‘Tell me, Mr Lister, was it a good interview?’
Leora’s sense of humour: Mr Lister of Leicester Road. ‘It was more like a natter with a friend. She didn’t shut up for a second. Talk talk talk.’
‘What about?’
‘Let’s see. Saul Auerbach, the godfather of documentary photography. Metaphysical acupuncture, the new thing. How to get chewing gum out of a budgie. Her dreams and ambitions.’
‘I thought she was interviewing you.’
‘I made the mistake of asking.’
‘Never show an interest. That’s the first law of self-promotion.’
‘I wish I’d known.’
‘What are her ambitions then?’
‘She wants to be a brand ambassador.’
‘For what?’
‘Herself, I think. She wants her own talk show and to grow and grow and be the best Janie she can be. She could give inspirational talks to young people on overcoming adversity, it’s just that nothing really shit has happened to her yet.’
I was being unfair, but I couldn’t stop.
Leora is a nicer person than I am, but she secretly admires and sometimes encourages this side of me. ‘She might have to settle for something in the performing arts,’ she said, pumping the juice out of a lemon as if she were doing reps at the gym, ‘poetry, say, or weather forecasting …’
‘The trick is to diversify. She’s writing a cookery book and a children’s book and a children’s cookery book. There’s a CD in the pipeline: some minor mogul overheard her scatting in the fitting rooms at the Zone and signed her to his label. Meanwhile, she’s working on a screenplay set in the future when we’ve run out of gas and everyone’s living in ruined Tuscan villages and puttering around in solar-powered golf carts.’
‘She sounds like a live wire.’
‘She’ll be an oober-something-or-other.’
‘You’re quite taken with her.’
‘It was like talking to a time traveller, a mime artist from a distant galaxy come to assure us that all will be well.’
Enough. Leora peeped into the oven, liberating a soothing waft of nutmeg.
‘And how did your side of the conversation go?’
‘Not well. I cast around for a story, some credible version of myself to impart, but I couldn’t find one. This pop stuff is infectious. I started coughing up factoids like a column in the newspaper. Not a columnist, note, a column, one of those last-ditch efforts to look like a website.’
‘You couldn’t find a story?’
‘No, I’ve dropped the thread and I can’t be bothered to pick it up again. I’m all thumbs anyway. What holds my attention now is design. Show me a pattern in the information and I’m satisfied.’
Leora tasted the salad dressing on the tip of her finger.
‘She was being ironic, obviously,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘And so are you.’
‘I guess.’
‘The whole thing is ironic.’
‘Including the ironies.’
‘Maybe they cancel one another out then,’ Leora said, ‘like a double negative.’
She put on the oven gloves that look like sharks and brought the bowls to the table in their soft jaws, the individual ramekins, each with a little chef’s hat of gilded egg. ‘Poor baby,’ carving out a spoonful of soufflé and raising it to my mouth, ‘here.’
Channel-hopping with the sound down is my kind of extreme sport: there is always a story to be gaffed from the sea of televised images. The tide is rising there too, it’s another case of global warming. Every day, an immense shelf of information drifts out into the channels, data, useless entertainment, dogma, edifying documentaries, reality shows, weather reports, travel advice, sport, opinions, views, news, views, news. Mainly, because I have been in a gloomy mood, news of the dead and dying. Two hundred feared drowned as ferry capsizes. Suicide bomber kills thirty in Baghdad market. Twelve die as bus plunges off bridge. Teenager slays mother, brother, self. Nearly 140 cases of horse sickness reported in KwaZulu-Natal. The fatalities keep ticking while the news hounds find another tree to bark up. All the correspondents appear to be embedded somewhere. Even the girl reporting on the interprovincial netball in Potch is tinged with the war-zone green. We are so used to human bombs scattering fragments of their own flesh like leaflets in the rubble that we hardly notice the numbers killed.
Unwilling to watch any of it through to the end, I do my research (Mr Lister’s Festival of Films with Peculiar Accents, coming soon to a multiplex near you); and when I weary of that, I piece together my own staccato sub-plots, ranging across the channels, leaping from one floe to another, taking as material whatever wildlife documentary or cookery show or courtroom drama or soap opera I land in. One jab of the remote and a round fired in Hollywood brings down an antelope in Mala Mala. A serial killer is always on the loose somewhere, and if he’s wielding a knife I can get him to chop onions, and use those pungent shards to make the survivors of the latest mudslide weep. Cooking, shooting, weeping, these three abide, 24/7.
The remarkable thing is how it all cuts. There is so much afloat, it’s impossible to create a clash, let alone a contradiction, and my improvisations can scarcely be told apart from the scheduled programmes. Chaos is a kind of congruence. Everything has jumped out of its skin, everything is raw and ready to be remixed. In the deluge of contiguity, things that are self-contained, that persist on their own course and refuse new relationships, cannot be endured.
These were the late, late hours of our Friday evening, the end of our end-of-the-working-week routine. Leora and I had eaten supper, finished a bottle of wine, watched a DVD. Her choice one week, mine the next. Last Friday, mine: Dances with Wolves. I had been calling her Stands with a Spoon all week and it was time to move on. Tonight, hers: Pride and Prejudice. No obvious jokes there. Now she was asleep beside me on the couch with the top of her cherished head pressing against my thigh, and I was flossing my teeth, savouring the exotic combination of minted wax and twelve-year-old scotch. In the uncharted reaches of the menu, between a documentary on Roman ossuaries and reruns of classic frames from the world snooker champs in Leicester, I found him: Jaco Els.
Chef Giacomo of the Paragon Laboratory. Still sleek, almost dapper. Thicker around the middle, but the chef’s tunic flattered. It was a vaguely military tunic with silver buttons and epaulettes, and the toque was not the usual tall mushroom but an oversized beret. Giacomo! It’s all Italy now. Whatever became of Greece?
Back in the ’90s, when the TRC hearings were on television, I’d watched as much as I could stand, hoping to plug the gaps in my knowledge and reanimate the deadened nerve-endings of my sympathy. Among the perpetrators, a long line of men whose memories were as badly made as their suits, I’d always expected to see someone I knew, someone like Jaco. And here he was, ten years too late, giving truthful testimony on the Paragon range of non-stick cookware.
Chef Giacomo was in command of a postmodern kitchen, the kind made for deconstructive cooking. Hi-tech finishes concealed traditional carcases. There was a coal stove with a stainless-steel hob, there were worm-eaten cabinets with granite tops, copper pots hung from steel-plated ceiling beams. Behind pale-green frosted glass that made the cabinets look like shower cubicles were the hazy feminine forms of glasses and bowls. Hollowware, they call it in the trade. On the end of the counter stood a Bunsen burner.
Leora would have loved it and I thought of waking her up. But the sight of Jaco after all these years was too strange: I needed to absorb it on my own.