The Folly Read online

  Mrs slumped down at the table and gazed into the frog’s eye, which gazed back without blinking from the gummy dregs of her coffee. “Is he one of these squatters we’ve been hearing so much about? Will he put up a shack and bring hundreds of his cronies to do the same? ‘Extended families.’ What do you think? Will they hammer together tomato boxes and rubbish bags, bits of supermarket trolleys and motor cars, noticeboards and yield signs, gunny sacks and jungle gyms, plastic, paper, polystyrene …”

  “Enough.”

  “… brass, bronze and Beaverboard. Fine. We’ll be forced out of our home. They’ll play their radios loud. They’ll go in the streets like dogs. They’ll tear up our parquet for firewood.”

  Nieuwenhuizen dug a moat around his tent with a broken bottle. Then he reviewed the interior of his portmanteau, in which a wide range of utensils and provisions lay snugly, cushioned by underpants, vests, and socks rolled into balls and swallowing their own toes. His rummaging fingers scared up a mouldy smell, which reminded him of the furry bodies of moths, which in turn brought the unthinkable taste of them into his mouth. To dispel this loathsome impression he quickly unpacked a few things and arranged them to his satisfaction around the camp. It looked good. Now for furniture. He fetched stones and constructed a simple table and chairs, and a hearth with nifty ingle-nooks and ledges.

  He rested.

  While he was lolling on his stony seat the man of the house emerged. Nieuwenhuizen followed his progress by the roar of an engine, gears grating, gates clanging, a door slamming. Soon a battered bakkie with a home-made canopy and a built-in roof-rack piled with planks and a capsized wheelbarrow came slowly but surely into view. Bravo! Right on cue. There was a sign on the door – half a manikin, Mr … Something … the surname was obscured by a smear of red paint. The bakkie drew up at the kerb. The driver got out, walked ponderously to the rear of the vehicle and kicked the tyre, and looked at his toe-cap. Then he went to the front, kicked that tyre, and looked at his shoe again. Then he got back into the cab and drove off.

  Long after the sound of the engine had died away Nieuwenhuizen remained glued to his chair with his head cocked and his mouth hanging open. Then he roused himself with an effort. There was work to be done.

  To begin with, he ruled lines with his eyes, from one little landmark to another, twig to knoll and kerbstone to leaf, pillar to post and branch to berry, so that his territory lay enmeshed in a handsome grid, and he numbered the blocks methodically, Roman numerals down one side and capital letters down another, and spent hours plundering each one until it delivered up its riches. He was surprised at how many useful objects lay concealed in the grass: beer bottles and cold-drink tins, inner tubes, bits of board and metal, scribbles of wire, insulators, screws, plastic bags, cardboard cartons – well, there was only one: a cardboard carton, strictly speaking – and scraps of newspaper. He carried all his finds back to camp in his drum and stored them away for future reference. He also salvaged half a dozen fine fence-posts and a cast-off letter-box shaped like a shoe.

  The discovery that pleased him most was a weathered FOR SALE notice he disentangled from the barbed-wire shroud of the fence. He was so delighted with it that he made a note of its position on the grid (XA) and wished he’d had the foresight to do the same for the other items. He turned it over in his hands. He gave it a stiff kick to dislodge some of its rust. It had useful object written all over it. It was not long before a precise potential function revealed itself: with the addition of a few strategically placed holes this simple metal plate would make an excellent braai-grille.

  At midday he sought the spiky shade of his thorn-tree, made himself comfortable, and scoured every last flake of rust and blistered paint off the sign with handfuls of gravel and an ingenious barbed-wire brush of his own device. Then he set about punching holes through it in regular rows with a large nail, which he had brought with him, and a well-proportioned flint, recently acquired, which he had nominated as his hammer.

  He now found time to reconsider his first impressions of his new neighbour. He was not disappointed. Firstly, he assumed that the tyre-kicking performance had been for his benefit, which was a sure sign that the man was eager to make contact. Secondly, the man worked, or so he inferred from the rattletrap vehicle and businesslike demean-our. Thirdly, his physical presence was imposing. He was bulky and solid. His face was the colour of putty, but his forearms were a healthy kiaat-red. Shirt-sleeves in this weather? Either he was hard as nails or he was trying to impress. His head was a little square perhaps, and his hair plastered down on its flat top like a doormat, but his features were open and friendly. No one’s perfect.

