Malgas arrived at the wall and took his stand. He squinted back the way he had come. For a split second he lost sight of the purpose of his journey — but before this seed of doubt could germinate, his eye fell on Nieuwenhuizen in the distance, in the lee of the hedge, with his fork pointing dramatically into the air. As if they had rehearsed this moment carefully beforehand, Malgas raised the rake in a reciprocal gesture. There was a symmetrical pause, charged with intent. Then, as one man, they set to.
Malgas spread his feet and put his head down. The shaft of the rake slid through his fist, the teeth bit into the matted stalks and stems, he drew the bounty in. At first he felt stiff and clumsy. But at each pass the rake grew more accustomed to use, as if the wood itself had softened to the shape of his hands.
Nieuwenhuizen struck up a song, but Malgas shut his ears to it, went in search of the rhythm in his own musculature and found it without difficulty. He was a natural. He began to perspire in a healthy, deserving way. The sun rose quickly, liberating delicious scents of decomposition from the vegetation. In no more than an hour Malgas had raised three provisional heaps, each comprising four barrowloads, each at home on the exact spot the grid prescribed.
“Pssst.”
Malgas’s sense of communion with the fruits of his labour was so pronounced by now that for a moment he thought one of the heaps was addressing him in a cryptic language of gaseous vapours.
“Hey!”
There was no mistaking this human voice. He traced it to the small face of his wife, which jelled in a pie-slice of spokes and rim. He motioned the face to go away, but instead it grew larger and spoke again.
“Come here. I want to ask you something.”
“Get back in the house.”
He turned his attention to his work, but his rhythm had been broken: the rake twisted and fell on barren soil.
“What is it then? Be quick.”
“Why aren’t you at work?”
“I’m working.”
“You know what I mean: who’s minding the shop?”
“Van Vuuren.”
“That monkey. What he knows about Hardware’s dangerous. I can see him swilling our life’s work down the drain.”
Mr did not answer. He loosened one of his laces and tied it again in a double bow.
“Typical,” she sniffed. “You’ll give Him the shirt off your back, although you don’t know Him from Adam, while your own family goes hungry.”
“I have to help him.”
“You’re doing everything, you big baby. Look at Him. He’s messing around, pretending to be busy.”
Mr straightened his back wearily to watch his collaborator at work on the other side of the plot. Nieuwenhuizen lifted a bale of grass on his fork and shook a cloud of red dust out of it. Then he dumped the bale and thrashed around in the dust, snorting and waving the fork in front of him like a pair of horns. He had tied a bandanna with yellow polka dots over his mouth and donned a big-game hunter’s hat with a leopard-skin band and the brim turned up sharply on one side. His dirty grey hair jutted out on that side like a scorched tuft of grass.
Nieuwenhuizen waved. Mr raised his hand to wave back, and realized just then that Nieuwenhuizen was simply fanning his face. So Mr’s answering gesture had to be elided into a stretch instead and his sleeve had to mop up the sweat of his brow. This subterfuge only confused matters further, because it felt transparent and foolish. Nieuwenhuizen chuckled under his bandanna and speared another load of grass on his fork. With a flush of embarrassment darkening his tanned features, Mr went on raking. Mrs continued to speak to him, pointing out the folly of his ways, and the guile of His, but he ignored her and after a while she went away.
From her grandstand stool Mrs Malgas watched the day’s proceedings with mixed emotions.
Her husband’s part in the charade unfolding on the plot struck her as ridiculous and she very nearly laughed; yet as the day advanced and he toiled on with the same diligence, she felt obliged to take him seriously. It was as if a mantle of nobility had settled over him. She tried to brush this impression aside but it persisted, and she gazed upon him with new eyes, eyes which refused to distinguish between the man and what he was doing. She found herself becoming tearful.
There was something touching in the fact that the details of his person were familiar to her. His clothes contained him like a baggy second skin, imperfectly moulted: his overalls assumed the shape of his elbows and knees, and there were shiny bumps and ridges on his velskoene where the bones of his toes had pressed against the hide. Those were his favourite overalls, they had seen him through countless DIY projects, including the bricking up of the fireplace and the laying of the Slasto. She saw him kneeling, he looked over his shoulder and grinned. Each job had left a blemish on the cloth — a birthmark of enamel paint, a festering oil-stain, sutured cuts and tears, scabs of wood glue and Polyfilla. Just to look at them gave her pins and needles in her hands.
Now his steady exertions produced circles of sweat in his armpits, which spread out to meet a dark diamond in the small of his back, and the familiar khaki fabric changed slowly to chocolate-brown. This patient transformation flushed the hard-won scars to the surface; it also summoned up some elemental process of nature itself and brought more tears to her eyes, which she had to dab away resentfully with the hem of her skirt.
As the hours passed, Mr’s neck seemed to redden visibly, but surely, she reasoned, that had more to do with the dust than the pale sunlight. More than once she was on the point of going to his rescue with a tube of Block Out and a pitcher of iced water, but she was held back by an intuition that this would implicate her in his foolhardy coalition with Him.
What made Nieuwenhuizen’s trickery all the more despicable was that Mr was so glad to be of service, and therefore so easy to exploit. It was clear to Mrs that He was avoiding Mr. He always contrived to be in some neck of the woods where Mr was not. And whereas Mr did the work of two men, He did nothing but stir and shake, and scare up clouds of dust to obscure His own idleness. Now He was down in the gutter next to the road herding dry leaves into piles; now He was galloping on the spot and hurling His trident into the blue; now He was prancing up and down along the hedge, beating it with the flat of His spade, raking it with His hands and kicking it with His feet, so that its leaves flew up in clattering flocks and whirled in circles overhead. Where would they come to roost? Where they liked. What was the purpose of it all? To make more work for Mr.
“Lunch!” Mrs Malgas called feebly at one o’clock, and again, “Lunch!” But her summons fell on deaf ears.
In the mid-afternoon, when Mr had single-handedly raked the entire plot and was driving the stragglers from the moat around the tent, Nieuwenhuizen was stalking from heap to heap stirring up a new cloud of dust, which boiled over the hedge like a thunder-cloud, bruised and bloodied by the westering sun.
Nieuwenhuizen revolted Mrs Malgas. He was a source of dirt and chaos. She sealed all the windows, but His dust continued to sprout like a five o’clock shadow on the smooth surfaces of her home.
He’s the salt of the earth, Nieuwenhuizen was thinking. A bit of a clod, but as solid as a rock for all that. And on top of it an eager beaver and a busy bee. He’ll do. But as for that flimsy Mrs of his. . lurking behind the wall as if she’s invisible. She’s no more than a scrap of tissue-paper. If you hold her up to the light you can see right through her.···