‌The Café Europa

Part One

He reads the world, like a favourite volume, only to find beauties in it, or like an edition of some old work which he is preparing for the press, only to make emendations in it, and correct the errors that have inadvertently slipt in.

–William Hazlitt

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A salesman buggering a pink elephant (excuse my Bulgarian). Not a sight one sees every day, even on the streets of Johannesburg – the Golden City as it were, Egoli as it are, to quote my pal Wessels, the last of the barnacles. As the century declines to a conclusion one has come to expect undignified behaviour as a matter of course, but this was an ‘all-time low’ (as the newspapers would put it). I see it before me now as if it were yesterday.

I say he was a salesman because of the pinstriped suit, the shirt-tails hanging out behind, the tie drooping on his chest like a slice of pizza. Old-fashioned associations on my part. He might just as well have been a popular star, or a lawyer with a passing interest in human rights, or the head of a syndicate for stealing motor cars. These days, the men in lounge suits are good-for-nothings more often than not, while the real businessmen are waltzing around in Bermuda shorts and espadrilles. Whoever he was, he had hold of the elephant on the pavement outside the Jumbo Liquor Market in Kotze Street, gripping its shocking pink buttocks in his paws and grinding his groin against its unyielding fibreglass tail.

I stopped to stare. A lifetime of practice has turned me into one of the world’s most shameless scrutineers.

The joker’s eyes were screwed shut in rapture, but the elephant’s were like saucers, with painted pupils as black as draughtsmen rattling in them. The beast’s pointed ears stood on end like wistful wings and its trunk curled an outraged question mark over its little gasping mouth. Its eyes met mine without blinking.

‘Hey, Arch! Check what Darryl’s doing.’ Spoken by another ill-suited entrepreneur fumbling for a wallet while the cashier rang up a carton of Camel cigarettes and a bottle of Red Heart rum.

The Jumbo Liquor Market, as its name suggests, is a ‘convenience store’ in the American mould. Sliding glass doors open directly onto the pavement so that the passing trade can totter in and out with a minimum of effort. From till to gutter in three easy steps. Arch came out to see what Darryl was up to. Arch, Darryl and the Third Man. A little triumvirate, unholy and unwise, but citizens nevertheless of the conurbation in which I find myself.

Bump and grind from the rear.

Arch said, ‘Ag, stop it man Darr. You making your name tawty.’ (Just who or what ‘tawty’ is, I cannot say: it’s in none of the reference works and no one will enlighten me. Perhaps a South African counterpart of that scoundrel Mudd?)

Darr slumped down on the elephant’s back and spoke passionately into one outflung ear: ‘Suffer, baby, suffer.’

Snorts of laughter from Arch and the Third Man. What would his name be? Some monosyllabic chunk no doubt, some unfeeling stump like Gav or Ern or Gord. People were starting to gather. Shoppers from the supermarket on the next corner, drinkers from the verandah of the Chelsea Hotel across the way, the twilight children, drawn out in broad daylight by the spectacle, a couple of continental gentlemen in open-neck shirts. As representative a cross-section of conurbanites as you could wish to find.

Suffer, baby, suffer. It was the punchline of a Wessels joke, I’m sure, entertained reluctantly like all the rest. I never forget a punchline – but I’m damned if I can remember a joke. Except for that one about Rubber Dinghy Sithole. ‘What’s black and goes with the stream?’ I’ve spoilt the effect by putting it back to front. It must be all of fifteen years since Erasmus at Posts and Telecommunications told it to me, around the time Rhodesia attained its majority, and for some reason it stuck. The pink elephant, I noticed, was chained to a parking meter, expired.

Right on cue, the Queen of Sheba staggered out of the alley between the Jumbo and Hypermeat. She had a throne there, a sponge-rubber armchair the colour of urine, upon which she sometimes reclined wearing a paper crown from a Christmas cracker and a robe of threadbare carpeting. She was drawn to Darr at once. As she gazed at him, she stuck a hand through the armhole of her dress and absent-mindedly rearranged her breasts. He huffed and puffed and oohed and aahed, and opened one eye to gauge the response of his growing audience.

Hypermeat was flogging half a dead sheep @ R12.95 a kilogram, and sirlion steaks @ R6.95 a cut. Doing a roaring trade, I suppose. ‘Nice meat’ said a blackboard, also chained to a parking meter, with ten minutes on the dial.

The Queen staggered closer. She smelt like the bottom of the barrel. Seeing that the rear end of the elephant was already occupied, she approached the front and tried to clamber up like a mahout. Darr kept thumping away. An ‘ugly situation’ all right, and bound to get uglier. Arch saw it coming. He took Darr by the arm and tried to drag him away, but was shrugged off. The Third Man, hurrying to Arch’s assistance, dropped his wallet, and coins scattered across the pavement. The children swooped. I put my foot down on a one-rand coin and examined the little ones to see if there was a deserving case among them.

The Queen got a leg over the elephant’s neck and sprang up, overbalanced, grabbed at an ear, which snapped off in her hands, and plunged over the other side. Her head struck the fender of the [Henry] Ford parked at the kerb. The car began to shriek; the Queen, God save her, was silent. Darryl came to a shuddering halt. A tiny peep, the sound a crib toy might make if you squeezed it, issued from the elephant’s trunk.

‘Meesta Ferreira! Meesta Ferreira! Pleece comb tew da frount!’ the cashier said urgently into a microphone. Mr Ferreira’s face appeared in a diamond of glass in the door at the back of the shop.

Enough. I kicked the coin down a stormwater drain and hurried on to the Café Europa. I had seen enough to know what would inevitably follow: skop, skiet and donner, and their corollaries, snot and trane. (These are Wesselisms for trouble and tears, and the fact that I stoop to them is a sign that better words have failed me.) Mr Ferreira arrives on the scene, thrusting out the managerial bulges of his pink blazer. Arch and Darr wrestle. The Queen bleeds unconsciously. Voices and fists are raised. The Queen comes round and begins to wail. Her courtiers creep out of their holes and try to console her by falling over her and tugging at her clothing. Speaking in indigenous tongues, roaring and cursing, laying on of hands and feet. Mr Ferreira enters into the spirit by taking out his revolver. The Third Man trots across the street, opens the door of a black sedan (one of those ubiquitous abbreviations that issue in an unbroken line from the Bayerische Motoren Werke) and reaches for something under the driver’s seat. The owner of the stricken Ford comes running with a serviette tucked into his pullover, and examines the dented fender as if it is a wound in his own flesh. Multilingual sobbing. Four-letter words fly, the whole dashed alphabet. The air goes dark with obscenity, the leading players are obscured by it, the bystanders grow restless, Darryl is still darrylling away in the gloom, Arch is arching, the manager managing. And then warning shots, Your Honour, falling down.

In a word: chaos.

One Sunday morning not too long ago, on an overgrown plot in Prospect Road, I saw a body in the weeds, under a shroud of pages from the Sunday Times. I saw it from the window of my own flat, where I stood with a carton of long-life milk in my hand, and I could almost smell the pungent scent of the kakiebos crushed by its fall. It lay among the rusted pipes, blackened bricks and outcrops of old foundations that mark every bit of empty land in this city, as if a reef of disorder lay just below the surface, or a civilization had gone to ruin here before we ever arrived.

What do I mean by ‘we’? Don’t make me laugh.

*

Wessels was waiting for me as usual in the Café Europa. Properly: Martinus Theodosius Wessels – but I’m afraid I think of him as Empty. Empty Wessels make the most noise. Or in this case, makes the most noise. Appropriately, it grates the grammatical nerve-endings. Errors of number are Wessels’s speciality.

‘Yes yes, Mr Tearle,’ he said through a jet of smoke. ‘Hullo-ss.’ Perhaps the sibilant centre of his own surname created this propensity for letting off steam. Before I could even sit down, he was rootling in my shopping-bag, trying to put me off my food. ‘Salamis, hey. Sweating like a pig in there.’

Salamis? Rang a bell. I made a note to look it up.

‘You’ll never guess what I just saw.’

‘Me first,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a major something to tell you.’

‘So long as it’s not a joke.’

‘Uh-uh. Sit down, you making me nervous.’

‘Take your foot off my chair.’ The foot in question was encased in plaster of Paris. I’d known Wessels for several years, but I’d only recently made the acquaintance of this grisly extremity. The toes were squashed together like foetuses in a bottle, and there were lumps of plaster stuck to the hairs curling out of them. He made a performance of moving crutch and limb and dusting the plastic seat cover with a serviette.

Moçes appeared at my shoulder. Properly: Moses Someone-or-Other. I’d added the hammer and sickle because he was from Moçambique. A little joke between myself and my inner eye, entirely lost on the flapping ear.

‘Have a dop,’ said Wessels. He ordered himself a brandy.

I ordered my usual tea and specified separate bills. Wessels was obsessed with getting me drunk. Ditto himself, with more success. When he’d broken his ankle, falling down somewhere in a stupor, I asked him, ‘Did it leak when you broke it?’ But he didn’t get it. He had the most fantastic excuse, though: said he’d hurt himself trying to effect a citizen’s arrest on a cutpurse outside the Mini Cine.

(What sort of a name is that for a cinema? They might as well call it the Silly Billy. I won’t be surprised if it goes out of business.)

‘So what’s the story?’

‘The Café Europa,’ waving his crutch recklessly, ‘is closing down.’

‘You’re joking.’ But I could see that for once he wasn’t.

‘At the end of the month, the doors will close on our little club for the last time. The end of an error.’

He mispronounces things deliberately to get under my skin. The last day of 1993 was less than a month away.

‘Shame man,’ Wessels went on. ‘Tony told me this morning. I wished you was here to hear it with your own ears. Because you our main man and everythink.’

‘God forbid.’

So the New Management was throwing in the towel. Properly: Anthony, pronounced ænθәni: for a reason I could never fathom. Popularly: Tony. But tony he wasn’t, so I preferred to think of him as the New Management, which he was.

I called Moçes back. I said I would have a whiskey after all, with an ‘e’ please, deciding to indulge. Time was when you couldn’t get anything stronger at the Café Europa than a double espresso. On high days and holidays, when grandchildren were born or horses came in, Mrs Mavrokordatos – the Old Management, although we never thought of her that way – might slip you an ouzo under the counter, in a thimble of a glass with a bunch of grapes and a twist of vine etched on it. That was before her own standards slipped in the direction of the shebeen.

‘Did he say why?’

‘Didn’t have to. No customers, no profits. This kind of place isn’t in any more.’

‘What about Errol and Co? I thought the New Management was catering for them. Specifically.’

‘Get real. They don’t spend their bucks here. They shoot pool, they sit outside in the sun, they have a couple of pots. Half the time they don’t even pay for those − it’s cheaper to bring your own. I see them topping up their glasses with nips from the girls’ bags. They think they clever, but I got experience in covert operations.’

‘My eye.’ He can hear a cork pop at fifty paces.

‘I saw it coming. Three years ago already I told Mrs Mav changing with the times won’t save us. We’ve had our chips.’

Wessels had taken to echoing me in the most infuriating manner. Still does. He swirls my sentiments around in his cavernous interior until they’re completely out of shape and mixed up with his own, and then he booms them back at me, made discordant and disagreeable, and reeking of the ashtray. I was the one who said: Changing with the times is not for us. Staying the same is our forte. He never gave the matter a thought; he was too busy feeding his face and ogling the coloured girls, most of them young enough to be his daughters. To tell the truth, I was hardly surprised that the Café was closing down. I’d been predicting it for years.

‘Our days are numbered.’

I’d said that too! And in my mind’s eye, the numbered days were perfect spheres, like pool balls.

The pool room was through an archway. It was always dark in there, because the blinds were never opened, and when the fluorescent tubes over the tables glowed, the surrounding darkness thickened. Now Errol came suddenly into focus in the smoke-marbled light. He took a cloth from his pocket and drew his cue tenderly through it. The thing was his pride and joy. He’d tried to impress me once with the name of the manufacturer, but it meant nothing to me. He carried it in two parts, in a case lined with velvet, and would screw them together with the practised efficiency of an assassin.

Moçes brought my whiskey, John Jameson’s on the rocks. Don’t suppose that this semi-literate peasant appreciated the distinction between Scotch and the real thing: ‘with an “e”’ was shorthand, drummed into him with difficulty.

‘To us!’ said Wessels.

‘Absent friends!’ I regretted that afterwards, because it set his cogs whirring.

The whiskey made me sentimental. I don’t like sentiment − it’s one of the reasons I seldom indulge − but Wessels was waffling on about the good old days and I found myself looking around me with new eyes. Now that the existence of the place was threatened, I saw it in a new light. I would have to look at everything properly, preserve the details that the years had somehow failed to imprint on my mind.

Décor. Tables and chairs – travesties of their former selves since the reupholstering, but still affectingly receptive to the contours of the familiar human body. The espresso machine on the counter. Even the new fixtures I had despised so much – the venetian blinds where I would have preferred to see the old brocade, the fake stained glass of the chapel where the one-armed bandits resided, the posters of football teams – all suddenly felt fragile. But not the television sets. There was a limit to everything.

The impending loss that grieved me most was Alibia, the painted city that covered an entire wall of the Café. I imagined workmen in overalls slapping polyvinyl acetate over our capital without a second thought. It should be moved to a new location, I decided: sawn up into blocks, numbered and packed, transported to safety, and reassembled. The Yanks were all for that sort of thing, carving up the world and recycling it as atmosphere. I don’t know why I was thinking this way. After all, it was no Florentine fresco, it was of no historical significance, nothing important had ever happened in this room. There was no point in preserving any of it. It was merely − that phrase so beloved of the Lost and Found columns came into my head – ‘of great sentimental value’.

‘If these walls could speak, hey,’ Wessels said as if he’d read my thoughts.

‘If they could speak English, you mean.’ Then I might have asked them: what is that stuff you’re covered with? Apart from the one with the mural, the walls were papered, and the pattern had always bothered me. What did it represent? Rising damp? Autumn leaves? ‘Besides, ears are common enough among walls, but mouths are rare.’

‘Now that’s above my fireplace,’ said Wessels, and looked baffled.

‘Never mind. I wonder what will open here when we’re gone?’

‘A whorehouse.’ As if he knew for a fact. ‘Or a disco.’ He made Christmas lights with his fat fingers.

‘So long as it’s not another chicken outlet,’ I said. ‘We’ve got enough of those. Though why they should be called chicken outlets, I don’t know. It sounds like the orifice through which a fowl passes an egg.’

‘I know this tone of voice,’ Wessels said, too familiarly by half. ‘It’s your letter-to-the-editor tone. We should write a letter to the Star. We haven’t done that for ages. Hey, Mo-siss.’

He ordered another round, make that doubles, and I didn’t protest. These were extraordinary circumstances.

‘Dear Editor,’ Wessels dictated, steepling his fingers and gazing up at the ceiling in what I understood to be a parody of my own attitude. ‘It have come to my attention that Europa Caffy, last outpost of symbolization in the jungly flatland that go by the name of Hillbrow, most densely populated residential hairier in the southern hemisphere …’

And growing denser by the day. More people and fewer motor vehicles. No one who could afford to drive a car wanted to come here any more.

I have never been able to hold my liquor, as they say, whereas Empty Wessels can hold a gallon (an ancient measure for liquids) in each leg without getting plastered. The walls have ears. I found myself going over the porous surface of Wessels’s face as incredulously as I had just examined the wallpaper. Another crumbling ruin. His face sat like a lump of porridge on the cracked calyx of his old-fashioned suit with its ridiculously wide lapels. A drinker’s nose, a real grog berry, with little sesamoid nodules in the wings of the nostrils. His features were all too big. You could say of him, without a hint of the figurative, that he was all ears. They were large and fleshy in the lobe and full of gristle, tufty in the middle, with tops like the curve of fat on a pork chop. It made sense to me that Empty Wessels should have these meaty handles attached to his head. Auditory meatus. To coin a false etymology.

Pitcher ~ pitchy ~ plague ~ plaguy. The whiskey beginning to talk. Then there was the hair. Also too big, obscenely thick for a man of his age, and worn in the ducktail style. The rear end of a bloody Muscovy. He dyes it black. Why does it vex me so?

‘What’s to become of us?’ he was still dictating, mocking my accent. ‘We part of the furniture around here.’

Speak for yourself. The whole of his person appears to be covered with the same stiff horsehair that sprouts from his ears. The way it sticks out of him, you could believe that he was stuffed with it. You wouldn’t be surprised to see a shiny spring burst out of the fabric stretched over his belly.

‘Those were the days. Yours faithfully.’

He has all the finesse of an ottoman, I thought. He had stopped speaking at last and was gazing at me over the spatulate ends of his fingers. You piece of wood. You wing-eared lounger. You stool. And then by anatomical association: You clot. You thrombus. ‘Those were the days?’ You have no idea what the days were. By the time you arrived on the scene, the days were no longer what they were supposed to be. That it should come to this. That I should end up with Wessels, of all people, up the creek in a leaky kayak. It was a bitter irony. I had often consoled myself that things were not as bad as they might have been, but now it came home to me that they were actually worse.

The same canoe coming and going (5): kayak.

Wessels called Moçes to turn up the volume on the television set. News from the Convention for a Democratic South Africa. For some time now, Wessels had been making a show of interest in national affairs. Oddly enough, I had a feeling he was trying to impress the waiters. CODESA this and CODESA that. The country was disappearing behind a cloud of acronyms. As for the décor at the ‘World Trade Centre’ – how could one expect proper political decisions to be made in those dreadful surroundings? The place looked like a brothel.

I excused myself.

Alcohol does not agree with me. It argues, it presents opposing viewpoints − like that Freek Robinson on the television. In the Gentlemen’s room I scrutinized, as I always did, the peculiar geometrical pattern in the frosted glass of the window. In the beginning, it had reminded me of those abstract designs in nails and string that were thought so modern when I was starting out at Posts and Telecommunications. But then I’d begun to think of it as a hide stretched between stakes, the skin of some animal kept under glass.

I turned to the wall above the washbasin where the mirror was meant to be (I had seen it there myself as recently as the day before): four small holes and a faint outline of grime showed where it had been secured to the tiles. Someone had unscrewed it and carried it off. I couldn’t believe it was gone. In the shiny tiles, my image wavered. I wet my fingers under the tap and ran them over what was left of my hair, then dried the bumpy top of my head with a wad of paper towels, staring down the pale ghost. I took off my spectacles, huffed on them, dried them on my tie. Without my eye-glasses, the ghost in the wall disappeared entirely.

Alcohol spoke in the archaic, extravagant language it uses during our arguments. It said: This is your lucky day, spindleshanks. Nature has done you a favour by dimming your sight. And some petty thief, working hand in hand with natural forces, a marvellous example of symbiosis, has performed a greater service by carrying off the mirror, in which you might otherwise see yourself as you really are: not the distinguished figure you think you cut, not the debonair sea-captain, but a shabby deckhand, a figure of fun, a fogram. You and Wessels make a perfect pair, Wessels with his sprouty ears, you with your raisiny cranium and your fish-eyes.

When I got back to the table, Wessels was just leaving. He said he had to get home to feed the cat. That was rich. He wanted to get to the off-sales at the Senator before closing time.

That reminded me. ‘I saw something amazing at the Jumbo Liquor Market when I was on my way over here. You know that mascot thing of theirs that they put out on the pavement, the elephant—’

‘Dumbo.’

‘Jumbo,’ I corrected him.

‘Dumbo, from the comics, the heffalump who could fly.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘You mean you haven’t read his books?’

‘It didn’t occur to me that he might be an author.’

‘Sorry, Aubs-ss, got to run. We’ll speak later.’

I had to call him back for his bill, which he was conveniently forgetting under the pot of sugar sachets. He paid up and hobbled out. Someone had written a message on the plaster cast and drawn an anatomical diagram. Obscene graffiti, I suppose.

When he had gone, I summoned Moçes to turn the sound down on the television. I was the only person watching, if you can call the idle apperception of an image on a screen ‘watching’: men in suits voicing opinions. Talking heads. Strictly, heads and shoulders. Moçes tapped the volume button with the end of a warped pool cue. Old Eveready used to make do with his forefinger, but these days people need ‘equipment’ for the simplest tasks. The set in the opposite corner went on murmuring. There was a different image on that screen: a football match. Alarmingly green lawn, cunningly mown into the MacLaren tartan. Arsenal 2, Urinal 1. A punchline, if I’m not mistaken. Half a dozen men (the Olé ’Enries, between you and me) were lounging in a semicircle of chairs below the set. The baize of an empty pool table, glimpsed through the archway, was the same acid green as the lighter squares on the football pitch. Errol and Co must have moved to another table, out of sight. I could hear the balls clicking together, like the building cracking its knuckles.

Why would a company that sold alcoholic beverages have a pink elephant as its mascot? It was supposedly a sign of extreme intoxication, even of delirium tremens. The Pocket Oxford Dictionary (the incomparable fourth edition, revised and reprinted with corrections in 1957, henceforth referred to as ‘the Pocket’), which I happened to have stored in the place it was made for, was mum on the derivation, and I’d had no first-hand experience of such things, but the connotations were hardly attractive. Was it black humour? Or mere ignorance? Why not purple snakes? Could the elephant’s name really be Dumbo? Lately, Wessels was always trying to trick me.

He would stow his nightcap under his pillow and hurry back for company. I wasn’t in the mood. I wanted to be gone before he arrived.

Usually when I left the Café, I took a turn around Hillbrow, my daily constitutional, sometimes as far as the Fort, or even the Civic Theatre to watch the sun sink over Braamfontein. Our highveld sunsets are spectacularly garish, thanks to the quantities of mine dust and chemicals in the air. But this evening, I was drawn straight back to the opposite end of Kotze Street.

The one-eared elephant was behind bars, between the two cash desks, with his silver chain and padlock coiled like a serpent at his feet. He was looking out between the burglar bars with the same ecstatic expression frozen on his face. Dumbo? It was possible.

Sausages for a Greek island (7): Salamis. Ruled by Ajax, the king of detergents.

*

I was an old hand at the Café Europa, their most venerable patron, an incorrigible ‘European’. Not a member though, never mind what Wessels said. We were never a club.

I am a proofreader by profession. When I retired half a dozen years ago, I came to live in a flat in Prospect Road on the edge of Hillbrow. Though my vocation had been a solitary one and I was used to my own company (never been married), I felt cooped up at home. The place was spacious enough and light, but my view of the skyline was all nickel and paste by night and factory roofs and television aerials by day. So I ventured out.

The public spaces in my neighbourhood were uninviting. The parks provided no seating arrangements. Where once there had been benches for whites only, now there were no benches at all to discourage loitering. The loiterers were quite happy to lie on the grass, but, needless to say, I was not. The park in Beatrice Street had a bench; but then it also had a reniform paddling pool that attracted the wrong sort of toddler. The public library was a morgue for dead romances. A series of children’s drawings, hideous without exception, had been stuck on the walls in a misguided attempt to brighten the place up. There were no pavement cafés à la française. The weather was suitable, but not the social climate: the city fathers quite rightly did not want people baring their fangs in broad daylight, cluttering the thoroughfares, and giving the have-nots mistaken ideas about wealth and leisure.

After a week of fruitless wandering around the streets of Hillbrow, the happy day arrived when an escalator carried me up into the Café Europa on the first floor of Meissner’s Building in Pretoria Street.

The ambience appealed at once. There was a hush in the din of traffic, a lull in the beat of the sunlight, with a melody tinkling through it like a brook. At the grand piano was a woman in a red evening dress, with a swirl of hair on a lacquered skewer. Even seated, she was tall and imposing. She was playing ‘I Love Paris’, which suited the establishment, if not the city and the season, down to a semiquaver. French doors gave onto a balcony, a sort of elevated pavement café with wrought-iron tables and chairs of bottle-green, shaded by striped umbrellas in the Cinzano livery, delicious monsters and rubber plants in pots. It was tempting to sit out of doors. On the other hand, it was so cool and quiet inside, with comfortable armchairs and sconces for reading by. At half a dozen tables, men of my generation, more or less, were playing backgammon or chess on inlaid boards, or reading newspapers with their folds pinched in wooden staves. Good idea: gave the news a bit of backbone. Another clutch of papers hung from hooks on a pillar, chafing their wings in the moted air.

I crossed the carpet, an autumnal layer as soft and yielding underfoot as oak leaves, past a glass counter where dainties were displayed in rows, like miniatures of the pianist’s hairdo, and chose a little square table against the wall near the French doors, where I could have the best of both worlds: from inside, the ceiling fans circulated a muted hubbub of conversation in foreign tongues, piano music, the clack of dominoes, the smell of cigar smoke and ground coffee; while a breeze from outside carried in the hum of traffic and the scent of the Levant, thanks to the lamb on the rotisserie at the Haifa Hebrew Restaurant down below. The doors were set into a wall of plate glass, segmented by brocade curtains drawn into Corinthian columns, allowing a panoramic view of the buildings opposite. Between two of them, against a postcard of bright blue sky, the top of the Hillbrow Tower stuck up like an attachment for a vacuum cleaner. I had never been fond of it. But then I had never seen it from this perspective – gazing skywards is next to impossible with my bad neck – and I thought it made a touching contrast to the cast-iron Tours d’Eiffel in the balcony railing.

I sat down and opened my paper. I was accustomed to working in silence, and so the piano was unsettling at first, but I would discover in time that the right sort of background music supplies a very productive rhythm for browsing through telephone directories or hunting for literals in the classifieds. A fugue, well played, will facilitate the identification of anagrams, for example, while a march will ginger up a letter to the editor.

The waiter, an affable and fairly efficient old boy who introduced himself as Eveready, brought my tea in a civilized cup and saucer; the cup was spoilt somewhat by a picture of a coffee bean in a sombrero dancing the cachucha, but in these days of polystyrene, the lapse might be forgiven. The serviette was folded into an episcopal mitre. The sugar was in a pot (later one would find it in nasty little sachets, which were supposed to promote economy, and instead encouraged pilfering) and the pot was equipped with a genuine spoon (rather than a plastic spatula). An unobtrusive perspex sign, which now came to my attention, informed me that I was table No. 1, and this pleased me inordinately.

A European ambience. Prima. The least one would expect from an establishment that called itself the Café Europa. Importantly, it was ambience rather than atmosphere. You may find ‘atmosphere’ in fast-food restaurants, thick enough to cut with a plastic knife and obedient to the strictest laws, being the necessary by-product of gingham curtains and sepia-tinted photographs, tables shaped like kegs and lithographs of the Three Little Pigs. Atmosphere is an American commodity. And that is why the citizens of the Golden City covet it. They want to breathe deep-fried oxygen, they want to be part of the Space Age. Europeans prefer ambience, which cannot be pumped in overnight or sprayed on with an aerosol, but has to accrue over time.

*

My first impressions came back to me the day after I heard that the Café was closing. By noon, I found myself walking down to the Europa. I wanted to have the place to myself, before Wessels arrived sloshing over with inanities. I had been dwelling on everything that had happened to me there, on the old days and the old faces, as we think of them, when we mean the younger ones. I was surprised at how indistinct some of those faces had become, ghosts of their former selves. Platitudinously, your memories are a precious possession; they can’t take them away from you, as Mevrouw Bonsma, our pianist, used to insist. I always wondered what she meant. Who were these robbers? And why should they want one’s memories? They would want something of material value, surely, wristwatches, wallets, shoes …

I came to the Café more concerned than ever to get it clear in my head. I brought my notebook along for a change, in case I wished to make a few sketches or diagrams. I pictured the establishment as a set about to be struck. If only I could arrange it all in my mind, like a diligent stage manager, with every prop in place, perhaps the characters would troop on from the wings of memory and take a bow.

I was tempted to sit at No. 1, where I’d spent my very first hours at the Europa. But as I’ve already indicated, sentimentality irks me, especially the American variety, which is descended from the Irish. I sat instead at my usual place, the round table where Spilkin and I first shared our thoughts on the crossword puzzle, which had been the great love of his life until grosser affections supplanted it, and ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’, which was and always will be mine. This table was No. 2. A signpost, a relic saved through my intervention, declared the fact (all the others had long since been filched, for reasons one can only guess at).

My eye was drawn to the city on the wall, to the walled city of Alibia, where I had roamed so often in my imagination.

In the foreground was a small harbour, with a profusion of fishing boats and yachts, and a curve of beach freckled with umbrellas. The palm-lined promenade cried out for women twirling parasols and old men nodding in Bath chairs with rugs over their knees. There were wharves and warehouses too, by no means quaint but necessarily somewhat Dickensian, and silos fat with grain, and tower cranes with their skinny shins in the water. Houses were heaped on the slopes behind, around narrow streets and squares. Despite the steepness of the terrain, there were canals thronged with barges, houseboats and gondolas. On one straight stretch of canal, evidently frozen over, one expected to see skaters in woollen caps racing to the tune of a barcarole. In the squares, there were outdoor cafés and neon signs advertising nightclubs; but in the windows of the houses up above, oil-lamps were burning. The baroque steeple of St Cloud’s, intricately iced, measured itself against glazed office blocks of modest proportions, while in the east a clutch of onion domes had been harrowed from the black furrow of the horizon. A Slav would feel just as at home there as a Dutchman. It was a perfect alibi, a generous elsewhere in which the immigrant might find the landmarks he had left behind. I had seen pointed out St Peter’s and St Paul’s, the Aegean and the Baltic. A receptionist at the German Consulate had shown us a bridge over the Neckar; and once an engineer from Mostar, then painting traffic signs for Roads and Works, had pinpointed the very house in which he had been born. His poor mother still lived there, with mortar-bombs raining down all around her.

What did Alibia mean to me? Certainly it was not ‘home’. I am a true Johannesburger, because I was born within sight of the Hillbrow Tower, our very own Bow Bells – or so Spilkin used to say. Of course, this was long before the Johannes Gerhardus Strijdom Tower (properly) was built, but he said it had retrospective effect: had it been standing at the time of my birth, I would have seen it from my crib.

Alibia was close to my heart for a different reason, an egocentric one, I suppose: in the middle of the city, bulging above the skyline and overhung by a dirty brown cloud, was a hill whose bumpy summit looked auspiciously like the crown of my own head. My personal Golgotha.

I came into the world, as many do, with a healthy head of hair. In my case, it was black and enviably thick (but not a thatch, like Empty Wessels’s). As a boy, I wore it with a parting in the middle, and as a young man, brushed straight back in the fashion of the day, which is how it stayed. In my prime, I cultivated a windswept appearance, with the tousle combed in and the loose ends held in place with oil. I fancied that this hairstyle reflected my character rather well: quick-witted and sporty, tidy but not without flair. However, as my hairline receded, which it began to do during my mid-twenties, I saw coming into view a skull to make a phrenologist’s fingertips itch. It was singularly bumpy, roughly-hewn and battered-looking, with a pronounced mound right on top. The most dismaying revelation was a bluish blemish on the occipital plate, around three o’clock, which looked a bit like a raisin embedded in the sugared icing on a custard slice. My marchpane pate. Over the years, as the denuding of my head proceeded, several more of these partly submerged excrescences appeared. Another four to be precise: two more occipitals at eight and nine o’clock and a brace of cranials at twelve on the dot and half past five. But none was more disconcerting than the first. I went to see a dermatologist about it, a Dr Zinn, who was as bald as a coot himself, and he tugged on my forelock, then extant, and told me not to worry. Easier said than done. It was as surprising to me that I should be thinking inside this malformed and discoloured lump as it is to find white flesh inside a fractured coconut.

From much massaging with various preparations in an attempt to revivify the follicles, my fingertips had memorized every square inch – as we used to say then – of my scalp. The digits have a surprisingly long memory, no less enduring than the eyes. I knew my dome’s shape exactly, and strange to say, it perfectly matched the hill that beetled over Alibia. Indeed, that hill might have been a study of my head, cast into relief against a permanent sunset, with the features below lost in a clown’s ruff of staircases, closes and wynds.

‘Yes yes.’ The echo chamber slumped down in one chair and propped his plaster cast on another. Seeing the toes of Wessels that close to the table top made my stomach churn. ‘Peace & luv’ had been printed on the cast in red ink, next to a drawing of a bird. Glory be. The duv of peace, the pidgin. I averted my eyes.

‘How’s it?’

‘Can’t complain,’ and so on. I don’t know why I bother. One may as well speak to a plank.

Then a spar of sense sluiced out on the bilge water: ‘I had a great idea.’

‘You’re moving back to Halfway House?’

‘Serious. Let’s have a party, before we close down here. A farewell.’

‘What for?’

‘To say fare thee well, what else? It’ll be tough not seeing the guys any more.’

‘I’ll be only too pleased to see the back of this mob, if that’s who you mean. I won’t even grace them with a goodbye.’ Errol and Co were lounging on the balcony. Goodbye wouldn’t suit them, godless heathen that they were. They were always shouting chow-chow at one another like a bunch of jinricksha men.

‘Not a goodbye bash,’ he said brightly. ‘A get-together, a reunion. We’ll ask all the old faces.’

This was complex reasoning for Wessels – so early in the day too. I examined his nose, the surest barometer of his state of inebriation the night before. Strawberry this morning, a full three degrees – raspberry, ruddy, Rudolph – from the top of the scale. And out came the Paul Reveres. When he was really the worse for wear, it was Peter Stuyvesant. Perhaps he’d missed the bottlestore last night after all? Those old faces I had spent the night thinking about, those speechless heads with fading features, drifted through my mind.

‘The old faces on their own might be awkward,’ I said. ‘You’d have to ask them to bring their old bodies along.’

‘Serious Aub.’

‘You could append it to the invitation, it’s quite acceptable: BYOB.’ Suitably baffled. I hate being called Aub.

‘Wouldn’t it be nice to see everyone again − Mevrouw Bonsma and them. Merlé. And Bogey – I wonder where he’s at? Mrs Mav.’

‘I honestly can’t imagine that Mrs Mavrokordatos would want to come back here. It would rake up too many painful memories. It would break her heart to see what the place has become. To see what we’ve become.’

‘Nothing wrong with us.’

‘Not that her hands are clean. But in any case, we don’t know where she is. We don’t know where anyone is.’

‘Tone’s got Mrs Mav’s number.’

So the New Management had finally turned into a monosyllable. He’d be an initial next and then he’d vanish altogether. ‘What does Tone say about your plan?’

‘He thinks it’s a great idea to go out with a bang. You’ll see. It’ll be a jôl. I’ll organize everything. You don’t have to lift a finger, you can just pull in.’

A (from the Old Norse jól, a heathen festival) is a rowdy sort of Afrikaner party, accompanied by heavy drinking and smoking of marijuana. And ‘pulling in’ is one of the more popular vehicular metaphors for arriving unannounced.

‘If it’s all the same, I think I have a prior arrangement. Or will have any minute.’

I didn’t like going out on New Year’s Eve anyway. It had become far too dangerous, with flat-dwellers of colour using the occasion to heave unwanted furniture from their windows into the streets below. In fact, the entire ‘festive season’ had degenerated into a drunken street fight, and the wise lay low until it was all over.

‘Anyway, you’re invited. Now give us a page of your notebook.’

‘No.’

‘Don’t be so snoop man.’

(Snoop? Put it on the list after ‘tawty’.)

‘I can’t.’ I showed him why: I number all the pages in advance, in the top right-hand corner, in ink, precisely to deter filchers. A tactic I learnt from Erasmus, whom I’ve mentioned before, my colleague at the Department of Posts and Telecommunications in the days of pen and paper.

*

During the course of my constitutional, I found the elephant’s ear in the gutter at the top of Nugget Hill. The Queen of Sheba must have dropped it there; when the weather was good, the Pullinger Kop park served as her country seat. In the rosy light of sunset, the ear looked for all the world like a gigantic petal fallen from some impossible bloom. Closer inspection revealed treadmarks from tyres and shoes, gooey fingerprints, splashes of what might have been royal blood. Perhaps Her Majesty’s minions had used the ear to stretcher her hither? Understandably, I was reluctant to touch this repulsive, disease-ridden thing, but I meant to drop in at the Jumbo Liquor Market the next morning to clear up the Dumbo question, and so I sacrificed a few pages from the classified section of my Star to wrap it in and bore it along with me.

As I was crossing Abel Road with my unsought trophy, a little preoccupied it’s true, but as mindful of the traffic regulations as ever, a baker’s delivery van, adorned with a painting of Atlas shouldering a crisply browned Planet Earth still steaming from the oven, careered around the corner and very nearly knocked me down. I am in good shape for a man of my age, pate excepted, and I was able to leap to safety. I had the presence of mind, even as I overbalanced on the kerb and plummeted to the pavement, to glance at the rear of the vehicle to note the registration number. And there on the bumper I saw, to my annoyance, a sign that read: ‘How am I driving?’

