The Exploded View Page 10

  He returned to the study, flopped down in the chair and put his feet up on the desk. He drank from the bottle and looked at the wall.

  University days. He was in the first year of a BA, young, ignorant about everything. Some Marxist firebrand whom he’d met in a Sociology tutorial, a young man with a patriarch’s beard so luxuriant it looked false, had collared him in the canteen and tried to teach him a lesson about the means of production. It was shocking, he’d said, that a black kid was so out of touch. He’d put a tin of Coca-Cola down on the table between them and made him think about where it came from. He had to think about the workers who mined the ore and manned the smelters, he had to think about the workers in the plants where the paint was made, that distinctive Coca-Cola red, and the labourers in the cane fields harvesting the sugar, and the stevedores, truck drivers and supermarket packers moving the goods to the point of sale. He even had to think about the workers who made the secret ingredient without realizing it, because the recipe was locked in a vault somewhere and known to just two living people, and these poor dupes seemed to him the most downtrodden of all.

  When the lesson was over and the boy with the beard had gone off to a lecture, Simeon still sat there, looking at the plate on the table-top, at the potato chips and the congealed tomato sauce, the knives and forks, the salt and pepper sachets, the linoleum, the bricks, the corrugated iron. These things had been put here by thousands of people, tens of thousands of people, bound together in a massively complex web of work, whose most surprising characteristic was that nearly all of it was invisible and unacknowledged. He heard a noise outside, beyond the glass, the hubbub of a crowd drawing near, the people who were behind everything he touched and tasted and saw, the man-made world. They were angry, these people, the proletariat, and who could blame them, they were the angry workers rising up and advancing while he sat still, looking at his hand sticking out of the cuff of his cotton sweater, the watch on his wrist, and his fingers curled around the shiny red tin.

  Simeon uncrossed his ankles on the edge of the desk, flexed his feet in the trainers, and put them down firmly on the floor. How strange that such an obvious perspective – one could hardly call it an insight – had struck him with the force of revelation.

  Where had Leon picked up this girl Amy? He knew the type. They drove to their televised protests in their snappy little cars, they took their djembe drums on board as hand luggage, they gazed upon exploitation and oppression through their Police sunglasses. And all along they demonstrated that there was nothing to be done. Their radicalism consisted in making manifest the impossibility of change.

  He went outside.

  ‘Mine host!’ You’d think Leon had just beaten him at arm-wrestling. ‘Come and eat before the hungry masses descend and scoff it all!’

  They had finished eating. Leon was picking at his teeth with the end of a sosatie skewer. He spat a piece of gristle into the dark and said, ‘So, did you sell anything?’

  ‘A couple of pieces.’

  ‘Norman Fischhoff bought the rhino,’ said James.

  Why is he even asking? Simeon wondered. He’s been at the gallery, he must have seen the works that were reserved. It’s just a game.

  ‘Tell them about Stockholm,’ said Sandy.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’ve been invited to show some pieces in Stockholm at the Kulturhuset. A group show.’

  ‘Who’s curating it?’

  ‘Johanna Dahlberg.’

  ‘The one who did the South African show a couple of years ago?’ Leon said. ‘The so-called overview.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well that explains it then.’

  ‘Explains what?’

  ‘Nothing. Let it go.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The connection.’

  ‘What is it, Leon? Come on, spit it out.’

  ‘The invitation.’

  ‘She’s invited me because I’m black?’

  ‘No, Sims, it’s because you’re an African.’

  ‘Look! Look!’ Ruth yelling from the far side of the pool.

  One of the lanterns had burst into flames and was blazing like a beacon in the shrubbery. It provoked a mood of awed hilarity that lasted for half an hour, as long as it took for the lantern to collapse in a smouldering heap.

  ‘Si!’ Philippa called from the lounge. ‘This one’s for you!’

  They were washing dishes. He dried his hands on a dishcloth, kissed Ruth on the back of her head and went to stand in the doorway of the lounge. Just the diehards left, watching TV. John and Philippa sprawled on the couch, Sandy stretched out on the carpet with her head on the pouffe, sending up smoke signals. Some guy who wrote for Beeld – he’d come with Marge apparently, but she’d left without him – dozing in the recliner.

