The Exploded View Read online

  He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. The papers were full of the trends – Exerboxing, Boxercise, Aeroboxing, Boxerobics. Aerobics with a bit of aggressive shadow-boxing thrown in. And something called Tae-Bo – Bo was short for Boxing – which he’d seen advertised on CNN. Looked a little more martial-artsy, full of hip swivels and hand chops. On the floor below, three different classes were in progress, but nothing that fitted this bill.

  Then he saw them in a far corner where a punchbag was suspended from the rafters, three or four women, gloved up and glistening, and a couple of men too, skinny teenagers with tattoos, ranged around a black instructor built like one of the MTN gladiators. A woman in red boxer shorts rattling the speedball. The instructor (the trainer, they would say) put his shoulder to the heavy bag, and one of the women, a woman he now recognized as Sylvia – not so much by her features, which were hidden under a bulky headguard, but by the way she moved, a signature slide of the hips beneath the boxer’s crouch and dance – squared up to the bag and let rip. She had the head-bob, the hooks and jabs, the nifty footwork, all put together with a ferocity that surprised him. My wife, the middleweight. He watched with grudging and guilty amazement as she threw everything she had at the bag, while the trainer kept it steady or let it sway, and then he sneaked out to wait in the bakkie. Didn’t say a word when she came out flushed and sweaty, just looked out of the corner of his eye at her fist, clasping the handbag strap, and drove.

  That very night, or it may have been a few nights later, his Wilkie Pieterse dream returned. Wilkie had done this before, stayed away for years, until it seemed he’d retired for good, then unexpectedly made a comeback.

  It is a boxing dream. He and Wilkie are facing one another in the ring. An enormous ring, meant for men rather than boys, with ropes as thick as a man’s arm, and Wilkie in his outsize shorts, satiny and shimmering in the powdery haze rising up from the canvas, the skirl of pipes like a white emanation in the air, the big red gloves, a clamouring bell. They circle, toe to toe, tapping and cuffing harmlessly. Then he feels his fists contracting, the two bulbs of the gloves beginning to beat like swollen hearts, his muscles acquiring iron and oil. His fists drive out from his body in a rush of steam. He turns into a boxing machine, he pummels Wilkie Pieterse mercilessly, mechanically, until blood spurts from his nose and ears and eyes, and he falls to his knees. A bell starts to ring and a man appears, pastel pale and clean as a male nurse, waving his palms to show that the bout is over, but his fists have a life of their own, they keep springing out from his body, thudding into the other boy’s face, until at last the bell dissolves in the morning’s alarm.

  The dream had lingered for days, because this ending came as a surprise. He’d been fighting Wilkie in his sleep now for forty years, on and off, ever since his final glimpse of that little twerp in the waking world, clanking through the turnstile behind the grandstand at the Caledonian Sport and Recreation Club. Always, Wilkie beat him black and blue. This was his first victory. It left him feeling strangely dissatisfied.

  Observe safe following distance. Always see three arrows.

  He usually slowed down when he saw the sign, so that there were three painted arrows on the tar between the bonnet of his bakkie and the tail of the car in front. He was exactly the kind of person this experiment in inculcating sensible driving habits was aimed at: attentive to the rules and regulations and willing to take instruction. But in rush-hour traffic on a Wednesday afternoon there was no point even trying to comply. No sooner had a gap opened up in a lane than someone barged into it, convinced that it would get him to his destination more quickly. The experiment had the opposite of its intended effect: it triggered a reckless Pacman instinct in people that made them want to gobble up arrows and catch the car in front.

  He saw two arrows, one arrow, two arrows, as the lane expanded and contracted to an unpredictable rhythm. He thought about braking distances. He had read somewhere that if you sneeze at 120 kilometres an hour, and the average sneeze lasts seven seconds, counting the bleary-eyed build-up and the snotty aftermath, effectively you’re driving blind for more than two hundred metres. Could it be true? He readjusted the side mirror with the toggle on the door panel, started converting kilometres per hour into metres per second in his head, let it go, tried to remember precisely what had become of his phone.

