The Restless Supermarket (35 page)

‘You’ve certainly invited a crowd.’

The place was filling up. People who’d never set foot in the Café Europa before, by the look of them. You’d have thought it was a free-for-all. I’d half expected this to happen: chaos had been let loose everywhere and it was even worse during the festive season. Why should tonight be any different? And yet I’d hoped against hope for something fitting.

‘Maybe they coming for the cham-
poing
-ships.’

‘Buzz off, you jamjar. You
urn.’

‘Come, Mr Tearle,’ said Hunky. ‘You mustn’t let him push your buttons.’

*

‘What you call this spot again?’

‘Alibia.’

‘Isn’t that where old Gadaffi hangs
out?’

‘You’re thinking of Libya, Floyd. This is A-libia.’

‘Pull the other one, Mr T. I can check it’s only Cape Town.’

‘What an absurd idea.’

‘Look. Here’s Khayelitsha.’

*

Elements, quinary. The digits: thumb and fingers (fore, middle, ring and little). Away with pinkie! To the market with him! To the nursery! The excrescences: occipital (three o’clock, eight o’clock, nine) and cranial (half past five and twelve on the dot). The vowels: a, e, i, o and u. The violences: train, bus, taxi, car and pedestrian.

From the balcony, we watched people gathering in the streets, clustering and parting, drinking from bottles and whooping like Red Indians, rushing this way and that as firecrackers went off at their feet. Some of the fireworks were as loud as bombs. ‘Thunderflashes,’ Wessels said. ‘Used them on manoeuvres at the Battle School in Luhatla.’

A beer bottle exploded on the tar. One of the tribe of Merope had lobbed it from a window in the High Point Centre.

‘This is nothing,’ Floyd said. ‘Just wait till tomorrow night, then you’ll see sports. Last Old Year’s, someone chucked a fridge from the top of Ponte. It was cool. It landed on a minibus.’

The most dangerous missile that had been launched inside the Café Europa so far was a Cheese Snack.

The taxis:
PNK497T
To Gether As One …
NGV275T
The White Eagle …
HJS046T
Step by Step …
MNN391T
My Business Is My Parent …
LTT843T
The Young and the Restless.

A window shattered high above in the darkness and guillotines of glass sheared down. Some of the rabble-rousers swaggered around in the dangerous air, others dashed for the shelter of the verandahs. More and more of them came up the escalator. Errol didn’t seem to be taking his duties as commissionaire too seriously.

‘Who are all these people?’ Wessels kept asking. ‘It’s only half past nine.’

‘You should know. You invited them.’

A horde of Olé ’Enries stampeded in. Mimicking the unsporting frenzy of exultation into which their heroes, the football players, would fly whenever one of them scored a goal, they hurled themselves to the floor between the tables and slid along on their bellies like toboggans, clearly as impervious to carpet as to grass burns. There must be new varieties of both, quite unlike those I knew in my youth.

The ‘Open Door Policy’ always gives me a chill
–
you can feel the draught blowing through. I’m for ‘Right of Admission Reserved’.

I should have stayed at
home.

*

‘Don’t get me wrong, Hunky. I dig your sound. Reminds me of old Felonious Monk, the musical Rasputin. But take it from me, you would be more of a
hit
,
you would be further
in
,
if you had a daft hairstyle. Say a bun like the Bonsma. And you must write your name on the side of the big bass drum.’

‘Ja, but I don’t have a drum. I told you, my drummer left
me.’

‘I’m sorry, I clean forgot.’

His drummer left him. Can you imagine anything more pathetic?

The brushcut, the moptop, and now these besoms and feather dusters. It’s no wonder they can’t find
jobs.

*

‘He had his moments. I remember once he tried to persuade us that the word “robot” was pronounced “
reau-beau
”.
Said it was from the French.’

‘Don’t go spreading lies about me among the rowdies. I know exactly where the word comes from. It was invented by a Czechoslovakian called Capek. Pronounced
’

It should have been easy to turn the tables on them. But even as I was speaking, I could hear that I sounded ridiculous.

