For an hour on end Malgas dodged around them like a presentiment, opening doors and windows, moving ornaments and artefacts out of harm’s way, even going so far as to place his own soft body between the blunt instrument and the object of his affection. But all these efforts were in vain.
In the inevitable end, Nieuwenhuizen and the removers whipped themselves up into a cloud of dust and typography, and Malgas could no more marshal them than you or I. The cloud boiled and spilled out fists and feet, caps and hats, asterisks and ampersands, dollar signs and percentages, sharps and flats, ›, ‹, and =. Malgas submitted. He flopped down in an emaciated armchair. His hair was full of glass. His mouth was full of dust. His heart was out of order.
“On your feet, Lazy-bones!” Nieuwenhuizen cried, popping out of the mêlée all stuck with quotation marks and iron filings. He kicked the sole of Malgas’s shoe and beckoned him to follow.
Malgas walked behind Nieuwenhuizen to the van. It was a relief to be out in the still air, in the moonlight. He looked back at the house as they walked: he could see the ribs of the rafters through the tiles. Now, more than ever, he wanted to say a few words, but his mind was a riot of capital letters and punctuation which his tongue could not manage. Nieuwenhuizen whistled a song and skipped, but he too said nothing.
They unloaded a freezer, carried it around to the east wing and squelched through the bottom of the moat. A fish out of water applauded flippantly. In a fit of abnegation Malgas steered them through a sliding door and smashed it into a pool of troubled light. He ground the sugary pieces with his heels; he dropped his end of the freezer on a teapoy; he kicked a terracotta statuette into the air. Nieuwenhuizen ignored all these attempts to communicate.
The house reeled around them, but it refused to fall. Malgas could only wonder at the obstinacy that kept it standing even as its chambers filled up with gloom.
Nieuwenhuizen became a child. He ripped open the cardboard boxes gleefully, and his playmates began to scatter his household effects in the topsy-turvy rooms. They propped pictures against the walls and lobbed ornaments onto ledges. They rolled his threadbare rugs over the floors. They piled his copper-bottomed pots and pans in leaning towers and shied them with shoes and table-legs. They threw toilet-rolls like streamers, and handfuls of pills and charcoal briquettes.
When they were finished Nieuwenhuizen gave them money, whisky and cardboard boxes, and they knocked off for the day and went to their van to relax.
Nieuwenhuizen himself prepared to go back to the camp. Before he left he took Malgas aside and said, “Mal, I’ve had a ball here today. I hope you have too.”Malgas opened his mouth but no sound came out.
“What’s the matter with you?” Nieuwenhuizen asked. “Is your nose still out of joint?”
Malgas put a finger on Nieuwenhuizen’s lips to hush him and bundled him out into the night.
Malgas stood for an age in a canted doorway, watching, waiting, while Nieuwenhuizen gathered wood and built a fire, cooked a rabbit, ate it with relish, and sat on a stone nodding off and mumbling a camp-fire lullaby. Then he turned his back on the tableau and ranged wearily through the dim ruins, marvelling at the debris, the balanced bits and pieces, above all, the incongruous juxtapositions, which he listed thus quietly to himself: hat and hammer, rock and paper, headache pill and custard powder, book and trousers, pipe and key, sealing-wax and vacuum cleaner, + and − until he tired of the game. He started on a list of miraculous survivors: light-bulb. . and left it there. He dared not go upstairs: the grand staircase hung by a thread and a nail. He went instead into his room and lay down on the rug, with his head against his toolbox. His hips ached. He shut his eyes, but sleep would not come.
Hip, the house was tossing and turning, its rooms were banging together in the dark. A button sprang off the belly of an armchair and ricocheted, hip, hip, louder and louder, hurrah. Threads unravelled noisily. Whirlwinds swirled out of teacups and ripped through paper bags. Hooray! Portraits of Nieuwenhuizen’s ancestors fell from the walls. Hip, hip, joints disjointed and screws unscrewed, plugs unplugged and locks unlocked, and so on and so forth, hubba hubba, the whole place was coming unstuck. Malgas tossed and turned with the tide en nog ’n piep.
The grand staircase slipped sideways and vanished in a chattering flight of planks and nails. Malgas crept under the scraps of the rug and pulled them tight around him, while fragments of house rained down on him and rebounded into the void. He heard voices whispering, wind howling, machinery clanking. He saw the familiar silhouette of his old rooftop, and Mrs in a frame of amber light, impossibly distant.
Then the house began to flicker and flare, and parts of it flapped away into the night, and parts of it crumpled up like sheets of paper. Malgas was scrunched up and folded flat, and pressed down into the ground with the house.
Time passed.
When the dead hand of the night lay on the small hours of the morning, Malgas lunged into a state of brilliant wakefulness. The air was roaring. It sounded like a torrent of voices, but it was coming from his blood and the heaving walls. The house was trying to pull itself together. Malgas struggled to his feet in the flow. He grunted and groaned with the house, and it breathed him in and out, and it sweated him and bled him and made him ache. Then the air turned to dish-water, as if the dawn had sprung a leak. Colour blazed up in the walls, swept through the ruins, and filled the creased spaces with sunshine.
Malgas gambolled in the light and gulped it down in greedy mouthfuls. The light foamed in his blood, and spangled it, and his veins were filled with sparkling music. Then the sweetness curdled as the house began to crack open and drift apart. Malgas called out to the parts that were precious to him, and grasped them lightly by their names, cradled them on his tongue for a moment and rolled them over his taste-buds for old times’ sake, before they slipped from his lips, losing their colours, fading into forgetfulness.
The house was full of holes and the night poured in. The rafters turned to charcoal, the roof crashed down onto the observation deck, and that crashed down onto the floor below. Flocks of nails flew up into the sky. Storey after storey, amid clouds of dust and laughter, the house fell in on itself. The walls flared up and faded, and died down, now flaring up again — guttering –
The world drained out of Malgas. On an empty screen a single nail revolved into an exquisitely formed full stop.
Malgas was struck dumb. He fell down in a stupor, and the new house fell down with him, at last. Crash.Mrs Malgas spent the night at the window.
The arrival of the removers annoyed her (she felt left out, of course) and she considered phoning the police. But watching the four of them stumbling around, breaking things and tripping over one another, and listening to their chorus of thuds and curses, had a surprising effect on her: she began to find them amusing. It’s not funny, she told herself, and stifled a giggle. Just then Nieuwenhuizen dropped a barbell on his foot, and although he laughed it off and said he felt no pain, Mr started whimpering on his behalf. The removers tittered behind their caps. It’s laughable, Mrs corrected herself, and laughed out loud. She laughed and laughed; she hadn’t laughed so much in years.