  A boxing machine? It was like something out of Popular Mechanics. ‘Machine throws combinations, mows lawn, makes ice cubes.’ Sometimes he thought the whole shape of his life was caught between those pages, preserved there as a kind of fate, like a timetable left behind in the nineteen-fifties. A bookmark.

  Lying on his bed in the afternoons, with the sun beating down through the window on the backs of his legs, reading his father’s magazines. There were piles of them on the shelves in the garage going back to the years after the War, tatty things that had never seen the inside of a library, at home rather among tins of grease and bottles of brake fluid, the clutter of spare parts and spanners and nuts and bolts. In the school holidays, he brought them into his room a dozen at a time, a year of monthly volumes, and they lay on his bedside table reeking of rubber and petrol, troubling his dreams with their fumes. He would go through them again and again, until he knew the images by heart.

  It was an American world he entered there, its surfaces airbrushed to perfection, gleaming with old-fashioned optimism; and its inner workings laid bare, frankly and practically, as the product of enterprise and effort. This double world expressed itself in two languages: the patter of leisure and convenience, of patios and porches, rumpus rooms and dens, pool tables, lazy Susans, TV trays; and a deeper music of planning and building, of lathes and drill presses, bandsaws and welding irons, bits and gauges. He wanted to acquire these languages himself, he wanted to live in this world, passing effortlessly between its countersunk dimensions, where he felt he belonged.

  In these well-thumbed pages all things were the sum of their parts. A slatted bench for the garden, a rocking horse for the nursery, a toolshed, a boathouse, an entire mansion made of wood. On the plans that accompanied the do-it-yourself projects every solid thing had been exploded, gently, into its components, arrangements of boards, springs, rails, nails, veneers, bushings, cleats, threads. Each part hovered just out of range of the others it was meant to meet, with precise narrow spaces in between. All it needed was a touch, a prod with the tip of a finger, to shift everything closer together, and a perfect whole would be realized, superficially complete and indivisible. Until then each element waited, in suspension, for finality. Not a single nut or bolt or washer had been forgotten; every last screw was poised a quarter of an inch away from the hole into which it would soon be driven, vibrating in the yellowed air of the paper, emitting what the boy, lying on his stomach with the open magazine propped against a pillow, took to be anticipatory music.

  Want to be an engineer?

  Yes, he thought, I want to be a popular mechanic. I want to wear these chiselled features, clench this square jaw and narrow these appraising eyes. I want crisp waves carved into my hair, as hard and smooth as scrolled maple. I want to work with an angular briar jutting from my lips like a speech bubble, a fragrant and stubborn Dr Watson. Now you can be a crackerjack. ‘Knurled thumb nuts used throughout.’

  But he had not become an engineer. He had worked instead for contractors, friends of his father, on small-scale building operations and alterations, and then for a couple of larger construction companies supervising minor procedures, clearing and levelling sites, excavating foundations, digging ditches or backfilling them. At thirty, with a family to support, he was not the success he wanted to be. He went out on his own, starting the first of many businesses, teaching himself to plant telephone poles, renovate swimming pools, fell trees – the ‘Tree Feller’ he called himself in that phase – losing money, losing interest.

  His latest venture had been the most enduring and lucrative: putting up billboards.

  Billboards are big business, he would tell a
nyone who asked. The outdoor advertising giants ran thousands of hoardings, including massive eight- and ten-storey structures along the freeways, bus-stop displays on suburban streets, painted walls in the city and electronic boards at the malls. He was in a different league, dealing with small boards, seldom more than thirty or forty square metres, for advertisers and property developers. Over the years he had done more and more real estate, inexpensive structures with a limited lifespan: the board announcing a new development stayed up while the construction was under way, advertising office space or town-house units for sale, and then it came down again. His connections in the building trade helped to rustle up business. There was not much competition, but then there was no ready demand either: many of the companies simply put up their own boards and needed persuading that a specialist could do a better, cheaper job of it. The sheer volume of development in the city kept him busy. As high-rises and office parks went up on smallholdings in Sandton and walled town-house complexes were set down in the veld around Midrand, the northern outskirts of the city began to regard themselves as its centre and the projects became more grandiose.

