The Exploded View Page 2

  ‘Michael? Butch. How you doing? Good man good. Listen Mike, that consignment we spoke about?’

  Budlender turned his eyes on Butch, a rumpled businessman in shirtsleeves and brightly patterned braces (an idiosyncrasy he might have copied from Larry King), with a sheaf of papers in one hand and a pen in the other, and a cellphone pressed to his ear by a hunched shoulder. He was squeezed between two tables at the window, looking down on the traffic, as if he expected to see Mike passing by any minute. Ready to wave.

  Only 35 per cent of South Africans have access to a landline telephone. On the other hand, there are four and a half million cellphones in the country. There are more cellphones than fridges.

  Budlender called the waitress to top up his cup and ordered a slice of lemon meringue pie. While he drank the coffee, he glanced through the list of respondents he still had to visit that evening. Three of them after Constantinou: Martha Masemola of The Reeds, which he would have to look up on the map; Eleanor Williams of Vorna Valley Extension 5, ditto; Jimmy Dijkstra of Glen Marais. It would take thirty minutes to get out there. Someone else on the Documents Committee should have done him. Doesn’t Stephenson live out that way? Then he pored with rather more interest than was necessary or proper over Iris du Plooy’s personal particulars. Her second name was Annabelle. She was twenty-eight years old. She was – in order of preference, presumably – an actress, a model, and a continuity announcer on Channel One. So that was why the name rang a bell. Perhaps he had seen her before?

  It was after ten when Jimmy Dijkstra buzzed him out of the driveway in Glen Marais. Going through the questionnaire with Dijkstra, a civil engineer, had been a production. He proved to be remarkably obstinate, refusing to understand things even when they had been explained to him five times. Is the man stupid? Budlender wondered. Or strong willed? Or merely lonely? He knew the signs of a man living alone. It was not the absence of a feminine touch so much as its delimitation. A bowl of fruit on the table in the hallway, an empty fridge, a sink full of dishes, a pair of pressed trousers over the back of a dining-room chair, running shoes and unopened bills on the carpet in front of the TV. You could tell at a glance, by the whimsical distribution of order and mess, that the woman in this house was the char.

  He turned onto the R562 and headed for the freeway. He felt like putting his foot down – there were never speed traps at this time of night – but a minibus was creeping up the rise ahead of him and he could not overtake. He dropped back and flicked on his brights. The taxi was listing so badly it seemed on the point of tipping over. Either the shocks were gone or the load had shifted. On the roof rack were stacks of cardboard boxes, a suitcase, a wheelbarrow, something wrapped in black plastic. A blind with ‘Born to Run’ printed on it in Gothic lettering had been drawn over the rear window.

  Then an indicator began to blink and the taxi slowed again and wobbled to the left. As Budlender nosed past, a stone shot up off the tar, struck his windscreen and ricocheted away, leaving a crack the size of a man’s hand.

  Even as he flinched from the impact, even before he saw that the taxi was lurching away down a side road, its headlights illuminating the shacks all around, Budlender realized where he was. A squatter camp had sprung up here in the last year on the open veld between this road and the freeway, directly opposite the new housing scheme. He had no idea what either place was called, but he had seen them from the freeway often enough, under a cloud of smog that drew no distinction between the formal and the informal, and he had passed between the two zones earlier that evening, an arrangement of little RDP houses on one side and a clutter of corrugated-iron and board shacks on the other. Somewhere in this field of mud and rust he had once noticed a bright sign saying Vodacom, where an enterprising builder had used a billboard for the wall of his house. There was only one entrance into the place and that was where the taxi had turned. He could not follow it there. But he braked anyway, with a curse, as if there was something to be done, some case to be made, and pulled over onto the gravel. He would have stopped altogether, but something drifted into range of his headlights: the inner tube from a tractor tyre, a huge black rubber doughnut, and a man reclining in it, with his head thrown back and his arms and legs dangling. He was floating there, in spiky new shoots on a blackened fringe of veld, with his fingers trailing in the ash of burnt grass, like someone bobbing in a swimming pool. The beams seemed to rake him from a shallow sleep, and he raised himself in the buckling rubber, arching his back, thrusting his seal-slick belly into the air, extending his right hand in a gesture of greeting or warning. Budlender took his foot off the brake and rolled onwards in neutral, while the naked man in the tube slid past the window, smiling drowsily, waving, drawn back into the dark wake of the car. Through the rear window, he saw the man bathed for an instant in the lurid red of the tail lights, twisting in the tube and craning his neck as if to meet his eye, and then the tube caved in and he went sprawling. Budlender put the car in gear and accelerated, veering back onto the tar, and the scene in the rear-view mirror was engulfed in a surf of dust.

