The Restless Supermarket (9 page)

‘If you don’t mind my asking, Tearle,’ Spilkin said, as I’d hoped he might, ‘what are you up
to?’

I had been dying to tell someone about ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ (although I wasn’t thinking of it in those terms yet). I was wrapped up in it then, rapt, passionately intent. And Spilkin and I would have to get to know one another, now that we were sharing a table.

‘I’m working on my System of Records.’

‘Gee-gees?’

‘Proofreading.’

That would have stopped many men in their tracks, but Spilkin, give him his due, was a sharp one: ‘Your life’s work?’

I’d never thought of it that way, but he was spot on. The story of my life. I nodded.

‘Tell me about it then.’

‘Well, in this file here, which is just one of several dozen, are the fruits of a long career
–
I won’t say a distinguished one, in the ordinary sense of the word, but certainly respectable. My documentation, my papers. You’ll see that many of them are clippings of one sort or another, from newspapers mainly, but also magazines and journals, and books. Those are the photostatic copies, mind you, or the handwritten quotations; I would never be so barbarous (from the Greek
barbaros
,
foreign) as to tear a page from a book. And then also gazettes, programmes, handbills, posters, wedding invitations, menus. I’ve got some unusual things, collector’s items. This here is a label from a tin: “Pot’ o’ Gold petit poise.” Now I’m busy transcribing the important parts of these documents into this notebook here
–
also one of many, twenty-six to be precise, one for each letter of the alphabet
–
in a form that allows for easy reference without losing the essence. I never had the time to collate all this raw material while I was employed, although I was gathering diligently for thirty years and more, and so I’m devoting my retirement to the task. Keeping the grey matter supple, too. They say it’s as important as taking care of the body, you know.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Excuse
me?’

‘Everyone’s always pointing fingers at “them”. “They” said this and “they” did that. Who do you mean exactly?’

‘Who do you mean by “everyone”?’ I countered.

‘People in general.’

‘Well, that’s who I mean by “they”.’

‘No, it’s
not.’

‘What are you driving
at?’

‘Americans. That’s who you mean. Yanks. Specifically Californians. Jane Fonda and Sylvester Stallone.’

‘Who?’

‘They’re the ones who’re sprouting this stuff about the mind and the body as if it was all their idea, as if it didn’t go back to the Greeks!’ Mrs Mavrokordatos’s ear pinkened. ‘The gymnasium, a noble institution founded for the social good, issues in the naked commercialism of Jim’s
Gym.’

I must have looked nonplussed, because he laughed out loud and said: ‘Cheer up, Tearle. Just a bit of verbal sparring, just pulling your leg, good for the circulation, didn’t mean to distract you from your story. So, what are the important parts of these documents you were talking about?’

In retrospect, this episode strikes me as rather unkind, revealing a streak of nastiness in Spilkin I would have been wise to acknowledge. But if I looked flushed and flummoxed then, it was not that I had taken offence, nor even that I found the sparring strenuous, but a simple expression of pleased astonishment that we appeared to understand each other so well. I went on happily.

‘They’re examples. Various kinds of things. Literals, misspellings, inversions, anacolutha, haplographies and dittographies, which are really two aspects of the same blindness. There’s a fine line between proofreading and editing, they say, although the proofreader worth his salt will know exactly where it is. Homonyms (dog, dog). Homophones (some, sum). Puns. You would be surprised how many typographical errors are the result of unconscious identifications. The odd apocope.’

‘You mean mistakes.’

‘No, I mean corrigenda: things to be corrected, especially in a printed book. From the Latin. Not the same as “mistakes” at all, once you know the ins and outs. People make mistakes. Their fingers slip, their concentration lapses. And what they leave behind are not mistakes, but corrigenda.’

He was looking at me a little sceptically. ‘Enlighten me. An example. I’m slow on the uptake.’ Which he was
not.

I assembled a typical triad: a cutting from the file, an index card from the box and an alphabetical entry in the notebook, and turned them all towards Spilkin.