  Then there was the woman. Nieuwenhuizen didn’t know quite what to make of her. There was no sign of her now, but a few times that morning he had seen her face rise wanly behind a mist of net curtaining or sink below the horizon of a window-sill.

  My next-door neighbours, he thought, except that I have no door.

  In mid-afternoon, when his handiwork was almost done, his eye fell for the hundredth time on the prefabricated wall – and he noticed with a jolt that the wagon-wheel panels were interspersed with rising suns. He was still puzzling over how these panels had escaped his attention thus far when it struck him, with another jolt, that perhaps they were setting suns! And who could tell?

  This line of thought threw him into a state of violent scepticism about every perception he had had since his arrival in this godforsaken place. He examined the house behind the wall with new interest. It was still there, which was reassuring, but would its plastered features pass for white? More like off-white, you could even say cream. Buttermilk? As for the roof, that was red all right, but what kind of red? Raspberry? It was certainly not the same shade as the bougainvillaea creeping up one pillar of the stoep. Hang on. What’s this? Flowering out of season? The blooms looked as if they were made of crinkle-paper pinched on stems like pipe-cleaners. That would be her doing. He turned his eyes on the empty frames of the windows, and the curtains on either side, nipped into hourglasses by tasselled thongs, and tried to caption them: Kitchen. Lounge. Bedroom. Bathroom? Bedroom. Lounge. Two lounges?

  Mrs Malgas, who had been standing thinly behind a lamp in her lounge for more than an hour, transfixed by the stranger’s peculiar mode of hammering, was astonished when his legs suddenly shot out rigidly in front of him. His kneecaps bounced up and down as if they were mounted on springs and his head bobbed as if it belonged to a doll. He looked for all the world like a dummy manipulated by an amateur ventriloquist. Abruptly he slumped against the tree trunk and appeared to fall asleep. But then he jumped again, causing his heels to thud together with such force that one of his boots flew off.

  Now he turned his eyes on her so intently that she was sure he had discovered her presence. She fled to her bedroom and lay down until she felt herself again. She switched on the radio. A familiar voice promised to tell her how to remove bloodstains from fine linen, stay tuned, and reminded her that the devil finds work for idle hands. In response she took one of Mr’s socks from her sewing-basket, a brick-red woollen sock thick as a blanket, stretched it over a fused light-bulb that served as a darning-egg so that the hole in its heel yawned, matched a length of wool to the colour and threaded a needle.

  Do NOT soak b-s item in water, neither h nor c – will set stn. Sqz juice 1 lemon in tmblr & stir well. Fold in white 1 L. egg & 1 Tsp Bicarb. Sprnkl.

  When she had finished darning the sock she put everything away in the basket and lay looking up at the ceiling and dozing. The radio hinted and tipped. Time passed. A time-check. Time to start the supper. She spilled a cup of rice on the Formica top of the kitchen table and picked through it. Then she swept the broken and discoloured grains into the palm of her hand and carried them to the bin. She stood on the pedal to open the lid, and at the same time pushed open the window and scattered the grains into the bed of gazanias below. The stranger was nowhere to be seen, although his tent was glowing like a lantern in the dusk.
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br />   Nieuwenhuizen turned his hands over in the rosy air and watched the play of light on his thick veins. Through the fretwork of his fingers he saw the unaccustomed lightning of thorny branches against the canvas. The walls swayed as he breathed, in and out, and despite himself he began to drift off. He turned his big head heavily on his pillow, which was nothing more than a plastic bag stuffed with straw, and it crackled. He threw himself over on his stomach, pressed his face into the din, and spread his arms and legs until each of his extremities was wedged firmly in one of the four corners of the tent.

  “All day, he was pacing up and down like a lunatic in a cage,” said Mrs, “stepping on his shadow and picking up junk. Like so.” She gave a demonstration of Nieuwenhuizen’s rickety stride. “And then he was hammering, bof-bof-bof, for three hours on end. I nearly went up the wall.” She demonstrated the hammering too, rattling her hands and nodding her head. “And then, to crown it all, he went like this – twice!” She sat down in a Gomma Gomma armchair and gave two startling imitations of Nieuwenhuizen’s spasms.