  The man in the tube disturbed him more than the cracked windscreen. He kept seeing him, tumbling silently into the dust. He could hear himself telling the story about the taxi and the naked man to the Documents Committee the next day, and laughing about it, but now he was filled with anxiety.

  The crack was a perfect expression of the sound the stone had made when it hit: a jagged star, like two crossed lightning bolts.

  When he reached the M1, and reflections of the yellow overhead lights began to crawl repetitively over the bonnet, he saw that the star had five arms. He tried to recall the registration number of the taxi. He should have memorized it. Someone he knew used to do that: make up a mnemonic to preserve the number of any vehicle that struck him as odd, just in case it came in useful later. Was it that friend of his father’s? Or was it a character in a book he’d read or some PI on television? Whoever, he liked the idea. Eternal vigilance. He should cultivate that, he should find some odd corner of human life to which eternal vigilance had never been applied, and apply it, just to see what dividends it paid. That numberplate had been in his headlights for a couple of kilometres, it must be lodged somewhere in the circuitry of his memory. BRN…KZN…BGN…RNG. There had been a motto too, in the back window, and a name painted by hand on the panel below. But all of it was gone.

  Apart from the news and a bit of sport – cricket, tennis, golf – Budlender did not watch much television. Drama of any kind bored him. As for Channel One, he had never done more than pass through it with a flick of the remote control. It was all music videos and soap operas in languages he did not understand. But now that his census visits were over for a spell (the next round of follow-ups was not due to begin for a fortnight) he spent time in front of the set, nodding off sometimes during the shows, starting awake when the adverts blared out, skipping from channel to channel with the remote as if he was looking for something. So he became acquainted with the continuity announcers and the odd interiors in which they were displayed, generically decorative spaces with crimped and puckered surfaces, draped and folded satin sheens, buckled planes like the insides of chocolate boxes or shop windows, in which they moved stiffly like overdressed mannequins, animated goods. Once, in some public-service advert for abused animals, he thought he saw Iris in dungarees and rubber gloves clutching an oil-soaked penguin, but she came and went in an instant. Why did everything have to happen so quickly? So incompletely? It was nothing but bits and pieces of things. How much of any given hour on the screen was actually explicable to the ordinary person? What proportion of it was composed of objects that were whole, actions that were uninterrupted, sequences that were linked by more than an insistent rhythm? An endless jumble of body parts amid ruins, a gyrating hip, an enigmatic navel, a fossicking hand, a pointing finger, sign language from a secret alphabet, fragments of city streets, images flaring and fading, dissolving, detaching, floating in airtime, dwindling away into nothing. Simunye, we are
one, the signature tune insisted.

  Then, on a Friday evening, as he sat down in front of the set with an instant lasagna from Woolworths on his lap, hot out of the microwave, there she was, trotting out the details of the evening’s viewing. She was speaking Afrikaans. Her companion, a young man with muscular arms and a beaded hairdo that made him look like a ritual object, was speaking – what exactly? Zulu? Sotho? He should learn to tell the difference, at least, Budlender considered, even if it was too late for the ins and outs. For all he knew, the fellow might be speaking Igbo. Come to think of it, he did seem to have the characteristic shell-like ears, the ‘Igbo ormer’, as Warren had put it in his arch way. He and Iris were carrying on a normal conversation, as if they understood one another perfectly. While the one was speaking, the other would gaze out with a look of sympathetic concern, casting sidelong glances of the most natural comprehension in the speaker’s direction from time to time, even nodding, or making small exclamations of agreement and support. It was possible, Budlender supposed, that the announcer – if he were not in fact a Nigerian – might understand Afrikaans quite well. But surely she did not understand a word he was saying? It is a fact that no more than 2 per cent of white South Africans speak an African language. Twenty-two per cent of the population speak Zulu as a first language. Nine per cent speak English. Interestingly enough, Afrikaans is more widely spoken than English. He watched Iris’s face soften as she turned into profile, harden again as she turned back. Softening, hardening. There was something in her expression that was close to disdain.