Some bystanders came to my assistance, but I fended them off with elbows and epithets, equally sharp. They try to pick your pockets under cover of kindness. My fall had loosened the newspaper covering the ear, and people were staring. I rewrapped it as best I could, picked myself up, and hurried away. The mishap had disorientated me and I found myself going down Catherine Street, the way I had come. This was all too much. Unable to turn back without losing face, unwilling to stray from my accustomed path, I took refuge in the lounge at the Chelsea Hotel, and ordered a whisky to steady my nerves. They didn’t have whiskey at all – which I should have taken as forewarning that the place had gone to the dogs.

No sooner had my drink arrived than a woman sidled into the chair opposite and commanded me to buy her one too. My astonished expression produced a gust of tittering from her friends at the next table. Ladies of the night, I would say. They all seemed to be wearing foundation garments on top of their daywear. I took out my notebook and jotted down a few points about the Atlas Bakery van while the episode was still fresh in my memory. The harlot did not go away. Instead, she started picking at the newspaper in which the ear was swaddled. I had to gulp my drink and leave. She made a crack in isiSotho or whatever, and the streetwalkers tee-heed in the same lingo.

It was growing dark. As I approached Abel Road for the second time that evening, the full horror of my narrow escape overwhelmed me and I broke out in a sweat. I shouldn’t be surprised if the bolted drink also played a part. To think that I might have been lying in the roadway here right now, awaiting the ambulance or, God forbid, the mortuary van. Strangers rifling through my clothing, making a show of ascertaining my identity while lifting my small change, reading my notebook, leafing through my Pocket with their greasy fingers, scattering my bookmarks to the wind … farceur … feather … fiat … fleck … flint … I saw my life ebbing away. I saw my death, touch wood, as a precipitate efflux of vocabulary and idiom, the hoarded treasures of a lifetime spent in a minute, one immaculate vintage running into another, and the whole adulterated brew spilt on the dirty macadam of an unmemorable corner of a lawless conurbation. Flow: glide along as a stream; gush out, spring; (of blood) be spilt; (of wine) be poured out without stint (f. OE flōwan, unconnected with L fluere: flux). Unconnected. This city had a short memory. How many deaths might have occurred on this very spot and left no memorial? How many forgotten Abels had bled out their spirits at these crossroads, how many smooth-cheeked Cains were going about scot-free. And what would I have left behind, apart from these shop-soiled mortal remains? Invisible work. A pile of manuals and documents, obscure gazettes, directories and yearbooks, most of them out of print, which I had proofread well, and on which I had therefore left no visible trace. A negative achievement. ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’, through which I had hoped to make a little mark, something of lasting value to which my name might be attached, lay incomplete in my desk drawer. Some second-hand furniture dealer would tip it into the rubbish skip in the alley behind his shop, along with my notes and cards and clippings, and the skip would be emptied into a landfill site and covered over with sand, and in the fullness of time another housing development would arise on the spot and bury it for ever. Hit and run! I saw myself lying there, sprawled across the elephant’s ear, newsprint fluttering around me like the Prospect Road corpse, and some ambulance man, or paramedic as they style themselves nowadays, smelling the alcohol on my breath and making the obvious wisecrack. But could a corpse be said to have something on its breath? The whisky was anachronistic anyway. If the bakery van had delivered me into the hands of the Great Compositor, I should never have stopped at the Chelsea to wet my whistle. I would have come up smelling not exactly of roses, but of Wilson’s XXX mints. My generally impeccable sense of chronology had been quite disordered. And it was all Wessels’s fault, talking about old faces and cartoon characters. He really was the bane of my life.

I didn’t want to take the ear up in the lift with me; what if I bumped into that nosey Mrs Manashewitz? That’s all I needed, to get half of Lenmar Mansions talking. So I left it in the care of Gideon, the nightwatchman, and he put it in the coal room in the parking garage overnight. Now that the thing had nearly cost me my life, I had more reason than ever to barter it for some useful information at the Jumbo Liquor Market.

*

Lenmar Mansions was built just after the war. It’s a six-storey block, square and solid, made of bricks and mortar, as a building should be. I took a one-bedroomed flat on the top floor (the bachelors didn’t suit me, despite my marital status). The minute I set foot in the place, I felt at ease. Spacious rooms, separated by proper walls and doors, parquet throughout, black and white tiles in the kitchen and bathroom. The south-facing lounge had large windows – there was no need for burglar-proofing so high up – and a small balcony.

In my researches, I discovered that the block had been built by the property tycoon Ronnie Lazerow, and named for his children Leonard and Marilyn. Portmanteau names of this kind have always been popular in Johannesburg. At one time, supposing the phenomenon might bear closer scrutiny, I started a list in my notebook.

Portmanteaus, residential: Lenmar Mansions … Milrita Heights … Norbeth East … Villa Ethelinda … Alanora Maisonettes …

But the sheer banality of the coinages exhausted my curiosity.

*

In the shiny glass doors of the Jumbo Liquor Market, with my black polythene rubbish bag over my shoulder, I appeared to myself for an instant as a sinister Santa Claus bearing gifts for the black Christmas everyone was threatening to visit upon us if they didn’t get their own way at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa, and this perception sent a malicious rush of sangfroid to my head. I deposited the bag on the cash desk. The cashier was the same young woman who had called out to Mr Ferreira, the manager, as the ritual ravishing of Jumbo/Dumbo reached its climax. I expected to be recognized – after all, I had played a prominent if unassuming part in that sordid drama – but the girl was clearly none too observant. Mrs Da Silva, as the badge on her lapel denoted her, seemed improbably young to be married, if you asked me, and inelegantly hirsute in the oxter.

‘Ken I yelp yew, Sir?’

(I hope I’ve captured the accent. A phonetic transliteration – – would be better by far, but not everyone knows the language.)

‘You may summon Mr Ferreira for me.’ I glanced meaningfully at the elephant with its one ear cocked. ‘You may say it is in connection with the corporate image.’ If needs be, I can bandy the jargon about as well as the next man.

‘Sorry, Sir, bud Meesta Ferreira yeece howt.’

Oh. ‘Da Silva has absolutely nothing to do with the metallic element,’ I said, conversationally, ‘whose symbol in the periodic table is Ag, from the Latin argentum; whose properties are lustrous, malleable, ductile. What else? Precious. Well, that first and foremost.’

‘Doughling, I yaven’t god oll dye. Yew god empties in da beg?’

I unbagged the ear, liberating a gust of the anti-canine scent with which the plastic was impregnated. She still didn’t seem to recognize me, but she was delighted to see the ear. She patted it with the convex ends of her manicured left hand. The nails on the other hand, I noticed, the one she used to punch the keys of the till, were half as long. In all likelihood the musculature on that arm would be more developed too.

‘Where dod yew fine deece yeah?’ she demanded.

I explained.

She spoke so fervently into the microphone sticking out of the till that it trembled like an antenna. ‘Joaquim! Joaquim! Pleece comb tew da frount!’

Da Silva. As in sylvan. Forests and so on. Boscage. Woods. Five o’clock shadow on the upper lip, and not even teatime. Lipstick: cherry tomato.

Joaquim appeared from behind a ziggurat of boxed wine. Beaujolais in boxes. Whatever next. Whisky in tins? Instant ice – just add water and chill? Under Mrs Da Silva’s direction, Joaquim tried the ear on the elephant, inserting the snapped-off metal strut like the stalk of a big autumn leaf into the hole in the elephant’s head, and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was indeed the missing part.

Mrs Da Silva clapped her lazy hand on her thigh, twice, and said, ‘Tenk yew, tenk yew.’

Joaquim carried the ear into the storeroom at the rear.

Portuguese workforce: manuel labour.

A man in a suit, another pseudo-businessman, a Stan, a Vern, approached with a six-pack of Lion Lagers in his paw, and she excused herself to ring it up.

‘Cheerio, Rosa,’ he said.

‘Yave a nace dye.’

Hypermeat was advertising lambada lamb sosaties, hottest prices in town. Little red and yellow flames flickered around the blistered letters.

‘Ken I yelp yew still?’

‘This elephant of yours interests me. I think I’ve seen him somewhere before.’

‘Heece dere oll da time.’

‘I mean I’ve seen an elephant like him somewhere else.’

‘Oll hour brenches hev dem. Troyeville yas tew.’

‘Wait a minute, it’s coming back to me. It’s Dumbo, isn’t it? The little elephant who wanted to fly?’

‘Ken be.’

Hopeless case.

‘Yew wand somb kesh?’ she said suddenly.

‘For the ear? My dear Mrs Woods, I wouldn’t dream of it. I was just doing my civic duty, as any decent person would.’

Before I could stop her, she had summoned Joaquim again, mumbled something to him − he must be a native of Moçambique, as he speaks the lingo – and in a trice he was pressing a bottle of Sedgwick’s Old Brown Sherry into my hands. It was almost offensive.

‘Could I have my bag, please?’

She spat on a working fingertip and dabbed up one of the yellow ones covered with pink elephants.

‘That’s one of yours,’ I said firmly but politely. ‘I’d prefer to have my own back, if it’s all the same.’

Joaquim fetched my rubbish bag from the storeroom.

‘Obrigado,’ I said nonchalantly, wrapped the bottle of sherry in it and sauntered conveniently out onto the pavement, no wiser than when I had arrived. Old Brown Sherry. Cheapskates. Ships’ kites. At least it wasn’t Paarl Perlé, which was quite undrinkable, by all accounts, and smacked of bitter associations. I supposed it would do for cooking with.

I found one of Dumbo’s literary efforts in the Central News Agency in Hillbrow, an autographed copy of Dumbo and the Pachyderms from Alpha Centauri. He was a brainchild, a brainbeast of that Walter Disney, whose passion for furry animals was surely unhealthy. The family resemblance to the Liquor Market’s mascot was striking. While I was paging, the shop manager came and stared at me over the erasers. Apparently I was acting suspiciously, and not for the first time. News to me. The rubbish bag was probably creating the wrong impression. I took out my Oxford. That made Management’s eyebrows disappear. Ostrogoth … overenthusiasm … pagoda … here we are: pachyderm. From the Greek pakhus, meaning thick, and derma, meaning skin.

‘You may thank your lucky stars,’ I informed Management, pocketing the Pocket again, ‘that I am the last gentleman in Hillbrow, as honest as the day is long, and pachydermatous to boot. As for Henry Watson Fowler, the man’s prejudice against polysyllabic humour did him no credit. No one’s perfect.’

Departed, trumpeting (inwardly).

*

Wessels found me writing in my notebook, an Okay Bazaars (Hyperama) special with a blue cover and white spiral binding, good value for money. To my chagrin, he produced a notebook from his own pocket and rested it on his thigh. A child’s scribbling block of cheap grey paper, feint ruled, with a chubby, bilingual little man called Mr Fatso/Mnr Vetsak on the cover. It was roughly the same size as mine, but also contrived to be a childish comment on it. He took out a pen, clicked the ballpoint in and out pensively, gazed up at a chandelier, and then made to write. No sooner had the pen touched paper than he let out a cry of frustration and had to wipe it clean on the lining of his jacket. I always write my rough copies with a pencil because it allows for erasure; I saw that Wessels, unable to lick the nib of the pen, but keen to emulate my technique in every particular, was licking the tip of his index finger between flourishes of the writing hand and surreptitiously using his tie as a blotter. The formation of each letter was accompanied by a sympathetic, schoolboyish contortion of facial muscles. That writing should be such a painful procedure! In anyone else, it might have been enough to thaw my frozen heart.

I introduced Mr Fatso/Mnr Vetsak to his brethren in my notebook – he fitted in between Mr Video and Mr Meat – and went on with my own work. Fortunately, I had finished my composition, in the requisite brief paragraphs, and was busy inking up a fair copy (which I would typewrite later that evening at home), and so I was able to put Wessels from my mind and concentrate on my penmanship.

When I had finished, I laid my notebook down on the table. The sight of a pen in Wessels’s freckled fist in place of a reeking cigarette was compelling. But it was so obviously a ruse to implicate me in his plans for the Goodbye Bash – as I was determined to call it – that I resolved to make no comment. Soon he put down his pad too. He swizzled his brandy with his pen, then clipped it in the flap of his right ear.

No sign of Moçes. Perhaps he was out on the balcony, behind the venetian blinds, where Errol and Co were cackling and hooting. Probably sharing an illicit cocktail laced with amphetamines. Discipline among the waiters had broken down entirely under the influence of these hooligans.

‘What you got there?’

‘A letter to the editor of the Star about an unnerving experience I had yesterday, which I wanted to get off my chest.’

‘We haven’t had one of those for donkey’s years-ss. Can I see?’

The man was a fount of amphibology. It was Café etiquette, in the old days, never to ask to read my communications until they were printed in the newspaper. Wessels’s flouting of the rules, to which I had long thought myself inured, coupled now with his persistent invocation of the past, irritated me all over again. But having watched his version of writing, I was intrigued to see him reading as well, so I handed him the notebook, which he bore up towards his face at once like a toasted sandwich, as if he meant to take a bite out of it. As I expected: the thick lips moved to frame each word. Personally, I prefer reading silently, to myself. Reading belongs in the head, behind the eyes, not just under the breath, but inside the folds of the brain. I can tolerate reading out loud on occasion, if the words are enunciated clearly and the circumstances are fit. But this soundless movement of the lips is uncouth, like a cat twitching through a rutting dream.

7 December 1993

Dear Sir,

In a lifetime of accident-free motoring, I have been the owner of half a dozen passenger vehicles, including several purchased out of the box, but as a pensioner I am now reduced to travelling either by bus, an ordeal since the municipal prohibition on smoking is no longer enforced, or by shank’s pony, ever the most reliable means of private transport, despite the hazards posed by ‘muggers’, excavations, hawkers, uneven paving-stones and reckless drivers.

Yesterday afternoon, I was crossing Abel Road in Hillbrow at the Catherine Street intersection when a delivery van in the service of the Atlas Bakery tore through a red robot and very nearly knocked me down.

As the rear bumper of the vehicle flashed before my eyes, I saw affixed to it a sign that read: ‘How am I driving?’ One might have assumed that the question was merely rhetorical. However, the telephone number appended made it clear that an answer was sought. I have a head for figures, thanks to my professional background, and so I was quick to memorize this number, along with the registration number, and several other details.

Immediately after the incident, I transcribed these details into the notebook I was carrying, and am enclosing a photostatic copy of the relevant page. The man in the street is not expected to have pen and paper to hand nowadays, I know, but then I have never resembled that mythical creature.

This morning, I dialled the telephone number of the Atlas Bakery and was put through to a Miss Papenfus, a superficially polite but intrinsically ineffectual young woman, who showed no interest whatsoever in the nimble undertones of her ostensibly flat-footed name.

Explaining the purpose of my call, I provided the registration number of the van and asked to speak to the driver concerned, but this request was refused. I was urged instead to address my complaint to the Director of Human Resources in writing, an offer I flatly rejected as being likely to end with my statement ‘put on file’ and duly forgotten. In any event, I am not a human resource, I am a member of the public, and I did not have a complaint, but an answer to a question.

Having failed to make a verbal report, an affidavit in the true sense of the word, I am now ‘going public’ through the channels of your newspaper.

‘How am I driving?’ You are driving atrociously. You are a menace on the road. A more urgent question might well be: ‘Why am I driving?’ And an honest answer should persuade you to seek a form of employment more suited to your temperament.

Yours faithfully,

A. Tearle

(Proofreader, retired)

Not one of my best, but adequate for a man who was out of practice.

Wessels, true to character, remarked on none of its qualities. After an elaborate show of thinking, which brought to mind the ‘cog’ in ‘cogitation’, he said: ‘You checked all these facts and figures with those binoculars of yours? This ou must of been doing five miles an hour.’

‘Bifocals, kilometres,’ I said, leaving aside the finer points of grammar and usage for the time being. ‘My eyesight is every bit as acute as your own.’

And I demonstrated by reading the signs that said ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’ on the lavatory doors (facetiously, of course, I have absolutely nothing to prove to Wessels). That ‘Gentlemen’ in particular has always touched me. I stood up for it too, when its existence was threatened by the New Management’s ethnic expedients ‘Amadoda’ and ‘Abafazi’. Not that too many of the individuals, both scruffy and overly groomed, who crossed that threshold deserved the compliment, but it was the thought that counted. ‘Gentlemen’ was so much more encouraging than the ‘Gents’ one encountered everywhere else. Or the cute couplings of Adams and Eves, Jacks and Jills, Romeos and Juliets, Bonnies and Clydes, Guys and Dolls, Mickies and Minnies, and even, confusingly, Nuts and Bolts (vide ‘nomenclature, cloakrooms’ in the notebooks). Frequently illustrated with tailcoats and crinolines and other outward signs, increasingly archaic, of the distinctions between the sexes.

‘Who’s this guy Shanks, with the pony?’

‘Old friend. Went to different schools together.’

‘Didn’t they teach you to write short and sweet? What’s-his-face will cut this in half, if he gives it out at all.’

Unfortunately, he was right. This letter has been shortened – Ed. The letters editor was someone of the Wessels type, at home among the Gavs and Erns. He’d delete the half he didn’t understand. Wouldn’t even bother to use a pen: just hit a button and make it vanish.

‘And what’s the use of talking to the driver? He probably doesn’t read the Star. Probably can’t read!’

‘Thanks for the constructive criticism.’ I took back my notebook. Mr Fatso/Mnr Vetsak puffed out his chest. Wessels wanted me to ask about his own literary efforts. I hid behind my newspaper.

‘What you suppose I got here?’

‘Invitation list. For the Goodbye Bash.’

‘Reunion.’

‘Have it your way.’

‘You wanna see it?’ And without waiting for a response, he shoved the pad under the bottom of my newspaper. I might have brushed it aside, but for the morbid fascination of Wessels’s drunken handwriting. Across that grey parade-ground of paper staggered mutinous ranks of tipsy letters, incapable of standing up straight without the support of their neighbours, struggling vainly to keep their feet on the lines. Half a dozen had fallen flat on their faces, one or two had wobbled right off the page. The only upright character was the very first capital M, rooted to the spot by the blue ink-blot, like a plaster cast, in which its right leg was encased.

Mr M.T. Wessels

Mr Aubrie Tearle

Mevrou Anna Bonsma

Mr Dan Bogus—

Miss Merlé Graaff

Errol and Raylene

Vlooid en Nomsa

Bill and Pardner

Mrs Mav

Mrs Hay

Ernie and them (Harry, Eddie, Little Harry etc)

Carmelita and Pardner

Mr Everistus alius Eveready

One hardly knew where to start.

‘Partner has a “t” in it,’ I said. Boggled. ‘A pardner is someone who trots along beside you on a bobtailed mare.’

‘Have I missed anyone out?’

‘Mnr Vetsak.’

‘Ha, Aub. Jokes aside.’

‘You’ve been very thorough. I see the bottle-washer’s invited. You should ask him to bring the kitchen sink along.’

‘I reckoned you wouldn’t mind about Everistus. He was like family. And times have changed: if he pulled in here today, he could park off with us and have a fresh orange.’

First it was a club, now it’s a family.

‘How are you going to track everyone down?’ I had a list of names and addresses he would have found very useful, but I wasn’t going to help him with this nonsense.

‘I’ve got my ways. My contacts.’

‘What’s become of Spilkin?’

‘He was on first, but then I took him off again. I don’t want to stand on anyone’s feet.’

‘I ’d have thought Spilkin’s name should lead all the rest, like Abou Ben Adhem. Not that he loved his fellow man, especially, but he had an eye for the ladies. Anyway, it’s your party, invite who you please. Even the hooligans.’

Speak of the devil. Errol came sliding in from the balcony with Raylene in tow – or was it Maylene? they all sound like household cleaners to me – and then Floyd and Nomsa, who appears to wear wigs, and our very own Moçes bringing up the rear, with his waistcoat unbuttoned and his bowtie hanging down from one point of his collar. Errol pulled up a chair at our table – ‘Please won’t you join us,’ I said – and flung himself over it like a discarded overall. Raylene or Maylene sat on the armrest and crossed her long right leg, not on her own knee but on Errol’s! I couldn’t quite see how it was done. She turned her face up to the fan, flushed, sweaty from the sun. They do seem to perspire rather a lot (although I remember reading somewhere that it’s a sign of good health, except in the tropics). Floyd and Pardner went on into the kitchen. I believe Moçes was supplying them with drugs – or vice versa – although Wessels insisted he gave them food. Leftovers. They were undernourished, according to Wessels, who had developed an entirely misplaced social conscience. Undernourished! With those muscles?

‘Howzit Wessie, Mr T, how the tawpies?’ (I’ve recorded a few snippets of the argot over the months. A is an elderly person – from their youthful perspective, more often than not someone in the prime of life. I suspect there’s an element of the racial slur in it too. And ‘Mr T’, in case you were wondering, refers to me.) ‘Dop?’ Errol went on. ‘Brandy or whatever the case may be?’ His mouth hung open. Also characteristic. You’d think he was always hungry, like a baby bird or some sea-dweller browsing for plankton. Certainly, he was usually putting something in his mouth, a Chesterfield cigarette (when he scrounged ‘smokes’ from Wessels, he snapped off the filters before he lit them), or some Black Label beer straight from the bottle, or a luminous orange larva called a Cheesnak (sic). But it was more than hunger, it was lassitude, some slackness in his long dark face, in his whole lank body, as if the bones were too loosely jointed. Needed starch. The outsize clothing he favoured didn’t help either. ‘Slapgat’ Wessels called it, and the vulgar Afrikanerism was apt.

‘We was just wrapping about the closing-down jôl,’ said Raylene/Maylene, ‘and Err had one of his bright ideas. He schemes we should get Hunky Dory to play. Like he’s usually weekends only, but I reckon Tony could ask him to come on Thursday instead, specially for the party. For old time’s sake.’

Err. Tony. Hunky Dory. They sounded more like conditions than human beings. But even Hunky Dory was a person. Tone had employed him as the resident musician. He played on Saturday nights only, but his equipment lay in the corner all week, like a junior electronics set, handfuls of gauges and dials, tangles of cable and wire, chromium tubing and grey insulation tape. ‘Hunky Dory’ hung on a string above the rostrum that passed as the stage, in glittering letters with ragged fringes of the kind usually reserved for Seasons Greetings, stirring gently in the breeze from the overhead fans.

I had once heard him manufacture ‘music’ on these ‘instruments’, to my regret.

‘I would rather hear a tribe of cats quartered on a bandsaw, fortissimo and accelerando,’ I quipped, ‘than be subjected to Hocus Pocus and his engines.’

Errol’s lip drooped. ‘Come again?’

‘Rock and roll gives me a headache.’

‘Take a Grampa,’ said Errol.

‘You a funny old tawpy,’ said Raylene/Maylene, and jogged her foot on Errol’s knee. It was unnerving, as if they were one person, Siamese twins joined at the thigh, a single creature that didn’t know whether it was Arthur or Martha. The impression was strengthened by the girl’s muscular calf and rubber-toothed combat boot (Israeli army surplus, they claimed). To test the limits of my theory, Errol’s right hand, which had been asleep on her hip with a cigarette smouldering between its fingers, awoke and began to creep over her bare midriff. It traced circles around her navel with the tip of an index finger and then dropped off again. The damp end of the cigarette slipped into the omphalic whorl in her flesh like a jack into a socket. The girl’s belly rose and fell with her breathing, the cigarette fumed. It was perverse. It reminded me of something I had seen on television: a barber-shop quartet of ugly Mongolians, which turned out to be paunches with faces painted on them. Humor.

‘What kind of music do you like smark, Mr T[earle]? Sakkie sakkie? Long arm?’ She looked at my unbarbered crown. ‘Classics?’

‘Sherbet is good,’ said Wessels. ‘And Schoeman.’

‘I’d have thought Brahms and Liszt were more in your line,’ I countered.

‘No really,’ said the girl. ‘What are you into?’

‘Into? I’ll tell you what I’m out of: the Talking Heads, the Simple Minds and the Exploding Pumpkins.’

That was bound to raise a laugh. Errol guffawed and slapped his better half’s knee. I noticed, with a start, because I had never seen it before, the word ‘Raylene’ tattooed on his forearm in that mouldy verdigris so beloved of tattoo artists and meat inspectors. Perhaps he’d just had it done. It solved the identity crisis, anyway.

‘How come you know this stuff?’

‘He’s a walking encyclopaedia,’ said Errol. ‘A seedy rom.’ Don’t ask me where they pick these things up.

‘He makes a study of everythink,’ said Wessels proudly.

A few more came back to me: ‘Snoopy Doggy Dog. Prefabricated Sprouts. Animals.’ Another guffaw. They might laugh, but they bought the records that made these jokers rich. The names were so ludicrous, you’d think the public was being challenged not to take them seriously. They might as well all call themselves The Charlatans and be done with it. I had a list of them in my notebook, which I was tempted to consult, but it was more telling to know them by heart. I’d made the list a few months before in the Look and Listen Record Bar, where I had gone to disprove Wessels’s claim that there was a famous ‘jazz’ musician called Felonious Monk. As it turned out, I was right on a mere technicality – his name was Thelonious – but I discovered something even more remarkable: his middle name was Sphere. Merle would have loved it. He was a rotund little figure too, a fully formed semibreve.

In the course of my researches, I wandered into the popular music section, and was soon as engrossed as one could be, given the din issuing from the loudspeakers ranged on all sides. The orchestras had the queerest names, fruit and vegetables, things like the Sweaty Lettuces and the Mango Grooves. By comparison, the ‘Beatles’ seemed rather innocuous, and felicitous too, when one recalled those neat young men in their suits and ties and their coleopterous hairdos. Michael and the Mechanics. Extraordinary. You never knew when such things might come in useful. I’d taken out my notebook to jot them down: absurd nomenclature, popular orchestras. (Absurd, from the Latin surdus, deaf, dull.) Pretty soon a sallow youth with a ponytail and a horsey set of teeth was hovering, looking over my shoulder, pretending that he could read. Probably thought I was acting suspiciously; by then, I was quite groggy from the noise as it was.

‘Do you have any Status Quos?’ I asked. Heard that one on the radio.

‘Of course,’ with a snort. I was surprised he didn’t tap three times with his foot.

‘Well I wouldn’t listen to them if you paid me.’

Floyd and Nomsa came back from the kitchen with bottles of beer and a girl I hadn’t seen before. There are more of them every day, and I confess that they all look rather alike to me. It’s probably the colouring. The new girl struck me only because she seemed much too young to be drinking liquor. She had her fingers curled around the neck of a bottle like a child with a ‘cooldrink’. A small hand glittering with plastic rings that might have come out of a lucky packet. Floyd was wearing a new playsuit with Donald Ducks on it: long shorts down to the knees and a matching shirt, many sizes too big for him. Not hand-me-downs, mind you, from an older brother: they all wore their clothes too big. Errol himself had an immense pair of trunks, in ecru canvas with red piping, of the sort that servants used to favour. The two of them looked like toddlers, very much enlarged. They even had oversized bootees on their feet, excessively padded baby shoes with their tongues lolling, but no laces. Quantities of silver buckles instead, which their clumsy fingers might manipulate more easily than bows. It would cost a fortune to bronze one of them.

These brawny, stubbled men in their rompers looked even stranger next to the girls, who were dressed for the beach, in stretchy pants and tops that were no more than singlets or brassières. Raylene’s slim body was like a teenage boy’s – a boy with a love for physical culture, I might add, for twirling Indian clubs or leaping over hurdles. Even the brown hairs on her arms were too thick and glossy for down. At least Nomsa had some flesh on her. Wessels was prodding that flesh now with a forefinger like a pestle. He had discovered a tattoo of a rose on her shoulder.

‘It’s a Bert Middler,’ Nomsa explained. Whoever he is.

‘No ways. More like a Naas Botha,’ Wessels said. He was chafing away at the tattoo with a rubbery forefinger. ‘Ask Mr T. He knows all about it.’

I’d been reading about rose cultivation in the paper a few weeks before: some rugby-lover had named a bloom after Botha, the fly-half.

I took refuge as usual behind the news.

Then Wessels wanted Nomsa to draw a replica of the rose on his plaster cast and they asked to borrow my pen. I refused. No ways, so to speak. They got one from Moçes instead. He was tiddly. Of no use as a waiter.

I should try to like them, I thought, despite their broken English. In fact, I should try to like them for that, I should find a place for them, not a soft spot, not in my heart, but a well-worn, callused spot, something pachydermatous and scarred, where their shrillness, their abrasiveness, their rough edges might be accommodated without tearing any tissue. I made resolutions to that effect. But they came to nothing, watching the girl Nomsa, a deracinated Xhosa as I recall, crouched over Wessels’s plaster cast, with his stubby toes wriggling like newborn puppies, blindly delighted to be alive. The way she held the pen! It was worse than Wessels himself. You would have thought it was a vegetable peeler.

*

-rama suffix, commercial enterprises: Hyperama … Meatarama … Cupboard-a-rama … Veg-a-rama … Leatherama … Motorama … Computerama …

*

Having once discovered the Café Europa, in the days before Wessels and Errol and everyone else, I made it my haunt. I steeped in its European ambience, in a mild dilution of pleasantly polite strangers, for half a year before I found companionship.

One afternoon, the stranger I would come to know as Spilkin entered the Café and sat at table No. 3, which was identical to mine, a small distance away and also ranged against Alibia. On the wall above that particular table was a sconce, which the muralist had cleverly appropriated as a beacon on one of the city’s rounded hills. The cone of light that the beacon played upon the water – or rather upon the place where the water would have been if the sea in the foreground had spilled out over the wooden dado that hemmed it in like a breakwater – gave that quarter of the city a wartime air, a mood of siege quite at odds with the [George] Ferris wheel and the festive lights on the terraces at the Hotel Grande. The stranger shifted his chair and crossed his legs, so that the searchlight’s beam, I imagined, would drop over his shoulder and illuminate the newspaper that he was about to prop against his knee.

He turned straight away to the page of the Star that carried the cartoons and puzzles, the chess problem, the bridge hand, the crossword. (Never played chess myself.) Then, cocking his head to one side, holding the paper at arm’s length and squinting at it out of the corner of his eye, he began to tear a square out of the page. The action was so awkward and silly, and yet so familiar, that I felt a pang of sympathy for him, as one might for an old friend observed in an unguarded moment. This feeling was so intense that I had to examine him more carefully, smoothing vanishing cream into his wrinkled brow, putting curls back on his crown, trimming the exuberant eyebrows, to see if there was not some more youthful incarnation I would recognize, some immature pentimento. Proofreading him, if you like, for familiar flaws. He looked soft, small and mild, but inquisitive too, almost saucy, like a worldly cherub.

I had been doing the cryptic version of the Star’s two-speed crossword since my days as a junior proofreader in the Department of Posts and Telecommunications. For as long as I could remember, the cryptic clues had been printed above the grid and the straight ones below. Very sensible. All one had to do to obscure the straight clues, and thus remove the temptation to glance at them, was to fold the page in half. And it was a temptation. So long as the simple clues were visible, hovering on the periphery of vision, the eye was drawn to them, seeking the easy way out, despite the mind’s attraction to the difficult problem. There was something wilful in the human eye that made it impossible to discipline. It would look. I had had the same problem in the old days when I reached the last page of a book. I would have to obscure the final paragraph with my hand or a bookmark to prevent my cheating eye from leaping to it at once. To think of coming all that way by the specified route, step by step, word by word, only to throw away whatever satisfaction there was to be gained, by skipping the last few paragraphs and arriving at the goal ahead of schedule. It was like taking a short cut in the last mile of a marathon.

I went further than most. The habit of years, the respect for rules and regulations, the dedication to matter in its proper order, front and back, that kept me reading steadily from A to B to ‘The End’, also made me read past it, through Appendices and Indices and Advertisements, through Bibliographies and Endnotes and Glossaries, until the endpapers loomed in their blank finality. And even then, nothing was more satisfying than to turn the final page of a tome, thinking that the race was run, and find a colophon, a ‘finishing touch’. A meaningful fragment of the whole, put there to be read, but which no one, perhaps, had ever bothered to read, by which I mean to scan deliberately, to pass the eye over in full and conscious awareness of these particular shapes, impressed upon paper, now impressing themselves upon the retina and the cortex, and thus upon the soft surface of time itself.

About a year earlier, in the final months of my gainfully employed life, the editor of the puzzles page, as he was probably known, and almost certainly a new appointment, some wallah kicked upstairs at the behest of the nabobs of the tricameral parliament, had taken it upon himself to change the tried-and-tested format of the crossword. The two sets of clues, cryptic and straight, now appeared one below the other alongside the grid (with the straight ones on top!). The reasons for the change were never explained – they were always tinkering with the newspaper these days, moving things around, making them bigger or smaller or doing away with them altogether, in the scramble for what they called ‘market share’ – but the upshot was that one could no longer fold the paper to obscure the straight clues without folding the grid itself in half. Just one fleeting glance at the straight clues could take the difficult pleasure out of half a dozen cryptic ones. Even as one began to puzzle pleasantly over ‘Races Thomas ran badly’, the disobedient eye would leap with infuriating precision to ‘Long-distance running races’ in the straight column. It was dispiriting. The only solution was to remove the straight clues from eyeshot entirely by tearing them out, resisting all the while the desire to look at them: I had resorted to exactly the cock-eyed procedure the stranger was now performing, and my heart went out to him, alone as he was, and with no one to turn to.

I had kept to myself at the Café Europa in the beginning, but in time I did establish a nodding acquaintance with Mevrouw Bonsma, our pianist, and Mrs Mavrokordatos, our proprietor. To Mevrouw Bonsma I occasionally sent politely worded notes, requesting an old favourite. She knew everything. She was an immense reservoir of melodies, endlessly seeping, flowing one into the other, always brimming. It was a fullness I found a little disconcerting. I tried to trip her up a few times by asking for chestnuts such as ‘The Isle of Capri’ or ‘Arrivederci Roma’, but she played them all without missing a beat. I had hopes of making her open her leather portfolio, which she stowed in the cross-stitched seat of her stool every day, and which I assumed contained sheet music, although I had never seen her consult it. Finally, in a spirit of curiosity, for I am not in the habit of playing practical jokes, I made something up. Then Mevrouw approached my table and asked me to hum the beastly thing. I had to refuse. I had never hummed in my life, I told her, and certainly not for a pianist, and I saw no reason to start now.

My acquaintance with Mrs Mavrokordatos, circumscribed by the more dependable bounds of reciprocation between proprietor and customer (custom, like costume, from the ME and OF custume, from the Latin consuetudo), was both more formal and more at ease. It was through the kind offices of Mrs Mavrokordatos that I found a neater, less bothersome solution to my dilemma with the crossword than the wretched ripping I had been reduced to. When I arrived at the Café in the afternoon, I would hand her the newspaper and she would snip out the straight clues with a pair of scissors, giving me the little patch of newsprint, considerately folded clue-side-in, to store in my wallet. This arrangement had a couple of advantages, in addition to the embarrassment it spared me. If there was some important information on the reverse side of the page, some damaged article I would only discover later that evening or the next morning when I was trawling for typographical errors, I could easily restore the excision, snug as a jigsaw piece. This very thing happened on more than one occasion. And in the unlikely event of my not being able to complete the puzzle, I could consult the straight clues. In my opinion, it was better to finish the puzzle with the aid of the simple clues than not to finish it at all. This proved to be one of the matters on which Spilkin and I held diametrically opposed views. (Dress sense was another. Not to mention … no, let me not mention it.) It wasn’t that we differed on the status of the straight clues themselves: in his book, as in mine, the straight clues were for simple minds. But we did not attach the same importance to completion, to finalization. He was quite happy (although it very seldom came to this) to leave a puzzle unfinished; whereas I could not get to sleep at night if a clue eluded me.

The stranger Spilkin, a person whose name I did not even know, finished tearing, crumpled the scrap into a ball and tossed it into the ashtray, where it immediately began to unfold, blossoming like a desert bloom in a time-phase film. He smoothed the page flat, propped it on his knee in the beam of the searchlight and took a pen from his pocket. It was a beautiful pen, a fountain pen with a marbled barrel, a Waterman I would have said (and I would have been right). The sort of pen advertising copywriters liked to call a ‘writing instrument’. This pen, reclining elegantly on the soft cushion of his forefinger, with its nib as sleek as a ballet slipper, made me proof him more thoroughly, from the open-neck shirt down to the white slip-ons. His clothes were pastel and sporty, casual but expensive; they would have been perfectly at home on the greens, under a blue sky, but looked flashy in this dim brown interior.

He began to fill out the clues with remarkable facility.

How long would it take him? Half an hour was considered ‘good’. I consulted my records: that day’s puzzle had taken me twenty-three minutes to solve. Now that my notebook lay open on the table, on the inlaid chequerboard I’d always fondly wished might be transformed one day into a crossword grid, I suddenly resolved to take up the matter of the inconvenient new format of the clues with the editor of the Star. I had been putting it off for months, but watching Spilkin’s contortions had made me aware that the problem was not just my own. A whole community of people were being inconvenienced by some lowly editorial whim. I took up the cudgels on their behalf.

The letter was a good one.

