The Folly (9 page)

“It’s a little late for sundowners, and a little early for nightcaps, but cheers anyway. To you and yours!”

His host’s gratitude, so deeply felt and tastefully expressed, brought a lump to Malgas’s throat, and he had to wash it down with a slug of the mixture before he could voice his own appreciation for everything.

Then Nieuwenhuizen said, “If you don’t mind I’d like to go over the plan now, while it’s fresh. If you’re not ready for such heady stuff, perhaps you should block your ears. Better still, go home to the Mrs. I don’t want to cause any trouble. Go on, take your drink with you.”

“I’d be grateful if I could stay,” Malgas protested. “Plans aren’t my thing, I admit, I’m a supplier at heart – but I’ve got to start somewhere.”

“That’s my boy, I was hoping you’d say that. Are you comfortable? Okay … where to begin? Yes: the corners. See that nail there, on the edge of the shadows, and the two behind it, with their heads together?
Well, that, my Malgas, delimits the north-eastern extremity of the rumpus room.”

Malgas gasped.

“That one there, in line with the letter-box, is the left-hand what’s-its-name … jamb of the front door. Not that one,
my
left.”

The long shadow of Nieuwenhuizen’s forefinger brushed over the smooth heads of the nails, weaving a web of diaphanous intent in which Malgas was willingly ensnared and cocooned. Nieuwenhuizen’s hand, moving now with the delicate poise of a spirit-level, now with the brute force of a bulldozer blade, levelled terraces and threw up embankments, laid paving and plastered walls. With a touch, his skittery fingers could open a tracery of light and air in a concrete slab, and through it his papery palms would waft a sea breeze laden with salt and the fruity scents of the orchard. Apricot, blueberry, coconut-milk. He made it seem so simple.

He began with the situation and dimensions of the rooms, which were many and various. Then he took the rooms one at a time and elaborated on the location of doors and windows, built-in cupboards, electricity outlets, switches and light fixtures. He catalogued special features, such as burglarproofing, air-conditioning and knotty-pine ceilings. He dwelt upon the observation deck, the rumpus room and the bomb shelter, all of which, he assured Malgas, had an integral place in the conception.

“Fascinating,” said Malgas, shaking off the narcotic effects of the presentation. “But I must admit that I still can’t really see it. There’s no point in lying about it, is there?”

“Of course not. You’re finding it heavy going because the plan isn’t quite finished; we’ve still got to join up the dots. When that’s done it will all become clear. For the time being, don’t lose heart, and practise, practise, practise. You know what they say.”

“I’ll try. But I feel so clumsy.”

“Let me give you a tip. I find that it helps if I … I shouldn’t be telling you this, I’m rushing you again. Let’s wait until you begin to see on your own.”

“No, no, please go on,” Malgas pleaded, “I’ll stop you if it’s too much too soon.”

“Just say when. I find that it helps if I think along the following lines: layers, levels; colour schemes, cutaway views and cross-sections; also surfaces and sheens; and last but not least, varnishes and veneers. Consider: the letter-box of the new house. No minor detail, this. The letter-box. Not exactly a replica of the new house itself, not exactly a scale model, that’s too obvious, but … reminiscent. An Alpine chalet, of the kind you associate with the better sort of pleasure resort, but not thatched. A roof of painted metal, red, but faded to a cooldrink colour, strawberry – no, that’s not it – faded to a – yes, this is good – to a pale shade of mercurochrome, a grazed knee after two or three baths, and just beginning to blister. The rusty door, for example, yes, I like this too, the rusty door has the scabrous texture of a cold sore. No, no: impetigo. Are you with me? You open the door,
scree
, you look in, the walls are galvanized, hygienic, hard-wearing and maintenance-free. There’s a letter in the box, a tilted plane of pure white, you reach in,
your hand glides over the floorboards, tongued and grooved meranti, sealed against the elements, yes —”

“When.”

Malgas paused at the letter-box. He looked in through a sash-window. Empty.

As he made his way home he heard Mrs saying, Where is everybody? Does He have relatives? He never gets visitors. What does He want with that letter-box? Is He on mailing lists? Does He get items marked Private and Confidential? Manila envelopes and cardboard tubes, magazines in plastic wrappers, tax returns, advertising flyers, free literature with a money-back guarantee?

Mr came in from the wilds reeking of whisky and gunpowder. His palms were covered in blisters and he showed them off like handfuls of medals.