Spilkin said: ‘Tsk tsk tsk. Pronounced cha-cha-cha.’

Hoots of laughter.

Next thing, he’d be introducing them to Conrad Mandela.

*

‘You’re on my spot,’ Mevrouw Bonsma said. ‘My piano used to stand right here, believe it or
not.’

For old times’ sake, Hunky surrendered the keyboard to her. It could produce a sound reminiscent of the piano, had she wished to perform one of her old standards, but she plunged instead into a new repertoire. He adjusted the keyboard so that it twanged like a banjo, and she played one of the less maudlin Cape coloured folk songs
–
‘Daar Kom die Ali Baba.’ Darlene put her up to it. The two of them were getting along like a shack on fire. Then it was some ‘soul’ music, which indeed made one want to give up the ghost, and a Croatian ballad left behind by the Bogeymen. Musical mayhem.

I was disappointed in Mevrouw Bonsma. She was cultivated in her own way, and what she lacked in sophistication she had always made good with a certain rustic charm. But this was uncalled for. Had my first impressions of her promiscuous excess been right after all? What did she hope to achieve by making a spectacle of herself? Some spurious popularity among hoi polloi? Did she miss the applause so
much?

Someone called for a duet and Mevrouw Bonsma promptly assented. She played ‘The Bluebird of Happiness’ while Hunky twiddled the knobs to make the oscillator hum. She stood on her toes and swayed like a moored blimp. He waggled his head from side to side like a dog with a bone in its jaws. The machinery barked and bayed. I hardly wanted to think about the havoc this discord must be invoking in the spirits of the listeners. I myself was feeling strangely disconnected.

‘Anything from the
bar?’

‘Whiskey please.’

‘With an e. As in Tearle.’

‘I’ll have a Flight of the Fish Eagle and
Tab.’

‘Are you watching your cholesterol?’

Fish Eagle, Famous Grouse, Cold Duck. Birds of a feather. The Bluebird of Happiness alighted upon the ‘national anthem’. Everyone sang along and beat time on the furniture. Not that I cared. It was all bound for the auctioneers anyway.

‘We’re like the United Nations,’ Darlene
said.

‘Amen.’ And then Spilkin’s distasteful joke about Eveready and Mevrouw Bonsma, which I had not thought about for years, came into my
mind.

‘What a face,’ Nomsa said, jiggling on Wessels’s knee. ‘You’re so straight.’

‘I refute that. I’m as cryptic as the next
man.’

‘He’s not straight at all,’ Wessels put in, ‘he’s completely bent.’

Spilkin came back with the drinks.

Bouncing up and down on the furniture had given Nomsa the idea for musical chairs. In a moment, a space had been cleared and some chairs arranged in ranks (I clung to mine like a leech). It was all just an excuse to be loud and reckless, to laugh like striped hyenas, to bump their bodies together. Wessels loved every minute of it; he always managed to fling himself down so that one of the girls would sit on him. The chairs would soon have been reduced to matchwood, had the New Management not pulled the plug. They gave Mevrouw Bonsma a special hand. Scattered applause, like chapters closing. Hunky Dory announced that he would be taking a slightly longer break than usual to eat his dinner. Once fortified, he promised, he would ‘rock on’ into the small hours. I saw no reason why the machines should not keep themselves occupied in his absence, but it was a welcome respite.

With that, the New Management unveiled the
eats.

*

‘Five-finger exercises, that’s what the doctor ordered, digital gymnastics.’ I was working my way round to the lexical version.

‘Hip hop like sucks.’

‘English please, Dory.’

‘Later, man. I’m trying to chow, if you don’t mind.’

So I was unable to discuss the etymologies of ‘woofer’ and ‘tweeter’, which his performance had revealed to
me.