18 July 1987

Dear Sir,

Until recently, the cryptic and the straight clues to your two-speed crossword puzzle appeared above and below the grid respectively, and appropriately so. This enabled the proponents of the higher method to obscure the evidence of the lower by the simple expedient of folding the page in half.

Since the two sets of clues now appear alongside the grid, this procedure is no longer possible. Your puzzles editor can verify this in an instant.

Some of your readers may be accustomed to a diet of chalk and cheese, but my constitution will not bear it. This new format will improve neither your circulation nor mine. I urge you to revert to the time-honoured one.

Yours faithfully, etcetera

The letters editor thought my letter had merit too, for he published it in this shortened version. One never takes excision lightly, but at least the blade was true. (The present incumbent, by contrast, uses a rusty hacksaw or the blunderbuss of the delete button.) The casualties? A mot on origami that I had been in two minds about all along – ‘your puzzles editor, unless he be an expert in origami, the Japanese art of folding paper into decorative shapes and figures’; and a postscript suggesting that the type used for the clues be increased from 10 point to 12. ‘The eyesight of many of our citizens, especially the senior ones,’ I wrote, ‘is more likely to be SO-SO than 20-20, I should imagine.’ Dispatched to File 13, now restored to their rightful place.

So engrossed was I in the composition of this letter that I forgot to stop the clock, and when I glanced his way again, the man at No. 3 had turned to the business pages and was doodling on the lists of share prices. Then Mrs Mavrokordatos came in and greeted him warmly – Ronald, I thought she called him – welcoming him back and saying she had missed him, and he said he was delighted to be back, he had missed her too. His voice was small and mild too, if a little nasal, and his grammar seemed presentable. I gathered from what passed between them that he was a former customer, recently retired like myself, that he had been away for some time on the south coast of Natal (KwaZulu-Natal, as he called it, quite properly) staying with a son, but that the arrangement had not ‘panned out’.

‘I’m not cut out for living in a granny flat,’ he said, and they both laughed. ‘But tell me, who’s that?’

For a moment I thought he was referring to me – I had just risen to leave – but he meant Mevrouw Bonsma. She was playing ‘Never on Sunday’, which served me rather well as an exit march.

When I returned to the Café a few days later, and then at regular intervals thereafter, I found him sitting at the same table, under the light, ‘ensconced’ as I thought of it. A creature of habit. Good for him. (How wrong one can be about people.) Habit maketh the manners and all the rest that maketh the man. Predictable behaviour is what makes people tolerable, and obviates a risky reliance on goodwill and other misnomers. Every day he turned to the crossword, painstakingly removed the straight clues, and went on with the puzzle. So I had the opportunity to measure his skill against my own after all. I discovered that he was a very good crossword solver indeed. Almost superhuman. He usually finished the puzzle in under fifteen minutes! At least, I assumed that he finished it, although I could not tell at that distance.

Proofreaders (one may retire from the post but not the profession) generally have suspicious minds and long memories. The Reader’s Digest, to which I subscribed in the days when my word power still needed improving, once published an anecdote (if you’ll pardon the contradiction in terms, etymologically speaking) in the ‘Life’s Like That’ feature, about a commuter, a mediocre crossword puzzler, who watched enviously every evening for many months as a fellow-traveller completed the cryptic puzzle in ten minutes flat. Until one day the master left his paper behind him in the train compartment when he disembarked, and the other, taking it up to marvel, discovered that the grid was filled with nonsense that bore no relation to the clues. Looking at the slim gold strap of Spilkin’s watch and the chubby fingers of his hands (surgeons and cardsharps have long thin fingers only in films), I became convinced that he was up to the same trick. One afternoon, when he left the paper unattended for a moment to visit the Gentlemen’s room, I actually rose and approached his table, meaning to snatch a glance at the puzzle, but he reappeared in a trice and nearly caught me red-handed. I avoided an embarrassing situation only by stooping to tie a shoelace. It was time to put a stop to this ridiculous behaviour.

It so happened that my letter on the new crossword format had been published that day and I now saw that it would provide the perfect excuse for making his acquaintance – and a rather impressive introduction, too.

Once he had returned to his puzzle, I opened my newspaper to the letters page and prepared to accost him. But my opening gambit – ‘Your troubles are over, Mr …?’ – died on my lips. My impending approach had transmitted itself to him as a receptivity to communication, for as I opened my mouth he cocked his head, rested the end of the fountain pen against his greying temple, and asked:

‘Clam for a solitary sailor?’

For a moment I was utterly nonplussed. The idiom, the rakish air, the slightly nautical plimsolls he was sporting that day, the voice which was rummier than the one he used with Eveready and Mrs Mavrokordatos, all of this took me aback. Was he making an indecent proposal? It was unthinkable. While I blanched, he snapped his fingers – an accomplishment I have never been able to master, even with the application of lubricating spittle to the relevant forefinger and opposable thumb – and exclaimed:

‘Abalone!’

Click. I clattered through my newspaper and scanned the clues. There it was: fifteen down.

‘Three across: Mabel out for a stroll? Five-letter word,’ I countered. And before he had time to reply, supplied the answer myself: ‘Amble.’

And so, swapping clues and offering tips, we began to hold a conversation.

He said he was a Spilkin. I knew the name: a dozen or so in the Johannesburg directory, with concentrations in Melrose and Cyrildene. Spilkin. It suited him, this combination of soft and sharp, lip and bodkin, wet flesh and dry glass. He said he was a retired optician.

‘By a stroke of luck,’ I said, ‘you have met the only person in the Café Europa who knows the difference between an optician and an optometrist.’

‘And an ophthalmologist?’

Easy as pie, I said. I could even spell it. Apophthegm and phthisical too, which were in the same orthographical league. I was a retired proofreader, I said, by way of explanation, and my name was Tearle. (Just the surname, to match his ‘Spilkin’. To tell the truth, deep down where the roots of language coil about the bones, I have never really felt like an Aubrey. Meaning a ruler of elves. Never had the slightest ambition in that direction. As for Aub, the inevitable diminutive – it’s nearly as bad as Sphere.)

‘How do you spell it?’ he asked.

Well really. ‘O-P-H-’

‘I mean Tearle.’

‘Oh. With two e’s.’

‘Spilkin has two i’s. Which was a distinct advantage in my chosen profession. I trust that having two e’s didn’t harm yours?’

‘Not at all.’

The details of that first conversation escape me now (this reconstructed sample is more or less representative), but we spoke, naturally enough, about optometry and proofreading, and the link between them: the eye. We discovered that we had much in common. I described, in lyrical fashion, the passage of the eye along a line of print; and he explained, with technical precision, the neurological fireworks and muscular gymnastics that made that movement possible. He admired my spectacles – horn-rims thirty years old and not to be bought for love or money – and gave a remarkably accurate account of my astigmatism and my lazy left by glancing through the lenses. This introduced a note of friendly competition. I recited seven verses of lemmata from the M section of the Concise Oxford Dictionary (my beloved fourth edition of 1951, reprinted with revised Addenda in 1956, boon companion of my heyday, well fingered and thumbed): Mauser ~ mazard ~ mazarine ~ measles … measly ~ medal ~ medallion ~ medium … medlar ~ melancholy ~ mélange ~ memento … memoir ~ menses ~ Menshevik ~ mercury … mercy ~ mesdames ~ meseems ~ metal … metallic ~ meteoric ~ meteorite ~ metropolitan … -metry ~ microscope ~ microscopic ~ mighty … He chimed in with the standard eye chart (the one devised by Professor Snellen) and an undergraduate mnemonic for recalling it: Eggheads from Paris, the omelet zone, and so on. If only I’d had that by heart when I went before the Medical Board! I wrote it down in my notebook. Then we produced a facsimile chart on the back of an advertising flyer from the newspaper and made several suggestions for improving it. I felt, for instance, that an ‘s’ might be more useful on line 2 than an ‘o’, so that the mnemonic might read ‘Elephants find Pretoria the superior zoo’. We became quite light-hearted and boisterous. He secured the chart to a screw on the sconce to test my eyes and I passed with flying colours, having memorized the mnemonic while I transcribed it. ‘Thanks to you,’ I said, ‘I will never fail an eye test again.’

‘You could always ask them to turn it upside down.’

And that reminded me of the crossword. I showed him my letter and he was delighted with it.

A few days later, the Star published a brace of readers’ letters supporting my views about the new format, from J. Serebro of Wendywood and ‘Also Miffed’ of Germiston. The puzzles editor surrendered, the old format was restored. Tearle and Tradition had prevailed.

Spilkin had Mevrouw Bonsma play the theme from The Longest Day in my honour.

*

The ‘spilkin’: a crucial spillikin, in a game of that name, the retrieval of which renders a whole nest of others more immediately accessible.

By analogy: the key word in a crossword puzzle, whose vowels and consonants provide the newels and rails for whole flights of solutions.

And hence: a crucial aspect of any problem.

*

Passing down Kotze Street on my way to the Café, I found Dumbo at the end of his tether again, still minus an ear. I’d have thought Management would be anxious to restore their corpulent corporate image to its proper state. Surely it would be bad for business having this elephantine amputee loitering on the doorstep? I almost went in to put my case, but that Rosa was on duty, moustachioed and prickly, and no doubt itching to cross my palm with another bottle of plonk.

Hypermeat had a special on half a lambkin. Heads or tails? Baa or Baa? A black sheep of the two-legged variety pressed a handbill on me: Hillbrow Hyperpawn was buying old coins, jewellery, watches. Any old iron? Endless irony. The shop was in Kapteijn Street, with piles of cheap loot in its dusty window. I had made a few purchases there myself, years back, when it was still Bernstein’s Second Time Lucky. Slightly shop-soiled goods and antiques, direct from the factory to the public.

Another new butchery: Hack’s Meat Superette. Something new every week. Men’s outfitters folding up and chicken grillers hatching. Why this obsession with poultry? Was it a tribal thing? A cook in a tissue-paper toque and a grease-proof inquisitor’s gown flicked a cigarette butt into my path, and rows of skewered carcases, cranked round by a machine behind fat-spattered glass, applauded with flippery wings. And what were these? Charred bits and pieces, cartilaginous lumps, new species of offal. There were new varieties of dirt on the pavements too. Sticky black scabs on the cement flags, blotches, bumps, nodules that cleaved to the soles of my brogues. More of them all the time, like some skin disease. What is this stuff? Where on earth is it coming from? You never saw it falling from the sky or spilt by a human hand. It seemed to be striking through from beneath, like some subcutaneous festering. A less fastidious man than myself, a man more accustomed to taking specimens, an indigent geologist, say, a botanist, a pathologist, might have made a study of it to determine its origins. Animal or vegetable? Outside the Pink Cadillac, which only opened its doors after dark, a heap of children, messily corked, theatrically ragged, like urchin extras from a production of Oliver, slept in black and white. A photograph from the archive of atrocities: a heap of corpses, with their big feet jutting out of blackened clothing, filthy as chimney sweeps. Perhaps they were pavement sweeps, responsible for spreading the dirt under the pretext of mopping it up.

Two portraits of Steffi Graf, the ladies’ tennis champion, ringed round by garlands of last year’s Weinacht tinsel (or was it this year’s tinsel, ahead of its time?), presided over the Wurstbude. In the first, she was preparing to serve. She was improbably, impeccably muscled, undoubtedly well-fed, a living tribute to scientific nutrition. The fake coals in the grilling machine cast a healthy pink glow over her wintergreened calves. In the second picture, she was holding up a trophy, a silver platter ideal for a sucking-pig, on the centre court at Wimbledon.

Herr Toppelmann, Kurt, the proprietor, put my Bratwurst and two rolls on a plate, tonged out a goose-pimpled dill pickle, dabbed mustard and patted butter. Everyone else got a cardboard tray, but I had argued for the plate on medical grounds – my dysfunctional duodenum (entirely spurious, I might add) – and he’d conceded. I also got my sausage whole, rather than lopped into segments by the ingenious stainless-steel, counter-top guillotine, as the advertising to the trade might have put it. Most of the regulars went for the Currywurst, which meant that their sausage segments were smothered in tomato sauce and dusted with curry powder. They speared up the segments with two toothpicks, dispensed from a little drum like a schoolroom pencil sharpener. It could be done with one toothpick, to tell the truth, but those in the know found that two afforded a certain Germanic stability. I would have none of it. I told Herr Toppelmann I wanted a Bratwurst, whole, on a plate, and a knife and fork to eat it with, I don’t need my food cut up for me like a child. I had to drag in the duodenum again, and the high blood pressure, when in truth I have the constitution of a man half my age, because there were principles involved, of linguistics and cuisine. Currywurst? It was ersatz, a jerry-built portmanteau if ever I heard one. I had denounced it the very first time I came in here, this having been the express purpose of my visit, but he refused to remove it from the menu. I vowed never to eat one. For the same principled reason, I avoided the pickle-barrel tables on the pavement outside: they were tacky, in the senses popular on both sides of the Atlantic, they smacked of fast food, grubby little hands that might tug at one’s flannels and spoil one’s appetite. I stood at the counter instead, where I could listen to Herr Toppelmann conversing in German with regulars of that persuasion, or, when the place was empty, hold a brief conversation with him myself in English and watch the sausages squirming.

This afternoon the place was empty, so I told him the news: the Café Europa was closing down. He took it very well.

‘Also I,’ he said in his charming English, ‘am closing down.’

‘No.’

‘Ja. I go home to Germany.’

Typical. But I sympathized, too. ‘I can’t say I blame you. Who would want to live under a black government?’

‘No, no, that is most unfair, you do not understand. I go home because my father in Frankfurt is sick. In the kidney.’

‘Ah. A Frankfurter. I might have guessed.’

‘I am most happy to be governed by the black man. Black persons and I are coming along strongly together.’

Indeed. The scarlet women of the Quirinale Hotel. Ever willing to put a crease in the Senf, if not quite to cut it. I was in here, eating a sausage, when the Berlin Wall came down. What was it Herr Toppelmann had said then? Communism is kaput in Germany, but here is just starting, it will come very bad. (His English had improved over the years.) The forcemeat philosopher. A rush of irritation, as quick and queasying as a spurt of saliva in the mouth, as he jabbed my Bratwurst with a fork and it spewed grease onto the grille. Bloody Germans. From Germany out und so weiter. Hungarians, Italians, Scots. Immigrants. Foul-weather friends. Slobodan would be hurrying back to where he came from too, no doubt, Wessels would search for him in vain … although he was so much at home here, living off the fat of the land. I felt fat too, schmaltzy and bloated. Stuffed with change, like a piggy bank or a parking meter. The mustard got into my cold sore and burned. I left half the Bratwurst on the plate and crossed the street. The wurst is still to come, I thought, in my Toppelmann twang. Nein, nein, the wurst is behind us. The opposite pavement was crowded with curio-sellers and their wares, wooden animals and idols shamelessly displaying their private parts. I was tempted to march through these hordes like some maddened Gulliver, trampling them underfoot. I escalated, like tensions in the Middle East, like the incidence of armed robbery on the Reef, and issued into the Café where, for the first time in many a long month, my eye was caught by the silver trophy gathering dust among the bottles. I’d been meaning to take it down and give it a good going over with Brasso. The brave little figure, tiptoe on the summit, clad in nothing but a wisp of lacy tarnishing, brought a lump to my throat. The proofreader’s cup, the floating trophy for ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’.

‘How ya doin’?’ said Tone.

‘How am I doing? If I was the frivolous sort, my managerial friend, I should affix a sign asking that question to the seat of my pants. And a telephone number.’ Then, resorting to sign language, tapping my larynx with the edge of my hand, ‘I’m up to here.’ Perhaps it wasn’t a lump after all, but a bolus of change, half-digested, sour, swimming in bile, bumping against my epiglottis. My little tongue.

‘I know what you mean,’ said Tone. ‘I’m also gatvol. But you’ve got to take the punch. Have a drink, man, it’ll make you feel better.’

Everything will stay the same. Everything will change. A football match was on one screen, and Joseph Slovo, the communist kingpin, on the other. Day or night, rain or shine, in some corner of a foreign field, someone was playing football. While in Kempton Park, at the World Trade Centre, they were levelling the playing fields and shifting the goalposts. As if the negoti-haters, as you-know-who used to call them, were nothing but glorified groundsmen.

My mouth was still burning, but my throat was dry. Perhaps I needed a drop of the damp after all. Moçes was lurking behind a potted palm, its fronds stirring gently in a breeze off the Bay of Alibia, dallying with some young woman, didn’t look like kitchen staff, too dolled up, lips as red as paint. Helen of Troyeville, or some Carmen from the Quirinale, the sort Herr Toppelmann came along with. Moçes was so enamoured of her, I practically had to stand on my chair to attract his attention. I started the lecture on service, abridged, but I really didn’t have the energy, and he looked so down in the mouth, I felt it necessary to be conciliatory.

‘Who’s the girl?’

‘She’s my nephew.’

‘Ha! You mean she’s your niece.’ Needs the talk on customer relations.

‘No, sir. She’s my nephew.’

‘Is she your brother’s daughter? Yes? Then she’s your niece.’

Looks baffled. Then deliberately: ‘She’s my nephew.’

For crying in a bucket. Whiskey, pronto. The nephew stilted out in her high heels.

Errol, on his way to the Gentlemen’s room in a hurry: ‘Hoezit bra. Checking out the chocolates?’

I wouldn’t eat what Tone calls a pastry if he gave them away. As for ‘bra’, I had voiced my objection to the term repeatedly, which only made them use it more.

I took out my files, but before I could set to work, Wessels wobbled in and started waving Mr Fatso/Mnr Vetsak under my nose. ‘I’ve nearly got everyone,’ he smirked, as if the party were no more than a confidence trick, and ran a smoke-stained forefinger down a row of ticks. ‘Even Merlé, see? Still dossing out in Illovo with her daughter, who might be able to bring her. No promises at this stage. Mevrou Bonsma’s still at the Dorchester, but it’s becoming a bit rough. She’s got a school now. Only ones I can’t find is Everistus, who’s gone off to his rondavel in the hills for a week or so. Someone died. But I left a message. You know he’s grafting at Bradlows. And Spilkin and Pardner, natch, who’s back in Joeys but lying low.’

Lying low? Like Apaches. Apache here, Apache there (punchlines, Wessels). Something to do with beards.

‘What you got there? Looks familiar.’

I closed the file on his finger. He knew exactly what it was, but he was the last person I felt like discussing it with. It was a selection from the fardel of notes and jottings and clippings and scribbled-upon typescripts that represented the raw material of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’. This unfinished business had chafed at my peace of mind for too long. I had made a bargain with myself: if I finished ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ before the end of the month, I would take it with me to the Goodbye Bash and present it to the sceptics – I might even make photostatic copies, one for each to bear away as a souvenir. If not, I would stay home, and a plague on all their townhouses!

*

13 December 1993

Dear Sir,

An able-bodied man might wear a T-shirt, though why he would choose to, when proper shirts with buttons and collars are freely available, is a mystery to me.

But what manner of monster would fit into a ‘t-shirt’ of the style advertised in your newspaper on 11 December (Hyperama Festive Season Bonanza)? A one-armed bandit, I suppose, some twisted wreck of a human being, the sort who would live in an a-frame house made entirely of i-beams …

Would the sub-editors care to explain?

Yours faithfully, etcetera

*

In the first weeks of my acquaintance with Spilkin, I always arrived at the Café Europa to find him already there, seated at one of the little tables against the wall. And I always sat down at the other, with the big round one in between, as if each encounter was the first between people who had never met before. We seemed to be participating in the primary activity that the café as a social institution made possible: being on one’s own in the company of congenial strangers. Another stranger, looking on, might have thought that our conversation had a cultured quality about it as well, carried on at intervals from a seemly distance while we each went about our own business, revolving around niceties of expression and quibbles of logic, anagrammatical teasers, aqueous humours, questions of craft, specifications of lenses and lemmata, headwords, grades of graphite, presbyopia and strabismus, occasionally politics – this was before change beset us and made the subject so tiresome. I say, Tearle, you don’t happen to have a pen-wiper handy? Why not use a serviette, Spilkin? Capital idea. Spilkin this and Tearle that. It all helped to cultivate a sort of formal bonhomie between us, the polite and companionable ease that someone who had never been in an officers’ mess might expect to enjoy there.

But happening to arrive one day at the same time, we fell into conversation on the escalator, and happy as I was with our arrangement, it seemed absurd to part and sit at separate tables. We should sit at the round table, obviously, we should meet one another halfway; but we both hesitated, with our hands on the backs of our chairs.

‘Alfresco, perhaps?’ Spilkin said, nodding towards the balcony.

‘“Fresco” is a relative term, Spilkin.’ He brought out a slightly haughty tone in me, which I was rather pleased about. ‘Sit out there and you’ll be breathing exhaust fumes in the rush hour, which is about to start. Every twenty minutes or so, the upper deck of the Braamfontein bus will slide into view and the passengers will gaze at you through the railings as if you’re a beast in a cage. Say a chimpanzee from Sierra Leone in the Jardin des Plantes.’ This flourish was prompted by the little Eiffels (I have never been abroad).

I could see he was impressed, but he continued to gaze around the room as if a better option might suggest itself. I had other bolts in my quiver – the wind will scatter my papers to the four corners of the block, the sun will blister my pate, the occupants of the flats above will drop the ash of their cigarettes upon me – but I aimed at a more subtle target in the gloomier depths of the room: ‘Over there?’

He voiced the obvious objection: ‘Too close to the W[ater] C[loset].’

The spot where we already found ourselves now became defined as a reasonable compromise between two unsuitable extremes, and by common consent, we sat down at the round table (it was No. 2) facing one another, with Alibia to my right and his left. A sudden chill shook me, as if a seaward breeze had lifted a handful of pins and needles off the white beach in front of the casino and flung them in my face. He opened the Tonight! section to the crossword and folded it in half with a casual flick, which I had to interpret as a gesture of gratitude. I opened my briefcase – only a fool or a drug dealer would carry a briefcase through the streets of Hillbrow today, but it was a common enough occurrence then – and unpacked my equipment, laying each piece in its position, which was as rigidly preordained as a place-setting: notebook, pencil (Faber-Castell 2B), sharpener, eraser, dictionary (Concise Oxford, fourth edition, opere citato, under the worthy editorship of Henry and Frank Fowler, faithfully revised by a certain McIntosh, proofreaders inexplicably unacknowledged, as usual), lever-arch research file, punch, scissors, Sellotape, index cards.

I opened the file and the notebook. I sharpened the pencil into the ashtray and returned it to its spot.

It has always been my practice before setting to work, to limber up with a few minutes of basic lexicology, stretching the verbal tendons, if you like, to guard against injury, and so I opened the dictionary at my marker. Since my retirement I had been working my way steadily through the Concise, a leisurely passage, no more than a column a day, lingering over words. Let’s see. Chew, Chianti, chiaroscuro. Chiasmus – I cannot dig, to beg I am ashamed. Chibol. Chibouk. Chibouque may have been better. Chicanery: from the Persian for ‘polo-stick’. As far as chime. Which comes from the same root as ‘cymbal’. Might make a fine graaff (a lexical backflip). When I was nicely warmed up, it was time for a bit of lexical fartlek (to use that unfortunate term, from the Swiss fart, speed, and lek, play): I opened the dictionary at random and put my finger down on Candlemas: feast of purification. I went to feast, quickly, and then rambled through the entry at my leisure. A large or sumptuous meal. Partake of a feast, eat or drink sumptuously. From the Latin festus, joyous. Obviously the same root as festival … I sprinted for that entry, via fertile ~ feudal ~ fictile … too far … back to festival. Here we are, festival, from the med. Latin festivalis, as festive. Festive … from festum, as feast. Bingo. Back to fictile. Made of earth or clay by a potter; of pottery. From the Latin fictilis, f. fingere, fict – fashion. Quick dash to fashion (farthingale ~ fasces ~ no sign of fartlek) and stroll through factio, f. facere, fact – do, make. Must remember to check ‘finger’. But first sprint to fiction. Yes, of course, as fictile. An invented idea or statement, an imaginary thing. A conventionally accepted falsehood. Back to facile: easily achieved but of little value. Of speech, writing etc., fluent, ready, glib. From the Latin facilis, f. facere – do. Take a breather. I turned to my notebook.

‘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.

Once I said to her: ‘You should charge him rent for that chair.’

And he piped up: ‘She should pay me for sitting here. Thanks to me, she can say in all honesty that this place is never empty.’ There were always people coming and going, men mainly, clustering around tables where card games were in progress, drifting off into corners for quieter conversations, talking over their shoulders to ‘contacts’ at the next table, hailing newcomers by sending up smoke signals from their cigars. The recent arrivals from abroad spoke more loudly than the others, and offered cigarettes from garishly coloured packets, which were inhaled like the fair weather of home. Those who were leaving looked distant and bored, and wore too much gold jewellery. They came and they went. But Spilkin was a fixture.

‘There are limits – or there should be,’ I said. ‘No offence, Mrs Mavrokordatos, you know how fond I am of this establishment, but I’m beginning to think that Spilkin here is an extremist, beneath his moderate exterior.’

I resisted the urge to follow his example, to seek out company earlier in the day, to pop in at all hours. I have never been the sort of person who pops in anywhere. I could no more pop in than I could knock about or toddle along. It’s not my way. I disciplined myself to leave my flat no earlier than three in the afternoon and to return at a decent hour. Routine is the foundation of happiness. A proofreader needs a clear head and a sharp eye. All my life it had been lights out at ten on the dot, and I saw no reason to make rash changes now. My routine gave me more than enough time for doing the crossword, reading the newspaper, writing the odd letter to the editor, conversing with my friend, and of course working on my System of Records, the meaty main course for which all these other activities were mere appetizers. In this way, several satisfying months went by.

Spilkin was a ladies’ man. Did I mind, he enquired one day, if Mevrouw Bonsma joined us, just this once?

‘Mevrouw’ because it did not seem right to call her ‘Bonsma’, in accordance with our usual practice – the house style, as I thought of it – and because Spilkin had got it into his head that she was Dutch. He said he could not look at her without being reminded of poffertjes (which turned out to be sugar-coated fritters, much eaten in the Low Countries). For my part, I found that she put me in mind of windswept dykes and wheels of cheese. But I went along with his suggestion. I am not easily swayed, but I was perhaps a little too much under his influence at the time.

‘Tell us about Rotterdam,’ said Spilkin, ‘and your triumphs as a soloist with the Philharmonic.’

Mevrouw Bonsma disengaged her long teeth with a click and patted his arm with a hand as red and square as a stevedore’s (it is with pianists as it is with surgeons and cardsharps). ‘You know very well, Spilkijn,’ – he had introduced himself thus and she seemed to think it was a diminutive – ‘that I was born and bred in Rustenburg.’ Despite all her efforts to modulate it and make it lilt, her voice hissed and crackled like an old gramophone record.

‘A lady of your accomplishments? Impossible.’

‘I am just a farm girl at heart. Sincerely, I have never even been in an aeroplane.’

‘Mevrouw!’ Pursing his lips, giving the exotic diphthong the shape of a grape, then swallowing it whole like a tickled schoolboy. If he made ‘Mevrouw Bonsma’ sound as sweet and juicy as a fruit, she made ‘Spilkin’ into an acute little instrument for winkling the stubborn flesh from its shell. Bodkin, kilderkin, cannikin, sooterkin. Was it my imagination or was there a trace of a Dutch accent like a dusting of cinnamon on her flat vowels? Perhaps she was putting it on, under suggestion.

The banter continued while she powdered her face. Pancake, she explained, for the lights. Light, actually: a sixty-watt globe in a bluebell shade, dipping its head over the keyboard. ‘Once an artiste, always an artiste. But I have no illusions, life has stripped me of them, one by one. People used to sit up and take notice when I played. Now I am ‘‘background music’’, that’s all.’ The skin of her neck had the texture of crêpe. She enamelled her lips and went bravely back to work.

‘So, what do you think?’

I had had the opportunity to examine Mevrouw Bonsma closely over the months, but I had not drawn many conclusions from the exercise. She was highly strung, but that was fitting. And she thought too much about what other people thought of her. Taking pride in one’s appearance is nothing less than good manners, but she was overly concerned with trifles. An occupational hazard, perhaps. While one of her raw-boned hands bickered away at the keys, the other was always wandering to the nape of her neck, fumbling for a label, checking whether her jersey was on the right way round. I saw that she did not have the feet of a pianist either. Her big plates of meat, tilted on the wineglass heels of slippers made of silver chain-mail, pumped the pedals, while her hands rolled over the keys, setting up a pale vibrato in the flesh of her upper arms. She looked like a navvy driving some shiny piece of earth-moving equipment. Five-letter word: spade. Or: piano. Incongruously, the music itself was a soft, insistent outpouring, like drizzle on the roof, or the tinkling of a wind-chime, to which one grows so accustomed, one only hears it when it falls silent. ‘A charming woman.’

‘You like her?’

‘Well enough.’ I did too, although we were not friends as such. There was something heroic in her efforts to be light, to keep her bulk afloat on such a thin stream of sound. Her fingertips touched the keys with exquisite delicacy, defying gravity, skipping like a flurry of raindrops across the surface of a pond, producing ever more intricate Venn diagrams of interlocking ripples.

Spilkin and I sat up straighter than usual, while she paddled through ‘Swanee River’.

‘Her name,’ Spilkin whispered, ‘is Suzanna, but I promised not to tell. She enjoys being Mevrouwed. Bit of a snob, never mind the country-girl stuff.’

Total snob, in reverse, to a degree (6). National serviceman in a boa (6). New edition of Bosman (6).

When she rolled without missing a beat into ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’, we gave her a round of applause, which found a few polite echoes at the other tables – or it may have been draughtsmen clacking over their foes. She showed us her grateful yellowed ivories.

‘Just this once’ was no more than a manner of speaking. Mevrouw Bonsma acquired a permanent place at our table. She would join us between shifts at the piano, to moisten her throat with the mug of tea or rock shandy to which her contract entitled her. She laughed voraciously at Spilkin’s jokes, as if she were crushing rusks between her molars, and left fading echoes of her laughing mouth on the rim of her teacup and the ends of her satin-tipped cigarettes.

Once had been a tolerable novelty; but being in her company constantly aggravated me. The sheer bulk of her was an imposition. When she sat down at the table, I felt myself rise momentarily in my own chair, as if the room had subsided in her vicinity. She loomed over us like a dam wall, which had seemed sturdy enough when observed from a safe distance, but appeared to be crumbling away now that we squatted, like a pair of truant schoolboys, in the damp shade at its foot. I felt as if I was on the shores of Mevrouw Bonsma. The phrase rang in my head, trying to fit itself to the tune of ‘Loch Lomond’ or ‘On Top of Old Smokey’, without success. Always, it was Rotterdam I saw. Such a watery fecundity! What if she burst? I would be washed away like a stick of balsa on a flood of evergreens. Even when she went back to the piano, the threat remained. She had elbowed her way out of the background to which she belonged, and could no longer be ignored. When she played, we had to listen. Her personal favourites bubbled along perkily, flats tumbling like little propellers, sharps concealed like lures in soft lumps of melody. The special requests, hauled up from the abysmal deeps, could be positively sodden. More than once I felt as if I was drowning.

It was impossible to discuss my fears with Spilkin. I could not be sure what he thought of Mevrouw Bonsma. He seemed to like her a great deal. But then he also treated her as if she were a fool. He thought nothing of speaking about her in the third person, while she sat nodding pleasantly, fingering the ugly beauty spot stuck like a pastille of salted licorice to the corner of her mouth.

As an act of self-preservation, to save myself from being swept away, I began to tell her about my System of Records. ‘Over my head,’ she protested, ‘Greek to me. I’m no good with words.’ But she was impressed with me, I could tell, she thought I was frightfully clever, and so I kept pressing my clippings on her and reading her extracts from the notebooks. At other times, it was lexical gymnastics, flashy routines full of pikes and rolls and tearles with a twist, moves I could execute in my sleep. ‘Medley, Mevrouw,’ I would say. ‘Heterogeneous mixture. See meddle. Meddle, busy oneself unduly. And mêlée. Same root in “mix” – from the Latin misceo.’ Then again: ‘Do you see, Mevrouw,’ I would say. ‘Wormwood. From the OE wormod, wermod, after worm, wood: cf vermouth. And vermouth. From the G. Wermut, wormwood. That’s what we call a backflip. Let me show you how it works here in the dictionary.’ And sometimes, when both of us were exhausted, I would fall back on frenzied bouts of lexical fartlek. ‘Here we are: absinth. A shrubby plant, Artemisia absinthium, or its essence. Also called “wormwood”. Hence a liqueur flavoured with wormwood. Are you still with me? Artemisia. Any of various plants, including sagebrush and wormwood, f. ME, f. L., f. G. plant sacred to Artemis. Artemis. G. Myth. The virgin goddess of the hunt and the moon. Sagebrush perhaps? f. L. salvia, the healing plant, from salvus, healthy, safe. Salvation!’ And so on. She would bite her bottom lip with her ragged incisors and gaze at me anxiously. I had the distinct impression that she admired me, an impression I had not gained from a member of the fairer sex (to stretch a point) for quite some time, and it flattered my vanity, I suppose, or what few shreds of it remained. I couldn’t help myself: I began to take pleasure in making her clap one of her big red hands to her mouth in astonishment and delight.

My behaviour was uncharacteristic; obviously, it lacked the decorum people associate with me. And it appeared to infect Spilkin too. Lapsing out of character, just as I had done, he began to tell jokes. Have you heard the one about? he was always asking. Mevrouw Bonsma, who did not have a funny bone in her body, declared that he was the wittiest man alive. Under this onslaught, shoals of old punchlines came adrift in my head and slewed about, looking for jokes to attach themselves to. Knock knock. Who’s there? Ja. Ja who? Boo. Boo who? To get to the other side. And one to hold the light bulb. Because it feels so good when I stop. What was that Indian’s name again? Said the Texan. Said the Irishman. Said the Jew. Clutter and disorder. I found myself plucking index cards out of box-files like some door-to-door salesman in a cartoon, an ugly little man with Dagwood Bumstead shoes and a daft hairstyle. Spilkin told another joke, something off-colour, lime-green, puce.

What was this attack of nerves all about? To speak for myself, I found the lack of discrimination in Mevrouw Bonsma’s dim interior alarming. A great jumble of music had been poured into her, like leftovers into an olla podrida, and it bubbled out in an indiscriminate broth. I am a repository too; but in me, everything has its place. In me, things are filed, whereas she was merely filled.

I imagined that Spilkin, with his fine sense of discrimination, felt the same. When Mevrouw Bonsma sat at our table, we burbled away desperately, as if trying to mend a crack in her foundation. When she returned to her piano, we sat in depleted silence, with our backs stiff and our fists clenched on our knees, while our newspapers lay unread on the table before us. When I went home exhausted, Spilkin was still clamped to the table under the sconce, like a floodlit statue.

Later it occurred to me that if Spilkin had felt the same anxieties as I did, he would have responded with a recitation of the eye chart or some favourite prescriptions, a mortar of solid sense, rather than this sludge of inane jokes. In the light of his subsequent behaviour, I came to believe, strange as it may seem, that he was competing with me for her favours. In which case he had infected me!

Then Mevrouw Bonsma, bless her chapped heels, announced that she had invited Merle and Benny to join us for afternoon tea.

More people! I was mortified. But as it happened, the newcomer – because there was only one – was just what was needed to restore our equilibrium.

*

Benny turned out to be a Pekingese, a canine knick-knack, disproportionately fierce. Benito, I called her afterwards: Il Puce, The Fleabag. In those days, animals were not allowed into the Europa, and so she spent her first visit to the Café tethered to a downpipe next to the door, nipping at the heels of patrons as they came and went. She had a go at my turn-ups, but I made her see sense with the business end of a brogue. They say that people grow to resemble their pets, or choose pets that resemble them. Merle was small, full of bounce, with round wet eyes and limp grey hair in a bob. She was already settled at our table, in the company of Spilkin and Mevrouw Bonsma, thankfully not in my chair. I hardly had time to sit before she declared, matter-of-factly, ‘You must be A. Tearle.’

‘I am the Tearle,’ I replied, ‘the definite article.’

‘I’ve seen your letters to the editor. Suzanna shows them to me.’

‘Good.’ How about that.

‘I liked that one about the rubbish bins, very acute. How did it go again?’ She tucked one flap of her hair behind her ear, as if to hear me better.

‘You mean the one about the lack of?’ I paused for effect, and then recited from memory: ‘One appreciates that the removal of the rubbish bins from our streets is part of a strategy to thwart the murderous ambitions of terrorists. But with littering now reaching unprecedented heights, one cannot but fear that the litter problem itself has become a time bomb waiting to explode.’

‘That was well put.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I’ve heard all about your System of Records too, from Suzanna, who professes not to understand what you’re up to. Sounds fascinating.’

‘Thank you.’ This enthusiasm was quite disarming.