“What have you done to your thumbs?” Mrs demanded.

But he silenced her with a speech about the plan, the mystery of the new house, and the special techniques Nieuwenhuizen had revealed to him for understanding it. Very impressive it was, she had to agree. Gratified, he marched to the bathroom, flung off his overalls and admired his aches and pains in the mirror. Then he sat in the tub with his knees jutting out of the foam like desert islands, while Mrs soaped the broad beach of his back.

“I think I understand about the plan,” she said, “and the palace fit
for an emperor, even though I don’t approve. But what’s this about special techniques?”

“I probably shouldn’t be telling you at all, but I’ll go over it once more.” He dipped the sponge in the water and held it up. “Take this sponge, Mrs. Solid, not so? Look at the surface here, that’s it, the surface. Full of holes, craters yes? Craters yes, mouths, leading to subsurface tunnels, souterrains, catacombs, sewers – yes, I like that – twists and turns. Squeeze it out, go on,
schquee
, full of water, not any old water, second-hand bathwater, I should think so, yes.”

“I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life! Really. I wish you could hear yourself.”

“You’d appreciate it if you’d been in the wars like me.” He let in more hot to cauterize his wounds.

While Mr was shovelling down his cold supper Mrs said, “You used to have your feet on the ground. That’s why I married you. That’s why you went into Hardware.”

This set Mr thinking about Nieuwenhuizen again, and he replied, “I think he’s a bit of a hardware man himself, you know, although he won’t admit it. He’s good with his hands. And this stuff about varnish and veneer, it boils down to materials. Doesn’t it?”

One hand poured fuel on the other. Then the pouring hand flicked an orange lighter and the doused hand burst into flames. The burning hand! Then the flicking hand snuffed out the flames with a silver cloth. The charred hand! Then the snuffing hand peeled off a charred glove.
The pink flesh of the inner hand. The perfect hand! The perfect hand turned this way and that, and waved (hello or goodbye), a
V
sign (for victory, approval, or vulgar derision), thumbs up (sl. excl. of satisfaction), finger language (up yours!), fist language (Viva!), so that you could see it was perfect.

Mr fell asleep in his La-Z-Boy with the
TV
glaring. Mrs went to the bedroom, seated herself before the winged mirror of her dressing-table and said, “Although I appear to be thin and small, and fading away before your eyes, I am a substantial person. At least, it feels that way to me.”

Her pale reflection repeated the lines in triplicate.

Yet she saw through the pretence. It was clear: she was made of glass. And under the bell-jar of her skin, in a rarefied atmosphere, lashed by electrical storms and soused by chemical precipitations, her vital organs were squirming.

In the middle of that same night, somewhere around three, as if he hadn’t endured enough already, it happened that Malgas was boiled alive in a gigantic cauldron. Nieuwenhuizen was in there too, fully clothed. It was rough. Logs of carrot and cubic metres of diced potato swirled up on torrents of bubbles and buffeted them. Hot spices seared the skin off their faces and onion-rings strangled them. They clung together in the seething liquid. A pea the size of a cannon-ball caromed off the side of the pot and struck Malgas in the eye. He went under once. Twice. The third time he grabbed hold of Nieuwenhuizen and
dragged him down for luck. Now it was every man for himself. Nieuwenhuizen seized a bouquet garni bound in muslin and held it over Malgas’s face. Bubbles, Bisto, Malgas began to lose consciousness. His lungs filled up with gravy, gasp, gasp, sinking, spinach, must hold on, everything went brown … He awoke in a sweat, clutching his pillow.

The stock left a bitter taste in his mouth, and he had to go to the bathroom to rinse it out. On the way there he made a detour past the lounge window to confirm that Nieuwenhuizen had never existed at all. But no sooner had he parted the curtains than a match flared and the hurricane-lamp bloomed into light.

Holding the lamp high, rocking it portentously like a censer, Nieuwenhuizen circled the ash-heap. After three circuits, he waded into the ashes and scuffed a clearing with his boots. He took a nail folded in a bandanna from his pocket, unwrapped it under the light, kissed it, knelt and pressed its point into the ground. It kept falling over, and in the end he had to prop it up with a forked twig. For a while he was silent, on his knees in the grey surf. Then he began to sway backwards and forwards from the waist, solemnly, gathering momentum slowly, extending his range, until at length his bony forehead, at the limit of its forward swing, began to meet the head of the nail. And by these means he kowtowed it into the ground. When the ashes had settled he killed the lamp and went back to bed.