  The announcements were over. The two of them beamed in unison and disappeared. Budlender flipped idly through the channels again: adverts, infomercials, boxing, news. He dropped the remote and went to fetch the concertina file full of census questionnaires from his study. When he returned to the lounge another programme was just starting. Homicide: Life on the Street. What’s that supposed to mean? Surely it should be Death? He turned the volume down and leafed through the file. Barry, Berman, Constantinou, Dijkstra, Du Plooy. Iris. He extracted her folder from the file. English, Afrikaans, schoolgirl French. Nothing indigenous.

  He had the mind of a clerk: each of his encounters with Iris was stored away in his memory like a folder in a filing system. His third visit to Tuscany was labelled: Duck. A more evocative title would have been welcome, but he had learned to suppress the urge to reinterpret what presented itself: when a label materialized and stuck to his experience, there was no point in trying to tear it off and replace it with something more elegant.

  He had come again, bearing a second draft of the census questionnaire, a clean white version incorporating all the revisions collated by the various fieldworkers. They sat in the lounge as before. He waited for her to sit on one sofa and then he sat on the other, in the L-shaped angle where the armrests touched, with the corner of the coffee table pointing out a safe distance between them. Always see three arrows. Genuine leather, he decided, pressing his palm into the cushion next to his thigh. They drank coffee out of the striped mugs while she glanced over the form. What is it about horizontal stripes of a certain proportion that seems French? Is it those jerseys worn by sailors? Or are the jerseys themselves repeating a pattern? The sight of her long forefinger crooked through the ear of the mug was disquieting. He wanted to press his lips to her knuckles and taste sea-salt and lemon rind. He took off his glasses and put them down on the coffee table. A touch of vanity. Without the glasses, she seemed softer, less abrasive.

  ‘This all looks fine to me now.’

  ‘No problems? I’d be happy to work through them with you. That’s what I’m here for.’

  ‘No, it looks fine.’

  He put on his glasses again and brought her back into sharp focus. She was looking at him with an expression that seemed intensely, almost angrily intent. Furious. She was furiously aware. There was a slight cast in one of her eyes. How odd that he had not noticed it before. Perhaps that was what gave her this look of angry penetration? Iris. Her name was derived from a flower, he assumed, but it evoked the sea-green of her eyes, fixed upon him, upon a point inside him, as if what might be taken for a defect was in fact some special power of insight that allowed her to see through him.

  This gaze redefined him. He had the urge to unsettle her, to turn the tables.

  ‘You must remember that this new version of the questionnaire contains the other respondents’ input as well as your own. People have very different responses. Something that’s clear to me might seem totally obscure to you. You’ll have to look at it carefully.’

  ‘I haven’t got a lot of time today.’

  ‘You did agree to do this.’ He almost added, ‘And you are getting paid for it.’

  ‘I’ve got to be in the studio at half past five.’

  ‘It won’t take long. Let’s just go through it together quickly. Let’s see. This paragraph here, p-11. “Sub-place.” Do you understand that?’

  ‘Sub-place?’

  ‘It says here: Main place (city, town, tribal area, administrative area) and Sub-place (suburb, ward, village, farm, informal settlement). Do you understand that?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘How about Villa Toscana? In which column would you put that?’

  The document began to crumble. At first, she was flustered. Later her furious focus returned, and she seemed to enjoy picking away at every apparent certitude. Five o’clock came and went. He made notes on the copy in red ink. He kept wanting to kiss the side of her head or slide his ink-stained fingers under her skirt. Through it all, he had the sense that he was performing. Not just behaving badly but acting badly.

