Mrs Pinheiro walked me out. For some reason, I remembered that there had been a letterbox at the gate, a quaint maquette with a crooked chimney and windows of solder, and I asked after it.
‘It was a model of the house,’ she said. ‘The Doctor’s idea of a joke. It was made for him by one of his pals with a workshop. Pity it’s been swiped.’
‘Shall I take your picture now?’ I asked.
‘Why not? It’s as good a day as any.’
I fetched my camera from the car. I think she was surprised that I really was a photographer after all. She wanted to pose in the garden, among the exhibits, but I’d had my fill of magic. I asked her to lean on the gate and that was that.
I came down with a fever. Flaring with light, leaking colour from the raw edges of my hands and feet, I lay in the bath until my temperature broke. At the worst, the water was boiling around me, frothing over the lip of the bath. Afterwards I felt overexposed and paper thin. The colour had been processed out of me. My hands were dusted with flour: I couldn’t bear the pressure of one fingertip on another. My only wish was to be folded twice, put in an envelope and left undelivered among Dr Pinheiro’s effects.
When at last I went in search of food and drink, I remembered how strange it was to come out of a matinee and find that it was still light outside, that the world was still there. The thrill of going astray between the real and the imaginary! We are in and out of malls so often these days we hardly notice the difference. The sun hurt my eyes and the discomfort reassured me that I would get well.
I stayed away from Fourth Avenue. My mother was right: it was unhealthy in a Latin American way.
Then one day I found a pamphlet about the postal system in my letterbox. Under apartheid, township dwellers and people in the rural areas had been denied access to mail services, the pamphlet said, many did not even have proper addresses. In the new dispensation, it was the aim of the Department of Posts and Telecommunications, as reflected in its mission statement, to rectify this situation, and thus play a small but vital part in building new communities of citizens and a new nation. A set of drawings showed the format of a typical letter, including the correct position for the address and return address, the stamp and the airmail sticker. A flow chart described the passage of a letter through the postal system, from the post office counter via the sorting depot to the receiver’s letterbox. Another set of drawings with arrows and captions showed how you could make a letterbox for your front gate out of an empty paint tin.
The pamphlet spurred me into the darkroom to print up the photograph of Mrs Pinheiro at her gate, and I had it with me the next time I drove over to Fourth Avenue. But I did not get to see her again. There was a For Sale sign attached to the fence and no one answered when I knocked. The house appeared to be empty.
A few weeks later, on a Sunday morning when a show day had been advertised in the property pages, I went again to Fourth Avenue, half-expecting to find Mrs Pinheiro in attendance, but there was only an estate agent reading a decor magazine in the lounge. She had brought her own camping chair, an elaborate contraption with canvas pockets for magazines and drinks. The house felt like a different place. The floors were newly varnished — every last scrap of wall-to-wall was gone — and the walls were freshly painted.
‘It needs a bit of TLC,’ the agent said, following me down the passage, ‘but it’s the perfect starter home. You couldn’t make a better investment. We’re in rainbow nation territory here, the area is about to boom. People want houses near the city centre, well-built places with features, character homes. Have you seen the fireplace?’
Dr Pinheiro’s door was open. Through the sash window I saw the window of the house next door, as clear as a mirror image. The room was large and clean, the walls were blindingly white, and panels of soft, perfectly normal light lay like bolts of silk on the pine floor. I stood in the doorway laughing.
Small Talk
‘Are you the big grey wall?’
‘That’s me.’
‘Then I’m here, Neville. I’m a bit early.’
‘That’s okay. I’ll let you in.’
I put down the phone and went outside. When I opened the street door she was paying the taxi driver through the window. A younger, softer-looking woman than I’d pictured from her telephone voice, but dressed tough in cargo pants and a denim jacket with biker embroidery. Her backpack had a hard shell like a piece of body armour.
‘You don’t have a doorbell,’ she said, as the pink Cabs for Women taxi made a U-turn and went back up Leicester Road.
‘No, I had an intercom but it was swiped.’
‘I scratched around there on the pillar, in case it was under the ivy, but then I thought, no, I’d better phone.’ Holding up one of those thumb-and-pinkie telephones the comedians use.
‘Good idea.’
‘Oh, I’m Janie,’ she said, as we went inside. ‘Obviously.’
‘Neville. I was just finishing breakfast. Would you like something? Coffee? It’s Ethiopian I believe.’
‘Juice would be nice.’ She’d seen the split oranges next to the juicer. ‘Before we do that though, would you mind letting me in again? I want to get something on my arrival.’
She unzipped a pocket on the bag and took out a digicam.
‘I thought it was a print interview.’
‘Ja, that’s the idea, but I also need something for my blog. Just a clip, you know, to introduce you and direct people to the article. Nothing major. Do you mind?’
‘I guess not.’ I could already see her taking the camera out on a street corner in Bertrams. I didn’t want to feel responsible for her. But the quip about introducing me hadn’t gone over my head. On the strength of a single showing at an unfashionable gallery, and that in a group exhibition full of amateurs — not excluding myself — the News had sent a journalist to talk to me about my photos, someone who was prepared to spend time with me and do a piece with substance. A little fish in a full pond should count the crumbs.
I led her back down the path. She went into the street and I shut the door behind her.
‘I’m going to ask you about the bell again,’ she said through the door.
Shit. Five minutes and I’m already being asked to play myself. This whole thing is a bad idea.
She knocked. I opened. ‘You don’t have a doorbell,’ she said. I explained the situation to the camera, saying ‘nicked’ instead of ‘swiped’, for some reason, and then we went back into the house. ‘Nicked’ is more nonchalant than ‘swiped’. Perhaps I meant to suggest that the loss of my intercom was no big deal, I understood what drove people to petty theft, I was not such a bad guy.
While I was squeezing oranges, she shucked the jacket and looked around the kitchen. She did not seem old enough to be a journalist. But I am trying to resist the creeping fogeyishness that comes with middle age. Just because the economists on TV look like schoolchildren doesn’t mean they don’t know their onions, or whatever the vegetable measure of insight is these days. Portabellini mushrooms, if the markets are anything to go by.
‘You’re into cooking.’ She was browsing along the shelf of cookery books in the dresser, making herself at home.
‘I enjoy it, but Leora’s the real foodie — that’s my wife.’
‘I’m very into cooking. I did a bit of an internship at Lemon Leaf in Stellenbosch. I see your wife’s got their book here.’
‘You can always get a job as a sous-chef if the journalism doesn’t work out.’