Mr recognized the secret nail at once: it was the one Nieuwenhuizen had annealed in the fire on the night he placed his order. It was the odd nail out, and yet it was the very model of a nail. Fire and ash. What did it signify? He made a note of its secret location (
IIIC
) but still
he was baffled. Then all at once bafflement gave way to an embarrassing abundance, and his empty mind was cluttered with possibilities: chains of mnemonics shaped like knuckle-bones and skeleton keys; a tissue of lies, knitted on nails and pencils; the family tree of fire, leaves of flame, seeds of ash. He pushed these shop-soiled articles aside and found a small, hard certainty, which he strung on the scale of intimacy between Nieuwenhuizen and himself: communion.

T
he plan was incomplete and it lay fallow. Nieuwenhuizen said it was maturing.

Mr Malgas spent all his spare time practising to see the new house, racking his brains to recall Nieuwenhuizen’s guidelines and finding them all reduced to the unhelpful ambiguity of dreams.

One night, after Nieuwenhuizen had sent him home and retired, Mr Malgas had such a powerful need to pursue his observations that he took a torch and crept back onto the plot in his gown and slippers.

Shielding the beam with a cupped palm, he examined the clearing in the ashes, and there he thought he saw the head of the secret nail glimmering. In the presence of this mystery, the key to the new house and its creator – he could reach out and touch it if he chose – his courage failed him and he almost fled. Steady, Malgas. He wiped the beam
of the torch slowly across the plan, and here and there, here and there the nails glinted, as if the land had been sown with petty cash.

He became bolder. He drew the beam from nail to nail, emulating Nieuwenhuizen’s self-assured gestures, hoping to trace the outlines of just one room, a passage way, an alcove that would presage a dwelling. The nails winked and told him nothing. He could not make out even a fragment of the blueprint nailed to the ground.

Growing increasingly agitated, and casting the need for stealth to the wind, he began to stride back and forth, doodling the finger of light from one shiny marker to the next, foraging in the outlying areas for any he might have missed and stirring them into significance. And even though there was no sign of the new house, he found himself whispering vehemently, “Bedroom … yes! Double bed, king-size … yes! Bathroom
en suite
, shower cubicle … yes! yes!” When this approach failed to produce tangible results, it came to him that everything would be crystal clear if only he could view it from above, from some vantage-point like the anthill – no, that had ceased to exist – like the tree – no, no, that was full of thorns – like the roof of his own house! The impropriety of this idea, especially at such a late hour, brought him down to earth with a bump, and he quickly went home.

Nieuwenhuizen saw him go, from the mouth of the tent, and laughed like a drain; Mrs Malgas saw him coming, from the lounge window, with tears in her eyes, and hurried back to bed, where she pretended to be sleeping.

“Queen-size … never! Over my dead body!”

Mr Malgas tossed and turned, trying to remember the disposition of the nails and chart them dot for dot, but try as he might, his markers were swept away repeatedly by avalanches of punctuation.

Never fear, Malgas practised harder than ever.

And late one afternoon his persistence paid off. He had been criss-crossing the plan for an hour on end with his chin on his chest and his hands behind his back. Nieuwenhuizen was sitting at the fireplace, in which some split logs and balls of newspaper had been stacked in a pyre, peeling a clutch of lumpy roots for a stew. He had a tolerant smile on his face. Suddenly a light-bulb blazed in a dusty recess in Malgas’s mind, and he understood why he could not see the new house: it was underground!

“What a clot I’ve been, assuming that these nails mark the foundations, when it’s perfectly obvious – once you cotton on to it – that they mark the chimney-pots, gutters, eaves, spires, domes and dormers, to name but a handful of your more prominent roof-top features. This nail here is clearly a television aerial. Two pigeons over there – that’s a nice touch – a family of gargoyles, and here’s a weather-cock.”

Malgas felt the Cape Dutch gables of the subterranean house thrusting up against his soles. He took off his shoes. That did the trick. In a transport of heightened sensitivity, he tottered along a gutter, clambered up a steep, shingled roof and established himself next to a chimney with a cloud of smoke swirling about his knees.

Then he came to his senses and found that he was standing in the ash-heap.

