplace,” Mr said. “It would be homely to sit around the hearth with one’s feet propped on the fender.”

“And then where would we put the
TV
?”

They both looked at the set, which stood on a trolley on the old hearthstone. A man spoke silently to them, they could tell he was speaking by the movement of his moustache. Then the economic indicators appeared against a backdrop of trumpets (which they could not hear) and paper money.

“So what was he doing with himself? I don’t suppose he was watching television, like a normal human being.”

“He was cooking his dinner, actually, in one of those two-legged pots.”

“Come again.”

“In one of those pots with legs, you know the ones I mean.”

“I heard that. You know as well as I do those pots have three legs.”

“I know,” said Mr with feeling, “but this one looked for all the world as if it had
two
.”

“Are you nuts?”

“The third was obscured, no doubt.”

“Of course it was. How could a pot stand up on two legs?”

“True.”

“So what was in this pot?”

“God knows. He offered me some, he was very hospitable, but with dinner waiting for me here at home, I naturally declined.”

“I’d give my right arm to know what was in that pot …”

“It was some sort of stew. It didn’t smell too bad either, out in the open, under the stars. Fresh air always gives me an appetite.”

“Probably some poor domestic animal.”

They both watched an advertisement for life insurance, which they knew by heart even without the sound. It was about facing up to death.

“I wasn’t going to mention it, it’s not important, but he asked me the strangest question, with a straight face too. You know the wall? You know the wagon-wheels?” Mrs prepared a triumphant expression but Mr cut her short with, “Well, not them. You know the suns?… He wanted to know whether they were rising or setting.”

“Now I’ve heard everything,” said Mrs. “Any fool can see that they’re setting.”

Nieuwenhuizen emptied the remains of his stew into a gourd, sealed its neck with a wad of masticated wax-paper, slipped it into a cradle made from a wire coat-hanger and hung it on a branch of the tree beyond the claws of nocturnal scavengers. He scraped the burnt rind from the inside of the pot into the coals, where it produced a lot of
acrid smoke, filled the pot with water and left it to soak. Then he unpacked a leather bandoleer and a tin of dubbin from the portmanteau and set to work.

“Mrs!… I said, Mrs!”

“Ja.”

There was whittling to be done, there was twisting, there was hammering, and of course there was drowsing. When he was not pottering on his property, learning the lie of the land, Nieuwenhuizen sat under his tree, keeping his hands busy and nodding off.

Mrs Malgas observed all his doings, secretly at first, and then more openly as it became apparent that her presence made no impression on him. She took to perching on a stool behind the net curtain in the lounge, knitting, flipping through a magazine, turning questions about his motives over in her mind as if they were cards. She didn’t like him. Specifically, she didn’t like the way he jiggled his head and the way he hitched up his pants with his thumbs, which he stuck into his pockets, fanning out his fingers as if he didn’t want to dirty the cloth. She didn’t like his jaunty gait and his drifting off and staring into space. More generally, she didn’t like to think that he had come for no other purpose than to upset her and turn things upside-down. She didn’t like to think about him at all.

So she distracted herself by making inventories of her knickknacks: copper ashtray, Weltevreden coat of arms (wildebeest rampant).
Wicker basket, yellow, a-tisket. Figurines, viz. cobbler, gypsy, ballerina, plumber, horologist, Smurf. Paperweight, guineafowl feather. Paperweight, rose. Paperweight, Merry Pebbles Holiday Chalets. Cake-lifter, Continental China, coronation centenary crockery, crenate, crumbs. However. Spatula. Just as things were starting to become interesting. Mug. As day followed day. Doll. As day follows night. Puppy-dog. As night follows day, sure enough, she found herself drawn back to the window.

Nieuwenhuizen’s wanderings over the veld, as much as they annoyed her, reassured her too by their aimlessness. They made him seem indecisive, ineffectual and itinerant. But when he settled down under the tree to hammer beer tins into soup-plates, to tinker with fragments of pottery and polystyrene, to plait ribbons of plastic into ropes, to carve and whittle and twist, to hammer holes through and bind together, it seemed that he was practising for something bigger, it became conceivable that he really would build a house next door, a house in the contemporary style made entirely of recycled material, a disposable, three-bedroomed family home held together by the dowels of his own ramshackle purpose, and that he would occupy it, permanently – and this prospect made her feel utterly despondent.