‘Have you got them in your bag?’

‘A good sample.’

‘So, what does it stand for – the A?’ With a sharp forefinger, she traced the letter in the monogram embossed on my leather briefcase, and then tucked back another flap of hair to expose a second delicate and expectant ear.

‘Aubrey.’ Sotto voce, but Spilkin’s theatrical eyebrows twitched. ‘However, we don’t hold with first names. You can call me Tearle.’

‘Poppycock.’ From the Dutch pappekak. The sort of mush that would agglomerate in Mevrouw Bonsma’s dental sluices. ‘I’ll do nothing of the sort. I am not a public schoolboy. It’s pernicious, this bandying about of surnames. Even the press has fallen into the habit. Thatcher said this and Reagan did that. As if people are no longer entitled to the common courtesies. As long as I have a say in the matter, I shall be Mrs Graaff to the world at large and Merle to my friends.’

As it happened, I agreed with her on the neglect of honorifics in the public sphere. But with Spilkin and Tearle it was quite another matter. Before I could begin to explain, she rattled on. ‘Pleased to meet you, Aubrey.’ She gave my hand a hard squeeze. A metacarpal twinged. ‘As for you, Myron, Suzanna’s told me all about you too.’

Oh my! He didn’t look one bit like a Myron.

‘If you don’t mind,’ said Mevrouw Bonsma, ‘I’d prefer to be called Mevrouw Bonsma.’ And simpered hugely, showing a smear of lipstick on a crooked tooth, like blood drawn from her own lip. There was certainly some Dutch influence in her dentition.

Merle observed her down a turned-up nose. It would be hard and dry, that nose, pressing into one’s cheek. ‘My dear, I couldn’t. You’ve been Suzanna for far too long. It’s … set.’

Eveready was hovering. She ordered hot chocolate, although she’d been invited for tea. Then she swept her eyes over the room. ‘So this is where you’ve been hiding out.’

Really. I wouldn’t put it that way.

‘What’s this?’ She fluttered a hand at the mural and looked at me.

‘It’s nowhere in particular. Or rather anywhere in general. It’s a composite.’ Not Erewhon, but Erewhyna. Alibia. Did the name come to me on the spur of the moment?

‘Looks French. I would say Nice. Met a Dr Plesance there once, on the promenade. A chessplayer, rheumatic, but very good-natured and fun to be with. Back in a tick. Just want to speak to that woman about Benny.’

‘I regret to inform you that her dear little dog,’ said Mevrouw Bonsma, ‘is unable to join us.’

‘Right of admission reserved,’ said Spilkin. ‘No quadrupeds allowed.’

Merle made for the counter, and soon Mrs Mavrokordatos was frothing a porringer with warm milk from the espresso machine. A momentary lapse of taste on her part, harbinger of a general collapse still shrouded in the mists of the future. ‘If she must cater for our four-legged friends,’ I said, ‘let them have separate crockery.’

‘I knew you’d get along famously,’ said Mevrouw Bonsma. ‘She’s good with words, like the two of you. She was a schoolteacher in her younger days, before her marriage. And at various other times, a librarian in the Reference Library and an office manager. She knows the Dewey Decimal System backwards.’

There is dew on the terraced lawns of the Hotel Grande, where Merle goes walking before dinner. It is the dew that makes her kick off her shoes and it is her bare feet and the wet hem of her gown that make her the talk of Alibia. When she catches a chill, Dr Plesance has remedies, all of which he has tried out on himself while performing voluntary service during various epidemics. So the ambulance returns empty to the hospital on the hill and Merle is carried on a chaise into the doctor’s parlour.

Merle came back. ‘That woman has the most extraordinary name.’

‘Mavrokordatos,’ said Spilkin.

‘Large-hearted,’ I said. ‘From the Greek makros, long, large, and the Latin cordis, heart.’

She appraised me with a quirk of a smile around her mouth.

‘Only joking,’ I added, just to be on the safe side.

Then she opened a handbag as large and black as a doctor’s, fished out a tube of artificial sweeteners and spilled half a dozen into her mug. She put on a pair of spectacles and blinked experimentally at the room. They were cat’s-eye frames, with diamanté glittering in their canthi, and they made her look astonished. Astonishing? Both. From the depths of the bag, she produced a big flat box.

‘Anyone for Trivial Pursuit?’

*

Merle came again the next day. This time the black bag offered up, along with half a packet of ginger snaps, to which Mrs Mavrokordatos turned a blind eye, the Better Baby Book of Names for Boys. The bag was an armamentarium. In the right hands, the terms it contained, considered as tools for categorizing and classifying, might get the better of any disorder.

‘Let’s see, Aubrey … Aubrey … here we are. From the German Alberich, ruler of elves. You must be the elf then? Only joking, Myron. Famous Aubreys: John Aubrey, author of Brief Lives. Just the one, I’m afraid, it’s not very common. And even that’s a stretch, being a surname.’

I knew the meaning of my own name perfectly well, but there was no stopping her once she got going.

‘And Myron. Greek: muron. Sweet oil, perfume, hence “something delightful” – that’s in quotes. Famous Myrons – this is more like it – Myron, Greek sculptor, known for his Discobolus. Myron Cohen, Jewish-American humorist, known for his You Don’t Have to be Jewish. Of course not. And Myron the Myrmidon, cartoon character, known for his battles in intergalactic space. In order of merit, descending.’

On her next visit, Merle brought a packet of McVitie’s Jaffa cakes and a chart depicting the human skeleton. She unrolled it on the table and secured the corners with salt and pepper cellars. Then she had Mevrouw Bonsma hold out her hands, as if she was addressing an invisible piano, and tapped off on them, with a knitting needle brought solely for that purpose, the phalanges, metacarpals and carpals, and, advancing the length of one arm, the radius and ulna, the humerus, the clavicula. I was able to chime in then with an apposite onions, as the handspring of lexical gymnastics is called – clavicle and clavichord, from the Latin clavis, key – and halt the pointer’s progress to other parts of our pianist’s anatomy. Not that there was anything unseemly in the display, but people may have jumped to the wrong conclusions.

Merle and Mevrouw Bonsma were old friends. They both lived in the Dorchester, at the bottom end of Twist Street, one of those establishments that housed whole floors of widows. Grannies a gogo, as Spilkin said. The two women had met up when Merle moved to the hotel after the death of her husband Douglas, but they had known one another for years. Mevrouw Bonsma, it turned out, had worked as a typist during the lean times when she could not find work as a musician, and was once employed by an insurance house where Merle kept the company library. She was the most elegant typist Merle had ever come across; her hands on the keyboard were almost lyrical.

It was Merle who showed me that there was more to Mevrouw Bonsma than met the ear.

‘If you think she’s “leaking indiscriminately”,’ said Merle, ‘you haven’t been listening properly, that’s all. She never plays anything without good reason. She’s like a weathervane, turning with the wind; open your ears and you’ll learn something about the air you’re breathing, the cross-currents you’re borne along by. She responds to the climate in a room, and she can change it too, as easily as opening a window.’

I had noticed from the very beginning a certain affinity between the music Mevrouw Bonsma played and the activities I was engaged in – the reliable rhythms of a waltz, for instance, suited lexical gymnastics down to a T – but Merle convinced me that such congruence was more than a happy accident. There was often a subtle interplay between the room and the music, as if Mevrouw Bonsma were a medium, communicating the moods of the patrons to the keyboard, turning them into music, and channelling them back, to bolster or subvert. When there was an argument brewing, voices raised, a fist thumping a table, she would find the dissonant chords to accompany it. And just as often, by a quiet counter-argument of interlinked melodies, she would smooth the ruffled feathers and cool the heated blood, and restore the company to an even temper.

Sometimes she seemed almost clairaudient. I made a note of the occasion when she began to play the uncharacteristically rowdy theme tune from Zorba the Greek. And who should come bounding through the door not a minute later but Mrs Mavrokordatos’s brother, who went by that name – or something very like it – and answered to that character. I had only seen him in the Café once, and it afterwards transpired that he had just stepped off an aeroplane from Athens after an absence of many months. Instead of greeting his sister with a conventional embrace, he began to kick up his heels to the music in a traditional dance of homecoming. He might have broken the crockery, if it wasn’t for the wall-to-wall carpeting.

Not all of Mevrouw Bonsma’s musical accompaniments were as dramatic as this. Often they were simply little chains of association, reminiscent, some of them, of an untaxing session of lexical fartlek. But even these connections were usually invisible to me, inaudible, below my threshold of hearing (not that there’s anything wrong with my ears). Merle, who was more educated than myself musically, made it all as clear as day, by an effortless and unassuming laying on of labels and drawing of distinctions.

I saw that I had misjudged Mevrouw Bonsma. She had a system, albeit one founded as much on intuition as on ratiocination; and there is nothing I admire more than a system. Enclosed in her hardy flesh was a sensitive, highly developed creature – and not struggling to get out, far from it, quite content to be there. Was refinement not precisely an appreciation of those qualities that were hard to see, that always lay hidden beneath the surface, where a superficial eye would fail to appreciate them? As usual the poor Americans had it all wrong; the real thing could not be grasped in a fist or quaffed in a few greedy gulps. It had to be found, more often than not, after vigorous effort. Under the benign influence of this understanding – which, I hardly need add, had an immediate appeal for a proofreader – the threat Mevrouw Bonsma had once posed was dispelled, and soon seemed inconceivable to me. Spilkin’s joke-telling subsided too, as suddenly as it had developed – an even more merciful reversal. So I finally accepted her into our company. When her shift was over, she would join us to talk or play games, and I came to enjoy her companionship almost as much as Spilkin’s and Merle’s. She seemed smaller, now that her contents were properly secured.

Merle, by contrast, was at home in our midst from the outset. Suddenly there were four of us. I have never been the most sociable of men, but I found her company unusually convivial. She was an organizer and perhaps we needed organizing, having nearly lost our sense of ourselves. She liked board games and cards, which neither Spilkin nor I had a taste for, but we played along because she was a good talker and had a quick mind. She tried to teach us bridge, and we bumbled through a few games of that. More often it was General Knowledge, always with a musical category for the benefit of Mevrouw Bonsma. Sometimes Merle insisted on giving her clues, humpty-dumpty-dum, so that she would not lag too far behind. Merle usually won. It was all in good spirit.

A month or two after the advent of Merle, influenza kept me abed for a few days. When I returned to the Café – to a salubrious air from ‘The Happy Huntsman’ – she said she was delighted to see me. ‘I wanted to come in search, because I thought you might be ill. But Myron wouldn’t tell me where you stayed. It wasn’t the same without you. We’ve become quite a little circle, haven’t we?’

‘Not that,’ Spilkin admonished her.

She was taken aback. ‘I’d call us a circle. Wouldn’t you, Aubrey?’

I wasn’t sure. Probably. But before I could make up my mind, Spilkin said: ‘It’s a question of arithmetic – or is it geometry? Two people cannot be a circle. Two is a couple, a pair, a brace. Three is a crowd only in idiom. Primarily three is a triangle. Four will always be a square – or two pairs.’ Was that a meaningful glance at Mevrouw Bonsma, who was pulling up her chair beside his? ‘But five …? Now my head and my heart tell me that five might be a circle. Only a specialist would see a pentagon. It’s a good thing there are just the four of us. A circle is a dangerous thing.’

‘Viz, it has no end,’ said the Bonsma cheesily.

‘What do you say, Tearle?’

‘I’m with you, Spilkin.’

He was right. Ever since Merle’s arrival, we had settled down very comfortably. The four of us made for solid geometry. We were bricks, regular good fellows. Four-square was the term that came to my mind. Four squares too, I’d no objection to that: four of a kind, four equals, coevals, discriminating human beings, adults with compatible systems of thought and feeling, gathered around a table to amuse themselves, to pass the time pleasantly in conversation, in listening to music, in reading and other pursuits that broadened the mind. I might have wished that the table itself was square rather than round, to underpin our quadrilaterality, our state of balance, but how could I have guessed what lay ahead when Spilkin and I first made the choice?

Which isn’t to say that Merle did not have some peculiar ideas. Here was a woman who turned first to the last page of a book and read that to see whether she felt like tackling the whole thing. It was abnormal. When she suggested that the four of us go to the symphony to celebrate Mevrouw Bonsma’s fifty-eighth, I followed Spilkin’s lead and made short shrift of the idea. There was no point in throwing the rules and regulations overboard.

So the two of them went on their own.

*

Proofreading, properly done, is an art. It demands great reserves of skill, experience and application. It is also a responsibility; and while not all responsibilities are onerous, never mind what the newspapers say, this one deserves the adjective. Only when an eye has scrutinized every word in a text may it truly be said to have been read. And the fact is that more often than not, the only eye that looks at every word and at the spaces in between them, at the folios, the running heads, every last entry in an index, every full stop and comma, every hyphen and parenthesis – the only eye that does all these things belongs neither to the author, nor the editor, nor even the most assiduous reader, but to the proofreader. The proofreader is a trailblazer and a minesweeper. The readers who follow him may take any path with confidence, may go down any passage and cross any border, and never lose their bearings.

Getting things right is not just a matter of form (although that is important enough in itself), but of necessity. Dotting one i might be regarded as a mere punctilio, and failing to do so dismissed as a trifle. But all the dots left off all the i’s accumulate, they build up, they pack together like a cloud over a field of stubbly iotas. Soon there is a haze of them in every hollow, and the finer distinctions begin to evade us. In the end, the veil of uncertainty grows so thick that everything is obscured. As for the crosses left off the t’s, who do you suppose shall bear them?

It is one of the ironies of the art that the better it is practised, the fewer traces of it remain. The world remembers a handful of proofreading blunders – the Breeches Bible, the Printers’ Bible, the Unrighteous Bible of 1652 (see Ebenezer Cobham Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, at Bible) and a few ghost words in the dictionaries – gravy, abacot, Dord. But the world knows nothing of the successes.

Standards of proofreading have been declining steadily since the nineteen-sixties, when the permissive attitude to life first gained ground, and so have standards of morality, conduct in public life, personal hygiene and medical care, the standard of living, and so on. All these are symptoms of a more general malaise. Decline with a capital D. Perhaps it goes back to the War. While I myself was working in the field, I did not have time to devote to proselytizing; I had my own garden to tend. Once retired, I began to pursue that most genteel form of activism, the letter to the editor. Nevertheless, I had always felt that the solution to the problem of declining standards lay with the individual, in the revivification of outmoded notions of personal responsibility, and so I turned from tending my garden to ‘cleaning up my own backyard’, as the expression goes (in point of fact, I don’t have a backyard at all). I am no Dictionary-thumper and I try to be tactful, but my patience was often tested. Take the Haifa débâcle.

The speciality of the Haifa Hebrew Restaurant was not, as one might have expected, traditional delicacies such as smoked salmon or gefilte fish (chopped fish mixed with crumbs, eggs and seasonings), which I had come across before on hotel menus, but things called schwarmas, composed primarily of grilled lamb. A special device had been installed for their manufacture. The lamb, piled up into a tower on an electric spit, was suffered to gyrate crazily before red-hot elements, while a singed onion and a deflating tomato, skewered at the top of the tower, dribbled their juices down its length. (These juices, dispelled in aromatic vapour, often made mouths water in the Café Europa up above.) I had peered into the smoky interior of the restaurant several times in passing and mistaken the translucent orb at the top for a sheep’s eye: the discovery that it was something more palatable was the immediate reward of my first venture across the threshold. A sign picked out in plastic lettering on an illuminated glass panel of Mediterranean blue informed the paying public that the lamb now rotating would be served in a so-called pita, with tehini, which sounded merely laughable, or humus, which sounded truly nauseating. It was that infelicitous ‘humus’, glimpsed from the doorway a few days earlier, which had brought me here in defiance of the threat of bomb blasts that hung in those days over fast-food establishments. I have no special knowledge of the Hebrew tongue, but I had done my homework in the greatest school of all, the Oxford English Dictionary, and came equipped for battle. Although this was a professional visit, I did not want to appear ill-mannered, and so I ordered one of the schwarmas, and while the chef was carving my portion with a machete, introduced myself to the manager, a certain Shlomo.

‘Forgive me if I speak frankly,’ I said after the pleasantries, ‘but you do not want to put “humus” on the mutton.’

‘Hey? What you?’ and so forth.

‘“Humus” is in the ground. Decomposing vegetable matter in the soil. Leaves, peelings, biodegradable stuff. What you want is “hummus”. Two m’s.’

‘Two humus fifty cent extra,’ said Shlomo, whose intellectual apparatus really did seem to be in slow motion, going to talk with his lady friend at the other end of the counter.

I pursued him with the dictionary. The seventh edition of the Concise was the first to record ‘hummus’ and I had brought it along purposely to show him the entry. ‘Look – two m’s. Em-em.’

‘English not so good,’ he said with a sympathetic grin, which made me suspect that he was referring to mine! Then I noticed the derivation: from the Turkish humus. An awkward moment. A version with one m could only cloud the issue. I put the dictionary away and resorted to some schoolboy dactylology and the mouthing of duo and tuo and twain, hoping to hit on something that would approximate the Hebrew. ‘Bi, bi,’ I said.

‘Bye-bye,’ chirruped the lady friend and pointed at my head with her Craven A. Some days before, I had scratched my salient excrescence – cranial, high noon – on an overhanging branch at Pullinger Kop, and it was still inflamed. I retired self-consciously to a dimmer corner of the counter.

To my surprise, the schwarma was quite tasty, and the double helping of hummus did no harm – in fact, I have preferred it that way ever since. Instead of the customary plate, there was an ingenious little aluminium stand like a letter-rack for propping the schwarma in, and as the pita itself was rather like an envelope of unleavened bread with enclosures of lettuce and lamb, it suited very well. I resolved there and then to become more cosmopolitan in my eating habits, even as I set about the big ‘clean-up’.

Alas, all my attempts to alert the shopkeepers of Hillbrow to the errors of their ways met with the same inarticulate incomprehension I had encountered at the Haifa. After half an hour of fruitless argumentation, the manager of the Restless Supermarket – he had introduced himself as Stan, although the badge on his lapel clearly said Stelios – showed me into his little office, a mezzanine cubicle with pegboard walls and gunmetal furniture. In the top drawer of the desk I saw lying a stapler, a bottle of Liquid Paper (God help us), and a revolver. When I had seen the stationery, he pushed the drawer shut with his thigh and offered me a drink, which I accepted out of politeness. He said:

‘My friend, we ollaways open. You come any day, twenty-four hour.’

‘I accept that, Stelios (if I may). But my point is that “restless” doesn’t mean that you never rest. Don’t you see? It means, and I quote, never still, fidgety.’

‘But we ollaways busy, never close.’

‘You’d be even busier if you’d just listen to me, man. The name “Restless Supermarket”, it creates the wrong impression. One thinks of mess, of groceries jumbled together, of groceries jumbling themselves together, of wilful chaos. Is that what you want?’

He looked disbelievingly at the shelves on the closed-circuit television, where sturdy towers of Bourneville cocoa and orderly ranks of tinned fruit and washing powder mutely supported my argument, and said, ‘My friend, you come two o’clock, you come three o’clock, I’m talking a.m., I got fresh rolls.’

‘That’s another thing, that sign on the bakery wall that says: “All our food is fresh and clean.” Clean food? I’m sorry, it doesn’t make sense.’

After ten minutes of this, he opened the drawer again.

Then there was the time I ventured down Nugget Hill to the Casablanca Roadhouse, no easy walk with my knees, to point out the unwitting obscenity that shoddy neon calligraphy had produced in FLICK LIGHTS FOR SERVICE. They wouldn’t hear a word of it. Fuck you too, they said quite amiably. Not having a car made my mission doubly difficult: the waiter kept asking what had become of my ‘wheels’ and pretending to attach the tray to my forearm. I had to eat a Dagwood Bumstead for my pains, the speciality of the house, served at a very uncomfortable picnic table with a round of dill pickle adhering to the outside of the wax-paper wrapping. It was one culinary adventure that did not bear repeating, although it repeated itself of its own accord, ad nauseam.

And then there were the ‘wanton dumplings’ at the Majestic Tasty Chinese Take Away, which I wouldn’t touch with a disposable chopstick, and the unfortunate messages in the fortune biscuits.

Not all my efforts at reform, nor even my most telling ones, had to do with commercial signage or catering. Once Spilkin complained so bitterly about the typographical errors in a book he had just purchased that I was persuaded to look into it myself. I hadn’t read a novel in twenty years, and one glance at the contents of The Unhappy Millionaire showed the wisdom of abstention: it was the story of an American Midas whose life had been ruined by his immeasurable riches. On the other hand, it seemed that I had been neglecting an exceptionally rich field for my System of Records. I found a spelling mistake on the title-page and a dittography in the first line. There were five obvious corrigenda on the first page alone. Some professionals regard one proofreading error in five pages as an acceptable norm; I myself think that one should aim for perfection and let the norms take care of themselves. Spilkin was reluctant to demand a refund from the bookseller, and so I took matters into my own hands.

The publishing house was a well-known English one with branches, or perhaps one should say tentacles, all over the world. I decided to make an example of them. I spent the next week proofreading this corny farrago, meticulously as you please, and then mailed it to their head office in London, surface mail. Was it any wonder, my covering letter said, that this millionaire was unhappy, finding himself in such a shabbily produced publication? They were welcome to share my work with their editorial department as a lesson in how it should be done.

Such a high-minded gesture, made at my own expense, would be easy to ridicule. But my new friends at the Café Europa, not excepting Mevrouw Bonsma in her placid way, seemed to understand what was at stake.

Schwarma, incidentally, from the Hebrew for ‘lamb’. I had imagined, rather fancifully, that there might be some connection with ‘schwa’, the character rendered as ә in phonetic transcription and derived from the Hebrew word for ‘empty’. The lexical world was overpopulated with scrawny, open-mouthed schwas, like hordes of hungry little pitas waiting for their stomachs to be filled.

*

The fame of my System of Records, if not their function exactly, had gone before them, and Merle wished to make their acquaintance almost as soon as she had made mine. For someone of her classificatory acumen and experience, it was quite self-evident how the Records worked, but I could see from the word ‘go’ that she wanted to make more of them than I had. From the pocket of her cardigan she produced a rubber thimble for her forefinger and fluttered through my index cards with practised ease, making girlish exclamations of delight. I remember she also leafed through the files of clippings, removing some that caught her eye and piling them face down on the arm of her chair. Then she turned one over in the afternoon sunlight slanting from the balcony windows, and laid it flat on the palm of her hand as gently as if it had been a feather or a pressed flower. It was an advertisement for Stirling’s Hardy Perennails. What might that lackadaisical florilegium contain? Voilets, dandeloins, hiacynths, anenomes. She laid the clipping face up on the table, turned over another, laid them side by side, shuffled them together, turned over a third, piled all three in one order and then another, as if she was trying to discover the rules of an unknown game; later, I came to associate that flick of her wrist with solitaire, which she sometimes played when the Café was full and noisy, turning the cards over expectantly, rediscovering order in the soothing congruences of chance.

The green fingers and thumbs of Mevrouw Bonsma interleaved a catalogue of floral riches: daffodils, heart’s-ease and phlox, meadowsweet and lady’s smocks.

When she was finished, Merle laid two clippings side by side. One was marked with a red cross, which meant that it had already been processed. I might have looked up the distinguishing corrigendum in my index in a matter of minutes. But evidently she had no interest in that, for she pointed to the photographs, which happened to show two women, and said, ‘Look, they could be sisters!’ I examined their faces closely. They looked nothing alike. With a laugh, she pointed out the family resemblance tucked away in the captions: Frau Schneider and Mrs Sartorius.

Merle was a great keeper of lists, as I am. But more than that, she was a lover of names. She had dozens of reference books on the origins of Christian names for boys and girls, surnames, nicknames, eponyms. Merle: from the Latin merulus via the Old French, meaning blackbird, of all things; and Graaff: from the German Graf, earl. She had lists of so-called ‘aptronyms’ that she had compiled herself, and curious theories about nominative determinism. Her memory was a trove of oddities, involving characters real and imaginary. Many people know that Three Men in a Boat was written by Jerome K. Jerome. But she knew what the K. stood for. And many know Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and the warring qualities each embodied. But she knew that one was Henry to his friends, and the other Edward. She knew that Patrice Lumumba’s middle name was Emergy. That Ali Baba had a brother Cassim (not nearly as famous, but treacherous as a snake). And she once told me, without batting an eyelid, that Judy Garland had been born Frances Gumm, which surprised me no end.

After I’d introduced her to the System of Records, she started bringing in her reference books and lists to show me. There issued from the black bag in rapid succession (I was keeping track in my notebook) anatomical charts of the alimentary canal, the musculature, the endocrine (but thankfully not the reproductive) system; atlases; posters showing the flags of the world and butchers’ cuts for beef and mutton; a compendium of the internationally accepted rules for sports and games; a board for snakes and ladders, and another for Ludo (‘I play Ludo!’ Mevrouw Bonsma tautologized); lists of weights and measures; handy reckoners; books on the international standard road signs, origami, first aid, national cuisines, bibliography (the last by a person called Bibliotheker); the book of postal codes (the 1972 edition, in which I myself had taken a hand); and the Reader’s Digest Book of the Car. In this way, I supposed, she was expressing her gratitude for my having introduced her to the Records, and I was grateful in turn; I found many of her books interesting and turned up some first-rate corrigenda in them.

But Spilkin cast another light on things. He said she was trying to get to know me. ‘That is what people do,’ he said, ‘they share their interests. Isn’t that just what you and I did when we met?’

‘But this isn’t the same at all.’

Fact is, the more Merle and I ‘shared our interests’, the more I realized how different they were. My Records had a serious practical purpose: nothing as meanly instrumental as Spilkin had once implied, but a sincere wish to document, so allowing for comparison and improvement. Above all, they were exempla. Lexical gymnastics, although they had a recreational dimension, were aimed at maintaining the highest levels of skill and fitness and therefore at improving the quality of the Records. Even in my more frivolous pursuits, such as crosswording, I sought completion, while at the same time enriching my vocabulary and deepening my philological understanding. I never lost sight of my main purpose, which was to hold up examples of order and disorder, and thus contribute to the great task of maintaining order where it already existed and restoring it where it had been disrupted.

Merle’s lists were no more than pretexts for games. She was always inventing, always trying to create something new, seeking entertainment. But fantasizing, simply for the sake of it, had never struck me as a constructive way to pass the time. When I said so, she had the temerity to call me ‘dry’.

‘It’s not dryness. It’s rigour.’

‘Of the mortis variety.’

‘That’s rigor,’ I said, to put her in her place. ‘We’re not in the Land of the Free and Easy. You won’t catch me in Noah Webster’s leaky ark. Onions is my man, for fullness, and the Brothers Fowler for concision. I mean Henry and Frank.’

‘There, it’s the worst case of dryness I’ve ever encountered. But just you leave it to me. We’ll get the sap flowing in no time.’

Fun and games. One quietish evening – card games in progress at a few tables, conversation at others, Spilkin perched on a stool at the piano to watch the strings rippling like water over a weir – Merle piped up: ‘Want to play Wellington in plimsolls?’

‘Is that like playing Hamlet in tights?’

‘It’s a game. You have to think of eponyms and their progenitors and put them together. Like Wellington and Plimsoll. That was the first one I came up with.’

‘Tell me the rules.’

‘There aren’t any. They’re just amusing combinations – I could have made Plimsoll in wellingtons too, but that’s not so funny. Mind you, they shouldn’t have to be funny.’

I really was at a loss. When she scooped up my Concise, without so much as a by-your-leave, I didn’t even think to protest. She tossed aside my bookmarks and began to leaf.

Then she said: ‘Wellington in bluchers. That’s nice, they were both brass hats. Old Blücher’s lost his umlaut, I see. Pity. They’re like a couple of eyes for laces. Blücher in wellies, on the other hand, or rather foot, is an historical impossibility. But we don’t want to get bogged down in footwear.’

As I’ve said, games hold the barest interest for me at the best of times. But games without rules? Then again, there might be some etymological capital to be gained. I called for another example.

She blew on her tea, stirring up a little tempest, said pensively, ‘Mae West in a macintosh,’ and then laughed so uproariously that Spilkin came over to see what he was missing. Mevrouw Bonsma let him have a ditty for his trip across the room. He had to stop at a couple of tables along the way to exchange a friendly word or two – as if he were the manager rather than Mrs Mavrokordatos – and that gave Merle a chance to sip and ponder.

I racked my brain for eponyms. But my moisture content was lower then than it is now, although I am a good few years older and brittler in the bone, as you would expect. All that would come into my mind was Boycott! Boycott! Boycott! The newspapers were full of it.

Spilkin took to it like a bufflehead to water. ‘No bloomers in the jacuzzi. By order.’ It came out of him just like that.

‘Leotards are fine,’ Merle countered.

Watching the pair of them giggling like teenagers, I couldn’t help thinking that the joke was on me. I tried to laugh along in self-defence, but my face was stuck. It had gone all stiff around the mouth, as if my risorii had seized up, and I tried massaging them from the inside with my tongue.

‘What a long face,’ Merle said. She had taken off her spectacles and her eyes were streaming, making furrows down her powdered cheeks. I have always found the notion of laughing until one cries repugnant. One wants to preserve the boundaries between emotions, I think, or they lose their value.

‘Sandwich …’ Spilkin began.

‘This has gone far enough.’

‘… with sideburns!’

‘Not allowed.’

‘Stop being so silly.’

‘A bit of silliness never harmed anyone – except a stuffy old cardigan like you.’

Monsoons of laughter. Enough. I marched out and didn’t slacken my pace until I had shut my own front door behind me. To think that she would speak to me like that. Stuffy? Sinuses were clear. Lungs as capacious as ever. I’ve never smoked – a dirty habit for an untidy mind – and always walked. I went out onto the balcony to breathe some night air. The lights of the city stretched away to the south. No diamonds and velvet here, but wampum and brushed nylon. Strings of cheap yellow beads showed where the motorways ran, while those blocks of tawdry marcasite, marred by empty sockets, were the South Western Townships (‘Soweto’), or so Gideon, the Lenmar’s nightwatchman, assured me. The black holes belonged to the mines. Some people thought the most cosmopolitan touch on our skyline was the Hillbrow Tower: the flats that offered a view of it were actually more expensive. When I was flat-hunting, the caretaker at Milrita Heights had presented it as a feature, flinging back the curtains in the lounge with a theatrical gesture to show the smooth grey shaft plunging past the window. How was she to know I found it vulgar? Like an enormous parking meter. I’d settled for a place on the south side of Lenmar Mansions, with a view of the southern suburbs.

I went back inside and sat down at the dining-room table, where my notebooks were piled. The tips of my fingers felt dry. I had to keep licking them to turn the pages. Was I as dry as all that? A bent old stick, a twig, a broken reed. Perhaps Merle was right: I had no sense of fun. What were all these facts for? I had lists of every description: street names, buildings, shops, taxis, T-shirt slogans, books, sandwiches, orchestras, species of violence. I even had lists of lists. Here was my list of portmanteaus for residential blocks: Lenmar, Milrita, Norbeth, Ethelinda. It was clear enough what it captured. But what had I hoped it would reveal? Merle might turn the whole thing into a game. Test your knowledge of the city: match the constituent part in Column A (Len) with its mate in Column B (Mar). I would never have thought of that. Was setting an example enough? Or did one also have to enjoy oneself? Perhaps it was time I cultivated the sense of fun I seemed to be lacking.

When I arrived at the Café the next day, I had in my briefcase a notebook containing a peace offering. It was one of my lists. ‘Mr’ prefix, commercial enterprises. I showed it to Merle and Spilkin at once.

Spilkin’s eyes glittered. ‘Mr Bathroom, Mr Cupboard, Mr Juice … Mr Propshaft … Mr Spare Parts! Who are these people, Tearle? Friends of yours? Or family?’

‘Businesses. Culled from the telephone directories when I was employed by Posts and Telecommunications. I thought you might find the phenomenon interesting.’

‘I do.’

‘As I recall, the mania was started by a Mr X-haust, as they chose to spell it, back in the seventies. There was a logo too: a little man in overalls with a stethoscope around his neck for auscultating the Wankel engine.’ The eponym, skilfully inserted into the flow of the conversation, went unremarked. ‘Dr Exhaust, then, strictly speaking.’

‘Perhaps he was a surgeon.’

‘Mr X-haust,’ said Merle. ‘It’s quaintly polite. If he got into the newspapers these days, they’d call him plain old X-haust.’

‘Well, it struck me as odd at the time. As if the title alone rendered the enterprise reliable. Not Bertie X-haust, or X-haust and Co, but Mr X-haust. An exhaust man of the old school, someone you could trust to tinker with your manifold.’

‘It’s better than Uncle,’ said Spilkin.

‘You’ve got an uncle in the furniture business.’

‘Or “Oom”, which one also comes across.’

‘The extraordinary thing is how it caught on. The next year there were half a dozen copycats in the directory: Mr Frosty – an ice-cream maker – Mr Ladder, Mr Plastic, Mr Sweets. And more and more every year – a full column within five editions. Then a couple of Doctors, a brace of Sirs – Sir Juice and Sir Rubble – and even a Missus or two. I haven’t updated my list for a while, but it shouldn’t surprise me if they ran to a page by now.’

Eveready brought us the 1987 directory from behind the counter.

‘More than a page,’ Merle said. ‘They should form an organization.’

‘A union.’

‘A support group. Mr Furniture would be chairman.’

‘Chairperson,’ Spilkin corrected her. ‘And I propose Mr Cash and Carry for Treasurer.’

‘What about this Mr Spare Parts …’

‘He could do the catering.’

‘A resurrection man,’ I should have said, ‘or a muti murderer.’ One could joke about such things in those days, people saw the funny side of it, and understood that one meant no harm. But I just sat there with a mouth full of false teeth. Frosty ~ fugleman ~ fugle ~ fumigate. The wrong associations. Anyway, I could hardly have got a word in edgeways. They went at it hammer and tongs, just as I’d hoped they might, for a good twenty minutes. Unashamedly light-hearted fun. When Mevrouw Bonsma joined us, Spilkin dubbed her Mrs Tuning Fork and she was tickled. Then Merle said I was in the Book too, and pointed to Mr Crusty. A jest, but wounding nevertheless, given the unavoidable connotations of ‘dryness’. Crusty: irritable, curt, says the Concise. Also crust-like, hard – a veiled reference, perhaps, to my excrescences. It was then, in an attempt to crack off my crustiness with levity, that I suggested we boil the last half-hour’s shenanigans down into something for the Reader’s Digest, under the rubric of ‘Towards More Picturesque Speech’ or ‘Life’s Like That’. They pooh-poohed the idea (to be picturesque for a moment).

But when Merle went to the Ladies’ room, Spilkin leant over – Mrs Mavrokordatos had ouzoed him again, to judge by his liquorish, little-boy breath – and whispered in my ear, ‘You were made for each other: Mr and Mrs Dictionary.’

*

From that day forward, I vowed to adopt a more relaxed approach towards social intercourse and to take the whole idea of fun more seriously. And I sustained that effort, through thick and thin, in one way or another, until the curtain – and everything else – fell on the Goodbye Bash.

I initiated several games along the lines of ‘Wellington in plimsolls’. I tracked down cryptic clues for Spilkin in the papers and made up some of my own, most memorably the classics ‘Sautéd poet’ (8) and ‘female cannibal’ (3-5). Anecdotes of the more tasteful kind, which were occasionally to be found on the wireless, I transcribed into my notebook and brought out at opportune moments. I tried to be lighter, moister and less crusty, like a good soufflé. Once or twice, I ventured to clap along with Mevrouw Bonsma’s cheerier medleys.

In those golden days of the Café Europa, which were then beginning, I might have gone too far. My imagination was awakening from a long slumber, like some Rip van Winkel, and was bound to overreach as it stretched its limbs in a new world. (The comparison is unsuited in some ways, as my sleeping habits have always been perfectly normal, and I’ve never been married, much less henpecked, but it can stand.) Looking back, I would say that the handclapping was certainly a mistake. I also delivered a few witticisms that might have been better suppressed, although it was never my intention to wound, as some would claim afterwards. But my most immoderate indiscretion was a practical joke, a form of wit I had always considered the lowest, fathoms below sarcasm (which strikes me as perfectly acceptable in a red-blooded fray).

All four of us were at the table one afternoon when Spilkin started the crossword. He was milling around, struggling to find the first indispensable ‘spilkin’, as even the most proficient puzzlers sometimes do, and Merle said, ‘Need a hand there?’

‘It’s a tricky one. I’ll get it going in a minute.’

‘It can’t be that hard.’ Merle was not a crossword puzzler herself – she said the people who compiled them had all the fun – and she was just pulling his leg. But her teasing prodded some sense of fun in me, or perhaps it was a cunning streak that I mistook for that etiolated sense.

I said, ‘He exaggerates how difficult it is, to make you admire him. The Star’s crossword is laughably simple. The cryptic clues would pass for straight clues in any normally endowed society. Intellectually speaking.’