  The Crocodile Lodge billboard was larger than usual and it had taken a week to put up. It was on rocky ground, on a sloping stand beside the N3, and sinking the posts had been a performance. Josiah and his team were breaking rock with a jackhammer for a solid day while the agency breathed down his neck, complaining that they couldn’t put in their invoice until the whole job was done. They even insisted on pasting up the sheets themselves, a ponytailed art director with a team of workers in white overalls, all of them white too. University students, he discovered. There was a University of Advertising, apparently, and this was one of their assignments. The ponytail brought a canvas chair and an easel to hold the design, as if it were a masterpiece rather than a simple jigsaw, and under his direction the students unfurled and attached the numbered sheets. An artist’s impression of the town-house complex came into view, a tidy, toy-town version of the bushveld. It was the first time he had seen a complex with an African theme, the safari lodge, all sandstone and thatch.

  As Crocodile Lodge appeared, block by block, he found himself leafing again in memory through the pages of Popular Mechanics. He remembered a holiday house on the cover of an issue from the mid-fifties. Except for a chimney of stone, the place was made entirely of wood, in the American style, and stood on the edge of a lake (if it ever caught fire, there would be nothing left but that chimney, like a tombstone in the ashes). There was a crazy-paving porch and a cindered drive with a Chevrolet parked in it. A slipway ran down to the water, where a Canadian canoe was moored to a jetty, and on the far shore was a stand of Douglas firs, reflected in the placid surface.

  He had spent many hours gazing at this picture, trying to decipher the specific meaning of America that lay in these shapes and shades, in the gloss on a fender like a smear of butter or the rune of smoke from a chimney pot mimicking a seabird. This place, impossibly distant and unreal, filled him with painful longing, an ache for containment that was peculiarly like homesickness. To be bathed in these colours, held by this light falling benevolently on every surface, aglow with prosperity and happiness.

  Some people, he thought, will find the same pangs awakened by Crocodile Lodge, which was materializing slowly, archaically, as the students glued and smoothed sheet after sheet with their long-handled brooms. Monkeying around. Dynamic Construction had done a deal with the University of Advertising. Could there be such a thing? Like that Kentucky Fried Chicken Academy in Bez Valley, where you could major in Herbs and Spices.

  He wanted to go home, but they wouldn’t let him: you never know, there might be problems. The only problem he foresaw was petty theft. Already there were bricks stacked up among the felled bluegums, bits of scaffolding and heaps of building sand – or was it beach sand railed in from the coast for the waterholes? They should never have delivered the materials before the contractor had established a permanent presence on the site, it was just asking for trouble. A few things had been pilfered in the past week. They would have to get a watchman. Or a company to patrol.

  While the students worked, he picked his way to the edge of the site and looked out across the veld. In the sump of the valley lay the freeway, the oily N3, like a slow black river. On the opposite slopes stood two recent townhouse developments: Villa Toscana in the east and Côte d’Azur in the west. He’d put up the billboards for Villa Toscana too, as a matter of fact, but those had been struck long ago, when the first phase of the complex was finished. The Riviera is harder to capture than Tuscany, a contractor had told him once, not so much in the renderings as in the real world, in the buildings themselves. French textures and colours are more subtle, the styles are harder to imitate. The Highveld light cooperates more readily with Italian colour schemes and that’s why Tuscany is easier to reproduce. Perhaps, he’d responded, it’s because the contractors have had so much practice? There were bits of Italy, a peculiar country born and bred in the colour chart, made of swatches and samples, rising everywhere on the Reef. Stage sets on which to dramatize work and leisure.

  Italy, France. In a month or two, at his back: Africa. That seemed even stranger than these European islands: a self-contained little world in the African style, surrounded by electrified fences, rising from the African veld.