  He looked at the screen over their heads.

  Soldiers on a bridge, beating an unarmed man. The war in the Congo, he thought, but he couldn’t be sure. How could his outrage have blotted out the facts? He’d seen the footage half a dozen times: someone in the SABC newsroom was obsessed with it. Especially the scene where the soldiers throw the man, the rebel, over the railings. Or is the victim a soldier, are the perpetrators the rebels? Here it comes now. They took him by his arms and legs, and swung him backwards and forwards, building up momentum, building up suspense, like children threatening to throw someone into a swimming pool, will we, won’t we, and then they heaved him over. The camera rushed to follow him down, arms and legs flailing, missed most of his plummet, but caught the splash as he hit the water below. A moment of relief – he’s landed in the water, he’s survived! – as he scrambled to the bank. But then the soldiers – the rebels? – leaned over the railings to shoot at him, dashing from one side of the bridge to the other for the best vantage point, firing with casual gestures, taking potshots, like children playing at war, as if the sound of gunfire came from the corners of their mouths rather than the rifles in their hands.

  A wick of rage sputtered in the back of Simeon’s mind. He saw how this evening might end. He could fetch the pistol from the Moroccan tea caddy on his bedside table, where it lay in a jumble of spare keys and foreign currency, the small change brought back from his trips and kept for luck, an expired passport, a rubber key ring shaped like the figure in Munch’s Scream which had been given to him by Johanna Dahlberg.

  He could lurch out into the garden and stumble along beside the pool with the pistol dangling from his hand. ‘S. Majara.’ The hero of his own drama. Putting the unsteadiness on a bit, pretending to be drunker than he is, behaving wildly, just for himself. Four of the lanterns are still burning. He aims at the one next to the street door, because it’s furthest away, and fires. A face topples into the lounge window, a terrified face looking blindly out: the man from Beeld, awakened from his slumber, yet again, by distant gunshots. Sandy hustles him away from the window and someone puts out the light. Sandy or Ruth or Philippa will make sure the reporter keeps his trap shut – it is still illegal to discharge a firearm in a built-up area – but the story will get around anyway. Life in the old dog yet. Tanya will be furious that she missed the fun and games.

  Crime Scene. A charred mask. Perhaps one of those that burst into flames earlier will be usable. If not, he can blacken it up with a blowtorch. What was the word Sandy used? Gunplay. A synthesis of Bullet-in and Curiouser. ‘Crime Scene I’: a charred mask, gouged and gaping, made to gape more chillingly. The wound is in the forehead, an exit wound, drilled with the Black & Decker. The pale wood chipped away around the hole is white as bone.

  ‘Crime Scene II’: another mask, more severely scorched, with bullet holes in the left temple and the jaw. Protruding from the wounds, to mark the trajectories of the shots, two long wooden dowels in luminous colours. Something he saw on Homicide: Life on the Street.

  ‘Crime Scene III’: the real loser. Burnt beyond recognition but gleaming white everywhere, as if the fire has pared the wood down to a skull. This victim has a little f
lag fluttering from his broken crown.

  A room full of death masks, dangling from the ceiling on fishing line – the average man is 1.75 metres, the average woman 1.63 – so that the height alone invites you to press your face into the smoky hollow. The eyes are shaped like keyholes and television screens.

  On the screen, black men in pale suits are getting out of limousines, passing through revolving doors, crossing lobbies, harried by reporters and cameramen, walking backwards, thrusting their notepads and furry microphones into the frame, as if the tools of the trade are the real subject of the news. The peacemakers, the negotiators, the mediators. Whenever they face the cameras, their bodyguards, tall men with short blond hair and dark glasses, the only white people you see, appear in the background, looking alertly over their shoulders, gazing into the invisible corners where danger always lurks, off-screen, cloaked in the everyday.

  Philippa stirred on the couch. She had slipped her hand into John’s pocket and the sharp outlines of her knuckles pressed against the cloth. The man from Beeld shifted in the recliner and sighed.