‘Bosh,’ said Spilkin, ‘it takes you hours.’

‘Because I stretch it out to prolong the pleasure. I could do it in ten minutes flat if I wanted to – but what’s the point of rushing?’

‘I’d like to see you get it out faster than me.’

‘Sounds like a challenge, Aubrey.’

‘Name your weapons.’

He waggled the Waterman. Perfect. Eveready brought my copy of the newspaper from behind the counter. I extracted the Tonight! section, turned to the puzzle and folded the straight clues under. Sharpened my pencil and poised it. Nodded to Merle to start the clock.

‘One across,’ I said. ‘Poetry serves badly.’ And paused for a finely judged second. ‘Verses.’ I spoke it out loud and wrote it in. Spilkin followed suit. ‘Two across: Safely wired near the dangerous part.’ One thousand and one, one thousand and two. ‘Earthed.’ Wrote that in. ‘One down: Muddled reports etc looking back. Retrospect.’

Now that I had the attention of the table I fell silent, except for making popping sounds with my lips and palatal clicks with the tip of my tongue. It was an extraordinary performance, even if I say so myself, for someone to whom the very notion of putting on a show was anathema. The timing was masterly. I let as much as twenty seconds slip by between certain clues and then, just when they thought I had stalled, rattled off three in as much time again. I had the whole thing out in six and a half minutes, including a magnanimous minute of grace allowing Spilkin – who had given up his own efforts to gaze at me, envious and amazed – a shot at the last clue.

I felt sorry for him, eventually, and nearly revealed the deception: I had just done the puzzle for the second time that day. My first effort, discarded in the waiting room at the General Hospital, where I’d gone for my blood pressure pills – and my Valia, for the nerves − had taken the better part of an hour.

In the years that followed, I sometimes surprised Spilkin watching me as I did the crossword at my usual pace, gazing out of the window between clues, sipping my tea. The expression on his face was slightly hurt and exasperated, as if I was patronizing him. I nearly confessed more than once. Now I’m pleased I didn’t.

As for the appropriate balance between gravity and levity in my dealings with the world, I am happy to say that it was restored in due course, when my acquaintances of those far-off days were scattered to the winds. Composure is everything. In the end, I was not so much a Rip van Winkel, who was immoderate and foolish after all, but a Derrick van Bummel. You remember, the schoolmaster in the same tale – dapper, learned, undaunted by ‘the most gigantic word in the dictionary’. One can even forgive him his drawling aloud from the newspaper, seeing that his companions were unqualified to do it for themselves.

*

If I had had my way (or a better start in life, if you’d rather), I would have been a proofreader of dictionaries. Lexicographical proofreading is the ultimate test of skill, application and nerve.

A proofreader worth his salt grieves over an error, no matter how small, in a printed work of any kind, from a chewing-gum wrapper (‘Did you know that the jodphur originated in India?’ – Ripley’s Believe It Or Not) to a Bible (‘Printers have persecuted me without a cause’ – Psalm 119, verse 161). Every error matters, not least because admitting even one into respectable company opens the door to countless others. Everyone welcome! the cry goes up, and the portals are flung wide. Only by striving constantly for perfection, and regretting every failure to achieve it, can the hordes be kept at bay.

However, errors once made should be acknowledged and understood, and their implications distinguished from one another. The repercussions of an error are nearly always bounded by the context in which it occurs. In certain exceptional spheres, such as pharmaceutical packaging, apparently minor errors may have fatal consequences. In the more mundane healthy climate, most errors on the part of the proofreader, committed in a spirit of honest endeavour rather than laxity and laissez-faire, are like ripples on a pond: disturbing but contained, and eventually finite. An error in the pages of a novel, for instance, may be compounded by reproduction, sometimes tens of thousands of times. Yet despite this wasteful abundance, the error itself seldom transcends the covers between which it is caught like a slow-moving insect, unless through the agency of an ill-tutored student, or a civilian foolish enough to seek instruction in these quarters. The good proofreader, the craftsman in pursuit of perfection, seeking to uphold standards but failing honestly, acknowledges the flaw, the place where the eye blinked and the hand slipped, and accords it its proper, proportionate place. Then he turns his attention to the work at hand.

Some say that an error of the right kind in the right place, something not too ugly, something truly devious, an error that demonstrates by its elusiveness how easily we might all slip into error ourselves, might have a purpose, perhaps even a beauty, of its own. One beggar at the banquet, they contend, cleverly disguised as a righteous burgher, discovered looting the cheeseboard and unmasked, will make the rest of the company savour their fine liqueurs more appreciatively. I myself find this conceit specious – as if a fly in the ointment improved it – although I grant that it might have some validity in a certain kind of publication, say, a coffee-table book or a hand-printed caprice. An error in that neck of the woods is hardly the end of the world.

But a proofreading error in a dictionary is invariably catastrophic.

Such an error is sent out into the world to multiply. It inveigles itself into the hearts of a trusting public. It works its mischief, like an odourless poison or a magistrate’s moustache, under the very nose of authority. It is exuberant and prolific. It has the capacity to generate its misleading progeny in an infinite number of places. It may introduce errors where none existed before, and unteach the best-learned lessons. It may settle down in respectable company and become naturalized as a citizen of good standing, until not even the most discriminating neighbour knows its shady past. The Great Cham himself gave us several bastards born on the wrong side of the galleys.

So it is easy to see why the dictionary should be the foremost test of proofreading skill, the Everest of proofreading, the Qomolongma, as a contracting Sherpa (7) might style it. Sadly, I was never able to plant my blue pennant on this summit.

After dictionaries, I would say that certain kinds of reference work present the greatest challenges: maps, calendars, timetables, technical manuals, logarithmic charts, diagnostic cyclopaedias, operating instructions, recipe books, telephone directories. And I was fortunate enough to make the last-mentioned field my own for two decades and more.

Erasmus of the Department once told me that some very authoritative authors did not regard publications such as these as proper books. In the opinion of these gentlemen, and Charles Lamb was mentioned by name, almanacs and guidebooks are ‘non-books’ – biblia abiblia, they spitefully put it. I wouldn’t know about that. When someone says, ‘Are you in the Book?’ which book do they have in mind – Essays of Elia? Even the Bible, that perennial best seller, needs qualifying as the Good Book; but the Book, plain and simple, is the telephone directory, and that’s all there is to it.

The demands of the telephone directory are different to those of the dictionary, of course. The emphasis falls less on first principles and final appeals than on service and convenience. Here, the errors the proofreader commits may be ranked according to the degree of inconvenience that results. On this scale, misspelling a surname but maintaining its alphabetical position is the least of blunders. People are understandably particular about the orthography of their personal names, especially those in which doubled consonants or optional concluding vowels create many variants: ‘with one t’ (or two) and ‘with an e’ (or without) are most commonly specified. But the fact is that only the most forgetful ever need look up their own telephone numbers in the directory, and people are as lax about the spelling of others’ names as they are finical about their own, and so the chances of causing offence are negligible. An error in the address is more bothersome; it may lead to misdirected mail, or turn an outing into a wild-goose chase. But again, few people consult the directory to obtain addresses. Placing a name out of alphabetical order is rather more serious: the user of the directory might not be able to find the number he is seeking. But the gravest error a proofreader can commit is undoubtedly a wrong number. It is inconvenient for the user, who is unable to reach the party he seeks; and it is annoying for the subscriber, who does not receive his calls; but for the third party whose number has been given by mistake, and who therefore receives all the misdirected calls, it can be a nuisance beyond enduring. Should this innocent bystander be a private citizen, and the directory entry falsely advertising his number a commercial enterprise, the volume of wrong numbers may be such that the victim has no choice but to sacrifice his own number, effectively rendering himself invisible.

The proofreading of numbers is a taxing business, requiring the highest levels of concentration. Needless to say, I was rather good at it. Not infrequently, I was seconded to assist in difficult operations involving other directories. But the one task that always gave me grey hairs, in the days when their colour still concerned me more than their number, was the proofreading of the emergency telephone numbers. I give them here to show that I have not lost my touch entirely, and also because one can never be too careful these days. Please note that they are for the Greater Johannesburg area only.

Flying Squad 10111

Ambulance 999

Fire Brigade 624-2800

Hospital 488-4911

Poison Information Centre 642-2417

Water 403-3226

Electricity 080011-1550

Gas 726-3138

*

As a young man, I briefly entertained the ambition to wield the blue pencil. There have been some fine editors, even of novels, and a handful who are virtually illustrious. Saxe Commins of Random House, whose famous blue staff could strike poetic bubbly from the most prosaic rock. Pascal Covici, midwife and manservant to John Steinbeck. Maxwell Perkins of Scribners, topiarist of the verdant shrubbery of Thomas Wolfe’s imagination. All Americans, you’ll note, adept at bathing themselves in limelight.

But there has never been a famous proofreader. God forbid. If one should ever pretend to an exalted position, treat him with circumspection. He is undoubtedly a charlatan.

I became a proofreader; there was hardly a choice involved. Proofreaders are born, and made, in the back rooms.

As for being a fabulist, nothing was further from my mind. There are more than enough of those. In any event, invention never interested me. I had no wish to add to the great bloated mass of the given; I wished to take something away from it. To be not a contributor, but a subtractor. The impulse was alembical. Possibly even alchemical; over the years, my attention shifted more and more from the perfected product to the parings, the shavings, the dross. In the end, I was only happy when I was up to my elbows in rejectamenta. Mr Crusty was the wrong label; Mr Spare Parts might have suited me. Some people found the idea unpleasant. Merle would not let me rest.

‘You know Aubrey, when I see you sweating over this system of yours, it makes me sad.’

This was a new one. The Records always made her giggle like a schoolgirl.

‘How’s that?’

‘What’s going to become of it? It’s all very well us amusing ourselves with it, but it would be nice if it had some broader application, if more people could somehow … use it.’

For a moment I thought she was going to stoop to that ghastly American ‘utilize’, but ‘use’ was bad enough. Spilkin had said something similar: What are you going to do with it? What is it for? This was rich, coming from the fun-and-games specialists, the hedonists. They were up to something.

‘My Records have a use, thank you very much. I’ve said it a thousand times: it’s a system of exempla. Each of these entries is a stitch in time, my dear.’ Dear was daring.

‘But who’ll be interested in it in this unwieldy form? It’s raw material, really, it’s all odds and sods. You should work it up into something longer, something people could read.’ She was turning some of my clippings over, sizing them up shrewdly, as if imagining ways of tacking them together with a storyline. ‘Paragraphs and things, threaded together. The cobbling would be fun.’

Fun. That more familiar three-letter word warned me what was really behind all this. But a train of thought was already puffing down my one-track mind. I had recognized long before that my exempla needed to be embodied in sentences in order to capture the proofreader’s true function and inculcate his habits of mind. Perhaps I hadn’t gone far enough. If sentences were good, why shouldn’t paragraphs be better? One of the great problems of proofreading was precisely the tension between momentum and inertia. The story was a horse that wished to bolt, and the unwary or unpractised proofreader might find himself thrown and dragged behind its flashing hooves.

But the wicked Bibles and lying dictionaries cautioned me.

‘It’s possible, a story of some kind, with all my corrigenda, my “things to be corrected” woven into it. But where will I put the correct versions, my “things corrected”? Weaving them in too will be an impossible task. It will spoil the story.’

‘Leave them out. Make it more interesting for whoever reads it. That will be the fun of it, as always: inventing order. Not extracting it, mind you, like a lemon-squeezer, but creating it.’

‘Leave them out! What if it falls into the wrong hands? Some story full of contrived errors could wreak havoc among the impressionable.’ A ticklish sensation crept over my skull at the thought: the follicles puckering, trying to make the vanished hair stand on end.

‘Forgive me,’ said Merle, ‘but isn’t this exactly what you spend your life doing – hunting for errors? Why deny others the pleasure?’

‘My corrigenda are accidents of carelessness or ignorance, designated as such, and held up for scrutiny. The perpetrators had no evil intent. What you are proposing would be premeditated. And in such fatal concentrations. It scares me. In any event, I’m a professional.’

‘It won’t be for greenhorns.’ She seized my writing hand, with the pencil still in it, and squeezed it till it hurt. Thankfully it wasn’t my left hand, my thumbing hand as I think of it: the bones of that, and the thumb-bones in particular, have been weakened by a lifetime of thumbing through. ‘It will be for the amateur, in the best sense of the word, for those who are already in the know – or like to think they are. It will preach to the converted and renew their faith. It will be sent to try them. It will be a test of skill for the whole clan of proofreaders – prospective, practising and pensioned-off. It will further the aims of your noble profession.’

And with that, ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ – although I still hadn’t dubbed it that – was born.

*

When I think of those times now (casting some shadows from my mind), they are dappled with daylight sifted through the north-facing windows of the Café Europa. Like gold dust blown in off the dumps. My golden days, caesar salad days, days of whiskey and roses. All in all, a moisturizing season, with the sap rising in dusty veins and the juices in the grey matter trickling.

Four people around a table. A round table. No. 2. We got to know one another a little, and to like one another to the same modest extent. There was not much depth to our association. I acknowledge it freely. I can scarcely recall a conversation now that could not be plumbed with a teaspoon or a swizzlestick, depending on one’s preference. But it was stable, reliable, secure – qualities some of us only came to appreciate fully after we had been overwhelmed by flimsy, crooked things. In my day, solidity was a virtue. Yet all around, the cry goes up for transparency, as if the capacity to be seen through were laudable, as if a house were better made of glass than stone.

The Records grew in leaps and bounds. There were now four people clipping items from newspapers and magazines, jotting down scraps from shop windows or advertising flyers. None of them had my practised eye, of course, but Spilkin came up with some gems. Even Mevrouw Bonsma made some well-meaning contributions from sheet music and knitting patterns – notably that old chestnut, ‘knit one, pearl one’. Soon I was spending half an hour a day cataloguing the new acquisitions.

Every other waking moment was devoted to transforming the System of Records into the Proofreader’s Test.

I am an accomplished composer of letters to the press, as I hope I have demonstrated, and an expert curator of lists, ditto. But the Test was a new departure for me. I came to regard it as in essence fanciful. I had very little experience as a consumer of fancies and none whatsoever as a producer, but that is exactly what seemed to be required. Although my ‘raw material’, as Merle encouraged me to think of it – the phrase never ceased to remind me of meat – had all been culled from published, or at the least, public sources, I was now required to place the elements into entirely new and undeniably imaginary relationships with one another. Imaginary relationships … I was like a man who, never having held a needle between his fingers, is given some mismatched offcuts, a fistful of gauds and ribbons, a few skeins of thread, and commanded to make himself a suit of clothes.

I took my cue from Merle, laying sentences side by side, building up paragraphs incrementally, nudging those into groups or ‘fascicles’, as I called them, allowing the Test to shape itself anyhow. I found that this patchworking obliged me to begin inventing as well. When a sentence wasn’t quite the right shape, I had to lop off a bit here or add on a bit there, cutting my cloth to suit the pattern − not my pattern, but its own. This was fancy, pure and simple, and so antithetical to my usual way of working, which consists of a precise and considered re-establishment of the disturbed order, that I frequently lost my nerve and wished to throw the whole project over. I forged myself a golden rule: the corrigenda themselves, the tesserae that formed the substance of the Test, could not be invented. The plaster (and I did seem to require quite a bit of it) mattered less. I took comfort in the thought that the laws that governed my seemingly random activities were bound to become apparent as I went along. In other words, I trusted that this detour through the thickets of invention would bring me back, wiser and happier, to the manicured lawns of the given.

For quite some time now, I have been inclined, looking back, to think that this is exactly what happened. But just lately, new doubts have beset me. Perhaps I shall never walk in that garden again?

Merle became my inspiration. I tried out sentences on her occasionally, as they took shape, but I always baulked at a paragraph. And naturally the finished material was kept from the others. Mevrouw Bonsma was relieved, I think. Spilkin, on the other hand, was always looking over my shoulder and winking so deliberately you’d have thought he was trying to demonstrate the musculature of the eye. It got to the point where I had to carry my confidential papers with me to the Gentlemen’s room to answer the call of nature.

As the months passed, the Test’s purpose became clearer to me, even if the laws of its composition did not. I began to see it as the centrepiece of an event, a championship if you like. When the Test was finished, and I had no inkling when that might be, it would be administered. There would be entrants, and they would pay a fee, and the one with the best results would receive a prize. A dictionary might be apt; say the seventh edition of the Concise – something newly revised would appeal to the youngsters – paid for out of the entry monies. I would have to decide on the winner myself. Merle’s notion that the Test be allowed to enter the world without correction was indefensible. I would prepare a corrected version, and hold it back until such time as the Test had been administered, so that everyone might have the ‘fun’ that meant so much to them. But then the corrected version would be made available too, as an antidote and an objective corroboration of my adjudication. If the inaugural event had to be delayed, well, so be it. It was essential, at any rate, that I myself adjudicate, that I retain control at least in the beginning. Later on, should the event become too popular for one person to manage, I might consider employing an administrator. Start small, I told myself. But how small was that? How many people would be interested in entering a proofreading competition? It would depend, among other things, on how well it was publicized. Would one advertise in the papers? What if people responded in ‘droves’, as the drudges put it? Who would foot the bill for a venue and for duplicating copies of the Test itself? Then again, if the entry fees were fixed at the right level, the whole undertaking might become profitable and eke out my pension. While these thoughts went round in my head, the Test continued to grow, and with it, my grand plans for the inaugural competition. Think big, I told myself. Instead of a dozen boozy subeditors cooped up in the ping-pong room at the Hillbrow Recreation Centre, why not the cream of the publishing world, possibly a few international figures – hardly celebrities, but prominent people, a Hugh Blythorne, a Dr Kate Babcock (if she was still with us) – all comfortably settled in the Selborne Hall? Competing not for a used copy of Peter Mark Roget’s Thesaurus, but for the Oxford English Dictionary in twenty volumes. The Proofreader of the Year Competition. The Aubrey Tearle Proofreader of the Year Competition. The First Annual etcetera.

I wrote in turn, and at mounting expense, to the Publishers’ Association, the larger publishing houses, the Printers’ Association, the larger printing houses, the smaller publishers and printers, the chains of bookshops, my former employers at Posts and Telecommunications, setting out the details of my project and requesting a meeting to discuss sponsorship. Disgracefully, I had not a single reply. Then I sent an abridged version of my letter to the Star.

17 May 1988

Dear Sir,

The late edition of your newspaper of 10 May asks: ‘How real is the threat of Muslin fundamentalism?’ In my view, it threatens the very fabric of society.

I am a retired proofreader with forty years’ practical experience involving a wide range of publications, notably telephone directories. In the course of my career, I came to believe that a standardized Test of proofreading ability would go a long way towards ensuring that qualified personnel are employed and standards maintained in this all-important but undervalued department.

I have devoted the years of my retirement to devising such a Test, drawing on Records kept during a lifetime of work, and this undertaking is now nearing completion. Besides its obvious value as a means of grading our own abilities, the Test may have wider applications in commerce and entertainment, which would serve to publicize the profession and draw young school-leavers into its ranks.

I am approaching your newspaper first because you fly the blue peter of the profession from your masthead, so to speak, in the Greater Johannesburg area. (Many of my letters, including several on orthographical subjects, have been published in your columns, and so we are not strangers to one another.) I would be happy to discuss the ways in which you might become involved in my venture at your convenience. A representative extract from the Test, an ‘appetizer’, will be forwarded on request.

Yours faithfully, etcetera

Breaking with tradition, I let Merle and Spilkin read the letter before I mailed it. Spilkin had me change ‘practical’ to ‘hands-on’, ‘our own’ to ‘in-house’ and ‘first’ to ‘up-front’. He said this prepositional largesse would show that I was clued up on current usage. Merle had me change ‘at your convenience’ to ‘as soon as possible’ – ‘Or they’ll think you want to meet them in the lavatory.’ I made the changes against my better judgement, which is why I present the original here, without meaning to suggest that it would have provoked a more satisfactory response than the tardy one I duly received.

10 June 1988

Dear Mr Tearl,

Thank you for your letter of the 17th inst.

I regret to inforn you that we do not have vacancies for subs at this moment in time. However, we have placed your letter on file and you will be notified if a position opens up in the near future.

Computer literacy and a familiarity with Quark will be a big plus factor.

Yours faithfully,
Mr J.B. de Beer
(Personnel Manager)

Even as it confirmed my worst fears about declining standards, this dismissive missive brought me down to earth. I was a man of sober habits, and the first draughts of invention had gone straight to my head.

On Spilkin’s advice I turned, somewhat chastened, to Mrs Mavrokordatos. She immediately placed her establishment at my disposal for the inaugural championship. I had never intended to broach the question of sponsorship or exploit the special privileges I enjoyed as a regular customer, but to my delight she herself proposed a finger supper, for organizers and competitors, a simple spread that took my own conservative tastes into account: cubes of sweetmilk cheese on Salty Cracks, sandwiches in triangles, hard-boiled eggs. I was grateful. But I also made the point that I had become more adventurous in my eating habits over time. With Merle’s encouragement, my public-service proofreading had evolved into a field study of national cuisines, and I no longer thought of Mrs Mavrokordatos’s menu as a dyspeptic hotchpotch. I was dipping into it myself occasionally. A couple of dolmades and other delicacies, served up with a pinch of Attic salt, would therefore not go amiss at our event. Delighted in turn.

‘Mavrokordatos’ was singularly apt: she had a heart the size of a barn. (I must say I’m pleased she wasn’t a Mavrokephalos, of whom there are several in the Book, chiefly in the Emmarentia area.)

The name for my championship came to me soon after: ‘The Proofreader’s Derby.’ I liked the connotations: laurels contested fiercely in a sporting spirit and a homely setting.

*

I acquired the trophy – and I’m not ashamed to admit it – at Bernstein’s Second Time Lucky. Electroplated nickel silver, black with tarnish, and ‘Bernie’ gave it to me for a song, or I should not have managed. It was a magnificent specimen, a loving cup, all of three feet tall from the scuffed green baize on the bottom of the Bakelite drum to the slim fingertip of the figurine on the lid, a little woman en pointe, with one arm trailing behind her like a lame wing and the other gesturing heavenwards. More suited perhaps to holding the diaphanous shell of a reading-lamp, or to perching on the radiator of a vintage car, like a goddess on the entablature of a Roman temple, than to turning somersaults and doing backflips. The balancing-beam at a stretch. For she was a gymnast of the old school and suitably, if featurelessly, naked.

Two tins of Brasso (the Silvo isn’t nearly as good) later, I bore the trophy to the Café in a laundry bag. Caused quite a stir when I set it up on the table. ‘Ladies and gentlemen: the floating trophy for “The Proofreader’s Derby”.’

‘Breathtaking,’ said Spilkin. I had set the trophy down so that the engraving on the bowl was facing Merle, but he had an unerring eye for what he wasn’t supposed to see, as if years of gazing through optical instruments had taught him to see round corners. He hooked a little finger into one of the handles and turned the cup towards him. ‘Transvaal Gymnastics Union. Senior Ladies – Overall Champion.’

‘Bernie says it could be ground off. But it would cost more than the trophy’s worth.’

‘Keep it. It adds character. You can always put “National Proofreading Champion” or whatever on the other side. “Donated by Aubrey Tearle.”’

‘That’s what I thought. More or less.’ There was the link with lexical gymnastics too, but not everyone would see that.

‘What’s this?’ Spilkin had spotted the row of little holes at regular intervals around the drum. It had been encircled by thumbnail shields of silver engraved with the names of the winners, but I had clipped off the rivets with a pair of pliers the night before. The shields, still filigreed with oxide, were in a Gee’s Linctus tin in my pocket and now I tipped them out on the table top.

Lily, Rose, Myrtle. How had names so fragrant become so stale? Was it because girls were no longer named after flowers but chemical compounds, vitamins, large muscle groups?

Spilkin spread them out, and then chose one and drew it towards him with a godlike forefinger. ‘Daphne Willis ~ 1928.’ Whether it was that the gesture awakened in the bones of his hands some memory of all the games that had been played at this table, or that the shields spread out on the inlaid chequerboard were like tokens in a board game, or that the backgammon draughtsmen clicking on a neighbouring table sounded a familiar rhythm, he sensed an opportunity for play. ‘Willis. A learner among wilis.’

‘Which Willie refers?’ Mevrouw Bonsma asked, deflating into a chair.

‘Villi, Mevrouw. The ghosts of girls abandoned by their lovers.’

‘Basta! Thank you, Tearle.’ She hummed an air from Puccini and performed a pas seul with two sturdy fingers.

Spilkin stirred the shields thoughtfully, unintentionally upstaging Mevrouw Bonsma. ‘You try one, Merle.’

‘You’re good with names,’ I put in.

‘What a lovely name. Almost an echo.’

‘That’s close.’ I looked over her shoulder. ‘She has left in a confusing echo. Five letters.’

‘Chloe,’ said Spilkin like a shot.

‘Chloe Mulrooney, to be precise, 1933.’

‘Biscuits?’

‘Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a Dymphna.’ Merle might have been turning over her own fragile girlhood in her fingers.

Erica. I care for her. Easy as pie.

‘My turn.’

‘Aubrey! What’s wrong with your finger?’

‘Brasso.’ It was black to the second joint. ‘I was up half the night cleaning this thing.’

‘Don’t go native on us, Tearle.’

‘You can’t walk around like that. People will think … I’m not sure what they’ll think.’

‘They’ll think he’s got a finger in the wrong pie,’ said Spilkin. ‘Mulrooney. Or mulberry.’

Macaroony. Macaroni. Merle was unpacking her handbag. Spilkin raked the shields over to his side of the table as if he had won them fair and square. A pair of bluntnosed scissors, made for the nursery. A season ticket for the bus. Where did she go by bus? She had a daughter in the northern suburbs somewhere, Illovo or thereabouts, and grandchildren she sometimes babysat. Jason (the leader of the Argonauts) and Kerry (a county in the Republic of Ireland). A packet of Romany Creams. A book of horoscopes. A cardboard box full of Johnson and Johnson earbuds: little blue and white dumb-bells. Tissues. And now finally what she was looking for: a bottle of acetone. She tipped some of it onto a pad of tissue paper and dabbed at my finger. It made no difference whatsoever. But it was so long since anyone had touched me tenderly that it brought a lump to my throat. What the rhinopharyngealists might call a tracheal clonus.

At Merle’s suggestion, Mrs Mavrokordatos put the trophy on a shelf behind the counter, in pride of place above the coffee cups, where it was to remain in anticipation of the joyous day when I would present it to the first deserving winner. It was a shame I wouldn’t be able to compete myself, but there seemed to be no way around it.

*

In its own way, governed by its own laws, ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ kept growing. Although I spent a good part of each day at home and each evening at the Europa working on it, I was no nearer finishing. As fast as I eliminated entries from the System of Records, new ones took their place. Standards were slipping. Where once one had been obliged to scour the world minutely for eligible corrigenda, now every printed surface was flyblown with them. My research assistants heaped fuel on the fire.

On top of all this, as I left the Café one night, I carelessly let fall from my file a page containing the following fascicle:

In the small hours of that bitter morning, Fluxman stood sleepless at the window of his penhouse, looking down on Alibia. Tutivillus Heights was the city’s only skyscarper – in Alibia, the top of a six-story block will brush the brow of heaven – and it made him feel immensely alert and far-seeing, and utterly detached from the earth. His eyes wandered from rooftop to rooftop, from street to street. He felt it. The building was swaying, a motion so gentle it would have escaped the notice of all but the most perceptive observer. It was not soothing at all; it filled him with foreboding. Then he recalled who he was and what he stood for. He erased his frowning mistgivings from the glass before him with an eraser shaped like an egg, but they came back again and again.

Eveready, it emerged afterwards, retrieved the page from under a table and passed it on to Spilkin, who thus had the good fortune of becoming the first person to lay eyes on a sustained passage of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ (even Merle had tasted no more than a line or two). Out of context, it was not at its best; I dare say it was like a scrap of canvas hacked from the frame with a pocket knife – and I give it here precisely to demonstrate that fact. But Spilkin seemed to understand perfectly. The following evening, I found the missing page on a plate by my chair, spindled and clasped by a serviette ring, along with a note in Spilkin’s sharply focused hand.

My dear Tearle,

What a luck to enter the world of your imagination at last, even if it was through the back door, where there is no sign to reserve the right of admission. The whole thing breathes and sweats and so on. You should be in no great hurry to finish: the longer you spend on it the better, I think. It was very exciting looking for ‘corrigenda’. You’ll make a proofreader of me yet. You might even start a craze. I found

Line 2: ‘penhouse’ for penthouse

Line 3: ‘skyscarper’ for skyscraper

Line 10: ‘mistgivings’ for misgivings

You must let me know how I faired.

Sincerely,

Spilkin

I was disappointed to see that he’d missed ‘story’ for storey. But he hadn’t done too badly.

Then that ‘faired’ grabbed my attention. Automatically, my mind performed a flawless backflip from Spilkin to spillikin – one of the wooden or ivory slips thrown in a heap in the game of spillikins to be removed each without disturbing the rest – and then reeled off-balance into spell-I-can, into spell-I-can’t. I’d expected more of him.

Or was he having me on?

*

‘No great hurry’ … hasty advice on Spilkin’s part, hastily accepted on mine. Five years had slipped by since then, and I was still trying to finish ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’. Why did Empty Wessels have to start this Goodbye Bash business and go raking up the past? There was so much of it too, a mountain of bygones. And the bit that was mine, the bit I had to show was so paltry, a scant barrowload. Has my whole life come down to a pile of papers, I asked myself, and those riddled with corrigenda? Would I have to say, looking back, not ‘It was all one big mistake,’ but ‘It was an endless succession of little mistakes’? More than I care to remember, let alone to correct. There might be some saving grace in a great mistake, boldly made – but in an unbroken line of piffling errors?

I was losing faith, or had already lost it. God knows, the past few years have given me cause.

The TO LET signs had gone up in the windows of the Café Europa. The Bash loomed. I had promised myself that I would finish ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ before then, by hook or by crook; that when the doors finally closed on the Café Europa, I would also close the book on this chapter of my life. I might even make something of the occasion, a little ceremony, a brief speech. But now I felt like taking my papers – files full of clippings, boxes of index cards, notebooks, typescripts of fascicles, the lot – and throwing them over the fence into the open plot in Prospect Road, scattering them among the green clumps of weeds where the body had lain that Sunday morning, obscured by the news, in the shadow of the sign that said No Dumping – By Order. Dumping was the done thing, to judge by the piles of rubbish already left there, another inexplicable mania. Perhaps the Queen of Sheba or one of her consorts, whose rotten kingdom this was, would find my disjecta membra useful to kindle fire when they cooked their tripe and tubers, to cover themselves at night when they slept like the dead, to wipe their illiterate backsides when they did their business.

Filled with despair, I packed every last scrap of paper connected with ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ into two enormous grey-paper shopping-bags with handles of gallows hemp and the ignominious stars and stripes all over them – two of the matching set of three that was Moçes’ unexpected gift to me the Christmas before – and went out into the street. I could hardly carry the blinking things. The nightwatchman Gideon offered to lend me a hand, and I had to give him the abridged version of my talk on his responsibilities, which were to open and shut the door for the tenants of Lenmar Mansions and to guard their fixed and moveable assets, indeed to frustrate the relentless efforts of criminals to transform the one kind into the other. What was fixed anyway? There were people, deprived creatures without garages, who resorted to chaining their cars to trees at night to secure them against car thieves. But that faith in growing, rooted things was misplaced: there were tree thieves as well, preying on the municipal flora. As fast as the Parks Department planted trees and shrubs on traffic islands and freeway embankments, thieves dug them up and carried them off, either to replant them in their own gardens or to resell them. Another species of thief stole manhole covers and sold them to scrap-metal dealers. Yet others specialized in bus-stop benches and kerbstones, street signs and fences, water pipes and electricity cables, milestones and monumental masonry. Material for building shacks. Entire houses had been stolen by these cannibals, even schools and factories.

People stole supermarket trolleys too, for their own intrinsic worth, or to transport their stolen goods in. And one of these trolleys was lying abandoned on the corner of O’Reilly and Fife. I had dragged the shopping-bags this far, but my bad elbow was beginning to act up. I dumped the bags in the trolley and righted it.

As I progressed along O’Reilly Road, pushing the trolley containing what Spilkin – so long ago now – had encouraged me to think of as my life’s work, I caught my breath and came to a more sober assessment of my situation: I, Aubrey Tearle, Proofreader Emeritus, was walking through the streets in broad daylight, in command of a stolen supermarket trolley. What was happening to me? What would become of me? If anyone enquired after the trolley’s provenance, I would say I was simply returning it to its lawful owners, the Checkers Corporation, the Okay Bazaars, Pick and Pay. The performance of my civic duty. That purpose had been at the back of my mind all along, and now took its proper place at the front. As for the trolley’s contents, culled from a thousand public fora but now indisputably private property … My precious papers! I had rushed out with the express intention of dumping them, but that was unthinkable. If someone tried to take them from me, I would defend them with my life. How horribly likely it was that I would be waylaid. It was years since I had ventured out with anything more substantial than the Pocket and a notebook. I should turn back. But that would make it harder to explain the trolley, if needs be. I must go on. And what if it rained? Then I would amount to nothing more than soggy paper, slimy and illegibly grey. I would boil down to: papier mâché. Moulded paper pulp made into solid objects. From the French for chewed paper. Chewed paper! Beset by ferocious doubts, by snaggle-toothed second and third thoughts, I pressed on into the concrete jungle.

Dumbo was on duty, chained in habitual servitude to a parking meter. Another misplaced source of security. I had seen meters beheaded, expiring in the gutters, or on kerbs spattered with five-cent pieces. Surprise, surprise: the missing ear was back. I stopped to examine the surgery. Someone had done a neat job with the welding torch – but the effect was odd … unhinged … untoward. Then it struck me why: the ear was not just back – it was back to front! Nincompoops. From the Latin non compos mentis, ‘no mental compost’ (Wessels). I was reminded of Noodler in Peter Pan. Naming all the pirates was Merle’s game. Captain Jas Hook, Bill Jukes, Skylights, Smee, I forget the others. My favourite was Gentleman Starkey – once an usher in a school. And hers was Noodler, whose hands were fixed on backwards. The only truly tragic figure in pantomime, she said.

Someone had better tell them. I steered my trolley into the shop, but a figure as broad as a nightclub bouncer rose to block my passage. It was Joaquim, he who had pressed the hooch upon me when I had brought back the ear. Rosa peered anxiously over his shoulder, mustachios aquiver. I addressed myself to her, but he flapped his hands in my face, as if to dispel an odour. What would they call it? … a ‘pong’. These people. I had to shout to be heard.

‘Wad dozy wunt, Quim?’ she asked. ‘Wad? Wad?’

Quim (noun, coarse slang) said, enunciated I should say, as if translating my words into an infinitely superior foreign tongue, ‘He sigh his yeah is beck tew frount.’

I could have blown my top, my lobes were liquefying, a magma of vitriol and vituperation boiled out of my spinal column, pressed up against my crusty dome – but I caught sight of myself in a mirrored pillar, like an Aborigine scribbled all over with Vat 69 and Castle Dumpies, R8.99 per dozen, in shoewhite on grey skin. I had espied myself there before, from time to time, but never in such a state of extremity. My hair was standing to attention in clumps, ragtag bands of desperate bristles whose company had been routed. My shirt was hanging out, and one tail of it was damp. My staring eyes, replete with scrutinizing, were afloat in my bifocals like melted cubes in the icy bottoms of shot-glasses. And then the trolley … I was stooped over it like a geriatric in a walking frame. I looked like a tramp – worse, like a hobo, one of the bag ladies and gentlemen, the collectors of old iron and empties, the perpetual window-shoppers, pushing their stolen trolleys through the streets as if the city were no more than a vast parking lot for supermarkets. These scavengers had turned the trolley into a symbol of want rather than plenty. Had I become one of them? I barely recognized myself.

But the light of recognition was dawning in Mrs Da Silva’s calculating eyes. Mention of the ear had jogged her memory. Before she could foist another bottle of Old Brown Ruin on me, I retreated. Down the length of Kotze Street, up and down kerbs at five robots, never mind the disabled, and not a soul would meet my eye.

The security guard at the Okay Bazaars, that merely satisfactory retailer, took his employer’s property into grateful, white-gloved hands: the gloves were a relic of the days of bomb threats, when they were meant to make more palatable the notion of a stranger’s hands upon one’s person. Frisking, they called it, as if there was pleasure to be had in being fondled by ‘Mickey’ Mouse paws, as if it were fun – and it probably was for some, it takes all kinds, and more’s the pity: a limited range of tried-and-tested kinds would simplify things immensely. It is with the wider world as it is with washing powders. I’d written a perspicuous letter or two on that very subject, carbon copies of which were adding their eloquent ounces to the shopping-bags as I lugged them across the road and up the escalator. An idolmonger from north of the border, one of the precursors of that entire race of Queequegs with which our pavements are now thronged, offered to lend a hand, but I wasn’t born yesterday and made shift.

