“Haven’t you done enough damage for one day?”
“This is a residential area.” But the hurt note in his voice had disarmed her, and she rustled away and put out the light.
“He’s coming out of his shell,” Mr whispered urgently to the open window, “but one more insensitive intrusion could drive him back in again for good. Is that what you want? By the way — are there any biscuits in the house?”
There was no answer.
“Marshmallows?”
Silence. She had deserted her post.
For want of something better to do, he meandered back to the camp. In the distance the crooked figure of Nieuwenhuizen lay like a black branch beside a mound of flickering embers.
Mrs turned the TV set on and sat down in Mr’s La-Z-Boy. The chair smelt of aftershave. It embraced her and made her feel small. The violet light from the screen, on which two men were swilling Richelieu brandy while they discussed money matters, lent the room the atmosphere of a butchery at night, glimpsed from a moving car. Pleased to meet you. She studied her thin forearms: her flesh looked bloodless and cold. “The pallor of death,” was the phrase that came to mind, and it occurred to her to shout it out of the window.
“She sends her apologies, it won’t happen again,” said Malgas, seating himself on his stone and holding up the rib. “You were saying. .”
“I was saying—”
“The pallor of death!”
“Then He danced around on the top, as if He was trying to trample the juice out of it, and He doused it with petrol, as if it was a tipsy-tart.” ”For crying in a bucket, will you please stop telling me what he did! I was there, you know.”
“Of course you were. I just thought you’d like a fresh perspective on events.”
“I wouldn’t. I’d like to forget the whole thing. . I’ve never been so ashamed.”
“You’re still cross with me.”
“We were getting on famously. He was opening up!” Whether or not Mrs was to blame, Nieuwenhuizen lost his sense of purpose once again and went back to mooching on the plot.
His indolence did not bother Mr at all. “He’s taking a well-earned break. He’s in training for Phase Two: the actual building of the new house.”
Mrs scoffed. “Break my eye. He’s turned the environment into a wasteland, and now He’s beating it senseless, pacing up and down in His clodhoppers. You may think that nothing’s happening, but I tell you, He’s busy. Nothing will ever grow there again.”
“Unless we want it to.”
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.”
Even so, her allegations came back to him the next evening when he saw the huge heap of ashes left over from the bonfire and the flat earth signposted everywhere with crosses and arrows by Nieuwenhuizen’s soles.
Every night Malgas joined Nieuwenhuizen at his modest new fireplace on the edge of the ash-heap; he no longer found it necessary to manufacture excuses for his visits, but he sometimes brought a small gift — a bracket or a hinge, a packet of screws or a brass lug, a plastic grommet or a fibreglass flange — as a token of his desire for constructive effort. Nieuwenhuizen stowed each one away with a smile.
Whenever Malgas inquired about the building operations, which was often, Nieuwenhuizen would chide him for his impatience. “All of this has been surveyed and subdued,” he said, flinging out his arms to encompass his territory. “That in itself is no small thing. I’m not as young as I used to be. I need time to regain my strength.”
“For Phase Two?”
“Of course.”
It was after one of these routine exchanges that Nieuwenhuizen decided the time was ripe.
They were waiting for the pot to boil when Nieuwenhuizen went into action. He raked a red-hot nail as long as a pencil from the coals, elevated it with a pair of wire tongs, dunked it in his water drum, waved it to disperse the steam, inspected it meticulously, approved of it, and held it up by its sharp point. “Do you stock these?”
A tremor of foreboding ran through Malgas. He knew at once that a critical moment had been reached and he rose to the occasion like a fish to the bait. He narrowed his eyes professionally, took the nail, weighed it in one palm and then the other, tapped it on his thumbnail and held it up to his ear, sniffed its grooved shank and pressed its flat head to the tip of his tongue. “Unusual. I could requisition them for you. . but surely you won’t be needing such giants? If you were laying down railway lines or building an ark I could see the point of it, but for laths and joists and stuff like that something half this size would be twice as good.”
“Don’t give me a thousand words,” Nieuwenhuizen said with a flicker of irritation. “I want three hundred of these, and so help me if they’re not exactly like this one I’ll send them back.”
“I’ll do it, relax. We have a saying at Mr Hardware: ‘The Customer is always right.’ But don’t blame me—”
Just then the pot boiled, Nieuwenhuizen jumped up to wrest it from the coals, and Malgas swallowed the meat of his sentence, which was “—when your place doesn’t have the professional finish, because the horns of these monsters are sticking out all over the show.”···
“The horns,” said Mr to Mrs, “the horns of the monsters.That was what did it. He finally saw my point of view. If he builds that house of his one day he’ll have me to thank.”
particoloured. Castanets, chromium-plated, Clackerjack (regd. T.M.). Willow-pattern Frisbee. Mickey and Minnie, blessed by Pope (Pius). Pine-cone. Crucifix, commemorative, balsa-wood and papier-mâché, 255mm? 140mm. Calendar, Solly Kramer’s, Troyeville, indigenous fauna painted with the mouth, 1991. Clock, Ginza, broken (TOCH?)
It turned out that the factory couldn’t deliver before the weekend because of a strike (living wage, benefits, maternity leave) and so Malgas made a detour through Industria on his way home from work and picked up the nails himself. Two hundred and eighty-eight of them came pre-packed snugly in two wooden boxes designed to hold a gross each, and the remaining dozen had been taped into a bundle and wrapped in brown paper.
Everything about this example of the packager’s craft reassured Malgas. The grainy deal boards and ropy handles spoke of concern for safety in transit and overall effect; but there was attention to detail too, in the countersunk screw-heads and the spacing of the stencilled lettering: THIS SIDE UP. Rush-hour traffic gave him pause, and by the time he arrived at the site he was almost convinced that the gigantic nails would be perfect for the construction that lay ahead.
He loaded the boxes from the back of the bakkie into the barrow and wheeled them to the camp. Nieuwenhuizen had excused himself from this activity so that he could rummage through his portmanteau; Malgas therefore took the initiative and stored the boxes in a cool, dry place under the tree.
Then he went back for the package containing the surplus dozen — the Twelve, as he thought of them. No sooner had he returned with those under his arm than Nieuwenhuizen found what he was looking for: a leather bandoleer, well loved but little used, to judge by the patina of dried Brasso on its buckle and the marrow of congealed dubbin and fluff clogging its many loops.
While Nieuwenhuizen strapped the bandoleer over his shoulder, Malgas took the initiative again and prised open the first box. He found a thick layer of shredded paper the colour of straw. Excellent. He threw the paper out and there they were: one hundred and fortyfour of the finest nails money could buy, neatly stacked in rows of twelve, with the direction of the heads alternating stratum by stratum to compensate for the taper of the shanks. Even his exceptional sensitivity to packaging had not prepared him for this fastidious arrangement, and his admiration for the nails redoubled.