  ‘Could I use the bathroom?’

  She pointed to a landing on the stairs, which must lead to the bedroom on the upper storey.

  He had anticipated a clean white space, where he would wet his fingertips and wipe the corners of his eyes, and look at himself in the mirror, from one side and then the other, like a man in a movie, composing himself. Instead, there was laundry everywhere, pegged to lines over the bath, draped over the towel rail and the sides of the washbasin. She was inclined to conceal herself, he had noticed, beneath loose-fitting blouses and full skirts. Her underwear evoked her naked body, but he could not imagine it precisely, all he saw was bits and pieces of other women, the thighs of his last lover, breasts out of magazines, hips and shoulders that were ambiguously, softly angled, like her face. He touched the collar of a shirt. Every impulse he had to press something to his face, to breathe something in – her towel must hold the memory of her shampoo in every fibre – felt ridiculous and false, like something he had seen someone else do and now felt obliged to imitate. He thought of panty raids in college residences, rock star fantasies, peepshow paraphernalia. He sat on the edge of the bath. There was a yellow sponge in the shape of a duck roosting on the soap dish. He picked it up and found that it was sodden. He squeezed it so that the water ran out between his fingers. Then he caught sight of his face in the mirror over the basin, looking out from behind a skyline of bottles and jars, like a man in a wanted poster. He put the duck back on its nest, flushed the toilet guiltily and returned to the lounge.

  Soon he said he had to leave. He was grateful to her for making the time to go through the questionnaire so thoroughly. He would be back in a week with the third revised draft. Did Wednesdays suit her?

  In his rush to get out of Tuscany, he took a wrong turn and got lost. At first, he was irritated. Not just with himself for his carelessness, but with the whole ridiculous lifestyle that surrounded him, with its repetitions, its mass-produced effects, its formulaic individuality. But then this very shallowness began to exert a pacifying effect on him. Gazing out at the pink and yellow facades, rumbling over the cobbled speed bumps that kept the car down to a walking pace, he grew calmer. He felt the tension leaving his body, draining out into the afternoon, almost visible, like some dark strand on the pastel air. He rolled the window down and dangled his arm in the breeze, trailing his stress behind
him like a purple ribbon. On a slope down into the valley, where the distant freeway hummed, he put the car in neutral and coasted, betting on himself to get over the next speed bump.

  He went round in the complex for three quarters of an hour. Once, a security guard on a bicycle stared at him suspiciously, but he gave him a cheerful wave that set his mind at ease. Twice, he passed the ceramic signposts pointing the way to Unit 24. Twilight sifted down, and the lights started coming on in the windows. When he saw the sign pointing to Unit 24 for the third time, he turned into Viale Pretoriano and coasted past her home. The lights were on in the kitchen now, causing the yellow sunflower to bloom again with its face turned to the world, even as the sun went down over the rooftops. The traffic increased. People coming home from work, cheerful Tuscans, rudely healthy and well dressed, banging the doors of their cars, fetching briefcases and grocery packets from their boots, pressing the remote control devices that switched on the alarms of their obedient recreational vehicles.

  In a distant corner of the complex, on the loop of road containing Units 71 to 84, he came to a map on a board and used it to find his way back to the gates.

  Falling in love. Falling? He had plunged off the edge of himself. Night after night, when he lay down to sleep, he repeated the false step and plummeted. Just as he was dropping off, he would start up awake, with his arms flung out and his fingers hooked into the duvet, like a man clutching at clouds.

  He calculated, in these early hours, that he had been ‘in love’ no more than half a dozen times in his thirty-seven years, including a teenage infatuation that had never progressed beyond a fever of hopelessly embarrassed desire. What proportion did this represent of all the women in his life, including those he had slept with, with whom he might have fallen in love? It was a pointless question – the terms were too vague, the variables too numerous – and yet it had, nonetheless, a perfectly adequate answer. A negligible proportion.