My entrance created quite a stir. Tony and a crony actually forsook a poker game to establish what was in the bags. Paperwork, I said. That is all we know, and all we need to know.

The trek across town had upset me. I was a bundle of nerves, to tell the truth. What had possessed me? As much to celebrate having come through the streets unscathed as to settle my stomach, I ordered a whiskey, washed down one of my Valia, and fell to. Had to make the best of a Wessels-free environment. And despite the shaky start to the day, I made steady progress: by lunchtime I had ten fascicles of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ shipshape. In the bag, which is to say, out of the bag and in the book. A Strammer Max for lunch, in memoriam, the last surviving item of the original menu, from the heyday of Mrs Mavrokordatos. Strammer Max: a stout Bavarian ploughman. One of Moçes’ many cousins, recently appointed as Chief Cook and Bottlequaffer, didn’t make too bad a hash of it, either. The afternoon held out the promise of another ten fascicles.

But it was not to be.

I was still mopping up the cooking juices in the continental manner when Errol burst in with a duffel bag slung over one shoulder and a bulky object wrapped in an army greatcoat in his arms. A corpse, was my first startled thought. And why not? Some poor pedestrian to be disposed of, some victim of senseless violence gone stiff as a board. The empty arms of the coat waved for help, and an ashtray went flying as Errol hurried across the room. Then, as he passed through the archway into the pool room, one end of the package struck the wall with a clang. Must be stolen property after all, I thought, a parking meter or a lamp standard. That Tone should allow these petty criminals to fence their booty under his roof … it was unconscionable.

(I’d taken a good look at the Prospect Road corpse through my opera glasses: black male, fortyish, fifteen stone. But the next day the Star said it was a white man, burnt to a char.)

Errol’s buddies had been loafing in the shadows all morning in a state of inebriation, but his arrival was greeted by a lively uproar. Half the customers, the waiters, even Tone himself pressed through the archway to gape. So much raucous laughter and obscene banter ensued that there was simply no going on with my work.

I scrutinized and took stock. Errol and Floyd were down on the floor behind the pool tables, where the shadows were thickest, writhing in a tangle of arms and legs. The greatcoat sprawled in a pathetic attitude across the green baize, empty and abject, light blazing down on it, and the thought that it must belong to some human being the boys were now trying to overpower or violate forced its way back into my mind. Dim faces studded with shiny teeth came and went in the glare and gloom like portraits on rocking walls. Demonic laughter. I advanced to intervene. But then Floyd scampered clear and vanished, as if through a trapdoor, and Errol stood up alone behind the central table. He raised one end of the object they had been wrestling over – my relief that it was an object after all was short-lived – and rested it against his crotch. The end of a cylinder of some kind, perhaps a broken pipe … a traffic light? Surely not! He bent over and wrapped both his arms around the pipe. Then he hauled it up, swivelling his hips as he did so, and slowly, in obscene mimicry of a gigantic male member, tumescent, from the Latin tumere, swell, the Hillbrow Tower rose into the light.

My cry of protest was drowned out by drunken hooting and gleeful applause. Thrusting, lurching from step to step, Errol advanced upon Raylene, who fled shrieking in make-believe terror to the other side of the room. He turned his attention to the new girl, the youngster who still looked like a child to me, never mind the combat boots. She was too awestruck to do anything but gaze at him. He staggered towards her, phallus towering. Would no one defend her honour?

‘Where did you get that?’ My voice was indignant and authoritative. I knew perfectly well where he’d ‘found’ it: recognized it at once.

‘In his pants!’

‘It followed him home.’

‘It’s stolen property. Stolen from decent people with charity in their hearts. Not to mention your poor countrymen afflicted with tuberculosis. I’ve a good mind to call the police.’

Titters and jeers. Let them, I thought, as Errol butted the air with the broken tower. ‘You have no sense of responsibility. In fact, you have an overdeveloped sense of irresponsibility. There’s a destructive streak in you. Vandals, that’s what you are, it’s the sack of Rome all over again.’

‘A sack of what?’

‘Not that kind of sack, you blockhead, it’s from the …’ And then the derivation slipped unaccountably from my mind. The drama of it! Silence had fallen. A circle of dim faces, gazing now at me, now at the hooligan with the tower jutting from his loins. I became aware of the dictionary clasped in my right hand: I must have taken it up intuitively, like a sword. By a stroke of good fortune it was not my precious Pocket, but the eighth edition of the Concise, published in 1990, carried to the Café that morning in one of the shopping-bags. An altogether weightier tome, somewhat too replete with Yankee-Doodlisms for its own good. What a shame I hadn’t brought along the Shorter, which I could still heft like a man half my age on a good day. All the same, I must have looked like a prophet in a den of iniquity. Like Moses – the original, with the serpent rather than the sickle in his bosom – come down off the mountain, clutching his tablets. I opened the dictionary. Verses of lemmata whirled in a sortilege of sorts – rub ~ rudder ~ ruddle ~ rule … ruler ~ run ~ run ~ runcinate – and as it sometimes happens, once in a thousand consultations, it fell open at the very page I sought – saccharin ~ sacring. Perhaps in this heightened atmosphere my fingers had been guided by some extrasensory urgency, as my eyes now were, to sack². (Of victorious army or its commander) plunder, give over to plunder (a captured town etc.). (Of burglar etc.) carry off valuable contents of. From the French in the phrase mettre à sac, put to sack. From the Italian sacco sack¹. My eye performed a backward roll to sack¹: large usually oblong bag for storing and conveying goods, usually open at one end and made of coarse flax or hemp. A jog would bring me to hessian, strong coarse cloth of hemp or jute, of Hesse in Germany. Foreign geography: Venetian blinds. Angostura bitters. Gin. But this was neither the time nor the place for the finer points. I focused again. Put to the sack: put in the sack. It was that literal. I opened my mouth to speak into the silence – and who knows what the effects would have been? These were surely moments in which lives might have been changed. But just then Wessels burst in, hopping on his good foot and waving his crutch, and with a swashbuckling ‘Bonsai!’, brought the crutch crashing down on the tower. Errol swung away, the end of the tower (where the revolving nightclub used to be) smashed into the neon tubes of the overhead light, and the room went dark in a shower of breaking glass.

In the rush for the exit that followed, I was knocked sideways, and heaven only knows what injuries I might have sustained had not Moçes, of all people, caught me up in his arms, as he had seen it done on television, practically shielding me with his own body, and marshalled me to safety. It was just as well I was wearing a chain on my glasses. When I found myself at my table again, I felt like some storm-tossed craft back at its moorings.

In a while, a semblance of order was restored. Tony marched around with his hands on his hips, detailing the costs of fluorescent tubes and the resurfacing of pool tables, while Moçes was set to dabbing up the splinters with cotton wool dipped in cane spirits (a home remedy from Tony’s mother). Wessels sat down and stuck his grog blossom in my papers: ‘What you liaising there?’ I gave him what for. Who did he think he was, undermining my authority in front of these hooligans, and then carrying on as if nothing had happened? Sulkily, he produced the Mr Fatso/Mnr Vetsak pad and began to go through his invitation list, muttering names under his breath and ticking them off extravagantly.

‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ could not hold my attention. My eyes kept wandering to Alibia, and I saw myself there, in a houndstooth overcoat, bending my steps to a fogbound wynd. My coat was the very opposite of Errol’s, which looked as if it was made of flea-bitten underfelt, and gave you the urge to smother him under the nearest carpet. The heels of my brogues resounded like hammerblows on the cobbles, my breath puffed out in chubby bales of mist, my scarf waved behind me on an icy breeze, as if borne up by a cleverly concealed armature. In an even narrower close, I was drawn to a lighted window. Tucking a coat-cuff into my palm I wiped a hole in the rimed glass and peered through. I looked in on the Café Europa. At myself, in an inglenook, raising a toby jug brimming with porter to drink some congenial stranger’s health. And in a corner, sipping shrub: Merle.

Wessels interrupted this reverie to draw to my attention an article in the Star. Vandals strike at Miniland. As if I didn’t know. ‘For the second time in three months, vandals’ – my word exactly – ‘went on the rampage at Santarama Miniland, the miniature village that raises funds to fight the spread of TB, hurling entire buildings into the harbour and turning the Carlton Centre upside down.’

These days, the newspapers contained so little one might believe in. But here was an indisputable fact. The city belonged to these Goliaths now, the country belonged to them. I saw them stretched out on the runways at Jan Smuts, with their heads propped on the terminal buildings, taking a smoke break, going slow. Flagpoles and street lights were no more than toothpicks in their fists, which they were always raising. I saw them marching down into the Big Hole of Kimberley, with the cables of the bucket winches tangled about their ankles, crunching underfoot the little miners who had flocked to build the new South Africa. I saw them striding up to the Union Buildings, two terraces at a time, in their big running shoes with the tongues hanging out. Shout! said their T-shirts. No! said their trousers. Bang! Bang! Action! Noise!

That useless letters editor at the Star had still not seen fit to publish my letter of 7 December, concerning my close shave with an Atlas Bakery van.

Later that afternoon, Errol and Floyd slunk out with their booty. Floyd, the stouter of the two, had the tower under his arm, swathed in the greatcoat again. I couldn’t help thinking of resurrection men, the descendants of those infamous Williams, Burke and Hare, stalking my city in the wall, and I held my peace. But Errol in passing patted his duffel bag with his long fingers and said: ‘The sack of Johannesburg.’ One of his sleepy, soft-lidded eyes closed and opened in a parody of a wink. What Spilkin would have called a nictitation. What does he have in there? The Botanical Gardens? The Supreme Court? The War Memorial? Zoo Lake? Then again, why should it be landmarks he’s carrying off? Why not a jumble of street corners and parking garages – let’s say the north-east corner of Tudhope Avenue and Barnato Street in Berea, or the south-west corner of Rissik and Bree – paving-stones and bus-stop benches – say the bus stop in Louis Botha, opposite the Victory Theatre in Orange Grove, where you might wait all day for a smoke-filled double-decker to take you to the city – trees – the avenue of oaks in King George Street on the western edge of Joubert Park – why not municipal swimming pools, parks, skylines, lobbies, doorways, vistas – say the view from the gardens of the Civic Centre, from the first bench to the right of the path that slopes down to Loveday Street, looking along Jorissen into the sunset …

After a while, I turned my attention to the sack of Tearle, the sacks. I couldn’t possibly drag them through the streets again. I had Moçes summon me a taxi, one of Rose’s, a compulsory treat. Moçes carried my bags down for me – a ‘madala’, he said, shouldn’t have to stoop – and I felt moved to give him a small gratuity. He offered to wait with me at the kerbside, until the taxi came, to shoo away the artless dodgers who had gathered like mosquitoes, but I didn’t think it was necessary.

I shall lift up mine eyes. At least the Hillbrow Tower was still there, the real thing I mean, ugly as it is. It was a shame one couldn’t go up there any more. Dinner dancing, and so on. Cheek to cheek, with the world at one’s feet. Or if not the world, at least the most densely populated residential area in the southern hemisphere. And there was Wessels, leaning on the Eiffels of the balcony railing and smoking a Peter Stuyvesant, moored, I should say, like a blimp in a cloud of blue smoke above that echoing Parisian scene, looking down on me, with me at his feet. I fancied I could see his crooked teeth glinting. That I should have ended up with Empty Wessels, whom I had never even liked. It was a bitter irony. How could I have foreseen such an outcome, in the gold-flecked afternoons of my past, how imagined that I would become a stranger in my home away from home, beset on all sides by change and dissolution? Or imagined: a pink elephant with its ear on backwards standing on a street corner, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, a dead body lying in an empty plot on a Sunday morning, burnt beyond recognition, a man of advanced years bearing what is left of his life in two paper shopping-bags. Then, as now, the television was full of experts, little people standing on tiptoe, touting their ‘scenarios’ of the future. As if tomorrow could be scripted. As if one might have expected to see the hammer and sickle trampled underfoot on Red Square and hoisted on the steps of the Union Buildings. The inconceivable times of our lives!

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

*

Bogey came to us in a cement-grey suit of communistic cut. It was single-breasted and ill-proportioned for his squat frame: too broad in the shoulder, too wide in the lapel, too long in the drop. The jacket pockets were shaped like shovels and the legs of the trousers were thick and round as traffic bollards. What material it was made of I couldn’t say, something Victorian, approaching sackcloth. A black patent-leather hat. In this case, the material was plain, but the shape was puzzling. Not enough altitude to be alpine. More like a trilby that had had the spirit knocked out of it.

‘Trilby O’Ferrall,’ Merle said in answer to my question. ‘Miss.’

‘Slobodan Boguslavić,’ said the concrete-clad one underneath the hat, conjuring a fleshy hand from the end of his sleeve. He sounded as if his mouth was full of olives. ‘Dan for short.’

‘Why not Slob?’ said Spilkin, shaking the hand.

‘Or Zog,’ I put in nimbly. ‘There’s a name I always fancied.’

‘Thank you very much,’ said Bogey. And with that, he more or less exhausted his conversational English. We discovered later that his words of introduction had been taught to him by a Swissair hostess on the flight from Zürich.

After he had shaken hands with Merle and me, and pressed his lips to Mevrouw Bonsma’s knuckles, with an elaborate pantomime of applause and gestures towards the piano, he reached for a chair at an adjoining table and drew it up between Spilkin and Mevrouw Bonsma. There was a moment of resistance, in which they both held their positions, while the arm of Bogey’s chair nudged insistently against Spilkin’s. I glowered at him, and saw nothing but the crown of his hat, deeply creased and puckered like a toothless mouth. It reminded me of a whelp mumbling for the teat. More and more in those days, as ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ continued to disturb my mental equilibrium, I was seeing things, thinking oddities, making morbid associations that would once have seemed quite mad to me. Nudge, nudge. Then Mevrouw Bonsma moved anticlockwise and bumped into me, and Spilkin moved clockwise and bumped into Merle, and then Merle and I, like elements in a physics experiment, with no option despite our specific gravity but to transmit the momentum, both moved and bumped into one another, and moved back and bumped into the others, and so on, until in this convulsive fashion, clutching our cushions to our backsides, moving furniture and fundament together, the five of us finally came to rest with equal spaces between our chairs.

‘There,’ said Spilkin, ‘order has been restored.’

Choosing to ignore the fact, of which he must have been keenly aware, that what had been restored was an entirely different order. In a minute of unseemly shuffling and pardon-begging, a quaternion of equals had been transformed irrevocably into a circle. What was it Spilkin had said about the pentagon? How I regretted then my failure to insist upon a wiser seating arrangement at the outset. A square table, at which each person had a side, clearly demarcated, would have exposed how undesirable this shapeless new arrangement was. Might have deterred it altogether. But a round table was so accommodating, made it seem so matter-of-course. A stranger walking into the Café at that moment might have thought that the five of us had been sitting there all our lives.

When he had made himself comfortable, Bogey unbuttoned the jacket of his suit, revealing a comical pot belly and a candy-striped shirt with an immense collar. He transferred his hat from his head to his left knee. His hair was thickly pomaded and swept back from the forehead; an indentation like a plimsoll line encircled his head where the hat had pressed. The extraordinary thing about the pomade, from an etymological point of view, was that it smelt of apples. I caught a whiff and it turned my stomach. As for the skull, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach would have loved it. For the moment, he produced his passport and showed us the syllables of his name, thickly sliced, like one of the sausages I had recently discovered at the Wurstbude in the course of researching the cuisines of the world.

The rest of the evening was a sequence of absurd charades about the newcomer and his history, with a Magyar soundtrack courtesy of Mevrouw Bonsma. Istanbul was Constantinople, now it’s Istanbul … Trust Merle to proffer an atlas, on which he was able to point out his island of origin in the Adriatic, a place devoid of vowels, and then to describe in a dotted line of greasy fingerprints left floating in his wake like oil slicks on the surface of the paper, his passage to our shores, while Spilkin said, ‘Ja, ja,’ as if he had confessed to being a German. Bogey seemed extraordinarily interested in the keys to the maps, the tuffets for prairies, the puffs of green popcorn for rainforests, the sutures for railway lines. In the middle of this performance, he changed seats with Spilkin, so that he and Merle could look at the new world from the same vantage point. Then they pored over the tidal charts at the front of her diary, as a month of crescent moons waxed and waned under his fingernails, and fumbled their way through lists of public holidays and the months of the year. I would have gone home then, had she not taken his rude forefinger and used it as a pointer to pick out the syllables: January. February. March.

‘April, May … June, July,’ Spilkin hummed. A folk song.

Regretfully, there was no ‘Slobodan’ in the Better Baby onomasticon.

I waited until well past my bedtime for him to take his leave, so that I might speak plainly, but he did not go. It was more consideration than he deserved, seeing that he didn’t understand a word we were saying. Finally I said to Merle: ‘You’ve done your good turn. But don’t encourage him too much. We don’t want this to become a habit.’

‘Why do you say that?’ She sounded genuinely surprised.

‘It won’t be comfortable with him around. He’s uncouth. And not much of a conversationalist.’

‘Well of course not, he doesn’t speak the language.’

‘Exactly. He won’t be able to keep up his end. Our discussions will be lopsided. You’ll have to get it across to him that he’s not welcome here.’

‘I’ll do no such thing.’

‘I don’t mind him coming to the Café, you know, he’s a welcome new splash against our famous cosmopolitan background. But I’d rather not have him at my table. He could join us again one day when he’s picked up a few words of English.’

‘Aubrey, how could you! He’s just a stranger in a strange city, looking for a bit of company. And he seems like a nice person.’

‘Nice?’ I looked to Spilkin for support, but he pulled a mouth. ‘Alliaceous is more like it.’

‘Who?’

‘Oniony-garlicky. From the Latin allium. I feel like I’m downwind of a saveloy, something full of hickory smoke and paprika. Look at his hands. He’s altogether too sausagey, of finger and breath.’ He smelt of change, to tell the truth, but I did not say so.

‘Of all the unkind things,’ said Merle.

‘I regret that you have now taken the cake,’ said Mevrouw Bonsma.

Whereupon the four-flushing topic of conversation, who had been gazing from one of us to the other with an eager smile on his face, doffed the shiny hat from his knee. The kneecap was like a skull embedded in cement.

We could have called him Boguslavić, by analogy with Tearle and Spilkin. It was not that difficult to master, especially when you saw it written down. I made a spirited defence of the principle, but to no avail. He himself badly wanted to be ‘Dan’, but an English label would not stick to such greasy goods. In the end, we called him Bogey. He would tell people – once he’d acquired the language − that it was because of his resemblance to Humphrey Bogart. When he leant on the piano, he said, with the brim of his hat aslant and the ceiling fan flicking shadows over his stubble, you would swear you were in Casablanca.

I would tell people to look it up in the Oxford. Bogey, noun, ‘an awkward thing or circumstance’. Or even, forgive the vulgarity, ‘slang, a piece of dried nasal mucus’.

*

The winds of change smelt, thanks to Bogey, like an osso bucco – a shin of veal containing marrowbones stewed in wine with vegetables. But the fact is, I needed no olfactory clues to the way the winds were blowing. The eye, sharp as ever, had it before the nose.

An era was ending. And without sounding my own cornetto, I think I can say that I saw it coming before anyone else in the Café Europa, and possibly in the whole of Hillbrow (although I wouldn’t lay claim to more territory than that).

A large part of my working life had been devoted to the proofreading of telephone directories, and specifically the Johannesburg Book. Quite apart from the technical challenges of the task, which I’ve already described, although they’re probably beyond the layman, there were unique insights to be gained into the city and the ways of its inhabitants. Initially, in my apprenticeship, I was struck by the obvious oddities: the Cook who lived in Baker Street, the Towers of Brixton, the Blairs of Blairgowrie, the Blacks of Blackheath. The Heaths, too. No Gowries, mind you, praise be. I compiled a few amusing lists along these lines, passing fancies. But as my eye matured, I began to notice subtler things, submerged reefs beneath the placid surface, patterns that only came into focus when one had squinted until one’s eyes watered. I noticed, for example, a preponderance of Baums and Blooms in Cyrildene; and likewise of Pintos and Pinheiros in Rosettenville; and of Le Roux in Linmeyer. Fully eleven per cent of the Van Rensburgs in the Book of 1973 had settled in Florida, whereas eight per cent of the Smiths, of whom there were more than four hundred, were in Kensington. By contrast, there were only three Schlapoberskys, and they were all in Oaklands. A small mercy, some might say. Don’t suppose that I was obsessed with ethnic groups – the concentration of medical men in Hurlingham, for instance, struck me with equal force – but it is in the nature of surnames to conceal age, status and sex, and reveal race.

With experience, my perceptions sharpened further, and I began to notice not just the patterns within directories, but the changes from one directory to the next, the slight shifts in emphasis and secret movements that only a comparison over time would uncover. I could tell that business was booming in Cleveland and dying out in Jeppestown, thanks to the new motorway. Without ever setting foot in Jules Street, I saw that it was becoming the used-car centre of the city. I saw that the head offices of the big businesses – the manufacturers, the insurance houses, the retailers, and their touts in the advertising agencies – were moving from the city centre to Rosebank and Sandton. I saw new suburbs rise from the veld – Lonehill, Mondeor, Amoroso – and old ones fall into decay – Doornfontein, Bertrams, Vrededorp – and then rise again, occasionally, in a flurry of restaurants and antique shops. Sometimes I saw the tracks of vast processes, generations on the march from poverty to wealth, Völkerwanderungs, exoduses, archaeological flows – and then I wished that I had turned my attention to directories as a younger man and kept comprehensive records.

In the twilight of my career, some intriguing trends became apparent in the Book, signs of the momentous changes that lay in store for the city and the country, glimmering between the lines, if one had eyes to see them, even before they became visible in the world.

Take the influx of Moodleys and Naidoos into Mayfair. I had been a proofreader of telephone directories long enough to have observed the steady relocation of these very surnames from Fordsburg and Pageview to Lenasia (or from Frdsbrg and Pgvw to Lns, as the crude abbreviations foisted upon us had it). The fact that they were flowing back into the city fascinated me. There were more of them every year. And it soon became clear, to this latterday Canute, that the tide would not be turned. An historic migration was afoot, comparable to the great scattering of the tribes before Chaka, the King of the Zulus.

In the years after my retirement, I kept up with the life of the Book, although my interest became rather more sociological than philological. There were some remarkable developments, notably the growing number of Hi’s, Ho’s and Fats in the Bedfordview area, an influx of -ićs and -wiczs and -ovas into all areas, including my own, and an inexplicable outbreak of MacGillicuddies in Orchards. But the most striking of all seemed less of a trend than an aberration. I was browsing one evening when I came across a Merope with a Hillbrow address. ‘M’ was then the fastest-growing section, thanks to the burgeoning numbers of African subscribers, but naturally one expected all these Mamabolas and Mathebulas and Masemolas to be in Mdwlnds and Mbpne and other far-flung places. This one was in Hillbrow. The 642- prefix corroborated it. I went at once to my desk and dialled the number. A child answered, a daughter of Africa, and while the little one was summoning her daddy, I put the receiver down.

The next morning found me loitering in the lobby at the High Point Centre, where Mr Merope apparently made his home. At first, the office-bound traffic was all white, as one would have expected. But by mid-morning, I had seen emerge from the lifts not one or two but half a dozen men who might have been he, black men wearing business suits and toting briefcases, trying and failing to look like chauffeurs or watchmen, and half as many black women besides, trying more successfully to pass as domestic servants.

Silently, while we slept, the tide was darkening. When I said so to Merle at the Café later that same day, she pointed out that Merope was one of the Pleiades, ‘somewhat dimmer than the rest’ from having married a mortal, and made light of my story. ‘Must be a Greek,’ she said. ‘What was the initial?’

‘V.’

‘Vasilas. That seals it.’

I didn’t mention the telephone call, for fear of seeming duplicitous.

It was not my imagination: there were more and more people of colour in Hillbrow. And it was obvious to me that they were living in our midst. Were the authorities turning a blind eye? When I raised the question with our caretaker Mrs Manashewitz, I discovered that the law was being circumvented by the registration of residential contracts for these outsiders in the names of white proxies. It took years before this situation became public knowledge, and letters about the ‘greying’ of Hillbrow began to appear in the newspapers – grey was misleading; the effect might be grey only from a great distance, as in a photograph taken from a satellite, whereas from close up it was more like salt and pepper – but by then, it was too late. Having diagnosed the cause of the problems of overcrowding and littering and so on when they were just beginning, I did nothing to alert the authorities. These were the golden days, as I’ve said, and my mind was occupied with other matters. Then, too, the law-abiding tenants of Lenmar Mansions were fortunate that Mrs Manashewitz, who like myself would have been a great champion of freedom of movement in an ideal world, was disinclined to break the law.

It was just a matter of time before these people felt free to wander about outside, and then to poke their noses into every doorway. Why should the Café Europa be spared?

One evening, a woman rose from a table in one of the shadowier corners and went towards the Ladies’ room. As she passed under the chandelier, I saw a gleam of crimson lipstick and a glimmer of ebony skin (not that I’m especially familiar, to tell the truth, with that heavy hard dark wood used for furniture). No one else seemed to notice. Merle was playing patience, Spilkin had his eyes shut and was tapping out the rhythm of ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ on the arm of his chair (Mevrouw Bonsma’s inimitable version). I went to fetch The Times from its hook, and scuffed my feet between the tables until she emerged from the Ladies with her lips newly glossed and her hair fluffed up. Indigenous, no doubt about it. I was quite shaken. She returned to her table, where another shadowy figure was waiting. A casual circuit of the room, as if I was just stretching my legs, took me past the two of them and revealed the unsurprising fact that the companion was a man, a bit of a bruiser, possibly an Italian.

‘What’s biting you?’ Merle asked, when I had resumed my seat. And then tried to soften the expression by turning it into a lesson in colloquial speech for Bogey.

I pointed out the clandestine liaison.

‘Perhaps Mrs Mav has applied for international status?’

I couldn’t remember exactly what that was, or whether it might still be applicable in these lawless times, whatever it was, something about foreign Africans and the number of lavatories, but I could hardly concentrate with Merle slapping my knee and telling me to stop staring. Later, I recalled that assignations across the colour bar were no longer illegal, strictly speaking. What people did behind closed doors was probably no business of mine. But when they made a public spectacle of themselves, did I have to look the other way?

As it turned out, averting the eyes, if not turning a blind one, was the order of the day. See no evil, etcetera. Other black women appeared in the Café. Always women, in the beginning, on the arms of sallow-skinned men wearing gold jewellery and open-neck shirts. Continentals and Slavs, men with overstuffed wallets and easy habits, consumers of espressos from tiny cups which they held in their signet-ringed fingers like the crockery from doll’s houses.

Mrs Mavrokordatos had her nose in her books and her eye on the bottom line.

‘You’re starting to attract a different sort of clientele,’ I said to her one day.

‘You mean blacks?’

‘They’re ladies of the night, in case you haven’t noticed.’

‘And what if they are? The men have money and like to spend it, and I want them to spend it in here. Don’t pull such big eyes, Mr Tearle. I need the business. You have to change with the times or you get left behind.’

Big eyes? Was it just a way of speaking, or a dig at my bifocals? All the better to scrutinize you with, I should have said.

I went back to my chair and surveyed the clusters at the tables with new eyes. The men were leaning in, they had clumps of hair at their necks where the shirt collars gaped, they had small buttons on the vamps of their shoes and thickly jointed watch-straps like astronauts. The dark women had fleshy shoulders, upholstery puckers of skin in their armpits, and glaringly red lips, which made their mouths seem even larger than they were. So large that the rest of their features looked somehow devoured. Black women. There would be black men too, one of these days, sleek and tufty, here and there.

You have to change with the times or you get left behind. And if you’re left behind, is that such a bad thing? Is the past such a terrible place to be?

*

Bogey did not go away. He came back as often as he pleased – to practise his English, he said. Merle took a schoolmistressy interest in his progress. To give him his due, he was a fast learner. His head proved to be stuffed with odds and ends of American, scraps of motion pictures and hits and commercials just waiting to be used. He fitted his ‘balonies’ and ‘gee-whizzes’ and ‘gimme-a-breaks’ into conversation like a child trying to master an educational toy intended for a more advanced age group. Once, he referred to Mevrouw Bonsma as a ‘broad’. You would think a Sauer Street nib-licker had emptied the Balaam Basket down his throat.

Predictably, it did not end with Bogey either. He had opened up a crack in our society with his chocklike person, and other strangers squeezed through it and made themselves at home. We welcomed them with open arms, we were so accommodating. We were no longer a foursome but a circle, and it is in the nature of a circle to widen irreversibly, like a ripple, while pretending to remain itself. But I knew better, I saw precisely what we were becoming, and I charted the evolutionary decline stage by stage. We were a sextet, and then briefly a septet, and then, God help us, an ogdoad. Ugly words for unpretty polygons and battered circles; each mutation heralded by the shuffling of chairs, as if we were dogs in search of new places to settle. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that necks were craned from other quarters. The lesser patrons patronizing us!

Many of these newcomers were men like Bogey. They had ridiculous names, like Grog and Bleb, which I vowed never to utter. Just as I vowed never to answer to their flatulent ‘Aubreys’. They were argumentative and obstinate. They sat at our table crackling their yellow newspapers like stage lightning and thundering among the crockery with their fists. They were obsessed with communism, both its demise in the old countries and its apparent resurrection in the new. Whenever Eveready came near, they tried to draw him into discussion about the Congress of South African Trade Unions, to call a spade a spade. Their great love was ‘talking politics’. Our ways did not cut much ice with them.

In my eyes, what bound them together most tellingly was their putrid spelling. I overheard one of them in the Central News Agency trying to locate the works of Bulgakov, with which I was familiar in my youth. B-L-U-G-O-V- They couldn’t even spell correctly in their mother tongues!

Broken English is no longer a drawback in the business world. Bogey went into import-export, commodity unspecified. He spent a great deal of money on clothes. His first and proudest purchase was a leather jacket from the Oriental Plaza. The garment was clearly some sort of Mohammedan practical joke. It was made entirely of offcuts, hundreds of patches of different colours, mainly if not exclusively imitation, and none larger than a playing card. A joker, I should say, or a knave.

‘Neat, no?’ he asked like a matinee secret agent.

‘Neat, no,’ I replied. ‘You look like something swept out of an abattoir.’ The overall impression was of a bale of bloodied hides, with one rudimentary cephalon still attached. It was the meaty colour of him too, and the Bovrilish substance he had taken to smearing on his head in place of the home country’s pomade.

What was it again in the perfume factory? Something lost. (One of Wessels’s cracks.) Pull yourself together, Pedro. (Mine.)

Bogey showed me the lining of his jacket, as enragingly red as a matador’s cape. Then the label, which was sewn on the outside at the back, between the shoulder blades. Leatherama. I added it to my -rama list, below Cupboard-a-rama and Veg-a-rama. Merle said I was cruel. But even she had to laugh when he appeared a few days later in a pair of sunglasses with ‘Glarebusters’ printed across the lenses. My scorn he mistook for concern that the trade name obscured his vision, and he would not be quiet until I had looked through them and confirmed, out loud for all to hear, that one could see right through the words from the other side. ‘You see, I no see,’ he kept declaiming. And then, when I had them on my nose, plunging the place into darkness, he went on in tones of childlike wonder, as if there were some witchcraft involved, ‘You no see, I see.’

This liking for things with their labels on the outside is degenerate. What sort of person willingly turns himself into an unsalaried sandwichman? A walking ‘salami on wry’ (Sonja’s Delicatessen). And pays for the privilege?

But despite my better judgement, I found myself making allowances for him. He was enchanted with being a consumer. No, it was more than that, for we are all consumers, willy-nilly, even the less materialistic of us, like myself. He, however, was a consumerist. His passion was not mere consumption, but consumerism. He regarded it with religious awe and defended it with the zeal of a convert. And coming from a country in which the opportunity to practise his faith had been so cruelly curtailed, who could blame him?

I saw him window-shopping in Pretoria Street one evening as I left the Café, and followed at a distance. He was waddling along with his hands behind his back, pigeon-toed, short-legged, bobbing his head from side to side, sweating in the butchered jacket. The blind trilby had been driven from his head by a straw Tyrolean with a guinea-fowl feather in the band. All in all, he looked like some odd bird that had strayed off course.

He stopped outside the Ambassador and looked into the glass-fronted display cases at photographs of revellers disporting themselves in the hotel’s discotheque. Shamelessly under the weather, most of them. Went on to Exclusive Books, where the latest blockbuster by the author of The Unhappy Millionaire had been given a whole window to itself. Went on again past Freeman and Marks, the outfitters, High Point Lock and Key, Papoutsi (from the Greek papoutsus, shoe) the shoe shop, past the Daelite (that is, Daylight) Pharmacy, past the trestle-table of knives and holsters at the top of the steps to the High Point Centre, tarried in front of Diplomat Luggage Specialists. He gazed through the iron mesh at the carry-alls and tote bags, some of them quite possibly relatives of his poor jacket. ‘Window-shopping.’ What a shabby word, concealing a rash of thwarted desire beneath a cloak of respectability. As if it were no more than a pleasant pastime. The expression on his face was curious and greedy, inquisitive and acquisitive. Avis, avid. Could there be some connection? I reached for my Pocket.

But he was on the move again, down the stairs past the hanging gardens of High Point, to the automatic photograph booth. He drew the curtain and I watched his feet sticking out below, facing west, and then north, and then south. He was having himself photographed, full-face and in profile, like a felon. And now east! From behind! Then I understood why: for the label. I hurried away before he should see me.

After several months, Bogey and his comrades discovered Benjamin Goldberg’s, the world’s largest ‘liquor supermarket’, and his faith in consumption found a shrine. He would ferry the new arrivals from Eastern Europe out there – more and more of them, as time went by – to introduce them to the mysterious abundance of the new world. Weekly pilgrimages were made. Sometimes they went merely to browse in the bottle-lined aisles, absorbing the atmosphere osmotically through their swarthy skins; more often, they returned with primitive forms of alcohol that the sober-minded could never have imagined and could scarcely pronounce, wines and brandies made from macerated fruits, beers as black as pitch, luminous vintages in oddly-shaped bottles with small animals suspended in them, liqueurs named after the leaders of obscure reformations, spirits so volatile the smokers had to stub out their cigarettes before the stoppers were drawn for fear of igniting a conflagration. They were always forcing their firewaters upon us, to win approval and friendship, when these were not freely given. Mrs Mavrokordatos let them keep their bottles behind the counter.

When the Bogeymen had had a few too many, which was often, one had to mind one’s tongue in their company. A single word – and not just the obvious tear-jerkers like ‘mother’ and ‘home’, but innocents like ‘football’ or ‘sausage’ – would make them weep inconsolably or break glasses in their fists. Mrs Mavrokordatos, more fool her, paid for the breakages from her own pocket. And Mevrouw Bonsma would chip in as well. They were just boys, she said, far away from home, as if that justified their Bohemian excesses.

All the others, even Spilkin, found this hooliganism picturesque. When I dissented, the old accusations of ‘dryness’ resurfaced.

‘Any fool can see,’ I had occasion to remark, ‘that the problem is not dryness but wetness, a certain soaked quality, a sousedness.’ Souséd, I styled it, pointedly, by analogy with curséd.

*

Not all the newcomers were Bogeymen and Bohemians, although they were all Philistines. As the circle widened, so did the cracks, and some peculiar creatures came floating through. There was a Mrs Hay, for example, a clairvoyant adept at performing her own facelifts, by gathering up the slack and securing it to her skull along the hairline and behind the ears with tabs of sticking plaster, in different ways every week, so that she always looked subtly unfamiliar. For me she predicted a long and happy life, bless her, in the bottom of a cup of Joko made with a tea bag (a round tea bag, which flavoured more in the steeping than the square kind, the advertising insisted, but portended less in the dregs). Then there was a McAllister who had worked for the municipality reading meters, until he fell into a French drain and broke his hip. He was prone to quoting Rabbie Burns at us, especially ‘To a Mouse’; and very often prone full stop, from a surfeit of usquebaugh. Jimbo, we called him, just a vowel removed from a pink elephant. And there was Wessels, who struck me at first only because he said ‘Hull-ohs’ when he arrived and ‘Chow-chow’ when he departed.

Wessels. Of all people! Riddled with plurality, liverish, toothy, thatched, thick as two short planks.

I missed the days of intimate quadrilaterality. But I would be lying if I said that I was not sucked into the maelstrom of our growing circularity.

