The Restless Supermarket (38 page)

And then pandemonium. Errol rose up in the air with his loose-limbed body rattling, as if an almighty hand had pulled his strings, and flew backwards through the stained-glass windows. It’s a miracle he wasn’t hurt. He can thank the Jewish Benevolent for giving him that tuxedo. Chaos all around, a full-scale bar-room brawl. They were trying to get at me, to tear me limb from limb. And in their midst Spilkin, the lord of misrule, stirring them up against me. Against himself! He was pummelling his own face, as if he meant to blacken it further, inciting them to do their worst. Why should he side with the mob? Why should he tar himself with the same brush? Was it a sign of how low he had sunk, or had he always been this way, and I as blind to his faults as he to Darlene’s? She was there too, egging them
on.

Then the bootboy, the one who had thrown Errol aside like a rag, stood in front of me. In his paw, the knife looked like a bodkin of the kind the compositors once used to winkle out type. He fell upon me. The blade struck my chest with a thud and went in. The force of the blow hurled me to the floor. I looked down and saw the hilt jutting from my rib cage. Pierced to the pith. I waited for the gush of bloody words. I felt no pain, but that was normal. I saw a crush of legs and enormous shoes with treads like teeth, and the plastered foot of Wessels, the toes squirming vermicularly, like the party snacks come to life. Then, in the thicket of combat boots and gymnasium shoes, I recognized a pair of winkle-pickers, with golden chains and black buttons. Moçes. He seized me under the arms and dragged me backwards into a corner.

Black and white and red all
over.

‘You mustn’t pull it out,’ someone said. ‘That’s what they say at the St John’s.’

The fighting raged all around
us.

I lay there, floating between life and death, waiting for the red river to carry me off into oblivion. It was a pleasant feeling, I wished it might endure. Then I opened my eyes and the spell was broken. I could not bear to look at the knife, lodged so improbably in my being, but I had an overwhelming urge to discover the extent of my injuries, to explore the split flesh, the intimate gore, while my life ebbed away. I reached my hand inside my jacket. And that was when I discovered that the blade had gone straight into the heart of the
Pocket Oxford Dictionary
.

*

I am not prone to theatrical gestures, but I made the most of this one. When they saw me walking calmly among them with the knife sticking out of my chest, the more superstitious invaders ran away, with Errol and Co in pursuit.

It was during this final skirmish that Floyd stabbed himself in the head. ‘They stuck the old tawpy,’ he said afterwards (meaning me), ‘so I schemed I’d stick them back. But I stuck my own self by mistake.’ I heard Floyd bellowing like a fatted calf and saw him fall by the glass doors. The others set upon him and began tearing at him greedily, like children opening presents under the Christmas tree. Were they ripping off his labels? No, it was worse, they were like scavengers at a carcase. A foot flew loose and landed near me. Not a foot, don’t be ridiculous, only a shoe, one of the oversized bootees. The tearing noises came from Velcro fasteners
–
the buckles were all false.

The knife was a comfort to me. It made me feel young and healthy, invincible and immortal. I did a circuit of the room, enjoying the feeling. Not to mention the holy terror in the eyes of all who beheld
me.

Then I strolled onwards to the Gentlemen’s room to see what I looked like
in extremis
.

*

The mirror had been stolen, of course, and all I could see in the tiles was a swarthy smudge. I went into the cubicle for some paper to clean the muck off my face. And there in the corner stood the floating trophy. I sat on the toilet seat and rested the trophy on my knees. I looked at my image in its tarnished surface.

I wished I might cry, but my eyes were dry as newsprint. A lifetime of poring over galleys had done my tear-ducts no good. Just as damaging as breaking limestone, if not so dramatic. And now this boot polish on top of everything. Perhaps I would need an operation, like The Madiba, to restore my sense of sorrow.

Better assess the other damages. No broken bones, thank God, but my pencils reduced to tinder. I pulled the knife out of my chest. One perfectly good blazer ruined. As for the
Pocket
,
the blade had gone right through the alphabet. There was a course to be plotted from A to Z in wounded words, but the exercise struck me as merely technical, a forensic parody of lexical gymnastics.