  Simeon went down the passage. He took a pack of cigarettes from his bedside drawer – the pistol had slipped from his mind, the visitors’ book lying on his pillow did not enter it – and went to his studio, passing quietly behind Ruth, who was still at the kitchen sink with her hands in the suds. The smells in the studio were comforting. Damp plaster, sawdust, creosote, glue. He sat in the neon glare while the work folded from his brain, one piece out of another, sequences and series, objects and their names, stamped with Roman numerals like the descendants of a single forebear.

  CROCODILE LODGE

  A truck has lost its load on the R24, that’s opposite Eastgate. Traffic lights are out of order on Jan Smuts Avenue at Bompas, in Roodepoort at Main Reef and Nywerheid, in Rivonia Road at 12th Street, in Sandown at Grayston Drive and Daisy.

  The cadences of the traffic report were as familiar as a liturgy. Usually it was reassuring, this invocation of rises and dips and the states associated with them, a map of sensations keyed to his own body, to the ball of his foot pressing on the accelerator pedal and the palm of his hand lazing on the gear lever. It would soothe him to hear that each of the named intersections had become the hub of a failed mechanism, the end point of an incomplete trajectory, and that he was implicated in none of it, he was still on course. But this afternoon, caught in the rush hour and sensing trouble up ahead, the measured words fell on him like a judgement.

  There has been an accident involving three vehicles on the N1 South before the Buccleuch interchange. Emergency vehicles –

  Knew it! Must be the third time this month. How many accidents are there in Johannesburg on any given day? The radio reports capture just a fraction, those that call attention to themselves by happening in the rush hour, but there must be dozens more. How many drivers are speeding at this moment towards death or worse, towards a lifetime of walking with a stick, disabilities that will necessitate new hobbies, scars that will demand a different wardrobe? Accidents. The word hardly does justice to the symphonic play of causes. Why do people see order and purpose in the ordinary and give over the high points and low points to chance?

  Someone blew past in the emergency lane. A fat bastard in a 4×4 with a name like a Japanese restaurant. There were more and more of these chancers on the road, the same set who used to favour the sleek saloon, flouting the unwritten laws of traffic. Their bulldog grilles came up in your rear-view mirror and began to nip at your wheels. Hard bodies, according to the advertising, but they looked milk-fed and soft with their puppy-fat fenders and bumpers like dodgem cars.

  The unwritten laws. Say you’re stuck in the slow lane, bumper to bumper, and everyone in front of you is going straight, whereas you want to turn off at the next exit. You can see the ramp ahead, an invitingly open stretch of tar. You’re entitled to use the emergency lane to slip past, no question about that – but your rights have limits. There’s a decent distance, a liberty you have to judge for yourself before you take it, which others won’t find offensive. You can’t jump the queue from a kilometre back, even if an empty off-ramp beckons, that’s boorish. But once you’ve narrowed the distance to two hundred metres and paid some dues in wasted minutes, you can ease past and people will understand.

  The vehicles involved in the pile-up at the Buccleuch interchange are on fire. Avoid that section of the N1 if you can and take an alternative route.

  He saw it in the distance now, a rubbery column of smoke bulging up as profusely as if it issued from a chimney.

  Someone else buffeted by on the left. When the system fails, the rules are there to be broken. He nosed out of the traffic and followed the offender along the emergency lane to the off-ramp. The freeway was useless now, might as well take the back roads through Vorna Valley and Kyalami, he’d get home sooner. Unless too many other people had the same idea…There was already a jam at the end of the ramp. You can never be sure you’ve made the right decision. It’s like queue-hopping at the tills in the supermarket: no matter which queue you choose, the other one will be faster. Or it will appear that way to you, which amounts to the same thing. Another law.

  The traffic edged towards the lights.