All these new acquaintances had one happy advantage for me at least, one ‘spin-off’ – the perfectly apt Americanese, implying as it does that something is going round in circles rather too quickly and throwing off consequences like sparks. I had never before in my life been exposed to so much misuse and malapropism, so much sheer barbarism. I had stumbled upon a windfall in the least likely place. Even as I struggled to concentrate in the mounting babble, I began to keep lists of these bad apples for incorporation into ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’. It wouldn’t take long before the newest of the newcomers, in sub-standard English of one variety or another – we had ceased to attract the better sort of person – would stick a nose into my business and ask: ‘What are you scribbling in that notebook of yours?’

‘Oh, it’s just something you said.’ And I’d put the book quickly in my pocket, with a deliberately dusty chuckle. ‘Nothing important.’

Then they would insist, indefatigably, until at last I relented: ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you … You see, a moment ago you said: “My cousin’s a computer boff.” Well, it’s not “boff” – it’s “buff”. Or “boffin”. But never “boff” or “buffin”, which I’ve also heard more than once.’

And from there it was a short step to telling them all about ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’, and a whole lot of other things besides. My ‘topics’ (Merle). Things they didn’t necessarily want to hear. Not one in ten had the foggiest idea what I meant; but they were impressed with me anyway, and proud to be part of my research. It was the index cards that did it, and the lever-arch files with the granite finish.

As far as my letters to the press were concerned, I believe the admiration was sincere. I had long since learnt to lay the newspaper down on the table in such a way that Merle would realize one of my letters had been published, and share it with the others. None of them in all that time ever earned the distinction, although several followed my example and tried their hand at it. What thrilled them most was seeing my name in print. ‘A. Tearle,’ they would mutter, turning it over in their mouths like so much melanzano or what-have-you, savouring the unexpected taste of it, while the living embodiment sat before them, sipping a tea, twirling a pencil. ‘A. Tearle.’ I served as a basic English lesson.

Once, when I’d included a covering note to explain a complicated layout and unthinkingly appended my full name, the editor took it upon himself to add it to my letter. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the imbecile rendered it Audrey Tearle. I hoped no one would notice, but the fool with the echolalia did, illiterate as he was, and started cracking jokes about ‘Little Audrey’. He was full of jokes. It reminded me of the mania for joke-telling that had seized Spilkin when Mevrouw Bonsma first settled among us, and I prayed it was just a ‘phase’ this one was going through, a nervous habit perhaps, brought on by the strain of being in more sophisticated company than he was accustomed to. But the condition proved to be chronic.

‘Who is that dolt?’ I asked Merle, when he had gone to the Gentlemen’s room, which he did at regular intervals, seeing that Mrs Mavrokordatos was plying him with beer.

‘Wessels,’ she said. ‘Martinus Theodosius Wessels.’

Perhaps that was when ‘Empty’ first occurred to me.

*

For two whole weeks, Mevrouw Bonsma poured out nothing but dirges, long draughts of ‘Galway Bay’ and ‘The Mountains of Mourne’ that had the Bohemians weeping as if they were Irishmen themselves, which they very nearly were. I said it was homesickness; the Wessels character insisted it was ‘dronkverdriet’ We pleaded for jollier melodies – ‘Loch Lomond’ was a favourite with McAllister, I recall, to restore the geographical balance – but Mevrouw would not comply.

‘I remain your humble servant, but I cannot. I feel so sad, and so does the piano. It hurts here.’ She stroked a tender spot on the keyboard and sucked a föhn off the Alibian Alps through the gaps in her teeth.

‘I feel it too,’ said Merle. ‘I feel it in my bones. Something terrible is about to happen.’

‘What do you say, Mrs Hay?’

Our clairvoyant just hitched up a region of her fallen face with her thumb and kept silent.

Whether or not the tragedy had been foretold in bone and ivory, it came to pass. Mrs Mavrokordatos acquired for the Café Europa two television sets. They were hoisted aloft on pivoting platforms attached to the walls, one over the door to the kitchen and the other over Mevrouw Bonsma’s head. Once again, I had to alert our proprietress to the perils of the course she was pursuing.

‘This will bring in the wrong crowd.’

‘You mean blacks?’

People had Africans on the brain.

‘I mean television watchers. “Viewers” as they want to be called. And sports enthusiasts in particular, fanatics of hockey, cricket, and especially football.’

I was right. The television sets brought in a lot of noisy immigrants from Glasgow and Manchester and Leeds, whose greatest joy was to watch the football teams from their old home towns, turnipy manikins with bulging legs and rosy cheeks, rushing around on lawns of the unnatural lushness usually reserved for botanical gardens. The clubs had the quaintest names, Rangers and Hearts, Tottenham Hotspurs and Crystal Palace. Occasionally there were local fixtures too, played by teams out of the Christmas pantomime, such as the Chiefs and the Pirates. I half expected poor old Noodler to take the pitch. One of the players, by the name of Khumalo, claimed to be a doctor. Probably struck off the roll for misconduct. The football fanatics were all diminutives: Robby and Freddy, Bobby and Teddy, a whole dynasty of Harries. Clientele, Mrs Mavrokordatos insisted, so long as their money is good. The phrase that came to my mind was ‘paying customers’. When they gave the attendance figures at sports stadia, that was the term they always used, as if there were bound to be gatecrashers and cheats too, who should not be counted.

After the sports fanatics, came a variety of others: spinsters addicted to situation comedies, bachelors with a passion for news or weather reports, devotees of the quiz show or the courtroom drama.

As I’d anticipated, Mevrouw Bonsma’s reign was drawing to a close. Soon she was confined to a single shift between five o’clock and half past six, a period known with cavalier disregard for accuracy on every count as the ‘Happy Hour’. By arrangement with the proprietor of the Haifa, a noticeboard spangled with chalky Hebrew Magen Dovids was secured to the railings at the bottom of the escalator in the street outside, with a photograph of Mevrouw Bonsma signed ‘Yours, Suzanna’ sellotaped to it under plastic, as if she were a piece of cheap merchandise – a disposable watch or an overripe melon. I tried to get up a petition to have more of Mevrouw Bonsma and less of the television sets, but no one would sign it, apart from the old squares, and even they thought it was a losing battle.

It wasn’t long before the television sets were being left on even while Mevrouw Bonsma played. At five to five every day, as she settled herself at the piano, Eveready climbed up on a chair and turned the volume down, so that those with the urge could follow the silent sequence of events that flickered there.

One evening, a brief part of one evening, stands out in my mind now as a turning point. Not the turning point, not the spilkin that unlocks the whole puzzle, but a key nevertheless, as significant as the discovery of a Merope in High Point.

I had been detained that day at the General Hospital, queuing interminably for my pills, and darkness was falling by the time I alighted from my bus in Edith Cavell Street. Meissner’s Building rode at anchor in the traffic like an ocean-going liner. I remember glancing up at the windows of the Europa, aglow between the columns of brocade, and feeling a comforting sense of anticipation. It was winter and I was looking forward to the heaters and, dare I say it, the warmth of human fellowship.

But as I stepped onto the escalator, there was a commotion on the first floor. A drunkard, a young black man in a shiny suit, appeared at the top of the escalator, and with an unprintable curse, hurled himself down it. The stairs were going in the other direction, bearing him back ceaselessly to the top, where they should soon have deposited him in the mechanical course of events. But he applied himself to the task of plunging downwards with such maniacal energy that he managed to make headway and bore slowly down upon me.

He seemed oblivious of me. As if I was invisible. There was nothing I could do, a man of my age, not exactly frail but necessarily careful, what with the blood pressure and the spastic colon (which pains me all the more acutely, thanks to my vocation); I could hardly be expected to flee. I did take a few precautionary steps backwards down the moving stairs, to no avail. I rose relentlessly.

A nightmare. Imagine: me, Aubrey Tearle, stepping calmly backwards, while rising swiftly and effortlessly into the air; and him, the nameless ruffian, panting and crying out in a fury of exertion, while sinking by painful degrees. Herr Toppelmann once had a clock whose hands sped backwards, trying in vain to erase the motto printed across its face: Manchmal geht alles verkehrt – which Toppelmann did into English as ‘On several occasions, everything is going wrong’ – and it alarmed me in quite the same way. Could there be a more disquieting concept, one more filled with dreadful fascination, than ‘anticlockwise’.

We converged, and despite the fact that he was the one doing the foolish thing, the machinery cast me as the aggressor. I gripped the moving handrails, jutted out my jaw in the shape of a cowcatcher, braced myself, and we collided with a thump and were swept up to the landing, all his efforts cancelled out in a headlong moment. I found myself immersed in his smell, which I recognized as an adulterated version of my own: Shield for Sportsmen. Improbably, for I had expected us to end up in a heap, with bruises and broken bones, he stumbled backwards and sprawled supine on the floor, and I took two steps along the length of his body, just as if he had been a log across a stream, stepping once on his belly and once on his chest, and then found solid ground beyond him. It was just as well for him, I thought, that I was wearing my Hush Puppies rather than my brogues.

He scrambled to his feet. I expected him to set upon me, but my expectations were disappointed. His face was contorted with laughter. ‘Be cool, my bra!’ he sang out, and launched himself again, neither onto the up escalator nor the down, but onto the narrow metal ledge between the two, and plunged shrieking downwards to the street. This ledge was very much like a slide in a children’s playground, except that it was studded with sharp little projections put there expressly to deter such pranks.

Against my better judgement, I found myself sinking again, even as my blood pressure rose, expecting to find him gushing vital fluids at the bottom, exsanguinating himself through lacerated arteries of calf and thigh. He had indeed ripped one leg of his trousers from turn-up to waistband, but otherwise he was completely unscathed. This miraculous escape seemed to tickle him. Waggling an exposed buttock, cursing good-naturedly, he went away down Pretoria Street.

For the second time in a minute I escalated, like death on the roads, like train violence. A tatter of tartan underpants fluttered on a spike. What was it he had called me? His bra? How odd. It was the first time I had come across that bit of argot – but it would not be the last.

The excitement was not yet over: the doors of the Café Europa were locked against me! A pang, an actual physical pain, not in my heart, which would have been worrying enough, but in my side, shot through me. It was probably a stitch brought on by all the exertion, but at the time, it felt like a stab of betrayal. Abandoned. I remembered how the Europa had opened its arms to me when first I came here. Now this cold shoulder.

I put my hand to the glass, and brought my face close, as if I was gazing into the promised land.

It was a busy night and nearly every table was occupied. Here and there a few dissenters were chatting or reading, but the overwhelming majority were watching the television sets. Half of them were staring in one direction and half in the other, and although I knew that they might be focused on the same image, to me they epitomized the idea of divided attention. They were so intent, I almost saw the trajectory of each gaze, solid as a beam; and yet together they made a confused thatch, like a jumble of immense pick-up sticks criss-crossing the room, piled to the ceiling.

Bogey and a pal were at the gaming machines, recently installed in a little cubicle separated from the rest of us by glass panes. I had warned Mrs Mavrokordatos about the one-armed bandits too: they’ll bring in the able-bodied variety. And the vice squad. But she just scoffed at the idea. It wasn’t even gambling, she said, they were playing for free games, with tokens. Did she think I was blind? That I wouldn’t see her passing Bogey a cheque under the counter? What was the isolation ward for?

Then my eye wandered over to Table 2. There was Merle, scratching around in the bottomless bag. Spilkin. A Harry and a Willy – the Spaniards, I called them, in spite of their nationality, because of their penchant for singing Olé Olé Olé during football matches. Arsenal fanatics they were. A woman I did not know. Wessels asprawl. All looking at the screen above Mevrouw Bonsma’s head.

I looked too.

The screen was stuffed with little television sets, a whole brood of miniatures, as if the thing had spawned. I was not much of a ‘viewer’, but I recognized the programme. Tellyfun Quiz. It was a favourite in the Café and, I gathered, in the country at large, and so I had been subjected to it several times. Telly. The word turned my stomach. Loo, brolly, iffy, butty, bumf. A degenerate vocabulary descended from the nursery. Words without spines, the flabby offspring of a population of milksops. ‘Telly’ was bad enough on its own, but squatting on ‘fun’ like a slug on a cowpat, it was repulsive.

The rules of the game had always eluded me. The contestants were made to clamber about on staircases and guess what was inside the television sets scattered on the landings. The hosts, as they were known, asked them questions, while the screens flashed Booby! Booby! Booby! There were two hosts, a gnome with the haunted eyes of a morphine addict and a body like a jam doughnut, so rotund he needed braces for his trousers; and a slender young woman, strictly speaking a hostess, with a bob of blonde hair. She was much the more presentable of the two, the very image of Merle in her younger days, I imagined. If only she would keep her mouth shut. Instead, she was nagging the contestants to switch on their television sets. Here it came now, in a wit-curdling simper … Turn on the telly!

Lip-reading is a useful skill to acquire, especially in these days of shoddy enunciation, but it can be a burden too. Although I looked away from the screen, I could not help seeing half a dozen patrons mouthing the catchphrase. How irritating it must be for Mevrouw Bonsma. Her beehive stuck up from behind the piano, her glistening eyes, which should have been staring wistfully into her own heart, were staring instead at – the other television set! She was tinkling away, as if she were accompanying a silent film, tellytinkling. Fortepiano! Back in time! Anticlockwise!

I looked to Spilkin to see if he was still the same man, to see whether his grey hairs had turned black overnight. And there lay the key to the episode. Spilkin was the spilkin, as it should be. He looked back at me with an expression so lacking in sympathy it made me shudder, as if he had never clapped eyes on me before. And then one by one, the other gazes trembled and fell away from the screen.

I must have looked a fright, with my nose pressed to the glass and my spectacles misted over.

Spilkin jiggled an eyebrow and Eveready came to open up. It was he who had tossed the drunkard out and locked the door behind him. He was quite proud of the fact.

‘He thinks it is a shebeen,’ he said.

An Irish term, naturalized.

*

Vocabulary, milksop: iffy … butty … whiffy … naff … dishy … dinky … fab …

*

‘It was like Little Hans and the dyke,’ Spilkin laughed, ‘with Eveready and Mevrouw Bonsma in the leading roles.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Come, come,’ he said with a salacious gesture. ‘Must I draw you a picture?’

‘I don’t believe you, that’s all. Mevrouw hasn’t said a word. And there are sanctions against forcing yourself on a lady.’

‘No force required. Go ahead and ask her.’

I suspected that it was all a tasteless joke; the ‘solitary sailor’ tone rang a distant bell. Nevertheless, I said I would take the matter up with Eveready; if there was an ounce of truth in it, he would find himself endorsed out, or whatever the expression was.

Then Spilkin admitted that he was just pulling my leg.

*

One of the benefits of television, Mrs Mavrokordatos said, was that it was educational. It brought you news. Personally, I didn’t see the connection. New information, fresh events reported, streamed from the set at specified times each day, gathering and subsiding in the official channels to a rhythm as pacific as an ocean roar. Just now and then, like a bottle on the tide, something out of the ordinary came bobbing along, and then one could pay attention if one chose.

One evening, I was working on ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’, fine-tuning a fascicle about Fluxman’s encounter with a ‘mugger’, when a hush fell over the Café Europa and all eyes turned to the screens. Our State President appeared there, looking gloomy, and announced his retirement.

I felt sorry for him. He assured us that he was in perfect health, but I know high blood pressure when I see it.

‘Poor old sod’s losing his faculties,’ Spilkin quipped.

‘Just like the University of the Witwatersrand.’ I’d read in that day’s Star that the Russian Department was closing down.

‘What’s the P.W. stand for?’ asked an Eddy, recently arrived from Birmingham.

Merle enlightened him: Pieter Willem. But Wessels had other ideas. He said it stood for Poor William.

When I got up to leave a little later, this same Wessels stumbled after me. He wanted to walk me home.

‘Forget it. It’s miles out of your way.’

‘Ah, come on Aubs, man, I need the exercise. It’ll get the circulation going.’

I had the impression he was mimicking me. Perhaps he’d heard me extolling the virtues of an active lifestyle? Shirty blighter. Stamping his feet and beating his chest with his hands as if he was on fire. He should have been wearing a coat instead of this leaf-green suit, with lapels like the fronds of some tropical plant and a flap in the back of the jacket wide enough to admit a cat. The last thing I needed was for him to find out where I lived. I went in the opposite direction to throw him off the scent.

All the way down Twist Street, he railed against the world in terms I would rather not repeat. He kept calling me ‘Aubs’, as if he was seeing double – but I suppose it was better than ‘Churl’, which was how he rendered my surname. I had to nudge him every few paces like a tugboat to keep him on the pavement, or I dare say he might have met his death under the wheels of a bus.

On the corner of Esselen Street, he stopped and stared across the intersection. He was trying to decipher the placard tied to a pole there. It was perfectly clear to me: WHY PW QUIT. Shrugging off my restraining hand, he went lumbering across the street, souvenir hunting, I thought. Just as he gained the opposite kerb, a man who had lain hidden in the shadows of a nearby bus shelter suddenly sat up on the bench. One of our growing army of indigents, muffled in greatcoat and balaclava.

Wessels stopped dead and gazed at this apparition. Then he cried out: ‘Peewee! What’s the problem, my old china?’

He made such a racket that concerned faces appeared between the gingham curtains in the windows of the Porterhouse. The Porterhouse! As if a pot of porter had ever been drawn in that dump. As if one in a hundred of their penny-pinching patrons even knew what porter was! I had a good mind to go in and give the manager a blast, but Wessels had fallen on his knees and was trying to kiss the hem of the vagrant’s coat. The other gazed back through bleary eyes.

‘Speak to me, Peewee,’ Wessels implored. ‘Or have the kaffertjies got your tongue?’

I ought to have left him there to degrade himself, but sheer irritation drove me to his rescue. The vagrant was white, or had been before liquor and the elements savaged his complexion. Not that it made a blind bit of difference. Summoning reserves of strength I scarcely knew I possessed, I dragged Wessels away.

‘Don’t worry, Aubs,’ he reassured me. ‘I’ll stand by you, man, even though I’m farming backwards.’

Duty done, I left him on the corner of Wolmarans Street, clinging to a traffic light, with his tie folded over his shoulder and his trousers falling down, garishly enamelled in red and amber and green like a cheap china ornament for the bar counter.

*

Spilkin took a shine to Wessels. I never could account for it, despite everything.

Just what Wessels had done with his life before then was anybody’s guess. He claimed to have been an ‘agent’, a game ranger, a member of the armed forces, a lid. Although this last was merely the Afrikaans for ‘member’, it struck me as apposite: he was stopperish, corky, a brother of the bung. He had a photograph of himself in uniform, but anyone could see by the toggle and braid that it was strictly fancy dress. A chauffeur or a commissionaire.

The photograph went around the circle a couple of times, and it had a surprising effect on Spilkin. ‘Take a look,’ he confided quietly, ‘this really gets to me: the way the cap presses down the tops of his ears. Pathetic, in its way, but endearing too.’

‘Must have been going to a party.’

‘He says he was on active service. He has stories about Magnus Malan and Constand Viljoen. He says he has “contacts” in high places.’

‘I’m amazed you’re taken in by him. That nonsense about being the General’s batman. Generals don’t even have batmen, except in those comic-books he reads about the War, where the Germans go around shouting “Achtung!” all the time. He must have been a driver … an ambulance driver! The St John’s Brigade. It’s as plain as the nose on my face.’

To tell the truth, I myself had felt an unwelcome pang of sympathy for Wessels, with his ears sticking out like the tips of a wing collar.

But he soon put paid to such feelings. He simply did not understand the rules of conduct in force at the Café Europa. Despite the new blood, we still observed certain proprieties. There was an unwritten law, for example, that we did not tolerate hawkers and other itinerants. Encourage them now, we used to say, and in next to no time, the streets will be crawling with beggars. But Wessels was above the law. First it was peaches from a snotty-nosed little Asiatic, then a painted wooden budgerigar, a good cockatoo from a dope fiend – he was in a clammy sweat and running a fever – and a wrought-iron pot-plant stand from a poor white. When he bought a rose in cellophane from a débutante, ridiculously overpriced, and fobbed it off on Merle, I thought it was time to speak out.

He twisted everything around. He said my ‘outburst’, which was really no more than a mild reprimand, was ‘petty jealousy’. He began to tease me.

‘Got the hots for old Merlé?’ Smirking in the shadow of his lascivious quiff, as if he was talking about a beast in heat, a leghorn or an Aberdeen Angus. And this while Merle was at the table! The way he pronounced her name only made it worse; I had set him right several times, but he insisted that it rhymed with Perlé. As in Paarl Perlé.

‘Mer-lay! Ter-lay!’ he began to chant. The rhyme (properly pronounced) had occurred to me too, but I would never have expressed it. It was like something out of a rhyming dictionary.

‘What are we up to now, Martinus?’ Merle said in her sweet way, and smiled to conceal her embarrassment.

‘Mer-lay! Ter-lay!’ It still resounds in my head, across the years.

I was prepared to cast a positive light on the Eddie-Come-Latelies and their crude ways, and especially on the faults of ignorance. Bogey had started out saying ‘Merlie’, but then he was a foreigner and he only needed correcting once. Wessels was incorrigible. If anything, being amended only spurred him on. That Wessels should cleave to me, like a limpet to a bass, like a leech to a calf … stick to rather than part from (6).

In the end, those two arch-offenders, Empty and Bogey, the guileful and the gauche, drew Merle into their mischief. I came upon them one afternoon, conspiring together. I saw in a flash that they were up to no good.

It was on this very day that I first noticed the hill in the mural, the one shaped like my head, Arthur’s Seat or the Mount of Olives, depending on your nationality. Possibly even one of the hills of Rome – although Rome, as Wessels once informed me, was not built on a Sunday (we were arguing about restrictions on the trading hours of bottlestores). I’ve already confessed that the oddest ideas were popping into my head as ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ took its toll on my mental health. I tried to find the connections afterwards; they had their heads together, whispering, and they sprang apart as I approached. I had a startling impression of Wessels’s hair, sleekly crouched over his brutal thoughts like some marsh-dweller on its eggs. I sat down, in an awkward silence. My eyes turned to the streets of Alibia, roaming from quays lapped by a dirty vinaigrette of engine-oil and brine, along cobbled ways past factories and boarding houses, to the staircases of the hills, and to one hill in particular, thrusting up through a greasy thundercloud (the residue of Bogey’s hairdo, which he would rest against the wall, although Mrs Mavrokordatos had asked him not to).

A shadow, which matched the hill in every particular, although it was marginally smaller, lay upon the painted surface; and turning slightly, I saw that it was the shadow of my own head. At one special angle – if I gazed into the corner where Mrs Mavrokordatos sat behind her till, keeping watch over the dainties and a growing array of bottles – the silhouettes were identical. Why had I never noticed it before? The source of the shadow was a spotlight above Mevrouw Bonsma’s piano, recently installed in place of the bluebell lamp to make her more visible, even as she became less audible. Perhaps it had been adjusted lately, perhaps I had never sat in exactly this spot before, and a unique combination of variables had produced a unique optical effect. Spilkin would be in a position to explain the physics of it; but he was absent without leave. I waggled my head, so that the shadow elongated and contracted, again and again, returning always to the point at which its shape echoed the hill’s perfectly.

Eveready at my elbow, plucking the sleeve of my blazer to get my attention. I had ‘wandered off’, as they say, which was not like me. Tea, to calm the nerves.

‘As I was saying,’ Wessels was saying, although he had not been speaking at all, ‘you don’t wanna get dirty. Wear a jean or overalls.’

The discomfort welled up again.

‘And don’t forget your torches.’

I feigned indifference. But later on, I contrived to leave the Café at the same time as Merle and, concealing my bad temper, quizzed her about the mystery.

‘Tinus is planning a little outing for next Saturday,’ she said.

‘Who? Oh, him. Where to?’

‘The zoo.’

‘Of all the hare-brained—’

‘Keep your voice down, Aubrey. We’re going to see the animals. People do it all the time. It’ll be great fun.’

She knew as well as I did that we frowned on extramural socializing. One had to protect one’s privacy. This Wessels character, for whom everyone felt sorry, seemed determined to turn everything upside down. Perhaps he was trying to push me out of the polygon?

‘Who else is going?’

‘Just Tinus and Bogey and me so far. There’s place for one more. We were going to ask you.’

‘What about Spilkin?’

‘He’s busy, bad luck for him. We’re trying out Bogey’s car.’

‘His car!’

‘He’s bought himself a Mazda.’

‘I thought he was broke.’

‘He has business interests that bring in a little.’

‘Can he drive? They drive on the right over there.’

‘He’s got his learner’s.’

‘I should have been kept abreast.’

That made her giggle like a schoolgirl. I was reminded of Wessels and his childish rhymes. And then I became aware of Merle’s bosom, which had never impressed itself upon me so insistently before, and of my embarrassing head. This playground atmosphere was becoming intolerable.

In the weeks that followed, I worried that someone else would notice the resemblance between my head and the hill, and make me the butt of a joke. I thought about changing seats. I thought about withdrawing from the Café entirely. But more than ever, I began to see Alibia as my territory, which it was up to me to defend. Afterwards, when one of the others cast a shadow on my head-shaped hill, my capital, it was as if they were inside my head. My head was in the city, a part of it, as solid as the earth beneath my feet. And Wessels and the others were in my head, flitting through it like migrant workers without the proper papers, as insubstantial as shadows.

*

The Zoological Gardens were even more trying than I’d anticipated.

We went at night. The authorities had instituted special night tours to allow for the viewing of nocturnal animals. Learn more about hyenas, bats, civets and owls, the pamphlet said. Bring your own torch. Prying into the lairs of innocent creatures? It did not strike me as edifying, and I thought of staying away. But then I imagined Merle surrounded by animals like Wessels and Bogey.

Predictably, the Mazda was a jalopy. On the rear bumper was a sticker that read: Don’t look at my tits. I had come across this bit of smut before, emblazoned across the front of a harlot’s T-shirt. Distasteful as it was, one saw the logic: it gave lechers like Wessels an excuse to gaze at the breasts in question. But its import in relation to a motor car was obscure.

Bogey was scarcely competent behind the wheel. To make matters worse, he’d brought one of the Bogeymen along, a slab of gristle called Zbignieuw. Merle had to sit in front, next to the driver, who perched himself on a copy of the Reader’s Digest Book of the Car. That left Wessels, Zbignieuw and me to cram into the back, which was already cluttered with empty bottles and dirty laundry. I refused to ride bodkin. I’d be squashed to a pulp. In the end, Zbignieuw piled in first and Wessels and I had to squeeze into the unoccupied margins. Just my luck to be on the driver’s side, where I could smell the back of Bogey’s head, wafted to me on the breeze like the aroma of a Sunday roast. As I’d feared, he was wearing the leather jacket. It was bound to incense the beasts.

The start of the tour was tiresome but innocuous. We ranged ourselves upon trailers, along with the other paying guests – two dozen of us all told, mainly mommies, daddies and little ones – and a tractor dragged us about from cage to cage. Those who had heeded the advice to bring their torches were able to rouse the nocturnals from their slumbers (evidently they were prone to unnatural behaviour) by shining the beams in their faces, while our guide, a nasal young woman dressed for a safari, provided us with useful information about their habits and habitats. I busied myself proofreading the little notices appended to each cage and maintaining an appearance of enjoying myself. I wouldn’t have them calling me a stick in the mud.

When we had finished eyeballing the owls, an encounter that should have signalled the end of our tour, our guide announced that there was a treat in store for us. Whispering excitedly, we were conveyed to a cage concealed in a grove of trees in a distant corner of the gardens, and encouraged to winkle out the creature contained therein. Something vicious, to judge by the thickness of the bars, and the moat and railings that kept us at a distance.

Fingers of light probed between the bars. What was that? A table and chairs! A premonitory shiver passed through our party. A television set? A painting suspended in thin air. A kettle. The torch-beams slipped from object to object, settled on a bed in one corner of the cage, where something lay sleeping under blankets. After a while, the blankets were tossed back and a face appeared. Everyone twittered.

I turned my attention to the signpost: ‘Homo Sapiens. Mammal. Typical male (1.75 m, 76 kg). Omnivorous, omnipotent, omnipresent. Hunts profligately, including its own kind. Considered the most dangerous and destructive of all species …’ Profligately. That was good.

The man in the cage sat up on the edge of his bed and gazed back at us with an expression compounded of suspicion, belligerence and boredom. I recognized the look: it was the same one we had seen on the faces of a dozen other animals in the past hour or two. Very cleverly captured. He must be an actor.

Abruptly, he lost all interest in us and stood up. Underpants, thank heavens. The members of our party, Merle not excepted, were engrossed, nudging one another and leering, like schoolchildren studying the reproductive system, as he crossed to the other side of the cage and opened the door of a refrigerator. An eerie, artificial light fell upon his body. Our guide seemed to be training the beam of her torch upon his loins.

The human animal – the term the guide urged us to use when we addressed our questions to her – removed a bottle from the refrigerator, slammed the door shut and went to sit in a chair. He switched on a lamp, took up a remote-control device and pressed a button. The television set started to life in the other corner of the cage. He stared at the screen and drank from the bottle.

While the others asked jokey questions – what does it eat? where does it relieve itself? does it talk? – I had time to examine my own feelings. I felt – what would capture it – threatened? No, that was too reminiscent of ‘endangered’. Certainly not merely affronted. I felt – I had to stop myself from quaking – that we were in mortal danger. We were on the verge of extinction, I realized, and the fact seemed chillingly explicit. But what did I really mean? Who were ‘we’? The human race? People of good sense and common decency? The ragtag remnants of the Café Europa? Was it a royal ‘we’?

These were hardly the circumstances in which to consider such questions; in any event, while I was musing, scientific enquiry had turned, as it invariably does when the wrong minds engage in it, to mockery. There was something about the human animal’s disdain for us, the lack of a reciprocal interest to compensate for our own morbid curiosity, that was extremely provocative. Predictably, Wessels, who had never shown much self-control, was among the first provoked – although Merle assured me afterwards that he was not entirely to blame for what followed. She said a child had tossed a pebble at the animal to attract his attention. He ignored us. A little fusillade of twigs and sucking sweets rained down on him. A coin struck him on the shoulder, but still he gazed blankly ahead.

It was Wessels who flicked a cigarette end through the bars. The reaction was explosive. The man leapt up, brandishing a club that had been hidden behind the chair, and hurled himself at us. He struck the bars a mighty blow, so violently that we started back in fright. A single metallic note resounded into the night. I wish Mevrouw Bonsma had been there to capture that sound precisely. All I can say is that it was deep, sonorous, and filled with rage.

The note subsided, calando, into a stunned silence.

Then a cackling and cawing arose in the cages all around and rippled outwards. At the same time, one of the children in our party, perhaps the one who had started it all, began to cry, which made the adults laugh. Merle giggled, the Bogeymen chattered like apes. I hesitate to say it, but only I fell back in shame, while the cacophony of grunts and cries rolled out over the treetops, and the man in the cage, switching off the television set and then the lamp, went back to bed.

‘Good Lord, Aubrey,’ Merle said, when we were enduring the campfire coffee and buttermilk rusks that concluded the tour and came with the price of the ticket, ‘you look like you’ve seen a ghost. You mustn’t overdo it.’

‘I’m not much of a night owl,’ I might have said.

‘You know what would hit the spot?’ Wessels said. ‘A slice of Mrs Mav’s balaclava.’

It was my fault, teaching him ‘baclava’. To stop him calling it shredded wheat.

Merle insisted that Zbignieuw sit in front on the way home. In the car she touched my hand, and declared it as rough as sandpaper. ‘You’re so dry, I could write on you.’

‘Dermatographic, you mean?’ Always wanted to drop that into a conversation.

‘You need moisturizing,’ she said, and produced from her bag a bottle of Vaseline Intensive Care.

*

12 October 1989

Dear Sir,

Allow me to respond to your article of 10 October entitled ‘Beastly nature on public display’, in which you applaud the exhibition of a ‘human animal’ in a cage at the Zoological Gardens.

This spectacle, well intentioned though it may be, does nothing but harm.

It upsets the true animals. On the night of our visit, we found the nocturnals sleeping, while the diurnals paced their enclosures in insomniac despair or tossed about on their pallets counting sheep.

It degrades the visitor. What message are we sending to our young people? That they are no better than apes? Whereas this ‘human habitat’ was equipped with all the modern conveniences, such as a refrigerator and a television set, there was no sign of a book. It might have been an idea to include some reading matter as part of the ‘natural world’.

It augments the tide of exhibitionism, which is one of the evils of our day.

It damages race relations. Was it wise to choose a black man? Apart from the question of just what sort of man might be regarded as ‘typical’ of the species, this display provides easy ammunition for South Africa’s extremist critics abroad.

Sincerely, etcetera

*

It was around this time that Mrs Mavrokordatos got the idea of staying open all night. A 24-hour service! You’d think we were the Restless Supermarket, I told her, or the Zoological Gardens. And I warned her of the consequences. Indigents will be coming in to find shelter, dozing off in our chairs and slobbering on the upholstery.

Eveready can go round waking them up, she said.

The new regimen threw everything out of kilter. Proper dining hours went by the board. In place of square meals such as breakfast and lunch came bastardized forms of dining, like the so-called brunch, which was neither fish nor fowl, and the buffet, named after the battering the well-mannered could expect to receive in the scrummage for unequal portions.

The menu was always out of date. I had long since acquired a taste for Vienna schnitzel and Parma ham, but these old standards slipped from view. On any day of the week, the kitchen was liable to throw up an entirely new range of dishes, nouvelle cuisines that did not agree with me any more than I agreed with them. Savoury tarts, for instance, which the unsavoury ones demanded for the sake of their waistlines; only to change their minds the next day and insist on ‘fatcakes’ stuffed with mincemeat, and acidulous stews for macerating stiff porridges. Chicken reared its ugly head. ‘Supply must meet demand,’ Mrs Mavrokordatos said, and Mevrouw Bonsma assented.

To keep up my strength, I turned once again to the international restaurants of Hillbrow, combining these visits when I could with public-service proofreading. I remember crossing spoons with a waiter in a so-called Pizzaghetti Factory one evening. ‘Pizzaghetti? Factory? It’s the nadir of poor taste. And “farinaceous” is stretching a point. I would say “farraginous”. From the Latin far, corn. Are you with me? You should serve this stuff in a nosebag.’

Milksop ran for the manager.

Never fear, I gave them both a talking-to about their macaronic menu, and especially the ‘Quattro Stagione’, which was nothing more than a ‘Four Seasons’ in plain English, the garden-variety winter, spring, summer and autumn. I wanted to know which of the seasons was represented by which of the ingredients. They didn’t have a clue. I had to tell them!

‘The way I see it, the ham is autumn leaves. The mushrooms, the dead wood of winter. The olives are the ripe fruits of summer. But why artichokes? Not nearly vernal enough. I would have had little budding capers. I’ve been tempted to cut a caper myself when spring comes. Never succumbed, mind you.’

Do you suppose they understood a word I said?

No more than Fräulein Schrenke, proprietress of the Potato Kitchen, when I pointed out that a conspicuous lack of ambience was ruining her business. ‘You need to colour these bare walls with an artwork or two. Something to warm the place up a bit.’

‘Like what?’

I did not usually have such information at my fingertips, but I had spent the morning in the library doing some research, and so I was able to flourish a shortlist. ‘Perhaps the “Battle between Carnival and Lent” by Pieter Bruegel. Or Adriaan van Ostade’s “A Room with Many Figures”. Or even – the simplest ideas are often the best – “The Potato Eaters”.’

‘Hungarians?’

‘Hollanders, I suppose.’

I put a photostatic reproduction of the work down on the counter. Made at my own expense. My pick of the three was the Van Ostade, but the Van Gogh also had something of Alibia in it. It might have been a wayside eatery on one of those Alibian country roads that bends away from the sea into the hinterland.

‘Die Kartoffelesser. Where should I buy such a thing, Mr Tearle?’

‘Who said anything about buying? You’ll employ someone to make a copy for you, faithful in all the essentials. This wall here is crying out for a fresco.’

‘I am not an associate of artists.’

‘I know just the person. A fräulein like yourself, an art student, whom Mrs Mavrokordatos engaged to do some decorating at the Café Europa.’

Using nothing but brushes and tubes, this person, who was much given to paint-spattered dungarees, had transformed the windows of the cubicle containing the one-armed bandits into something resembling stained glass. On closer examination, her tableaux proved to be depictions of bloody carnage and mindless vandalism. They disgusted me at first, but in time I came to appreciate their efficacy. In the door to the ‘chapel’ – a door that shut itself with the aplomb of a commissionaire, thanks to a spring-loaded elbow – was a lozenge of glass that had escaped the artist’s attentions. I could never look through that clear pane, at the men and women attached to the machines inside, the air around them aswirl with smoke, without being reminded of a gas chamber. Throw in Bogey and Zbignieuw and their ilk, and the effect was uncannily lifelike. It was better by far to gaze through the fake stained glass, to fit one’s eye to a block of blue sky above a blazing cottage or to a patch of grass beside the bloodied smock of a ravaged peasant, and view the world through a glaze of unreality.

‘I have the young lady’s telephone number here in my notebook.’

