Mrs Malgas observed all his doings, secretly at first, and then more openly as it became apparent that her presence made no impression on him. She took to perching on a stool behind the net curtain in the lounge, knitting, flipping through a magazine, turning questions about his motives over in her mind as if they were cards. She didn’t like him. Specifically, she didn’t like the way he jiggled his head and the way he hitched up his pants with his thumbs, which he stuck into his pockets, fanning out his fingers as if he didn’t want to dirty the cloth. She didn’t like his jaunty gait and his drifting off and staring into space. More generally, she didn’t like to think that he had come for no other purpose than to upset her and turn things upside-down. She didn’t like to think about him at all.
So she distracted herself by making inventories of her knickknacks: copper ashtray, Weltevreden coat of arms (wildebeest rampant). Wicker basket, yellow, a-tisket. Figurines, viz. cobbler, gypsy, ballerina, plumber, horologist, Smurf. Paperweight, guineafowl feather. Paperweight, rose. Paperweight, Merry Pebbles Holiday Chalets. Cake-lifter, Continental China, coronation centenary crockery, crenate, crumbs. However. Spatula. Just as things were starting to become interesting. Mug. As day followed day. Doll. As day follows night. Puppy-dog. As night follows day, sure enough, she found herself drawn back to the window.
Nieuwenhuizen’s wanderings over the veld, as much as they annoyed her, reassured her too by their aimlessness. They made him seem indecisive, ineffectual and itinerant. But when he settled down under the tree to hammer beer tins into soup-plates, to tinker with fragments of pottery and polystyrene, to plait ribbons of plastic into ropes, to carve and whittle and twist, to hammer holes through and bind together, it seemed that he was practising for something bigger, it became conceivable that he really would build a house next door, a house in the contemporary style made entirely of recycled material, a disposable, three-bedroomed family home held together by the dowels of his own ramshackle purpose, and that he would occupy it, permanently — and this prospect made her feel utterly despondent.
“We have to be realistic about this,” Mrs said to Mr on a Friday evening when the conversation turned inevitably to Nieuwenhuizen. “We have to act like responsible adults and stop thinking about ourselves alone. He’s dangerous. Ask yourself: Where does he go? Does he dig a hole and squat over it like a dog?”
“A cat,” said Mr irritably.
“I’m talking about the principle. Where does he get his water from?
He’s got a drumful there, for washing and cooking and all his household needs. Probably siphons it out of our pool in the dead of night, when normal people are sleeping.”
“We could offer to supply him with a drop of water. We’ve got plenty. I could run a hose over to his place easily enough.”
“What does he eat? What’s cooking in that two-legged pot of his? Four-legged chickens? Pigeons? Cockatoos and budgerigars?”
“There’s another neighbourly thing we could do — if you didn’t dislike him so: we could give him a square meal from time to time.”
“Where does he get his money? He’s got money, surely?”
“Sigh!”
“How many times must I ask you not to say that? You know how much it annoys me!”
“It’s just an expression.”
“Why can’t you sigh like everybody else? How would you like it if I said ‘Laugh’ all the time instead of laughing?”
Mr thought about that as he slipped out into the garden. Only the night before he had chanced upon a picturesque view of Nieuwenhuizen’s camp, framed between two spokes of a wagon-wheel, and he was anxious to recapture it; with luck he would pick up a wholesome aroma and a snatch of some melody or other. A welcome breeze stirred a ripple of applause in the shrubbery. He smelt chlorine, creosote and mint. The swimming-pool’s Kreepy Krauly was silent, asleep in the depths below the diving-board, but the water echoed the slapping of his sandals against the soles of his feet as he made his way to the side of the house, along a Slasto pathway he had laid himself.
Mash through strainer da-da-da. Return pulp to stove, bring back to boil and simmer for 30 mins. Add seasoning.
Mrs Malgas shook Mixed Herbs into her palm and tipped them into the pot. She pinched salt and pepper, she dashed Tabasco, she squeezed lemon. She stirred and tasted. Bland. She spiked the mixture with a handful of cloves as piquant as upholstery tacks.
As the days had passed Mr Malgas had developed a conviction, which his wife was well aware of although he had not chosen to share it with her, that he was connected in some important way to Nieuwenhuizen — “Father,” as he named him to himself with difficulty. They had not spoken since their first meeting, which Mr Malgas rehearsed constantly in his mind, but when he left for work in the mornings and when he returned home in the evenings he would give a few cheerful blasts on his hooter and Nieuwenhuizen would invariably pop-up somewhere on the plot and respond with a wave. Such simple reciprocal gestures struck Mr Malgas as a form of co-operation with his new neighbour, foreshadowing a more meaningful relationship, which presented itself as a series of words all starting with “c,” each one a node on a scale of intimacy: collaboration, coexistence, collusion.
Yet the distance which now prevailed between them, a distance familiarity was bound to bridge, seemed necessary, even desirable. Concealed behind his ambiguous wall on this unprepossessing evening, with the breeze bearing the woody tang of the great outdoors to his nostrils, Mr Malgas was shaken by a thrill of suppressed excitement the likes of which he had not experienced since he was a boy playing hide-and-seek.
Nieuwenhuizen’s head quivered, as if Mr Malgas’s greedy gaze had joggled it, and seemed about to swivel in his direction.
But a bowl of brazen light dropped suddenly over Mr as he knelt in the shadow of the wall. Mrs had slammed the curtains open like two sheets of metal and stood in the garish window-frame brandishing a serving-spoon and looking down on him disdainfully.
“You’re making a fool of us,” she said while he was dusting the sand off his knees on the back step. “He pitches up out of nowhere and you, of all people, welcome him with open arms. You should be ashamed of yourself. We don’t have a clue who he is. He has no history. Are you listening to me? We don’t even know his name.”
“We know that,” said Mr, brushing past her and sagging down at the kitchen table. He watched her mangy slippers twitching impatiently. “He told me, when I was over there last week. Why don’t you dish, it’s getting cold.”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“I was going to.”
“Well?”
“It’s ‘Father’.”
“Father?”
One thing leads to another. Nieuwenhuizen, rolling on the ground, yelping in agony, clasping his left hand between his knees, cursing himself, landed up in the remains of the cooking-fire. Just moments before, he had brought his hammer down on his thumb-nail. That opposable pain was forgotten now as he tossed and turned to shake off the clinging coals. The hair on his head crackled, budded into flame, bloomed — but he crushed the petals with an oily chamois. When the crisis was over he composed himself once again in front of his tent, sucking his thumb and nursing his blistered elbow, and through his tears, which were two parts pain and one part embarrassment, saw Malgas on the horizon.