The Restless Supermarket (39 page)

Lava lamps. Never had the temerity to buy one. I used to see them in the display window of the Okay Bazaars in Eloff Street, on the way home from Posts and Telecommunications. What was that substance? It always seemed to be red. Was it magma? Magma come louder. Magda. Merle. Mazda. Bogey. Bonsma. Organs suspended in … that other substance the lava was floating in … Amniotic fluid? Glycerine? Oil. Muddy Waters. Meltdown in my overheated brainpan, my head full of words, my prolix crackpate, my derivations running into one another. The sump. The sumptuous. The crankcase. I am not the crankcase, I am the crank itself. I have been moulded into a shape that was once useful, but is useful no more. I saw the crank. It looked like an S fallen flat on its face. A proofreader’s mark: transpose. Cause to change places. Change the natural or the existing order or position of. The crank was made of hardened steel, and it was lying in a crankcase made of oak and lined with velvet. The velvet was blue, midnight blue. And the crank was me, that rigidly mortised form, that stiff. I was lying in my casket the way I prefer to lie in my bed, on my side, with my knees drawn up and my hands clasped between them. I was lying like that now; the rubber sheet that cleaved to my cheek smelt of methylated spirits. My stomach heaved.

I opened my eyes. The girl was shaking my shoulder.

‘Wake up, we’re there.’ And then, with a morbid laugh, ‘I thought you were dead.’

*

The ambulance men lifted the stretcher down onto its unfolding wheels and rushed Floyd away, and the girl hurried after him through the automatic doors, down the neon-scalded corridor to the accident
unit.

Bodies under blankets. And the barely breathing, leaking fluids onto the floors. And the walking wounded, bound up and splinted, stilting along in their rods and slings. Everyone was staring. Was I an oddity in this infernal place? Had the Johannesburg General gone so solidly black in a matter of months that a white man was already a novelty? I should have come with the dirk sticking out of my chest. That would have given them something to gawk at. But then they were used to bodies stuck with blades and spikes, prickly as voodoo dolls. At Baragwanath Hospital, patients strolled in off the streets with axes lodged in their skulls.

I decided to take a turn in the grounds to clear my head. But I had not gone far when I tripped over something in the darkness. A signboard jutting out of the lawn. De Wet Irrigation. My stomach said: enough is enough. Heave-ho! Lights were shining through the trees in the valley below. Probably a squatter camp. Or was it Harold Oppenheimer’s place? Living without a care in the world, either way. And poor old Tearle, fallen to earth again, on all fours in a herbaceous border.

*

I traced the girl to a desk in the reception area. The clerk seated opposite smirked when she saw me coming. It was time to take charge.

The girl gave me her seat. I reached for the admission form with one hand and a pencil with the other, forgetfully, and found nothing but splinters and ground graphite in my pocket. The clerk resisted. She put her fist down on the form like a rubber stamp and raised a plastic pen like a club. I brought my upside-down reading skills into play. Once you’ve tackled some Tagalog against the grain, a bit of plain English is a piece of cake
–
even standing on its head. The form was blank except for the word ‘Floid’ on the first
line.

‘That’s a “y”,’ I said, ‘
F-L-O-Y-D
.’

She took up the Liquid Paper, and I oversaw the lavish whiting out, the painstaking correction.

‘We’ll put you down as the next of kin. What’s your name?’

‘Shirlaine,’ the girl
said.

‘Can you spell it for
me.’

‘
S-H-I-R-L-A-I-N-E
.’

It was like something you would find attached to a block of flats. Mount Shirlaine. I repeated the spelling for the clerk.

‘Do you have surnames?’

Floyd was a Madonsela. Shirlaine was a Brown. True enough.

The clerk got half of it wrong. I made her do it over. No medical aid, of course, no fixed address. Allergies? Work, I should say. Previous conditions? Drunk and disorderly. Legal guardian? Impulsively, I put my own name in that box. Black humour.

Then Shirlaine went to find out what had become of Floyd, and I sat down in the waiting room on a plastic seat bolted to a metal frame, and tried to gather my thoughts. The seat was one of many, and I was surrounded on all sides by the wounded and bereft, all facing the same way in rows like passengers on a bus, all bathed in neon as corrosive as acid, all gazing forlornly at the Coca-Cola machines ranged against the
wall.