Nieuwenhuizen, who was crouching nearby dicing his roots on a chopping-block with a hand-beaten copper cleaver, called out, “Good one, Mal! You’re getting the hang of it.”

Malgas was embarrassed.

He went home looking for sympathy, but Mrs glared at his laddered socks, rattled her newspaper and gave him a lecture: “Terrible times we’re living in. Death on every corner. The forces of destruction unleashed upon an unsuspecting public. Trains colliding, ferries capsizing, mini-buses overturning, air liners plummeting from the sky on top of suburbs, massacres in second-class railway coaches, public transport in general becoming unsafe, rivers bursting their banks, earthquakes shaking everything up, volcanoes erupting, bombs exploding, businesses going bang, buildings collapsing, among other things. And on top of all this, as if we don’t have enough on our plates, a lunatic on our doorstep. And on top of the top, his accomplice under our own roof.”

“It could be worse.”

“It could be better. Look here:
BOF
! in a bubble. Sometimes I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Here, a cat cracking jokes in English. Ducks in suits and ties, a dog in a flashy sports coat, a mouse driving a car. And here’s your foolish friend to a
T
: this man is walking on thin air, if you don’t mind, until someone points it out to him … and
that
makes him fall like an angel.”

Out of the blue shadows of a Sunday afternoon, Nieuwenhuizen let it be known that the plan had reached maturity. Malgas’s joy in this news was premature and short-lived. Apparently, the fact that the plan was mature did not imply that the actual construction was about to begin; rather, it meant that the plan could now be
completed
, and unfortunately Nieuwenhuizen alone was qualified to perform this delicate operation. He sent Malgas packing, with strict instructions to lie low until his presence was requested at the official unveiling.

“I’ve got your interests at heart,” Nieuwenhuizen said. “You’ve been a sport, but there’s really no point in seeing bits and pieces of the plan. To get the proper effect you need to see the whole thing, fully assembled.”

Feeling that he had unwittingly passed some test, and failed another, Malgas said, “Thank you, thank you,” and left.

Nevertheless, as soon as he arrived home he ordered a beer shandy and a bowl of salted peanuts from Mrs and when she went to do his bidding usurped her stool behind the net curtain.

She did not protest. “I’m tired of humouring Him anyway. He loves being the centre of attraction, like someone else I know.”

Mr Malgas had hardly installed himself when Nieuwenhuizen popped out from behind the thorn-tree with a ball of string in his hand. After a brief search he squatted down and attached the end of the string to the head of a nail, tying several knots of different kinds – Mr Malgas spotted a clove-hitch and two grannies – and tugging hard to make sure they held. Mr Malgas judged correctly that this was no ordinary nail and made a note of its position (
IE
), but he had no way
of knowing that it was the inaugural nail, the very first one to take its place in the plan.

Nieuwenhuizen stuck his index fingers into either end of the cardboard tube on which the string was wound and swung out his forearms like hinged brackets. He raised them and lowered them a few times, as if he was testing out a patent string-dispenser. Apparently the gadget worked, for he now walked confidently backwards, playing out the string as he went, until he bumped into Malgas’s wall. He chose another nail and looped the string around it, performed a difficult manoeuvre with the whole ball which unexpectedly resulted in a slipknot, and pulled that tight.

Mr Malgas’s standpoint may have been comfortable, but it was also limiting, and he found that he couldn’t determine what block of the grid this second nail was in. Oh well, it didn’t seem to matter. The line between Point
A
and Point
B
(Obscured), as he spontaneously renamed them, was so beautiful, so true, that he laid his eyes on it with love. Upon such a line one wished, without even thinking about it, to erect a noble edifice. This desire stretched the line so tight that it hummed with possibility and he grew afraid that it would snap.

Nieuwenhuizen, meanwhile, had trotted off to the hedge in search of another nail. He dropped down on all fours and scrambled in among the woody stems, thrashed around in an uproar of splintering twigs and dust, re-emerged boots first, picked himself up, shook himself like a spaniel, and set off again, wagging the line behind him.

The technique was clumsy, Mr Malgas thought, as his initial infatuation with it wore off, but the intention was clear: this new line,
B
(Obscrd) to
C
, proposed a wall. It was a little too close to his own wall for comfort, perhaps, but what the hell, it was also a beautiful line.

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 absent-mindedly 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 of these 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.