‘Ah. A Frankfurter. I might have guessed.’
‘I am most happy to be governed by the black man. Black persons and I are coming along strongly together.’
Indeed. The scarlet women of the Quirinale Hotel. Ever willing to put a crease in the Senf, if not quite to cut it. I was in here, eating a sausage, when the Berlin Wall came down. What was it Herr Toppelmann had said then? Communism is kaput in Germany, but here is just starting, it will come very bad. (His English had improved over the years.) The forcemeat philosopher. A rush of irritation, as quick and queasying as a spurt of saliva in the mouth, as he jabbed my Bratwurst with a fork and it spewed grease onto the grille. Bloody Germans. From Germany out und so weiter. Hungarians, Italians, Scots. Immigrants. Foul-weather friends. Slobodan would be hurrying back to where he came from too, no doubt, Wessels would search for him in vain … although he was so much at home here, living off the fat of the land. I felt fat too, schmaltzy and bloated. Stuffed with change, like a piggy bank or a parking meter. The mustard got into my cold sore and burned. I left half the Bratwurst on the plate and crossed the street. The wurst is still to come, I thought, in my Toppelmann twang. Nein, nein, the wurst is behind us. The opposite pavement was crowded with curio-sellers and their wares, wooden animals and idols shamelessly displaying their private parts. I was tempted to march through these hordes like some maddened Gulliver, trampling them underfoot. I escalated, like tensions in the Middle East, like the incidence of armed robbery on the Reef, and issued into the Café where, for the first time in many a long month, my eye was caught by the silver trophy gathering dust among the bottles. I’d been meaning to take it down and give it a good going over with Brasso. The brave little figure, tiptoe on the summit, clad in nothing but a wisp of lacy tarnishing, brought a lump to my throat. The proofreader’s cup, the floating trophy for ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’.
‘How ya doin’?’ said Tone.
‘How am I doing? If I was the frivolous sort, my managerial friend, I should affix a sign asking that question to the seat of my pants. And a telephone number.’ Then, resorting to sign language, tapping my larynx with the edge of my hand, ‘I’m up to here.’ Perhaps it wasn’t a lump after all, but a bolus of change, half-digested, sour, swimming in bile, bumping against my epiglottis. My little tongue.
‘I know what you mean,’ said Tone. ‘I’m also gatvol. But you’ve got to take the punch. Have a drink, man, it’ll make you feel better.’
Everything will stay the same. Everything will change. A football match was on one screen, and Joseph Slovo, the communist kingpin, on the other. Day or night, rain or shine, in some corner of a foreign field, someone was playing football. While in Kempton Park, at the World Trade Centre, they were levelling the playing fields and shifting the goalposts. As if the negoti-haters, as you-know-who used to call them, were nothing but glorified groundsmen.
My mouth was still burning, but my throat was dry. Perhaps I needed a drop of the damp after all. Moçes was lurking behind a potted palm, its fronds stirring gently in a breeze off the Bay of Alibia, dallying with some young woman, didn’t look like kitchen staff, too dolled up, lips as red as paint. Helen of Troyeville, or some Carmen from the Quirinale, the sort Herr Toppelmann came along with. Moçes was so enamoured of her, I practically had to stand on my chair to attract his attention. I started the lecture on service, abridged, but I really didn’t have the energy, and he looked so down in the mouth, I felt it necessary to be conciliatory.
‘Who’s the girl?’
‘She’s my nephew.’
‘Ha! You mean she’s your niece.’ Needs the talk on customer relations.
‘No, sir. She’s my nephew.’
‘Is she your brother’s daughter? Yes? Then she’s your niece.’
Looks baffled. Then deliberately: ‘She’s my nephew.’
For crying in a bucket. Whiskey, pronto. The nephew stilted out in her high heels.
Errol, on his way to the Gentlemen’s room in a hurry: ‘Hoezit bra. Checking out the chocolates?’
I wouldn’t eat what Tone calls a pastry if he gave them away. As for ‘bra’, I had voiced my objection to the term repeatedly, which only made them use it more.
I took out my files, but before I could set to work, Wessels wobbled in and started waving Mr Fatso/Mnr Vetsak under my nose. ‘I’ve nearly got everyone,’ he smirked, as if the party were no more than a confidence trick, and ran a smoke-stained forefinger down a row of ticks. ‘Even Merlé, see? Still dossing out in Illovo with her daughter, who might be able to bring her. No promises at this stage. Mevrou Bonsma’s still at the Dorchester, but it’s becoming a bit rough. She’s got a school now. Only ones I can’t find is Everistus, who’s gone off to his rondavel in the hills for a week or so. Someone died. But I left a message. You know he’s grafting at Bradlows. And Spilkin and Pardner, natch, who’s back in Joeys but lying low.’
Lying low? Like Apaches. Apache here, Apache there (punchlines, Wessels). Something to do with beards.
‘What you got there? Looks familiar.’
I closed the file on his finger. He knew exactly what it was, but he was the last person I felt like discussing it with. It was a selection from the fardel of notes and jottings and clippings and scribbled-upon typescripts that represented the raw material of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’. This unfinished business had chafed at my peace of mind for too long. I had made a bargain with myself: if I finished ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ before the end of the month, I would take it with me to the Goodbye Bash and present it to the sceptics — I might even make photostatic copies, one for each to bear away as a souvenir. If not, I would stay home, and a plague on all their townhouses!
*
13 December 1993
Dear Sir,
An able-bodied man might wear a T-shirt, though why he would choose to, when proper shirts with buttons and collars are freely available, is a mystery to me.
But what manner of monster would fit into a ‘t-shirt’ of the style advertised in your newspaper on 11 December (Hyperama Festive Season Bonanza)? A one-armed bandit, I suppose, some twisted wreck of a human being, the sort who would live in an a-frame house made entirely of i-beams …
Would the sub-editors care to explain?
Yours faithfully, etcetera
*
In the first weeks of my acquaintance with Spilkin, I always arrived at the Café Europa to find him already there, seated at one of the little tables against the wall. And I always sat down at the other, with the big round one in between, as if each encounter was the first between people who had never met before. We seemed to be participating in the primary activity that the café as a social institution made possible: being on one’s own in the company of congenial strangers. Another stranger, looking on, might have thought that our conversation had a cultured quality about it as well, carried on at intervals from a seemly distance while we each went about our own business, revolving around niceties of expression and quibbles of logic, anagrammatical teasers, aqueous humours, questions of craft, specifications of lenses and lemmata, headwords, grades of graphite, presbyopia and strabismus, occasionally politics — this was before change beset us and made the subject so tiresome. I say, Tearle, you don’t happen to have a pen-wiper handy? Why not use a serviette, Spilkin? Capital idea. Spilkin this and Tearle that. It all helped to cultivate a sort of formal bonhomie between us, the polite and companionable ease that someone who had never been in an officers’ mess might expect to enjoy there.