*

i. For ‘information’. Why didn’t they use a capital? That minuscule ‘i’ suggested that the information was not very important. Information was what the doctor ordered. Surely they didn’t think people would confuse a capital ‘I’ with the Roman numeral? I knew what that dot was, of course: a tittle. But what was it doing there? The question had never presented itself to me in exactly this form. Why should ‘i’, of all letters, have that detached fragment floating above it? I went through the alphabet in my head. Just ‘i’ and its neighbour ‘j’. All the others were solid citizens. In that inhospitable waiting room, reeking of blood, it seemed ominous. What hope was there that prescriptions would be filled correctly, that the right tissues would be readied for dissection, that the appropriate procedures would be followed and diagnoses struck, that proper disinfectants would be swilled in the scrub-ups, that the diseased limbs would be amputated rather than their healthy counterparts?

These apprehensions proved diuretic. I sought out the cloakrooms. Dames and
Here.

And so I saw myself in a mirror, lit up, fluorescently frank, covered in boot polish. How could it have slipped my mind? Tearle in blackface. Denigrated. A creature of nightmare. An aged printer’s devil, on the wrong side of pensioning-off, not going out in a blaze of glory like that lucky McCaffery, but dropping dead in the traces like Aldus Manutius’s slave. Black. No wonder people were staring. I fetched some toilet paper and cleaned away what I could, which was not very much. Was it indelible?

All along Hospital Street, as they called the main corridor, I looked for a nurse. No one familiar was on duty in the wards near the dispensary. I recalled that the gentler natures were sometimes posted to Paediatrics, on the sixth floor, and so I made my way up there. By a happy quirk of architecture, the sixth floor was just one above the ground. Nothing but glum faces. They were none too pleased to be on duty, but they cheered up no end when they saw me. Laughed like drains. I let them enjoy the joke. Then I persuaded one
–
a Xhosa, to judge by the cluck-clucks of sympathy
–
to lend me a hand. She poured methylated spirits into a kidney dish and scraped at me with wads of cotton wool until my skin
hurt.

When she was finished, I made her fetch a mirror. I looked like a badly printed half-tone, dismally grey. But it would have to
do.

*

On the television screen in the cafeteria, an American amazon called Debra Marchini was chewing the news to pap and sending it south down her supple windpipe, while her audience, a few forsaken inpatients and other lost souls, slept in the beige plastic chairs. I helped myself to a tea bag and hot water from the urn. Half a lemon would serve nicely as a febrifuge, and a rusk to line the stomach. As I dipped the rusk, Mrs Marchini dispatched another bolus of spittle-softened flong, and share prices plummeted in the Far East. The sun was setting in Atlanta, Georgia. Whereas we, according to the clock on the wall, were fast approaching the witching hour. I found a long-handled feather duster behind the silver counter and reached up with its end to change the channel. More news. Bloody bodies and broken glass. A terrorist attack on a Heidelberg tavern. The Germans were always a bloodthirsty bunch, never mind what Herr Toppelmann said. It would serve him right if some terrorist gang made mincemeat of
him.

What a blast they must be having at the Café Europa. By now, Wessels would have uncorked the Cold Duck. Thank God it was all passing me
by.

In the bowels of the hospital, someone began to weep. A thumping sound, like a chef tenderizing steak, issued from the air-conditioning ducts. Two Thomas Dooleys awoke at the same instant, at separate tables, and looked around with bleary
eyes.

*

‘I thought so! I’ve been hunting high and low for you, and I was just going to split when I remembered your thing about
tea.’

Shirlaine had Floyd’s bloodied pyjamas, sheared off him by the nurses in the theatre, bundled up in a plastic bag. The cartoon character on the cloth was more irritating than ever. Perhaps it was that Snoopy Doggy Dog whose adages they were always invoking? The eyes were human enough, but the ears hung down at the side of the head like a Labrador’s.

‘How is Floyd?’

‘Needed some stitches. Sixty-five, if you don’t mind. But the doctor says it’s only a flesh wound. And he says it’s just as well he stabbed himself in the head, which is full of bone, or it could have been serious.’

‘Are they releasing
him?’