Chow. For now. In the scramble at the buffet table, I bumped into Herr Toppelmann, another gatecrasher. He had brought a barrel of dill pickles as a donation, and urged me to try them. But by the time I got to the front, there was nothing left but buffalo wings and tinker toys. Blocks of Gouda, cross-sections of red-skinned wiener sausages and green cocktail onions, skewered on toothpicks like little models of traffic lights.
Reau-beaus
.

*

Chairs had been dragged to tables and a few ragged circles constituted. The old faces and old bodies jumbled up with Errol and Co, higgledy-piggledy. ‘In utter confusion.’ Probably with reference to the irregular herding together of pigs, from the Latin
porcus
.
With their snouts in their paper plates. I’d expected someone to turn on the telly, so that the silence might be filled up with chatter, but they were all too busy stuffing themselves. For a while you could hear nothing in the Café but an oceanic murmur of snorting and snuffling, in which the sounds from the street
–
hooters, curses, catcalls, explosions, drunken choruses
–
were presently submerged.

I looked in on Alibia, where it was still broad daylight, where this evening had not yet begun, and made straight for St Cloud’s Square to buy a buttonhole for the long-awaited dinner. Perhaps I should splash out on a bottle of champagne, I was thinking, and pop the question along with the cork? My old friend Munnery hailed me from the other side of the canal: ‘Big night tonight, Tearle. Don’t forget the chestnuts.’

Should I present ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ now? As a prelude to my announcement, I cleaned my spectacles. When I put them back on again, I noticed the plastic No. 2 still standing to attention beside the sugar pot, and it brought a lump to my throat. I am generally a tough customer. As if to remind me of this fact, a girl with a silver boater on the back of her head took one of the sugar sachets from the pot, opened it with her teeth, and poured the contents into the pocket of Patronymić’s jacket.

The gobbling rose, and fell, and ebbed away. As the plates emptied, and the realization that they were still hungry began to creep up on the grazers, the mood of disappointment grew.
They were still hungry
.
It made them bloody-minded.

‘Just like old times, hey?’ Wessels smirked.

‘Not exactly. We were a quieter
lot.’

‘You wouldn’t shut up for a minute,’ Darlene
said.

I addressed Spilkin over her head. ‘We got on splendidly in the beginning, before all this other nonsense started.’

‘What nonsense would that be, Aubrey? Bad table manners? Talking with your mouth full?’

‘This perpetual discord.’

‘I think it’s quite peaceful around here, all things considered.’

‘Even you and I had our differences. But we always patched them up, because we had so much in common to start with.’

‘I wouldn’t say that. We shared a couple of interests, but we were worlds apart as people.’

‘Do you really think
so?’

‘You’re totally
verkramp
,
for one thing,’ Darlene put in her five cents’ worth.

I’d heard the Afrikanerism before. There was silence for a moment, a true silence, round and hollow, as her words sank in, and then the grunting and grinding rose up in it like backwash in a blowhole. Greasy lips, crumbs of food in the corners of mouths, flies and fever blisters, morsels spilled on the tables, gristle, grubs.

‘Some misguided people find me unbending, but that doesn’t bother me in the slightest. It serves my purposes. My one aim has been to raise standards of conduct and thought, not just between these four walls, but in the world beyond. I’ve always tried to set an example.’

‘That’s the bloody problem,’ said Spilkin. ‘You think people need correcting. Your obsession with raising us up to your level shows exactly how little you think of us. It’s the measure of your disdain.’

Then an ’Enry said I was a misanthrope, and Wessels said I hated him, and Darlene said I hated her even more. No matter what I said in reply, they just shouted me down with mock arguments about which of them I disliked the most. They were ganging up on me. I saw it now. At the eleventh hour, they had resolved to drive me out. The drumsticks rose and fell, beating a tattoo on the paper plates, the jaws went on grinding. Darlene drew a wishbone through the gaps in her teeth, first one branch and then the other. ‘Make a wish, Tearle.’ She held the bone out to
me.

My little finger twinged, but refused to pronate.

‘You see. He won’t even pull with
me.’

‘He might get a bit of your gob on his precious pinkie.’