  Mr was perplexed. He stared at his wife’s shaggy slippers, sitting up like dogs on the ends of her stiff legs, and couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “You might have phoned, just to see if I was coping.”

  While Mrs was dishing up the supper, Mr kept watch in the darkened lounge. The camp, alone on the moon-bleached veld, with the hedge bearing down on it like a wave about to break, appeared to him as an island of light and warmth. The stranger crouched over his cooking-fire. A hurricane-lamp suspended from a branch overhead buttered his shoulders lightly, and the coals splashed blood on his down-turned face. A screen of smoke drifted over the landscape and softened all its edges.

  He eased a window open, put his face to the burglar-bars and sniffed the meaty breeze. Scrumptious. He was still standing there with his hands in a knot behind his back and his nose quivering when she carried in their plates, drew the curtains in front of his eyes and switched on the TV.

  “The rice is dry,” she said. “I can’t concentrate with all this going on.”

  “I’ve been studying our friend and his camp,” said Mr as they ate. “It looks quite jolly.” He was thinking, too, that it looked almost – what?… Brave. But the contemptuous dimple in one corner of her mouth warned him against voicing that observation and he remarked instead, “We should have a braai one of these days.”

  “In this weather?”

  They both chewed and stared into the TV set, where they saw the same collapsing shanty they had seen the night before, now captioned ARCHIVE MATERIAL. Mrs shivered and put her hand in Mr’s. His fingers remained open, like an unsprung trap. She put her fork down and curled his fingers over one by one with her free hand.

  Mr reappraised the iron roof, which fell interminably in slow motion. He picked up his fork in his left hand and said, “This is delicious. Fit for a king. Never mind a king – an emperor.”

  Nieuwenhuizen lifted a chop from a polystyrene tray on the end of a piece of wire, carried it up to his nose and sniffed it. Full of goodness. He dropped it on the grille. He sprinkled the blood from the tray over the chop and suspended his hungry face in the smoke. Then he sat down with a sigh on one of his hard chairs.

  He looked at the windows of the house behind the wall and tried to imagine what the occupants were doing. He saw Mrs at a wooden sideboard lighting a candle in a stainless-steel candlestick. He saw Mr, in slippers and gown, glass in hand, pipe in mouth, darkening a doorway. She fluttered at the wick. He stepped out of the door-frame into the warm embrace of the candle-light. He took two steps towards her, and paused. She looked over her shoulder, and smiled. He put one hand on the back of a chair and raised the other towards her hair. He stopped. He would go no further.

  Nieuwenhuizen lanced the chop with his wire and flipped it over. He looked at the windows of the house and tried again.

  Mr stepped out of the frame and took two steps towards Mrs. The ruby liquid in his glass glinted. She looked over her shoulder, which was sheathed in crimson taffeta, padded within and sequinned without, brought the match up to her mouth and blew out the flame. A puff of smoke drifted into his eyes. He blinked rapidly, put one hand on the back of the chair and raised the other towards her lips, which still held the softly rounded shape of her breath. His hand hung in the air, O! He would go no further.

  Nieuwenhuizen ran the chop through and put it down on a ledge. He levered the grille off the fireplace with his foot. He spat on his fingers, picked up the chop, chewed the fat off it and stared into the coals.

  An ornate citadel, in which were many golden chambers, with corridors and staircases of copper and brass, and silver and lead, and bronze and pewter and aluminium foil, and other metals too numerous to mention, took shape in the heart of the fire, endured, and crumbled away.

  The pockets of Mr’s trousers yielded up a screw, a one-cent piece, a receipt from the Buccaneer Steakhouse (1 × Dagwood, 1 × Chps, 1 × Gngr Beer), a soiled serviette, a fatty deposit slip from the United Building Society, a shirt button, a length of twine and a toothpick chewed at one end. Mrs stuffed the trousers into the washing-machine, jabbed a button to start the cycle and carried her finds to the lounge, where she arranged them on the coffee-table. She examined each of them in turn, as if each had a story to tell.

  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 shifting-spanner 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 vantage-point 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 so
me 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.