With the knife in my hand, I became fully aware of how narrowly I had escaped. A
salto mortale
,
a double tearle with a twist, unfolded in my brain. Here was the double tearle:
jot
(small amount, whit) and
iota
(atom, jot), both from the Greek
iota
,
which is the letter ‘i’ without the dot. A jot is an iota. And here was the twist:
tittle
(small written or printed stroke or dot). Ergo: an iota is a jot missing a tittle or a tittle missing a jot. By distinctions as fine as these, I had cheated death.

*

The Café looked like a battlefield. I picked my way between broken-backed chairs, over the shattered kaleidoscope that was all that remained of the chapel, to the boneyard of the buffet. I was famished
–
it is common in the aftermath of combat
–
but there was not so much as a crust left. Mrs Hay passed like a ghost behind the blinds. In the doorway, Floyd lay clutching a bag of ice from the Hebcoolers, with a knot of people around him. Spilkin had the bloodied head in his lap, Darlene the stockinged feet. She glanced up accusingly as I approached. ‘Are you satisfied?’

‘By no means.’

‘You’ve got a lot to answer
for.’

I’d expected a chorus of mockery, but the levity of the early evening had been replaced by a sombre calm. All these faces masked in black. Even Darlene, the mustafina, was as black as night. It was no longer amusing to anyone.

Mbongeni had surrendered the tea cosy as a makeshift tampon and let his hair down. Cotton-waste wads as long as my arm, the kind of thing that would come in useful at the printing works for wiping down the presses. I showed him the skewered
Pocket
.
The word quickly spread that I hadn’t been wearing a bulletproof vest after all. It dispersed some of my mystique.

‘You an incredibly lucky somebody.’

‘You could of died.’

‘But Floyd saved your life.’

‘I wouldn’t go that
far.’

‘Ja, they would of come back to finish you off if it wasn’t for Floyd.’

It made no sense to me that he should have leapt to my defence after what had happened. But it seemed crystal clear to them. Errol, dusting a confetti of shiny glass from his padded shoulders, said: ‘You a puss, Churl
–
but you one of our boys. Leave it or lump
it.’

Hunky Dory reappeared. ‘I called 911 and
wah-wah-wah
,’
he declared, which was his way of saying that he’d summoned an ambulance.

*

The ambulance men put Floyd on a breadboard, for the spine, they said, and wrapped him in aluminium foil like a garlic loaf, for the shock. He looked smaller than usual. They carried him out through the glass doors. Incongruously, I thought of Merle. I saw her packaged by the undertakers, stuffed into a fluffy brown bag with a zipper up the front, like an oversized slipper. The idea was suffocating.

There was a muddle on the landing outside as they bundled the stretcher onto the escalator. In the midst of it all stood Wessels, with the silver boater on his head, swinging his crutch imperatively and bawling out instructions. His face had been rather inexpertly polished, except for the chin, which was as shiny as a toecap. The sight of me seemed to enrage
him.

‘It won’t help to have a long white face,’ he said. ‘If you truly sorry for what you done, you can make yourself useful. Go with to the hospital.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I say it might help to have a white face along.’

What relevance this had, seeing that I myself was as black as the ace of spades, was beyond me. In any event, I had no wish to go about in public looking like a greasepainted minstrel. I turned away and watched the ambulance men descend towards the pavement with their burden. The ghouls had gathered, crowding around the open doors of the ambulance, trying to catch a glimpse of Floyd.

Then Wessels stuck the crutch in the small of my back and thrust me bodily onto the escalator.

In my younger days I might have vaulted clear, like that daredevil in the tartan underpants; but when a man of my age finds himself upon a ‘moving staircase’, he moves with it, willy-nilly. I descended. A distracting consideration echoed in my mind: could one be carried
downwards
by an escalator? Strictly speaking. The very normality of the distraction reassured me that I had come to my senses. De-escalation. The sort of ugly back-formation that would be in the book on top of the cistern. Along with the sayings of sailors and whores. Anything
goes.