‘Here’s one I’ve already processed
–
see the red cross? This was one of my first finds. I came across it in the
Pretoria News
of 7 January 1956. An article on poultry farming. Corrigenda in the press were relatively few and far between then and I was new at the game, so I was especially pleased to capture
it.’

He examined the clipping. The headline read: Feathers Fly As Poultry Farmers Meet. The corrigendum was in the third paragraph: ‘Mr Goosen refused to anser questions about the price of eggs.’ Spilkin chuckled when he got there, to show that he had spotted
it.

‘I collected corrigenda haphazardly for a good fifteen years, by which time I had quite a pile of them, even allowing for the relative scarcity of material. Four or five files’ worth, I should think. In the early seventies, I made my first attempt to establish order by developing a catalogue. You see that I transferred the relevant word − in this instance, “anser”
–
onto an index card. This number here records the location of the original document in the files
–
the N means “newspaper clipping”. And this T in the corner stands for “typographical error”.

‘Unfortunately, I never had more time than my annual leave and the occasional long weekend to devote to the system, and so I was never able to catch up. Also, the volume of corrigenda in printed matter of all kinds increased steadily over the years, and so the collected material gradually outstripped the index system. By the time I retired, the Records had grown to occupy more than a dozen files, and no more than a third had been catalogued.

‘I’m ashamed to say that it was only then, when I turned my full and undivided attention to the system, that I perceived its inadequacy. The essence was escaping me. The stress in proofreading must fall at least as strongly on the reading as on the proof: one might contemplate a single word and comprehend it, but one could hardly be said to be “reading” it. Proofreading as a skill only comes into its own at the level of the sequence, in the order of motion; a solitary word, set firmly in space, is beyond its purview. The eye has to move. The proofreader is a tightrope artist, managing the difficult tension between momentum and inertia, story and stock, sentence and word. As soon as he becomes too engrossed in the sense of what he’s reading, he loses sight of the unitary word; on the other hand, the failure to register sense at some level, however rarefied, will lead to harrowing technical misjudgements. If he is to survive this hazardous passage without falling, he must find the still moving point between the excitement of the chase and the rapture of possession.

‘To cut a long story short: I am revising the entire system, documents and catalogue alike, by providing fuller versions of the corrigenda, preserving the context of each one, arranged alphabetically in these notebooks. Returning to our example, you see the new version here, in the form: “anser/answer: Mr Goosen refused to anser questions about the price of eggs.” First the example, then the correct form. From the thing to be corrected, to the corrected thing. And note that this more complete version contains the germ of an explanation for the typist’s error
–
deeply buried as it may be
–
in the relationship between “anser” and “goose”.

‘The task remains daunting. I’ve got this mass of documents, growing larger by the day, as standards of correctness decline. Then perhaps a quarter or a fifth of the material
–
the proportion continues to shrink in relation to the mass
–
is referenced on these cards. I could simply throw the cards away, except that they help me to relocate the original corrigenda: over the years, many that seemed blindingly obvious when I first identified them have blended back into the printed background
–
like a bird in the bush, which vanishes as soon as you take your eye off it
–
and without an index card, it can take me hours of proofing and reproofing to drive them out into the open again. And then finally, I have these notebooks, growing steadily fuller, and matters of internal organization to think about. But in the end, I hope to arrive at a unified system.’

(If I had known then what would become of my System of Records, I might have abandoned the project entirely. And if I had looked into Spilkin’s heart
…)

‘It’s a beautiful system,’ he said, casting his merry eyes upon me, eyes that seemed more than usually wet. I had touched him, I thought. ‘What are its beauties, specifically? Breadth, depth, one is tempted to say length. It’s ambitious, one might almost say grandiose. The beauty of error. It gives me goose-flesh.’

‘Thank you, Spilkin. I hoped you would understand.’

‘So, what are you going to do with
it?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You’re going to put it to some use, I should think.’

‘Must it be useful?’

‘Not necessarily. But it seems like a lot of effort to go to for no good reason.’