  ‘Radio-controlled lawnmower lets inventor loaf in shade.’ ‘Unique floor lamp has aquarium base improvised from gasoline-pump bowl.’ ‘Bathroom scale folds into wall when not in use.’ ‘Decorative kitchen wall-light made from spoon and bowl.’ Half the magazine was taken up with descriptions of gadgets and inventions, household hints and handyman’s tips, objects put to new purposes or brought into new relationships with one another, improvements, adaptations and customizations. He went from one headline to another, poring over the pictures and diagrams, absorbing the innovative emanations of seemingly ordinary things. Nothing was truly itself. ‘Jar covers provide small pulleys.’ ‘Drawing board is easily adjusted if held by storm-sash brackets.’ ‘Mesh tube laid in gutters prevents clogging by leaves.’ This must be the meaning of America: an endless series of improvisations on the material world. A kind of jazz.

  One arrow, two arrows. Spent the morning in Rivonia speaking to a new client, showing him a portfolio, talking technical. Phone rang three times: Firoz, Lewis at Dynamic, Firoz. Early lunch in the Brazilian at Rivonia Junction. Tramezzino. The waitress insisted it was a tramezzini. Called Peter John during the espresso to confirm the rugby tickets. Picked up Josiah and four guys and took them out to Crocodile Lodge. Dynamic have decided they want illumination at night and so there are lights to install. Up and down a ladder all afternoon. Phone rang a couple of times. Called Firoz back about some VAT invoice or other. Must have lost it after that, on site. Or put it down in the cab, maybe, where someone else picked it up. Josiah’s totally reliable, so’s Oupa. If it’s been swiped, it’ll be one of the temps. There’s that new guy Josiah brought along. Alan. Not a very common black name, can’t recall ever meeting one before. Perhaps it’s Olun? Looked like a Nigerian. Could it have wound up in one of the toolboxes?

  The Star Stop Egoli was coming up. On an impulse, he turned off and looked for the public telephones, spotted the four units like snail shells in a face-brick alcove near the toilets. He parked the bakkie at the kerb, went to the nearest phone, fed it with a handful of parking-meter money and dialled the number of his own cell. Leaving the receiver dangling, he went quickly back to the bakkie and walked around it. His phone was programmed to play the theme tune from Mission Impossible. Nothing.

  When he picked up the instrument to replace it on the cradle, he was surprised to hear his own voice, muffled and distant, as if he was speaking from the boot of a car. ‘Gordon Duffy…The Outdoor Edge.’ He put the receiver to his ear. ‘I’m not available right now, but leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you asap.’

  A superstitious tremor shook him. He imagined the cellphone lying somewhere in the
grass at Crocodile Lodge, in a place full of red ants and dry roots, and his own voice calling from it like a small creature. Or even worse, his telephone voice, disembodied and businesslike, speaking out of some thief’s pocket. This thought was suffocatingly worse, choked with lint and dottle. The smell of his own aftershave and sweat rising from the plastic handset in the hot pocket of an overall. It’s an intimate object, this channel for voices – he’d never seen it that way before – pressed close to your body and your thoughts, breathed into and spoken through. A catalogue of your own connections too, the pre-programmed numbers to wife, mother, son, daughter, doctor, armed response company.

  The tone sounded. The idea of leaving a message for the supposed thief flickered through his mind. ‘I know who you are…’ Then he pictured the phone lying on a makeshift table in a shack, among beer bottles and ashtrays. Four men sitting around, drinking and smoking. He put the phone down. At least the thief hadn’t answered. It’s common enough for the culprit to answer and tell you to piss off. Happened to Sylvia’s brother.

  Instead, he called home and left a message on the answering machine for Sylvia to find when she came in from boxing. I’ve been delayed, he said, I’ll be home around seven. He did not say why. She did not like him messing around on construction sites after hours, especially since Manny Pinheiro got himself shot in a hijacking at Kya Sands.

  Back on the freeway, with a tin of Stoney ginger beer clasped between his knees, it occurred to him that when she found the message, she would phone his cell. Please God, no one will answer. Or I’ll have the thing in my hand again by then.

  Traffic lights are out of order in Bedfordview at Harper and Van Buuren, in Parktown North at Jan Smuts and Jellicoe. There are roadworks on William Nicol between Ballyclare and Peter Place. The accident at the Buccleuch interchange has been cleared, but emergency vehicles are still on the scene and traffic is moving very slowly. If you can, avoid the N1 South, that’s near the junction with the N3.