I had every intention of returning to the fray. It was not as if I could be ‘bounced’ from the Café Europa, especially not by Wessels. I would go straight up again, I would take hold of his foliose lapels and shake him until his epiglottis rattled. Didymus. Skeuomorph. Jughead. Imagine quaffing the contents of that bonce
–
that watery pap! Point made, I would track down Moçes, the hero of the moment, and thank him for his help. A small reward might be in order. And then I would retrieve ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ and leave the whole lot of them to the mess they were in. That ersatz eighth edition could stay where it was, at the mouth of the sewer. I had every intention … But on the pavement, I bumped into the improvable girl, clambering into the ambulance. The child looked quite lost against a backdrop of cheerful onlookers. Evidently, the sight of a broken crown tickled
them.

‘What are you doing out here?’

‘I’m going with Floyd to Casualty.’

‘Where’s his girlfriend?’

‘She won’t come. She says he’s just being pathetic and he’s not going to spoil her bash with his nonsense.’

My heart went out to her. She must have sensed it, because she began to plead with me to accompany her. I felt my resolve weaken. I should do the decent thing. Who else could be relied upon? Dimly, I couldn’t help wondering whether I had played some part in this fiasco. Floyd’s bloody head rolled over on the pallet. The wound was like the flesh of an olive peeled away from the pip. The doctors might give him a talking-to while they were stitching him up. Perhaps it would all work out for the
best.

An ambulance man nearly saved my bacon by holding up a bloodstained rubber glove. ‘You can’t come with. Only the wife in the ambliance.’

But the girl said, ‘He’s my father-in-law’
–
as if that were within the bounds of possibility
–
grabbed me by the arm, and before I knew it, they had hauled me aboard and slammed the door behind me. The sirens broke into a Hunky-Doryish melody.

‘I’ve never been in an ambulance,’ she
said.

‘Neither have I. Strong as an
ox.’

She smelt of watermelons. It reminded me of the watermelon feasts of my youth.

And then Floyd groaned: ‘You gotta stand by me, Mr T. Don’t let me die, man. Don’t let me
die.’

*

I had a funny turn on the way to the hospital.

It started with my crooked reflection looking back at me from the shiny surface of some piece of equipment.
Crank
. An eccentric person, especially one obsessed by a particular theory. See cranky. Perhaps from obsolete
crank
,
rogue feigning sickness. I was sick. I belonged in an ambliance. I should lie down on the other stretcher. Flawless backflip with a double twist to
crank
, part of an axle or shaft bent at right angles. From
crincan
,
related to
cringan
,
fall in battle, originally ‘curl up’. I was bent. Twisted in the wrong place. Crinkum-crankum. I needed straightening out. Ortho
–
as in orthopaedic, orthographic
–
from the Greek
orthos
,
straight. ‘You’re so straight.’ I moved myself backwards and forwards, watching my shape deform around the elbow in a silver tube. My head distended into a soggy melon, elongated impossibly, like a blob of molasses on the end of a spoon, until it suddenly flowed around the bend and stretched my neck into a long thin string. Just as my head was about to detach itself entirely and plummet, I moved slightly, causing my shoulders to swell up and flow after it in a rush. An abrupt constriction in the chest. My recent past, unsavoury to the last morsel, churned in my stomach and threatened to revisit the outside world.

The girl put her hand on my arm. Her voice was sweetly scented, candy-striped in flavours of green, it came close to my ear. ‘Are you okay, Phil?’

Jesus Theodosius Christ. I drew her attention to the shape of my
head.

‘Lie down. They won’t mind.’ A confirming glance at the ambulance men, solicitous phantoms in a miasma of Old Spice and congealed regulations.

She pushed me back, and soft and melting as I was, I keeled over on my side. The canvas stretcher was red, and so was the rubber sheet, and the blanket. Sensible choice. My feet got left behind on the floor, and she picked them up like a pair of shoes, very professionally, I thought, and put them on the end of the stretcher. Long practice, probably, with a drunken father. Harvey Wallbanger, everyone’s
pal.

Floyd was trying to speak, but they had clamped an oxygen mask over his jaw. Blood welled in his crizzy hair, and one of the ambulance men swabbed it with the tea cosy. Blood was dripping out of the aluminium foil too, around the waist, and splashing the leg of the girl’s jeans. I tried to raise my arm to point it out, but it was glued to the stretcher.