‘No, he’s got to stay overnight.’

‘I suppose we should get going then.’

‘Suppose so. I just want to go past
ICU
to say goodbye.’

We went downstairs.

‘Thanks a lot, hey, Phil,’ she said. ‘You really stood by
me.’

‘Don’t mention
it.’

*

The matron left us at the window, with instructions not to tap. ‘They can’t hear
you.’

Floyd lay on his back, the sheets tucked tightly around him. His head was tilted back on the pillow, his eyes were wide open and glazed, his mouth yawned. The wound had been bandaged, but I imagined that I could still see it throbbing under the gauze. He looked pale, strange to
say.

The screens had been drawn around the next bed. The green cloth sprang out, buffeted by blows from inside, as if some master of ceremonies was trying to find the join in the stage curtains. But Floyd did not
stir.

There is a simple physiological explanation, I’ve been told, for why the mouth of a corpse is so often open, as if the dead were gasping for breath until the end or gaping in horror at their first glimpse of the hereafter. I could almost believe that Floyd had breathed his last. Or was he pretending? Any moment now, he would start up and hurl a bedpan against the glass. But there was no sign of
life.

‘Do you think he’s all right?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps we should call someone.’

‘He’s fine. You can tell by the ghetto-blaster.’

She meant the spurt of green lights on the monitor, pulsing to the rhythm of his heart.

*

‘Shall we call a taxi?’

‘Are you paying?’

I reached for my wallet. Gone. Swine must have stolen it during the invasion.

‘We could walk,’ she said, ‘if you’re up to it. It’s not that
far.’

‘That would be very pleasant.’ Little did she know how fit I was for a man of my age. And if I exhausted myself, so much the better. It was bound to be dangerous as well, but after what I’d been through, ordinary perils no longer daunted.

We went out into the dark brown air. It was a thirst-slaking antidote to methylated spirits and floor polish, the smell of wet earth and cut grass rising up from beneath our feet as if it had been raining, although there was not a cloud in sight. The night sky was black and full of asterisms. A shooting star exclaimed and fell silent. Then a spatter of rain with a rhythm as steady as the pulse on the machine told me that De Wet’s sprinkler system had switched itself
on.

‘Do you mind if I call you Phil? You won’t think I’m too big for my boots?’

‘That would scarcely be possible. And my name isn’t Phil. That was just my
nom de guerre
.’

‘Oh.’

In fact, she wasn’t wearing boots tonight, but a pair of oversized ‘tackies’, visibly sticky things like the pedipalps of an insect, marked correct with a grandiloquent tick. Nike, the label said. A Nipponese tycoon, I supposed; the marketing managers of the East could not be expected to know Nike of Samothrace, the Goddess of Victory.

‘What is it then? Your name.’

Aubrey, the erl-king, a bearded goblin who lures children to the Land of Death. Well, I wasn’t exactly bearded, but I needed a shave. ‘It’s Tearle.’

‘Is that why they call you Mr
T?’

‘I’m afraid
so.’

‘You don’t look like
him.’

‘Like
who?’

‘The guy who used to be on
TV
.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Mr T in the A-Team. He was nothing like you. A big black guy, very well built, wore a lot of jewellery. And he had a Mohican.’

‘Seems singularly inapposite, I must
say.’

‘Sure.’

‘A Mohican? I thought we’d seen the last of them.’

The guard raised the boom for us, as if we were an emergency vehicle, and we went on into the darkness.

‘You have an interesting name yourself,’ I
said.

‘My mom made it up. My grannies are Shirley and Charmaine, and she didn’t know which one to call me after, so she came up with a combination. It couldn’t go the other way round, because that would have been “Charley”.’

The poor thing was a portmanteau.

*

‘What do you do actually?’

‘I’m retired now, and pursuing private interests. But I was a proofreader.’

‘What’s that?’

I explained.

‘Sounds about as exciting as reading the Phone Book.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So your spelling must be really good?’

‘I like to think it’s perfect.’

‘You showed that cow of a clerk a thing or
two.’

‘That was just my party trick.’

‘Maybe you can help me fill out my form for the Tech. I’m going in for Dental Technician. My mom wants me to apply for Beauty, but I’m not keen.’