This exercise gave her an appetite for conversation. She went to her prize knick-knack cabinet and surveyed the exhibits. Budgie. Paper nautilus. Plastic troll. Worry-beads. Dinner-bell.In the end it was a glass paperweight with a guineafowl feather aflutter in its heart that spoke to her.
···
Nieuwenhuizen was overcome by a great weariness. It drifted like spume from the tireless billows of veld and infiltrated the wide-open portals of his eyes, filling him slowly to the brim. His head listed, and the weariness slopped over and spilled down his cheeks. Mr Malgas advanced towards him through the rainbowed mist, parting the grass with his muscular thighs, extending his right hand like a shiftingspanner and saying, “How do you do?”
“He was sitting there like a lump all day,” Mrs told Mr when he came in from work. “He was looking at our house as if there’s something wrong with it.”
“You shouldn’t take it personally,” said Mr. “He’s probably just tired from his journey.”
“What journey?” she demanded suspiciously. “Where did you get that?”
“I’m just supposing.”
“It’s not like you to suppose.”
“He must have come from somewhere. He didn’t sprout there like a bean.”
“Ha ha, that’s the spirit. Don’t worry about me. I’ll get used to being a prisoner in my own home.”
“What can a man do?”
“A man can find out what he wants. Go over there and ask him.”
Mr shrugged.
“He’d have to say something, if you asked. He couldn’t just sit there with a mouth full of teeth.”
Mr Malgas paused on the verge, in the twilight, to look over the plot. A thin melody mixed with the smell of cooked meat washed over him. He wasn’t sure what to do next: there was no gate to rattle, no doorbell to ring. After a while something came to him, a phrase he had heard in a film about the Wild West, and he tried it out: “Hail the camp!”
The singing ceased. Nieuwenhuizen loomed in the distance, wreathed in smoke, as tall as a tree struck by lightning. Mr Malgas was tempted to run away. But one twisted branch beckoned and the human gesture heartened him. He set out across the veld.
Nieuwenhuizen looked down on his settlement from the vantagepoint of the oil drum. It was a dirty mess. He thought about tidying up, stirring the coals to enhance the atmosphere, even throwing on a log, but there wasn’t time. Mr Malgas drew near, breaking noisily through the undergrowth. Nieuwenhuizen stuck out his hand and grasped the cold air experimentally. Firm but friendly.
When he reached the outskirts of the camp, where the grass had been trampled flat, Mr Malgas was relieved to see that the stranger owed at least some of his height to the fact that he was standing on something. As Mr Malgas broke into the pale ring of lamplight he leapt down and came forward with his hand raised. “Hail yourself, neighbour! I’ve been expecting you.”
“Malgas,” said Mr Malgas, fixing his eyes so earnestly on the gaunt face that its features blurred, and enclosing a thorny hand in his own. It weighed next to nothing and it pricked his palm.
“Father,” said the stranger.
“Pardon?”
“Father. Pleased to meet you.”
“Malgas,” Mr Malgas repeated slowly. “Did you say ‘Father’?”
“It’s odd, isn’t it? Everyone says so.”
“I’ve never come across it before.” Mr Malgas sneaked a glance at the fireplace, where a blackened pot was squatting over the coals. “It seems improbable, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“Be my guest. I’m used to it. And you’ll get used to it too, believe me. People will get used to anything.”
In the silence that followed, Nieuwenhuizen noted Malgas’s Hush Puppies and his long socks bristling with blackjacks, his hairy, bulbous thighs, and a belly he tried to conceal, like a stolen melon, under the elasticized band of his shorts. Mr Malgas, while he watched Nieuwenhuizen watching him, heard the pot pass a wind and smelt singed hair, leaves, burning rubber and incense.
“Are you a priest?”
“Heavens no.”
The silence sizzled.
“Pull up a stone,” said Nieuwenhuizen, suddenly jovial. “Take the weight off your feet.” He dragged his drum to the fireside, seated himself on it, gave his visitor a toothy grin and stirred the pot vigorously with a stick.
Mr Malgas sat on the proffered stone, with his knees sticking up like anthills and his hands hanging down between them like spades, looking at Nieuwenhuizen’s unlikely limbs and listening to the pot as it bubbled and squeaked.
Nieuwenhuizen said nothing, so Mr Malgas cleared his throat and said too loudly, “I’ll come straight to the point: Why are you here?”
“I’m building a new house,” said Nieuwenhuizen.
Mr Malgas looked over his shoulder.
“I haven’t actually started yet,” said Nieuwenhuizen with a crackly laugh. “It’s still in the planning stages.”
“You’re a builder then. I’m in Hardware myself.” Mr Malgas wished he had a business card to present, but he hadn’t thought to bring his wallet. He was wearing a Mr Hardware T-shirt under his track-suit top, as always, but showing that would surely be improper. So he made the following conversation instead: “What brings you to our part of the world?”
“It’s a long story. Have you eaten?”
“No thanks.”
Nieuwenhuizen wiped his stirrer meticulously on the rim of the pot and laid it on a ledge made for that purpose. Mr Malgas saw from the protuberances at either end that what he had taken for a stick was in fact a bone. While he was inspecting it surreptitiously in an effort to determine its ancestry, Nieuwenhuizen took up a jagged bottle-neck and ladled some of his stew into a tin, plucked a plastic fork from his instep and began to eat.
“Where do you hail from?” asked Mr Malgas, rousing himself from his reverie.
“To cut a long story short: I left my home far away and came here to start over. It was a comfortable old place, give it its due, with one and a half bathrooms, but it had served its time. It was falling apart, to tell the truth. Full of maggots and tripe. The stuffing was coming out of the sofa, for example, the pipes leaked, the boards under the bath were green. I could see myself falling through them tub and all, up to my neck in hot water. The earth around there was quite rotten, and soft, a bit like cheese. I’d sink through it one day — that was my nightmare — I’d keep on going down to the centre of the planet, which is molten I’m told. Sss! Gone up in steam like a gob in a frying-pan. Can you imagine?”
Mr Malgas examined the soles of Nieuwenhuizen’s boots, which were stretched out towards the heat. The rubber bore a mysterious pattern of crosses and arrows. He also looked at Nieuwenhuizen’s oversized head, which bobbed constantly as if to keep its balance on his stalk of a neck; the proportions of this head no longer reassured him.
“Excuse me?”
“Are you sure you won’t have a little something?” Nieuwenhuizen repeated, pointing to the pot and smacking his lips. He observed with approval the inquisitive look on his guest’s face.