But Fräulein Schrenke was blunt. ‘It is a Fata Morgana,’ she said. ‘My business is going downstream. Black people are eating porridge more than potatoes. I cannot spend money on nonsenses.’

The Fräulein’s assistant, a youngster with shell-shock and eczema, banged a polystyrene casket down on the counter. ‘Need some tools?’

I gathered he meant a knife and fork.

I have always liked the Germans. I admire their discipline. Which made the collapse of order in their fatherland all the more shocking. I was passing a lot of time with Herr Toppelmann in those days. As I’ve mentioned, I was in the Wurstbude, eating a Bratwurst off my personalized crockery, when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.

‘It is well,’ Herr Toppelmann said, ‘now Europe is again one.’ And he made a pretzel of index and middle fingers to demonstrate the union.

I supposed he was right. I was as glad as anyone to see the Iron Curtain fall. But hadn’t the East always been a source of conflict and corruption in Europe? Wasn’t there a crooked line between that infamous Bosnian Gavrilo Princip and the Slobodan Boguslavićes of the world? A line drawn in blood and therefore indelible. One hoped this German business didn’t lead to a licentious collapsing of borders everywhere. There was never a shortage of volunteers to wield the sledgehammer. People were so delighted to see things fall down, to see the boundaries effaced and the monuments toppled, and to greet every fall with wild jubilation. In our own towns and cities, in every little Jericho on the veld, the mobs were on the march, exercising their God-given right to go in procession through the streets. When you scrutinized it properly, it was more like prancing. Lifting up their knees like a bunch of Mother Browns. ‘Long leave! Long leave!’ Nothing must continue, everything must change. Great gouts of change came sluicing out of the television set, to make up for the petty trickle from the one-armed bandits. Mevrouw Bonsma breathed deeply and played on, but she sank nonetheless beneath the polluted airwaves.

What did I think of all this? Herr Toppelmann wanted to know.

Frankly?

But of course.

Frankly, I found it struthious. That’s S-T-R-U-T-H-I-O-U-S. Of or like an ostrich, of the ostrich tribe. From the Latin struthio. From the Greek strouthos, sparrow. Out of proportion, but there you are.

The dust had hardly settled in Germany before the rubble of the Berlin Wall was up for sale. One of Bogey’s country cousins arrived with a piece of it in his luggage, a bit of brick and a layer of paint-smeared plaster. Muggins had paid fifteen marks for it, according to the cardboard container, which also had a picture purporting to show that the paint was a scrap of the garish babble with which the entire wall had been coated. The Western side, that is. It reminded me of the old scouting trick: you could always find your bearings by determining which side of the tree trunk had gathered moss.

Bogey was all for launching the product on the ‘domestic market’. He had picked up the phrase at the Small Business Development Corporation (which he had begun to frequent almost as religiously as Benjamin Goldberg’s), and he said he would find his ‘capital’ there too. When I pointed out that shipping rubble from Europe could prove costly, he said he wasn’t that stupid. Half of Johannesburg was in ruins. He would scavenge his merchandise at the Civic Theatre.

Half a city (6): Berlin? Beirut? Joburg.

*

One day, as I was passing along Kotze Street, three palm trees hove in sight, proceeding sedately through the lunch-hour traffic. Nothing surprised me any more, and I strolled on for a closer look as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. Each tree had a lorry to itself. They were imposing specimens, fully grown, their roots bound up in hessian like enormous potted ferns. I deduced that they were en route to the Civic Theatre, which was then being renovated; although the construction work was far from complete, the landscape gardeners were already at it, and I had been monitoring their progress during my daily constitutionals. I followed the convoy to the construction site.

Today the place depressed me. This endless cycle of building and demolition, this ceaseless production of rubble. Was this the end of civilization? While the trees were being unloaded, I went to view the shattered masonry that Bogey had threatened to market. And it was then that I remembered the flagstones. Near the grand entrance, Johannesburg’s Civic Theatre had boasted a little memorial terrace, modelled on the famous original outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Here, visiting stars of stage and screen and local celebrities alike had left impressions of their hands and feet (and other parts of the anatomy when these were famous) in squares of wet cement. Second-rate buffoons mostly, worthless even before they washed up on these shores, but with a few old troupers among them, like Danny Kaye and Sidney James. What had become of their memorials? The place where they should have been was covered with rubble and rusted scaffolding.

The junior official dozing in the prefabricated hut marked ‘Site Manager’ did not have the faintest idea what I was talking about, and left me to hunt about alone under boards and buttresses. After a while, a curious labourer approached. I was able to convey the object of my quest to him by pressing my palms into a bank of muddy earth and scratching my name on it with a nail. He kindly fetched me an ill-named ‘hard hat’ from somewhere, and with that bit of protection rattling against my skull, I was guided into the half-built interior of the theatre. In a corner smelling of wet cement, under a sheet of blue plastic, I rediscovered the missing evidence, stacked up in blocks. My guide heaved one of them into the light for me. It was Max Bygraves. A personal favourite. I put my hands into the impressions of his and, strangely enough, they were a perfect fit.

Perhaps our first language was a dialogue with the earth in prints of hoof and paw? It is always affecting when a part of one’s own body becomes a measure of the world. The inch assumes its proper importance in the length of a thumb joint. The measures that matter most are not metres or yards, but hands and feet. Not to mention heads (thinking of my head and the hill).

Merle, who was rather well travelled, had been to Grauman’s. Her most vivid recollection of the place, she once said, was that all the stars had the daintiest extremities imaginable. The stilettos had left behind breathless little exclamation marks, as if the earth was surprised to find such sublime beings abroad upon her surface. The tourists went about trying to force their walking shoes into the tracks left by their idols – but none of them fitted. Ugly sisters! Clodhoppers!

Just then a terrible racket started up outside. Glancing out through a ragged hole in the wall, I saw palm trees gesticulating on the horizon, and imagined for a bizarre moment that I had been transformed, with horrible injustice, into a tourist in America. But it was just our newly transplanted windbreak attracting attention. Vegetable décor, animate atmosphere. The workers were tamping down the earth around the boles with pneumatic hammers. Strips of instant lawn were piled up like rolled carpets, ready to be laid. In a week or two, the ill-informed would swear that the palms had grown to maturity on this very spot.

*

Into the crumbling order of the Café Europa, Spilkin introduced a lady friend. Darlene. I took her for one of the escorts, as they apparently preferred to be known, an increasingly brazen coterie of whores who drummed up custom under our roof. Even when she joined our table, I assumed that she was just another hanger-on and that Spilkin’s interest in her, like my own, was sociological. But at the end of the evening, when I rose to leave, I suddenly noticed his hand on her thigh. It was a shock, believe me. Like spotting an error on the final proofs – a comma, say, where there should have been a full stop – just as the printer’s devil stuffed them into his satchel. It gave me such a turn, I nearly regurgitated my dinner.

I had the good sense to keep my objections to the liaison, such as they were, to myself. Times were changing and one never knew what would happen next. But in the days to come, I made a point of appraising this Darlene with my old eye for detail: I marked the chipped nail polish, the bruised eyeshadow, the great buckles as trusty as a steeplejack’s on the straps of her brassière, the bent pins holding together the frames of her sunglasses. None of it up to scratch. I didn’t like her colour either. One isn’t supposed to say so, but I’m past caring. Coffee finds favour in some quarters, but this was insipid. Less melanin in it than a cup of Milo. Great-grandfather on the mother’s side came from Madras, I discovered later, and it showed in her features. A touch of the tarboosh, I said to Merle, but she wasn’t amused.

Naturally, there was more to it than her colour. She was coarse, in a raw state, unrefined. She was one of those people who consider it amusing to sneak up behind you and clap their hands over your eyes – never mind the greasy fingerprints they leave all over your lenses – and you’re supposed to guess who the culprit is. I would not play the game, even though I recognized her at once by her smell: sweat, perfume and cigarette smoke. Always an unsettling combination.

She was barely literate. She kept saying pri-horrity and cre-hative, negoti-hation and reconcili-hation. Some of it was almost Dickensian. ‘I’s allus paid on the werry last Vens’day arternoon of the munt,’ she’d say, and you’d swear some gin-shop red-herring vendor was standing before you rather than a bank teller. She developed a passion for pasticchio nuts. She ordered expressos and blonk da blonks as if they were going out of fashion. And she never shut up for a minute.

I began to mine her, like all the others, for misuse. Considerately, when Spilkin wasn’t around. But she would go and tell him, pleased as punch, that she was going to be in my book. He pretended to be proud of her, but that snout of his was out of joint.

Nevertheless, he chose to show me a ‘love letter’ she had written him on the back of a postcard from the Durban aquarium. Darling My, it began dyslectically. I had the foresight to reconstruct it for my notebook.

Darling My,

Having a wonderfull time here in Durbs. The family is all fine. But I can’t stop thinking about you, Sweetie. Its just a natural phenomena. C U soon.

PS please pay the phone bill, I forgot!!!

Chow for now,

Your darling Darlene

The telephone account was included. An address in Bezuidenhout Valley. I returned the card and the account to their envelope, and Spilkin put it away in a folder. He had some other papers there, which he rummaged through, and for a moment I thought he was going to inflict his reply upon me too. I could just imagine: My fuliginous darling, my sooty beauty, my dirty sweep. But he thought better of it.

Her letter was the last straw. He found it charmingly innocent and endearing, but I was mortified. It was so tasteless. Not just the fact that she was taking advantage again, but the babyish hand, the tone, the excess of exclamation marks. It changed my opinion of Spilkin irrevocably. The forgivable weaknesses, the hairline cracks that had been there all along, suddenly yawned wide to swallow my good estimation of him. But I couldn’t help thinking that her coarseness had rubbed off on him, that close association had roughened him up, and so I refused to give in.

I raised my concerns with him tactfully. Could he really afford the little wax-paper packets of nuts he was required to bring her every other day, as if she were a squirrel? Wasn’t it possible that she was using him? Couldn’t he see that they had different standards of behaviour, different systems of pronunciation, different grazing habits? (I never said a word about her colour.)

But none of it did any good. He was blind to her flaws, and my observations merely annoyed him. I knew from experience how an error that was glaringly obvious to everyone else could continue to evade the best of proofreaders. He would look past it again and again.

Spilkin and I ended up shouting at one another more than once, thanks to her sheer stupidity. Memorably when she tore half my crossword out of the newspaper on the back of a recipe for pickled fish. It reminded me, ironically, of something Spilkin used to say when we still saw eye to eye: ‘There was always a crossword between us, Tearle, but never a cross word.’

Spilkin across and Darlene down. Darlene across and Spilkin down? I still haven’t found the words.

*

Our Eveready was a waiter of the old school, trained in the beachfront hotels of Durban by a Hindu master. In his spare time, he had a church of his own, with headquarters at his kraal in Zululand, and he was the archbishop. He did not like bacon, although he would serve it up grudgingly. But he resolutely refused to tender alcohol. It was against the commandments of his church, which he himself had brought down from the top of a mine-dump on the East Rand. Seeing that the sale of alcoholic beverages made up a growing proportion of the Café’s earnings, it was not long before Eveready’s conscientious abstention proved inconvenient to Mrs Mavrokordatos.

Then there was a raid by the Hillbrow police, all the bottles on the premises were confiscated, and Eveready abruptly left Mrs Mavrokordatos’s employ. She said he had taken early retirement. But Wessels, who witnessed the sorry scene, said the poor fellow had been dismissed, protesting his innocence to the last, on suspicion of having tipped off the police about our proprietress’s liquor sales. After that, some of the policemen who had conducted the raid would pop in occasionally, and chat with Mrs Mavrokordatos in a corner, or drop a few coins in the fruit machines. Wessels recognized some of them from his days on the force, but did not let on because they were working undercover. Quote unquote.

Eveready’s replacement was a native of Soweto. Name of Vest. Waistcoat, I dubbed him. He had none of his predecessor’s antipathy to alcohol. The more people drank, he told me, the more likely they were to make mistakes with their money or drop their change. He was a bad apple all right. Standards of service went into immediate decline. The waiters were always searching under the tables for some drunkard’s pennies – when they weren’t watching television, that is.

The standards plumbed new depths (long since superseded) on the day Nelson ‘The Madiba’ Mandela was released from prison. You couldn’t get a pot of tea for love or money, because the waiters would not be dragged away from the screen. The kitchen staff, including several we had never seen before, trooped through in their aprons and shower-caps, and created quite a carnival atmosphere. The whole business went on for hours; it must have been four o’clock before he finally showed his face, and I had a feeling they’d been delaying deliberately, playing to the gallery. Now you see him, now you don’t. Some of the resident courtesans had been lifting their elbows all day, and when they finally clapped eyes on him, they began to weep, from sheer relief. Darlene, too. You never heard such a racket. Ululation and whatnot. Everyone wanted to get in on the act. Then they all stood to attention, waiters, cooks, bottle-washers, baggages, with their curled-up fists in the air, and sang the plaintive gobbledygook of their anthem. Vest had his pen in his fist and his order book under his arm. You could have waited till doomsday without attracting a waiter’s attention. In the end, Mrs Mavrokordatos had to fetch me a pot of tea herself, like a common serving girl. By which time I needed something stronger to steady my nerves.

*

First impressions? I was pleased to see that The Madiba was just another old party with spectacles, like myself, although he had rather more hair than was seemly. That aside, he was straight as a ruler, smart as a pin, not unreasonably black. The prison authorities had given him a finely tailored suit to step out in – but they might have spent the money more profitably on an eye test. Dip each frog, pour over the egg custard, and so on. He could hardly see with the spectacles he had, even after his wife had huffed on the lenses as if she meant to make a meal of them. They kept sliding down on his nose when he tried to read his speech.

‘Needs a new prescription,’ Spilkin said. ‘Myopic.’

I wrote a letter about it afterwards to the Star, starting with the etymology: from the Greek muops (muo shut + ops eye). Shut-eye. Then a little joke about needing forty winks. Presented my credentials as something of an expert on eyewear. Thought of giving Spilkin a nod, decided against. Didn’t deserve it. Took the opportunity to comment on the lack of vision displayed by Mr Etcetera during his first speech to the masses. Behind my jocular tone was a serious point. The Madiba had been out of circulation, so to speak, for nearly thirty years. He could scarcely have a clear-sighted view of world affairs. How much more important, then, that further obstacles not be put in his way. Surely people realized that the lack of appropriate lenses might lead to serious errors of judgement; a single word misread – ‘suspicious’ for ‘auspicious’, say, or ‘congenital’ for ‘congenial’, or ‘treasonable’ for ‘reasonable’ – might plunge the country into crisis. As it was, there were several elementary grammatical errors in the speech (which I was pleased to correct for the benefit of the newspaper’s readers).

My letter came back unread: I could tell by the crispness of the folds in the paper that it had not received due consideration. That short-sighted letters editor had decided criticism was premature. It was the first sign that people like us would no longer have a say.

Why were standards falling fastest in those areas where examples should be set – in the public service, in the press, in broadcasting? It was thanks to shoddy pronunciation that I misapprehended The Madiba’s name. Spilkin had to set me right: not Conrad Mandela, but Comrade. And then he went and told the story to everyone who would listen. Darlene, who would have been well-advised to keep her trap shut, said it was amazing how the very people who thought they knew everything about the world knew nothing about their own country. ‘You whites,’ she said, and it struck me as odd, with Spilkin sitting there as large as life.

*

The most beautiful and mysterious of all the proofreader’s charms is the delete mark: .

Its origins are obscure. Debra Nitsch traces it back to the scribes and clerks, which is not inconceivable. But she is surely being whimsical when she sees in the mark the little gilded halo, complete with handle, found in engravings of medieval morality plays. And her story about the snuffer is pure conjecture.

Fleischer and Toyk are marginally better. Mervyn Toyk, as befits a son of the South-West, puts his money on the lasso. Helmut Fleischer sees half a percentage sign, and comments drily that it always summons up a missing something – ‘or rather a missing nothing’.

I myself plump for nothing, plain and simple. Make it nothing, the mark insists. Plunge it in this white hole, where it will vanish for ever. Paint it the colour of this little swatch: paper-white on paper-white.Through this soap-bubble loop, this circus-lion hoop, this insatiable and unshuttable maw, an endless quantity of bad copy has passed and been voided. Spoilt material, repetitious and dull verbiage, misplaced stops, misspellings, solecisms, anacolutha. Throw them in, sear them, make them hop. Keep our country beautiful. Imagine, if you can, the mountain of delenda purged from the galleys of the world. Who would build on such a landfill?

*

Our accompanist fell silent. For three days, the piano stood in the corner as if Mevrouw Bonsma, bless her, had been packed away inside it on a bed of dry ice and crumpled sheet music. Then the removal men, not the brawny louts one would have preferred, but a cadaverous gang of body snatchers, came and carried it away. Urchins brandishing ceremonial bottles of glue made a guard of honour at the bottom of the escalator, but the piano would not fit through the front door. It went instead through the kitchen, like a deep-freeze, and out of the service entrance into the alley at the back of Meissner’s Building.

Once Spilkin went looking for Mevrouw Bonsma to invite her for tea. But our humble servant, whom she remained, sent word that she could not face the Café ‘in her private capacity’. He came back in a mood and would not speak to me for a week, as if the absence of harmony were my fault.

Without the tacking thread of her melodies, things felt disconnected and out of sorts. The television did not help. In place of Mevrouw Bonsma, we had music video films. The Balaam Box again: scraps from the cutting-room floor strung together in no discernible order. It was enough to make your hair curl. As it was, the so-called artists had the daftest hairdos. I recall one in particular, as bald as a stone except for a little pile of greasy brown curls like a dog’s dropping on the crown of his head. Claimed to be a doctor – a dentist, Darlene said – but a veterinarian was more likely.

My fear had been that my nerves were dying back, like the branches of an old tree in winter. I had flattered myself that I was the pachydermatous one, Fowler be damned. But perhaps it was the very opposite. Was my skin not too thin, parched to a wash of lime-white over my bones, with the nerve-endings jangling in the noisy air, raw as the root hairs of an uptorn plant? Was the skin of the world not thickening, growing hard with calluses? Even Spilkin, with Darlene at his knee, clapping her hands delightedly every time they solved one of the straight clues on the two-speed puzzle, had grown deaf to the bedlam around him.

*

The new order? The new disorder is more like it. Mrs Mavrokordatos was right: television was educational. It taught the geography of conflict. In time, every lost soul with a goggle-box would know the way to Bosnia and Baghdad.

And it taught the grammar of neglect. These were ungrammatical years. Could no one speak English properly any more? And would the solecists be the very ones who insisted on speaking the most? Suddenly everybody was talking to everybody else. Talks about talks. About talks about talks. And so unidiomatically on. I had the impression that no one understood a word anyone else said. I stopped watching. Lip-reading would no longer suffice. After Spilkin left, there was no one to see to my eyes. And, of course, his charts were always custom-made. I tried the eye clinic at the hospital once, but I had the chart down pat.

The circle unravelled. Some invisible hand had found a loose thread, and tugged at it constantly. I kept a list of departures and destinations in my notebook, or I’m sure I should have lost track. I might have made this list available to Empty Wessels when he started planning the Goodbye Bash. But why should I stir that pot of mischief? Even the latecomers drifted off eventually, and I added them to the bottom of the list – until the exercise began to bore me. In the end, I was left with the Slob and Wessels. And then the Slob slouched away too – going home, he said, to fight in the war of independence, which I didn’t believe for a second – and one fine morning, it was just Wessels and me. Hopefully, I put his name on the list, but he refused to go.

It became a labour of Hercules to sustain my interest in ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’. Not from a lack of material, of which there was a superabundance, but from a fatalistic certainty that it would do no good. Nonetheless, I persevered. Wessels was always taunting me that I would never finish it; and after a while, the urge to frustrate this ill-natured prediction was practically all that kept me going.

From time to time, I managed a letter to the press. There was a particularly fine one on the absence of rubbish bins in the conurbation – the poor were stealing them, I’d heard, for brewing beer and doing the laundry. I won’t give the letter here, but it made an excellent companion piece to one from years before on the same subject – only then, the absence of bins had been put down to the war against terrorism. There was also a broadside on standard pronunciation, which I fired off the day after we finally saw the back of Darlene (with Spilkin in tow). Showed considerable sensitivity on my part, I thought – the very quality that Merle, of all people, declared I lacked. A Parthian shot over her cardiganed shoulder.

‘Where are you off to?’ I asked Spilkin.

‘We’ll be aestivating at the coast, in some ravaged urban area or other.’

Smart Alec. It took me a week to figure it out. I left it off my list of destinations on purpose and sent a spineless question mark traipsing after him.

*

‘You never told us you had a daughter! Or have you been hiding a young wife away from us all these years?’ There was a picture of this ‘relative’ of mine in the sports section, Wessels said. Tilde Tearle. A very athletic young woman, a marathon runner, who always found the energy to smile as she crossed the finishing line in yet another test of endurance.

How had she come by such a beautiful name? I wondered. Perhaps her mother was Spanish.

When I made enquiries, she turned out to be a Tilda. Short for Matilda, I presume, and nothing diacritical about it. I might have known it was too good to be true.

*

The theme of Merle’s valedictory address was fault-finding. ‘You’re always picking nits, Tearle,’ she said. She had never called me ‘Tearle’ before and I was touched, but she spoilt it by adding, ‘You’re like a dog with a bone, worrying and gnawing, trying to find the weak spot in everything you get your teeth into.’

‘It’s my training.’

‘But it upsets people so.’

‘An occupational hazard.’

‘You’ll do what you have to do.’ (As if she was talking to an old dog about new tricks.) ‘But I can’t help thinking you’re a bit of a round peg in a square hole here. You don’t fit in. You should go somewhere else, somewhere you belong. What’s the point of rattling about?’ (I puzzled over that round peg afterwards. Was it a slip of the tongue? Or did she mean that I was out of shape?) ‘If you really must stay to the bitter end, at least you could try not to make the people around you unhappy. Find a little compassion in that hard heart of yours.’ (Hard. Bitter. Dry. Variations on a theme.) ‘Look on the bright side. Open up. Try talking to people properly, instead of playing these silly games.’

What, I might have asked, had become of the much-vaunted idea of fun? And if she was such an optimist, why was she abandoning ship? I’d have given long odds it was the dirt on the streets, the noise, the creeping decay. And I shouldn’t be surprised if she found the liaison between Spilkin and Darlene distasteful too. But I wasn’t going to pry.

She gave me her telephone number and said I should ‘call’. Yoo-hoo. Not blinking likely. I did try to give her a peck on the cheek and dealt her instead a nasty blow on the nose with the frame of my spectacles.

She became tearful. I remember she opened her bag, which smelt of Zoo biscuits and Gee’s Linctus, and found a handkerchief. While she dabbed at her eyes, I considered the monogram. DG. That would be the late lamented Douglas. He seemed fascinating to me all of a sudden. I should have liked to know more about him. Did he have a moustache? Was he a golfer? What did he do for a living? But I could not pursue this line of questioning because Il Puce was panting foully in my face. She had been carried in especially to make her farewells.

‘Say goodbye to Benny.’

I had to shake the dogsbody by the paw.

‘Keep in touch!’

And that was that.

With Merle gone, I should have been able to concentrate on my work. I’d always enjoyed her company too much (I don’t mind saying that I’d grown fond of her), and I welcomed the opportunity to find my own way again. But I had lost interest in ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’, the circumstances just weren’t conducive, I was listing on the tide of change, going under, and it was all I could do to send off the occasional letter to the editor, desperate notes that smelt tipsy from having been shut up in the sticky gourd of Wessels’s company, and got short shrift.

Some time after Merle left, I came across Withering in the paper, I mean William, the botanist, the one who worked on the foxglove, and I had a mind to write to her about it. I looked up her address in the Book. Imagine my chagrin to find it listed as Slvmnte. I thought she’d gone to roost with the bad eggs of Illovo. But Slvmnte? Where the dckns was that?

My eye roved over the next page or two: Lnehll. Hlfwy Hse. Where Wessels was thinking of retiring to. Qllrna. Sdrrd. Vgnvw. Properly Veganview. Overlooking the fruit and vegetable market, I’ll warrant.

Where were the vowels? Was this what the drudges meant by ‘vowelence’? The city had been shot full of holes. It was turning into the sort of place a Boguslavić would feel at home in.

*

The story remains to be told of the losing battle Erasmus and I fought to keep the Book free of abbreviations. Bones with the marrow sucked out of them. ‘Leave out an “a” here and an “e” there,’ Erasmus warned the bigwigs at Posts and Telecommunications, ‘and you’ll be leaving out half the alphabet in the end.’ And he was right. Someone should find out the meaning of Brnnda and Rwltch, Slvmnte and Wst Prgs, and publish a list for use in emergencies.

*

Mrs Mavrokordatos, our oracle, told me to be happy in my misery and apologized about the Star. Subscription cancelled.

The next morning, there was a sign on the door: Under New Management.

‘They should hang one of those on the Houses of Parliament,’ I told Wessels.

That unstable epoch. Every day brought a new departure, and every other day a new arrival. There was so much coming and going, one could not always tell them apart.

The New Management called itself Anthony. A manager? That dog in a manger (7)? Before you could whistle, he’d taken out the porcelain urinals and installed industrial troughs made of stainless steel, more fit for hospital laundries and army messes than a café. You’d think he was expecting a corrosive new strain of urine. Handfuls of solid disinfectant were always disintegrating in these troughs, and I made it my business, when I answered the call of nature, to shift the pellets aside hydraulically so that they would not clog the drainage pipes. He wanted to rename the cloakrooms, he already had the little signs – Amadoda and Abafazi – but I wouldn’t stand for it. ‘How on earth will people know which is which?’ I said. ‘We’ll be Ladies and Gentlemen here, thank you very much, so long as even one decent person remains among us.’

God forbid a stone should be left unturned. The New Management embarked upon its alterations, knocking down walls and blinding windows. I had the devil’s own job saving Alibia. He would have sloshed some Portuguese colour scheme all over it. Our beautiful brocade ended up in the alley, and then on the backs of the Queen of Sheba and her entourage. I arrived one morning to find the door bolted against me: Closed for renovations. That’ll be the day! I banged until he let me in. Place was frightfully full of brick dust, but I took up my post regardless.

In the new room through the archway, workmen were running wiring through plastic conduits and smoothing plaster with trowels. Wessels said that the New Management was putting in a [Candido] Jacuzzi, place was becoming a fully-fledged bordello, but I could see by the light fittings what was in store. Our numbered days flew apart, rushed to the four corners of a flat world, disappeared down holes.

‘Snooker, origins unknown,’ I told the New Management, ‘although one might speculate. In my day, snooker saloons were not frequented by gentlemen, who preferred billiards, from the French billette, diminutive of bille, a tree trunk. But I grant that a certain old-world charm has attached itself to the pastime over the years, what with bowties and embroidered waistcoats. And one does need an eye. In short, I’m prepared to put up with snooker tables.’

‘Not snooker, man, pool.’

‘Pool! That’s a different ball game altogether. Snooker by numbers. They trick the balls up with digits, for those who are incapable of remembering the value of a colour. That will attract the wrong crowd.’

Which it did. A sort of gang. The doors had hardly opened on the refashioned Café Europa when Errol and Co ‘rolled up’ and ‘parked off’, as if they were motor vehicles.

The first thing I noticed about them was their footwear. The boys were shod in tennis shoes with treads like tractors and oversized sandals with soles like the pontoons on a seaplane. The girls, on the other hand, went in for military surplus.

‘Bovver boots,’ Wessels said, when I drew his attention to them.

‘Bother.’ He also says Smiff. He had a friend of that name in the force, another lid, a Captain Keef Smiff.

‘Bovver,’ he insisted. ‘That’s what they calls them.’

The man’s ineducable. You’d think he was one of the lost generation the television’s always rabbiting on about.

The other thing one could not fail to notice about Errol and Co was that they were daubed all over with writing: slogans, labels, tattoos. I had made allowances for Bogey’s declamatory clothing because he came from a deprived society, where opportunities for expressing oneself were few and far between. But what excuse could one make for this lot?

I’d been keeping a list of such things for decades, and trying to search out trends – the names of American colleges, the faces of popular stars, obscene humour – but the practice had become so anarchic, it defied understanding. Most of the slogans were nonsensical. Blue! for example, on a yellow shirt. Aqua. Factory. Sweat. Big shirts with ‘Big Shirt’ printed across them in 72 point Garamond. Baseball caps with ‘Boy’ written on them. Africans do not like being referred to as ‘Boy’, and so I supposed this to be a provocative gesture. But when the girls wore the caps, I wasn’t sure what to think. Is Raylene one of these newfangled ‘gender-blenders’?

They tried to push me around in the beginning, but I stood up to them. I was never afraid of bullies, as Erasmus at Posts and Telecommunications could testify. I could always get the better of them with words: their nursery language didn’t stand a chance.

‘I’ll evaginate you, you over-inflated little windsock,’ I remember saying to Errol the day he tried to occupy table No. 2, whose little perspex signboard now seemed to state, with obvious pathos, that it was a table for two: Wessels and me.

‘He chaffs you a cunt,’ Mbongeni said. This one’s claim to fame was the enormous knitted tea cosy he wore upon his head in place of a cap. Stuffed full of hair, unshorn for decades. A religious observance.

‘No man, he said you a “windgat”.’

‘You twit. You’ve got less gorm than a block of wood.’

Sheepish laughter. My barbs had struck mutton under their woolly hides. And they respected me for it.

‘He’s insulting you,’ said the girl called Nomsa.

‘I’ll add injury to insult in a minute. If I were ten years younger, or twenty for that matter, I’d give you an astragalus sandwich.’

‘I don’t smark aspragalus,’ said Errol.

‘Ag, loss the old tawpy. He doesn’t know what goes for what.’

And they shambled away to the pool table.

Erasmus, who has been in my thoughts lately, had a conceit about snooker, which influenced my own understanding of the game. The white ball, he said, did all the thinking. It was always pushing the other balls around, especially the red ones, which were not worth much, and making them do things they would not otherwise have done. Yet the most important ball on the table was the black one, which just sat there all day, waiting to get potted.

I would have shared this with Errol and Co, but it was too grandiose an analogy for pool. I elaborated another instead; it is possible to play the perfect game of pool, to ‘clear the table’, as they say, but it is seldom done because two things get in the way: chance and human error. And it is just the same with proofreading. I never got round to sharing this idea with them either, I never really broke the ice. If I had, all the nastiness that followed might have been averted.

As for Wessels, he was always too busy watching the proceedings at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa to talk. It was all a bit above his fireplace, he said, but he liked to keep in touch with developments, to be part of history in the making. Giving himself airs.

‘I hear they’re thrashing out the future,’ I told him. ‘And I’m behind them all the way. They should not spare the rod.’

I could see them beating one another senseless with their olive branches.

‘Just a sec, Aubs-ss. I’m watching this.’

Joseph Slovo dancing. A man of his age. And in the Oxford, too.

I have a high regard for furniture and its place in the scheme of things. But the negotiators, as the talkers were called, were obsessed with it. Specifically with the table. With the comings and goings around it – no one cared a fig for its shape – with coming to it, sitting around it, laying things upon it, leaving it in a huff. They had a thing about the chair too: occupying it, addressing it, rotating it. And then the window! I made a vow: if one more person opens a window of opportunity, I’ll heave a brick through it.

The New Management, not to be outdone, started tinkering with the furnishings. Our décor declined relentlessly. Pictures of footballers were tacked to the walls. Oilskin tablecloths were flung over the chequerboards: half the chessmen had been stolen and no one played any more. The chairs were covered in a garish new material and a layer of plastic. Plastic upholstery. The New Management defended it on economic grounds, but it was indecent. I still recall the sucking sound the backs of Nomsa’s thighs made on the plastic when she crossed and uncrossed her legs. It was like the smacking of lips. I was compelled to stare at her scarlet mouth, while the word ‘labia’ resounded in my head, with that ‘b’ smack in the middle of it, tight-lipped and pressing.

‘This place won’t last,’ I said to myself. And to Wessels as well. And he parroted back at me, through that sticky beak, those fly-paper lips, where a word was always stuck, waving its feelers: ‘This place won’t last.’

When the news got out that the Café Europa was closing down, no one was less surprised than I.

*

One day, I overheard Floyd teaching Nomsa the mysteries of chess with the stragglers from that fighting army. ‘This is a lighthouse,’ he said, ‘and it ducks both ways. And this is a horse and it’s just a lightie.’

*

It was neither the black Christmas the trade unions had promised us, nor the white one of Bing Crosby’s dreams. Our Christmas-tide was grey.

*

On Boxing Day, Wessels was quizzing me, in his sly way, about my plans for New Year’s Eve. What would I be doing? he wanted to know. Dinner-dancing at the Ambassador? I would be at the Goodbye Bash, I replied warily, like everyone else. He corrected me: the Goodbye Bash wasn’t on Friday, which was the last day of the year, but the evening before. ‘We all got better things to do on Old Year’s. Hunky’s got a gig at the Dev …’

Was he trying to trick me? They’d said all along the Café was closing down at the end of the month. I could not have been mistaken. But the New Management confirmed it: the Bash was on Thursday. Friday night he would be tucking into a ‘slap-up graze’ at the Clay Oven.

To tell the truth, I was relieved. The rowdiness always reached a crescendo on New Year’s Eve, when I would be more than pleased to stay indoors. On the other hand, I now had one day less in which to finish ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’.

*

The corrective surgery had not been entirely successful. Dumbo’s ear was now facing in the right direction, but flying at half mast. He was looking a little down in the mouth, under that crooked trunk. While Wessels hobbled on into the shop, I paused on the pavement to commiserate.

I hadn’t wanted to go shopping at all, never mind at the Jumbo Liquor Market. Rosie Woods might cause a scene. ‘Let’s walk over to Solomon Kramer’s in Yeoville. They’ve got as fine an array of bottles as you could hope to find, to judge by the window display. Or take a bus out to Benjamin Goldberg’s and see the attraction for ourselves …’

But Wessels insisted. The booze for the Goodbye Bash had to come from the Jumbo. Something about the free ice. In Hebcoolers. Heb? From the Greek hepta, seven. Refrigeration seven days a week. Or short for Hebrew?

‘The New Management’s got plenty of alcohol anyway. Why should we buy more?’

‘Bring your own booze. It was your idea.’

‘Where from!’

‘We’ll just get a few special things. I’m sure Tone’ll chip in with some mix.’

I peered over the curvature of the ear, trying to gauge the mood of Rosie. Just my luck: the Queen of Sheba, nodding unremarked in the shadows of the doorway to Hypermeat, roused herself at the sight of me and shuffled out into the sunlight. She had lost most of her clothing, and what remained was sackcloth and ashes. Head bound up in a citrus pocket. Grubby brassière. Hessian boots. My worst nightmare lurched into motion: she began groping at Dumbo’s rear. Was it starting all over again? Would we be treated to the Queen’s impression of Darryl darrylling? I could see her scrambling up on the invalid’s back, overbalancing, grabbing for the tender ear. It might well have happened. But before she could get a leg over, Quim dashed out of the shop and began lashing her alliteratively with a quirt. New acquisition. Sent her packing to a decent distance.

I emerged from cover and hailed my rescuer. My idea was to clarify the matter of his origins – ‘He also talks pork and cheese,’ Wessels had said, ‘probably a cousin of Moçes’ – but he was in no mood for conversation. He marched back into the shop, and when Rosie raised her muscular button-punching arm like a boom to let him in, I slipped in too. Fired off an ‘Obrigado’ just to shake her up a bit. What in God’s name had she been spraying in her armpits? Doom?

Wessels was blundering around like a bull in a china shop. I could imagine him moseying along Kotze Street, waving his crutch at the throng as if he were trying to part the Red Sea, with your humble servant, A. Tearle, following in his wake, as laden down as a Bactrian camel.

He handed me the plastic basket and began sniffing out purchases with the end of his crutch. Mainstay. Klipdrift. Störtebeker Apfelschnaps. Little plastic sachets of whisky and gin. Count Pushkin. Lord Nelson. Coffin varnish. I thought he would want Paarl Perlé just to wound me, but instead it was Fifth Avenue Cold Duck.

‘Champagne,’ he said.

‘In inverted commas.’

*

I was up all night, typing out the fair foul copy of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’.

When I sat down to work, there spilled from one of the files an index card, on which I had written, all those years ago: National Proofreading Champion. And in smaller letters: Floating Trophy presented by A. Tearle. The words I had meant to have engraved on the trophy. I propped the good intention against the glass of the window and it kept me going in the wee hours.

Somewhere near dawn, I was gazing through the window at the lights of the south spread out to the horizon, when I became aware of my reflection in the glass, my cheeks stubbled, my nose throbbing, my excrescences, occipital and cranial, pulsating, my hair crying out to be cut, rampant, quaquaversal, awry.

I laboured on. Then at last, as the sun cast its bloodshot eye over the penultimate day of the year, I was done. For the first time in years, I felt at peace with myself and the world.