Выбрать главу

“What do you consume, to build yourself up I mean?”

“Oh, birds, roots, that kind of thing. Berries. I’m living off the land. Naturally, I get my basics from the corner café, and the occasional luxury to keep me going. I’m especially fond of a chocolate digestive.”

The air thickened. Nieuwenhuizen kept his eyes closed. Minutes coalesced into hours, oozed by, and Malgas found himself dozing off. Perhaps it was the tea? Or was it Nieuwenhuizen’s husky voice, rising and falling like a wind through the treetop?

They discussed edible ground cover, drifted off, moulds, hydroponics, broccoli, market gardens, touched on barter (Nieuwenhuizen waved a bath mat woven from plastic bags), drifted off again, bumped against Hardware (Malgas revealed his T-shirt, which showed an overalled manikin, who bore a passing resemblance to Malgas himself, holding a huge spangled nail in one hand and a hammer in the other), hinges, handles, hafts, wallpaper, sandpaper, zinc, sink, sank, surfaced again into the niceties of skinning a cat, dropped off, slid in slow motion through spec housing and restaurant rubbish bins, recycled waste and domestic security gates, found themselves talking about the weather.

At length the sun dipped towards the red roof of Malgas’s house, which for some time had appeared to him through his eyelashes as a distant koppie. Then the elongated shadow of his wall touched his toes and he awoke to an uncomfortable recollection of the purpose of his visit.

“You find out what his real name is,” Mrs Malgas had announced bitterly, “or don’t even bother to come back.”

Mr Malgas looked into the swampy bottom of his teacup and assembled a question.

The house, when it was emptied of Mr’s absorbing presence, seemed more full of objects. They multiplied and grew in stature, their edges became sharper, their surfaces more reflective. Mrs Malgas moved among them, running a finger along the scalloped edges of display cabinets, stooping to blow dust off polished table-tops, pinching fluff off the velveteen shoulders of armchairs. She felt lonely. Mr had been gone for hours, and she could no longer bear the sight of him, reclining at the fireside with his hands behind his head and his feet up, as if he was in the privacy of his own home.

She took a bone-china shoe from the mantelpiece and turned it over in her hands. The shoe was slim and white, with a gilt buckle and a wineglass heel. It feels as if I’ve always had this, she thought, but that’s impossible. Always. Slipper. It must have come from somewhere? A gift from Mr? For some reason, it called to mind the day on which he’d bricked up the fireplace. She saw him, kneeling in front of the gaping hole, holding a trowel laden with wet cement in one hand and a brick in the other. His hair was standing on end and his shoulders were dandruffed with plaster chips and wood shavings. When she came in with the tea-tray he looked over one flaky shoulder and smiled woodenly, as if he was an advertisement for DIY products.

Suddenly the air was infused with the smell of meat. Mrs Malgas turned to the TV set on the hearth. A pitchfork hoisted a slab of red meat the size of a doorstep and threw it down on a grille. A familiar anthem, all sticky-fingered strings and saucy brass, came to the boil as the meat rebounded in slow motion from the grille, splashing large drops of fat and marinade. The smell of meat, basted in the surging melody, was overpowering. Mrs Malgas shut her eyes and fumbled for the flames, she felt the hot screen against her palms, a tacky button, she pressed it. She swallowed her nausea and held the cool sole of the shoe to her burning cheek.

The set was still sizzling when Mr Malgas traipsed in and switched on the light. The startled planes of the room banged into one another and fell back into their accustomed order.Mr sat down on his La-Z-Boy with his hands dangling.

Mrs looked at the damp shadows on his shirt. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” she said.

“What’s been going on now?” He looked at the blank screen.

“Nothing.”

She put the china shoe back in its place. The TV set felt warm against her belly. She said, “So.”

He cleaned one fingernail with another.

“You did ask him?”

“I did. ‘Father’ turns out to be a nickname of sorts.” She raised an eyebrow.

“As luck would have it, his real name is ‘Nieuwenhuizen’.”

The name snapped in half in the air and the two pieces dropped like twigs into the shaggy carpet. Mr hunted for them under the pretext of tying his shoelaces until her shadow fell over him.

“That’s impossible,” she said. “It’s too much of a coincidence.”

Mr looked at her slippers. The sheepskin was the same colour as the carpet. He saw her glossy shins, sprouting from the bulbs of her feet like saplings, and his own hands burrowing in the tufted fibres as if he was trying to uproot her. The idea made him uncomfortable. He raised his eyes to her face. It was scrunched into a small, livid fruit. In the juicy pulp of the eyes the pupils glinted like pips.

“I ask you,” she said, hawking. “Nieuwenhuizen of all things.” Her tongue held the two parts of the name together precisely, as if she was waiting for the glue to dry. “Nieuwenhuizen! Obviously an alias. A stage name. Did you ask for ID?”

“Nieuwenhuizen is a common name,” he said, focusing on her mouth.

“A criminal,” the mouth said. “I knew it. A killer.”

“I was at school with one.”

“Please,” said Mrs, using an intonation she had acquired from American television programmes, as Mr walked out of the room with his laces dragging behind him like dropped reins.

“Please,” she said again, as he returned in his socks, carrying the telephone directory. He flung the directory open on the coffee-table and rummaged through it. “Here: Nieuwenhuizen, C. J. of Roosevelt Park. A midwife, it says. Nieuwenhuizen, D. L. of Malvern East, just down the road. Nieuwenhuizen, H. A. of Pine Park. Another Nieuwenhuizen, H. A. of Rndprkrf. Where’s that?”

Mrs knew, but she didn’t feel like telling.

“Never mind.” His finger cut a furrow down the page. “There must be twenty of them, thirty if you count the Nieuwhuises and the Nieuwhuyses and the Niehauses. There’s probably a Newhouse too.” He flipped. “What have we here? No. But there’s a Newburg, and a list of Newmans as long as my arm.”

“We live in the west,” she said, going over to the window, “but our name isn’t Van der Westhuizen.”

“That’s my argument exactly! We may not be called Van der Westhuizen — I’ll grant you that — but thousands of people are, at least, say, what. . five thousand?. . and many of them are to the west of something. See?” Her shoulders drooped, and he went on triumphantly, “There must be thousands of Nieuwenhuizens countrywide, and at any given moment I’ll bet a dozen of them are building new houses — or thinking about it, anyway. It’s the luck of the draw. No, that’s feeble. It’s the law of averages.”

“It’s too good to be true.”

Mr Malgas went to stand beside his wife. Nieuwenhuizen had built up the fire and was walking slowly round it, dragging his long shadow over the landscape.

After a while of looking straight through it, Mr Malgas became aware of his own face reflected in the glass. Then he saw that his whole body was there, floating in the chilly space beyond the burglar-bars, and his wife’s face too, with its body below, and their lounge and its familiar clutter, dangerously cantilevered, and Nieuwenhuizen’s fire blazing in the middle of the carpet where the coffee-table should be. Tenderly, Mr put his arm around Mrs’s shoulders and drew her to him, and watched his pale reflection in the other room mimic the gesture.