Malgas couldn’t believe his eyes. He gazed in horror at the splintered boards and the string purling from the hole like a distended vein. Nieuwenhuizen stretched the string over his knuckles and snapped it. Both ends burst into tufts of throbbing fibres. He pinned one of the loose ends under an elephant-foot pouffe; he wound the other tightly around his fist and stood up. Not a moment too soon either, for the empty chair sank to its haunches even as he rose. He backed across the room, pulling the string up through the floor as he went. It sliced through the varnished pine like a knife through buttered gingerbread.
The house shivered.
Nieuwenhuizen disappeared through a doorway into the next room, coiling the plan on his left arm between thumb and elbow. Malgas stumbled after him, croaking and gesturing at the crumbly edges of the gash. His knees were shaking, and his hands were opening and closing on the air.
There was a fireplace in this room, which was a reception room of some description, there was a fire in the grate, and Nieuwenhuizen bore down on it unerringly. He reached into the flames, smashing the hearthstone to smithereens, and jerked up a nail in a tangle of string. He extricated the nail, wiped some sticky flames off it on his thigh, puffed the heat out of it and pushed it through a loop in the bandoleer. It fitted.
Malgas found his voice, but now he couldn’t find anything to say with it. He hopped backwards and forwards over the gash and felt the house trembling as the shock set in. At last a sentence came to him — it wasn’t quite right but it would have to suffice — and he steeled himself and declaimed: “In the name of decency, stop this senseless destruction!”
Nieuwenhuizen glanced at him quizzically, snorted, picked a new thread out of the ashes in the broken hearth and walked through a wall, shattering masonry and woodwork. Malgas heard him in the next room, coughing and laughing. He made to follow him through the jagged hole, in which a storm of plaster dust and wood shavings still raged — but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He’d have to take the long way round. He ran out into the passage and plotted Nieuwenhuizen’s position as he went. I.
Nieuwenhuizen had come out in an unused en suite bathroom in the east wing. When Malgas caught up with him, he was standing coyly in the broken shell of the bathtub disengaging his nails from the plan, which had frothed into a clot on his left arm, and loading the bandoleer. He was powder-white and there were crumbs of brick and flakes of ceramic tile on the brim of his hat. A severed pipe gushed soapy water over his boots. He stepped out of the bath ever so daintily, flattened a screen and emerged in the bedroom. He began reeling in handfuls of string from under the bed.
Desperate measures were called for. Malgas filled his lungs with abrasive air and said, “What’s going on here Father — I mean Otto?”
“I’m getting rid of this old thing.”
“This ‘old thing’ is our beloved plan, the apple of our eye. Do I have to remind you?”
“It’s fucked.”
“What!”
“Excuse my French. It’s had it. Kaput.”
“You haven’t consulted me. We can sit down and talk it over, by all means, I don’t even mind if we stand, but I must be consulted before the fact. I think you owe me an explanation for this unaccountable behaviour.”
“I don’t owe you anything, let’s face it. But if it gets your goat — and I can see it does, don’t ask me why — I can explain. It’s simple: the plan has served its purpose. We have no more use for it. Don’t just stand there, give me a hand with it. The sooner this is all over, the better.”
Nieuwenhuizen tugged at the ball of string and a volley of nails tore through the carpet in a cloud of desiccated underfelt. The room shuddered as if someone had walked over its grave. A crack ran opportunely through a wall. Malgas braced himself in the door-case; Nieuwenhuizen, by comparison, sat down on the bed to undo a knot. The wall behind him swayed, and a picture-rail and two landscapes in ornate gilt frames broke loose from it and floated down to the floor. They smashed spectacularly, with no sound effects, and a wave of fragments cascaded into the room, sluiced off Nieuwenhuizen’s hat and shoulders, and, subsiding, poured between Malgas’s legs. Malgas fell on his knees and cupped his palms for the bobbing pieces, but they drained away into the swamp.
“Please stop!” Malgas gurgled, losing all self-respect. “I still need the plan. I won’t be able to see without it. I’ll go under.”
But Nieuwenhuizen was firm. “I’m sorry, it has to go. They’re bringing my stuff at four o’clock and I’ve got to be finished by then. I can’t keep them waiting. In any case, this place is a death-trap. Someone’s bound to trip and break something.”
“What stuff?”
“My goods.”
Malgas grovelled in his failure to understand.
“My furniture,” Nieuwenhuizen said in an exasperated, parental tone.
“You never said you had furniture. .”
“Of course I’ve got furniture! Use your head: a man of my age.”
“Well, let’s say you’ve got it, but we won’t be needing it. Why not? you interject. It’s obvious, I retort with finality: We’ve already got furniture. We don’t have space for more.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
“It’s not right.” Malgas was close to tears. “I won’t let you do it, we’ve been through too much together.”
“Who the hell do you think you are?” Nieuwenhuizen said angrily. “The architect? The landlord?”
Malgas sniffed and looked at his hands.
“This is my house,” Nieuwenhuizen went on. “My namesake. You’re just a visitor. . not even that, some sort of janitor — a junior one, with no qualifications and precious little experience, and damned lucky to have a broom cupboard all to yourself. What were you when I discovered you and took an interest in your welfare? A DIY good-fornothing, that’s what, a tongue-tied nobody. What I say around here goes, is that clear? Look at me when I’m talking to you. Crumbs! To think that you’d turn on me like this, after all I’ve done for you. It hurts me, it really does.”
With that Nieuwenhuizen swung on his heel, bundling up nails and string in his arms, and walked through the cracked wall. He passed through an eye-level oven and a kitchen sink, upsetting a half-baked bread and butter pudding and a stack of dirty dishes in the process, and came out in the walk-in cupboard in the master bedroom. He walked out of that, he slid through two walls, he sank through a floor and stood in Malgas’s room under the stairs with his head jutting through the ceiling.
Malgas jumped up and ran after him, choking in the confetti that gusted in his wake. Malgas took the long way round; Nieuwenhuizen took the short cuts. Malgas glimpsed him at the end of corridors, through archways and serving-hatches, moving fearlessly through space. At each new breach of its integrity, the house trembled more violently.