But when he tried to breach the surface his blade rebounded with a hand-numbing clang. It took hours of patient chipping with the sharp point of the blade to break through the shell, and then he exposed nothing but an elaborate system of empty corridors. He hacked a thick chunk of the stuff from the core, which was softer than the shell and riddled with holes like a Swiss cheese, and examined it more closely: no sign of life.
It was too much for him. He went to bed.
When Mr Malgas arrived that evening he found Nieuwenhuizen shut up in his tent, fast asleep. The stillness of the camp was unnerving. The visitor made his offerings — a Cadac gas-bottle which he had filled with his own hands and a Mr Hardware T-shirt, XL — and went back home.
Mrs had the full story. She wanted to re-enact it too, with her fishknife and a heap of creamed cauliflower, but Mr wouldn’t hear of it.
“He trimmed the grass all round neatly,” she insisted. “It reminded me of when you had that mole removed and Dr Dinnerstein—”
“Mr Dinnerstein,” Mr corrected her. “Now stop playing with your food and eat up.”
Not everyone is cut out to retail Hardware. In a day’s work a hardware man might have to arrive at creative solutions to a dozen all-important little problems. Mr Malgas, who was ideally suited to the vocation, was upset to find that he couldn’t concentrate. He dispensed tacks instead of panel-pins and insecticide instead of whitewash.
Insects. He couldn’t get them out of his mind. Mrs was right: there had been a remarkable increase in their numbers recently.
On Thursday evening he had three excuses for visiting Nieuwenhuizen: a carton of mosquito coils, a stick of insect repellent and a length of fly-paper that he insisted on tying to a branch of the thorntree. On Friday, by contrast, he took a newfangled contraption which allowed one to balance a three-legged pot on top of a gas-bottle and so eliminated the bother of building a fire.
Nieuwenhuizen accepted these gifts with equanimity. He took each one in both hands, looked at it from different sides and said, “Thank you, it’s just what I need.” Then he found a place to stow it and looked at his benefactor expectantly.
Malgas would have appreciated a more enthusiastic response, especially to the gas-bottle gizmo, which he thought would suit Nieuwenhuizen down to the ground. But he was satisfied all the same. Each evening he was able to inspect the building site. He was pleased to see that progress was being made, even though the grid system escaped him and he felt a pang when he saw the footpaths vanishing under swaths of cut grass and topsoil.
As he made his rounds he arranged the practical considerations of building a new house into ear-catching pairs, the easier to enumerate their pros and cons — bricks and mortar, nuts and bolts, ups and downs (in relation to pipes, this was), rands and cents, days and weeks. Nieuwenhuizen, hunkering down at the fire to stir some simmering brew or reclining before the tent gazing up at the heavens, chuckled inwardly but would not be drawn. Undeterred, Malgas always found the opportunity to say something like, “Remember now, when you get round to the actual construction as such, I’m right here on your doorstep. I’m handy. Make a note of it. Here, tie this around your finger.”
Malgas was demonstrating the versatility of the new cooking gizmo on Friday night when Nieuwenhuizen butted in to take up his offer of assistance. “Why don’t you come over first thing tomorrow and give me a hand to get rid of this compost.”
At that moment Malgas heard a metallic click in the air between Nieuwenhuizen and himself. More than likely it was the gizmo slotting into place on the gas-bottle. But Malgas came to believe that it was his relationship with Nieuwenhuizen shifting gear from co-operation to collaboration.
At dawn on the appointed day Malgas shouldered a brand-new rake (the price-tag was still wrapped around one of its colour-co-ordinated teeth) and marched next door.
“Malgas.”
“Father.”
“How goes?”
“Well. Yourself?”
“Raring to go.”
“Same here.”
“Good.”
They went on in this way, exhaling small talk in fussily pinked clouds of condensation, while Nieuwenhuizen decanted two mugs of coffee from the three-legged pot. Malgas was so caught up in the drama of the situation that he didn’t think to ask after the gas-bottle gizmo. He found himself copying Nieuwenhuizen’s clipped sentences. The restraint of the exchange marked it as a prelude to constructive effort and Malgas was proud to keep up his end.
“Sugar?”
“One.”
“Honey. .”
“Better.”
They sipped the scalding coffee. “It’s got a muddy aftertaste,” Malgas thought. “And what’s this afloat in it? Fish-scales?” But he didn’t care, it was strong and stimulating. The ear of the mug still would not admit his finger, but that didn’t matter either, because he preferred to curl his hands around the hot tin bowl, the way his host did.
Nieuwenhuizen put forward a plan of action, starting with the grid — big letters down this side and Roman numbers down that — and explaining tersely how one might approach the intersections as appropriate points at which to heap up the dead vegetation. Then he posed an important question: At a later stage, when the ground had been cleared in an economical fashion, might one not convey each of these small provisional heaps to a depot in the vicinity of the camp, on the spot now occupied by the fireplace, and amalgamate them into one mountain to facilitate the incineration? No?
Malgas listened with mounting excitement. The grid system was a revelation. As for the words hovering in bubbles around Nieuwenhuizen’s head, moored to his lips by filaments of saliva — “economical,” “provisional,” “accumulation,” “depot,” “vicinity,” “incineration” — they left him in no doubt that a great deal of intelligent forethought had gone into the plan, and he felt a thrill of vindication. With a full heart he set out for the work-station allocated to him on the wagonwheel frontier. Nieuwenhuizen stayed behind at the tent, tinkering with one of his gadgets.
“Wish me luck, Father.”
“Good luck, Malgas.”
The sun was rising as usual behind the hedge when Malgas tramped across the devastated plot. Grass and weeds mown down, fractured stems and lacerated leaves, flayed boles and bulbs, dismembered trunks and dislocated roots told a moving tale of cruelty and kindness in the name of progress. The carpet underfoot was steeped in dew and its own spilt fluids, and it offered up a savoury aroma as he passed over. The sun brushed the back of his neck with tepid fingers and made him shiver with anticipation. His eyes in turn caressed the bruised skin of the horizon, and then snagged on the protruding tip of his own rooftop. It was stained, he noticed, with the blood of the dawn. He went on bravely. The house thrust itself up through the horizon with every step he took, until it squatted clean and complete in the early morning air. The walls were as white as paper, the windows in them were blinding mirrors. The wagon-wheels began to plash through the sunshine: soon he would be bathed in the full splendour of a new working day.