‘It’s no effort at all. I enjoy it, I find it
very rewarding.’

I had some thoughts on my hobby-horse’s utility: one of my initial aims had been to determine
species
of error, and to assist in eliminating them. But Spilkin’s question betrayed an uncharacteristic crudeness, as if he were talking about a crowbar or a mallet, and so I kept my thoughts to myself, and the matter was left unresolved.

Be that as it may, Spilkin took to the task like a duck to water. He was an avid newspaper reader himself, and soon he was dredging up some gems, which he generously passed on to me. He was at ease in the murkier depths of the classifieds, areas of print even I found it difficult to venture into
–
221. Miscellaneous Sales 235. Poultry/ Livestock 300. Bands/Discos 413. Hairdressers/Barbers 950. Senior Citizens
–
and he had the stomach for 107. Deaths, which is more than I can say for myself (duodenum or no duodenum). In my heyday, I’d made a few memorable finds in those funereal quarters
–
‘knowing you enriched our livers’ … ‘Loved by al, missed by many’ … ‘I will always remember your simile’
–
but lately I’d grown afraid of coming across someone I knew. There were too many familiar names, and just looking at them made my teeth ache. This aversion was a shame, because the quality of those particular pages deteriorated spectacularly as time went by: apparently the people employed to answer the telephones in the Classified Department were no longer required to speak English.

There was another reason: a surfeit of heroism. Too many exemplary demises, milk-fed and arum-scented, too many equable departures for glory. Nine out of ten people died peacefully. Did no one die kicking and screaming any more, cursing God and the sawbones? They all seemed to struggle with such good grace against cruel misfortune. One miserable death acknowledged, one long season of pointless suffering faced with bitterness and resentment, would have been a breath of fresh
air.

*

In later years, the death notices became so consumed by corrigenda that I was able to venture back into that territory from time to time. The rot reached such unnatural proportions that it began to subvert the purpose of the service itself, and the whole enterprise acquired the tone of a macabre joke. One could imagine the unhappy surprise of those left behind when they came to clip their remembrances.

Maggots, death notices: Till we meat again … Our heart felt thanks … Safe in God’s cave … The father figure of refrigerator services … Pissed away after a long illness
…

*

Spilkin and I began to meet at the Café nearly every day, circumstances permitting. Before making his acquaintance, I had fallen into the habit of arriving in the mid-afternoon, to pre-empt the stream of after-work regulars and improve my chances of securing my favourite table (I had not been pushy enough to ask Mrs Mavrokordatos to reserve it for me); now I found, by empirical experiment, that no matter how early I arrived, Spilkin had beaten me to it, and no matter how late I left, Spilkin would outstay me. On the single occasion that I stayed till midnight and the closing, he contrived to dawdle so that he would be the last through the door. All his waking hours were passed at the Europa. He took lunch and supper there
–
outlandish platters of moussaka and shish kebabs, spaghetti Bolognese and Vienna schnitzel, Strammer Maxes and Croque Monsieurs. In those days, my own eating habits were more conservative than they are today, and in any event, dining out constantly was beyond my means. I deduced that Spilkin was rather better off than myself
–
no doubt there is money to be made in spectacles and prudent investment. Why he should have such an antipathy to being in his own home, I do not know. He had a room in the Flamingo, a residential hotel in Edith Cavell Street, but I never set foot in it. The laws of propriety, which propriety prevented us from ever discussing, had declared our private lives, the lives we led once we left the Café, strictly out of bounds.

As I’ve said, I was on comfortably proper terms with Mrs Mavrokordatos, although our relationship was not without its personal touches. She had begun to take in the
Star
,
for instance, and kept it behind the counter in its own binder so that I should have first crack at it. But with Spilkin she behaved differently, almost as if she were his housekeeper or, their ages notwithstanding, his mother. She was always plying him with complimentary titbits
–
Italian kisses (as I believe they’re called), almond-flavoured amaretti sprinkled with angelica, oily dolmades, little tumblers of resinous retsina.