I thumbed up the volume.
Maestro! Time had knocked the rough edges off his accent and there was a twang in there now that intrigued: he sounded like a spray painter from Roodepoort who’s been to Bible School in San Antonio. It made his storytelling more compelling than ever. In a minute, I was drawn in. While he described the unique properties of the Paragon’s non-stick coating, he settled a pan on a gas ring and turned up the heat. He showed us a bottle of sunflower oil and tossed it in the bin. He showed us a brick of butter and sent that south too.
Sticky stuff was lined up in tubs beside the stove, and he reached for them and dribbled honey and jam into the pan, and spooned in sugar and custard powder. He made it bubble, added a handful of flour and gave it a good stir with a spatula. Then he poured the goo out and broke an egg into the empty pan.
Where exactly is a twang, I wonder. I would like a linguist to explain it to me. And why San Antone? Why not Tulsa or Forth Worth?
While the egg was frying, he showed us a pot scourer and tossed it in the bin. He spoke about the damage caused by steel wool and abrasive scouring agents, ickcetera. He tossed aside brushes, pads and soap-impregnated pillows.
When the egg was done, he slid it on to a plate, put the empty pan back on the gas and turned up the heat until the flame formed a blue calyx around the black iron base. He spoke about the special guarantee, but that’s not all, he mentioned special prices if you dialled now. He said that if something stuck to a Paragon, they would give you your money back. While he was speaking, he took from under the counter a thick, rainbow-striped beach sandal and dropped it in the pan. Easing a paper mask over his mouth and nose, he fired up a blowtorch and played it over the rubber until it smoked and bubbled and began to melt. Prices and order numbers flashed in jagged clouds. Jaco reached for the spatula again and pressed the molten sole down in the pan. The smell of burning rubber filled the room.
My knees are packing up, my mother would say, and my back’s already gone out. Quoting Shelley Winters, I think. Now this business with her eyes. She’d woken up with double vision. Hoping it would go away, as the aches and pains usually did, she’d held out for a week before making an appointment with Dr Jacobson, who did her cataracts. ‘You should see me trying to decide which of my faces to powder,’ she said when she phoned, making light, working her way round to asking for a lift to the clinic. We’ve spoken about moving her into a retirement village or a home, some place with frail care for when the time comes, you have to think ahead, but she loves the flat. She has friends in the block, widows like herself, decent bridge players. And she values her independence. Not being able to drive is the worst.
Herbert got up from his desk in the lobby to usher us out of the lift and then took her other arm with the decorous familiarity of a son-in-law. He even held the door of the Charade while I helped her into the passenger seat. I always worry she’ll bang her head, more so since her eyes started troubling her, and I was glad of the help. How much was it worth though? Recently Leora had rebuked me for giving a car guard two rand. Apparently the standard rate had risen to five. I gave that to Herbert and he seemed satisfied.
‘We should have kept the Merc,’ my mother said as we drove off. ‘You and Herbert could have carried me down on a stretcher and stashed me in the back seat.’
‘You always were a back-seat driver.’
Letting that pass, she asked: ‘How’s the work going?’
In my mother’s vocabulary, ‘work’ means what you do for a living. I told her about the shoot that morning. We’d been on Constitution Hill, in one of the cold, narrow cells at the old Women’s Jail, dropping crockery on the concrete floor, clay pots and china cups called Annemarie, Busi, Caroline, and so on down the alphabet. A public service ad on spousal abuse. By the time we were finished, the place looked like a Greek restaurant.
We moved on to other things. I thought of telling her about the interview for the News, but my nascent career as an ‘artist’ still embarrasses me in front of the family. I am much too old to bud. Giacomo Els and his shtick — his non-shtick — might amuse her. Or it might remind her of my father, which is not always a good thing. She still has her wit and her wits about her, but these days she’ll get sad in the blink of an eye. To play it safe, I told her about the catering business Leora is setting up with her friend Bo. Before they’ve even registered the company, they’re arguing about the colour of the table linen.
My mother was reminded of the shenanigans at body corporate meetings, which she attends purely for the theatre. Now the members were at war over the redecoration. ‘That old queen Paul Meagher wants lilac tiles in the lobby!’ she said. ‘It will look like a bathhouse, which is where he got the idea, I think.’
In the parking lot at the Garden City, as I was about to get out of the car, she put her hand on my arm and said, ‘Is everything all right?’
‘I’ve been out of sorts,’ I said. ‘This place gets to me sometimes.’
‘What is it now?’
‘Nothing specific, a succession of small irritations with the way things work, or don’t work, as the case may be.’
‘Tell me, before we go in.’
‘Here’s an example. I was at Home Affairs in Randburg last week to renew my passport. I hadn’t been out that way for ages. First I couldn’t find the place because I was looking for Hans Strijdom and the name has changed. I’ve heard Malibongwe Drive on the traffic report a hundred times and I didn’t put it together. Then there was a queue a mile long. You’d think it was an election. When I finally got to the counter, they wanted a copy of my old passport, but they didn’t have a photocopier, it was broken. The clerk sent me into the parking lot and there was a guy out there with a photocopier rigged to a 12 volt battery. He made me a copy for five rand.
‘The whole transaction was so half-baked, so underdeveloped. And there was a backscratching tone to it, the photocopy guy must be a cousin of the guy behind the counter, he probably takes a cut. They have a little business going on the side, they’re in the photocopy racket. The machine in the office, the proper machine, probably isn’t even broken. And if it is, why don’t they bloody well get it fixed?
‘The photocopy guy was eating a chicken breast. He wiped his fingers carefully on a rag, took my passport and hunkered down between two cars. The device was in a tatty cardboard box held together with packaging tape, and he flipped open the lid and got the copy going. My glum, official face edged out of the slot into the sunshine, burnt out, overexposed. This process shouldn’t be happening outdoors, I thought, it belongs in a quiet, dust-free, well-lit office. I looked across the street and there behind a palisade fence was some hi-tech head office where people behind cool grey glass were working at terminals in air-conditioned quiet. That’s where I should be doing this, I thought again, in a carpeted open-plan office with a water cooler, in an American space, not on a dusty, potholed patch of tar with the sun burning the back of my neck and the smell of fried chicken in the air.
‘I paid the guy and went inside with my photocopy. I’d been on the point of complaining about the quality of the print, which made me look like a ghost, but when I got it out of the sunlight it wasn’t too bad.’
‘So it all worked out in the end.’
‘Well, that’s what Leora said. When I told her the story, how the whole thing made me feel depressed and anxious about the future, she said it all depends on your perspective. It sounded quite hopeful to her, quite efficient and convenient. My photocopy guy is the African entrepreneur in action. He’s found a niche, he’s providing an ingenious solution to a problem and making an honest living. It’s a sign that things are working. They’re just working in a different way.