  Vendors moved between the cars, proffering coat-hangers, rubbish bags, sock puppets, baseball caps, trays of naartjies, hands-free kits for cellphones. A balsa-wood schooner, swept up in a black boy’s hands, came sailing through the Highveld air. From a distance there was an illusion of intricacy and craft; from close up it was shoddily made, stuck together with staples and glue. A slave ship, mass-produced, he supposed, by children in a sweatshop somewhere in Hong Kong or Karachi or Doornfontein. And how about this: a man with a sign around his neck – Keep South Africa Beautiful: Give Me Your Litter – holding out a waste-paper basket in one hand and cupping the other for a tip. He thought of handing something over – the cab was a mess – or rewarding him for sheer cheek with a few coins from the parking-meter stock in a compartment on the console. Thought again, as the lights changed and he jerked forward with the lane, keeping one eye on the wing mirror to make sure no one lifted anything off the back. Should have laced that cover properly, even though it was late when he dropped Josiah and the temps off in Tembisa.

  Sylvia. Must let her know I’m stuck in traffic.

  But his phone was not in the pocket of his jacket where he usually kept it. He rummaged through the junk on the seat beside him, paper serviettes, fliers for shocks and diffs and show days at town-house developments, sticky plastic spoons caught in the crocheted blanket that covered the vinyl. From the crack where the backrest joined the seat he raked a drinking straw, a book of matches and a Yale key. No sign of his cell. He wound up the window. The floor on the passenger side was cluttered with tools, offcuts of pine, coils of wire, half-used squares of sandpaper like little relief maps of the Namib, fastfood wrappers. He scratched the contents of the cubbyhole out on the floor. Nothing there either.

  When was the last time I used the bloody thing? Took a call at the Crocodile Lodge site. No. The phone rang in my jacket pocket while I was up the ladder and I left it for the voicemail. Where was the jacket then? Hanging from a bolt somewhere on the hoarding below. Later, I called back. Firoz, at the office, wanting to know what I’d done with the VAT file. And then? Must have put it down somewhere.

  He reached the end of the ramp. Three or four cars were getting across the intersection at a time. If that prick in the Subaru would pull finger we could stretch it to five. The lights changed and he tacked himself onto the gaggle turning to cross back over the freeway. Now he meant to go straight on, homewards, but instead he found himself turning onto the N1 again, going back to the building site, going back to Crocodile Lodge to retrieve his phone, allowing the arrows on the tar to make the decision for him.

  I should leave it for tomorrow, of course. It’ll be dark by the time I get there; and someone’s probably walked off with it anyway. But if it’s lying out there…Sylvia will be furi
ous. She’s such a worrier. Then again, she only comes in from gym at six on Wednesdays. I’ll call and leave a message on the answering machine just to say I’ll be late, nothing specific. Except that I don’t have a phone!

  He pushed into the traffic streaming towards Midrand. Twice in the space of a kilometre he thought he should call to say he’d be late, and twice he had to remind himself that the phone was gone. A broken record player, he said to himself, that’s what you are.

  Actually, you could not really call it gym, what Sylvia was doing these days to keep fit. It was boxing. The latest fad. When she’d started a few months back, she wanted him to join her. ‘Finally, a fitness regime that’ll suit you.’

  ‘Serious?’

  ‘It’s macho stuff. Full of feints and jabs. You’ll love it.’

  ‘No, no, I get enough exercise running around on building sites. On a slow day I’m up and down a ladder fifty times.’

  ‘And this?’ Pinching a fold of skin on his midriff.

  ‘Can’t be helped. You know, men of a certain age.’

  Of course, she was ribbing him because he’d been in the ring a few times when he was a kid. One of his stories, the kind you know by heart after twenty years of marriage.

  His arm could not be twisted. But a month or so later, her car went in for a service and he had to pick her up at the Health and Racquet (or as he always said: the Health Racket). She was supposed to wait for him in the parking area, but he arrived early so that he could see what this ‘Boxercise’ was all about. It was early spring, the smell of jasmine and carbon monoxide in the air, a flare of sunset as if a huge primus stove had been left to scorch the wall of the sky. The exercise junkies were hanging out in the juice bar at the entrance like a bunch of old soaks. He went up a flight of stairs and found a balcony with a view of the floor.