His colleagues shared these frustrations. First Munnery, and then Figg, and then all the others began to create their own amusements — which they passed off as ‘improvements’. In certain areas of Alibian life, they said, there was simply no point in returning to the past. Levitas, for instance, redesigned the Alibian Alps to allow for more pleasant skiing in the foothills and more hazardous climbing on the peaks. He put the General Hospital up on the snowline where the air was more salubrious, and he put the Hotel Grande down on the beachfront, with its wings stacked one on top of the other, so that every room had a sea view, and he gave it a casino and a Ferris wheel and a miniature golf course, because he himself was fond of simple pleasures. The people of Alibia were so grateful for these alterations that Banes, intent on eclipsing the example of his colleague, embarked on a public-spirited campaign of his own. He reappropriated mansions for the homeless, he reassembled the Royal Alibian Golf Course in the wilderness (Munnery was allowed to keep the eighteenth), he reunited families who had been separated by the upheavals. These acts made Banes something of a hero to the lost and the loveless, to widows and orphans, to the homeless and the unemployed.
Experience taught them that nothing is perfect. They reconciled themselves to the errors of judgement and perception that beset the best-planned operations. It rained loafs from Buurman’s Bakery and fishes from the munchipal reservior. The streets were littered with crutchers, rhinocerous products, muslin fundamentalists, celeried employees and their pardners, bonsai boababs, dawgs.
When the waste material piled up, they called for Fluxman. It was enough to make him feel like a street sweeper.
*
In time, everything was returned to its proper place, which sometimes was not the place it had started out, but the place it deserved to end.
Alibia basked in its imperfect glory. Even the Members of the Society — Fluxman aside — had come to consider one error in five pages acceptable. Who would notice the odd waterfall flowing upwards to its source, the icicles on the fronds of the palms, the gondolas marooned in a stream of concrete? Who would begrudge such flaws, or even perceive them, when there was a promenade beside the sea, a bandstand in the park made for old-fashioned melodies, a tavern at the end of a fogbound wynd? The bells of St Cloud’s rebuked the faithless on the hour, the waves kept beating against the quays, the metronome of a searchlight kept time in the absence of the sun.
When peace had been restored, the City Fathers afforded the heroes a victory parade, the grandest that had ever been seen, proceeding now on foot through the streets in a blizzard of ticker-tape, now on barges down the river, and now on sleighs across the frozen canals, and arriving finally at the triumphal arch through which they all passed, first the heroes and then those who had come to honour them, vanishing as they went, drawing the offspring of error after them, and abandoning the city to a state of flawed completion.
All except Fluxman, that is, who came behind in his dignified way, sweeping the last of the delenda up from the gutters with his hoop and stuffing them into his bag. When the streets were clean, he went down to the white beach in front of the casino, where his coracle was moored, rowed out into the bay, and emptied the bag into the water.
Part Three. The Goodbye Bash
Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.
Minute Print made me twelve photostatic copies of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’. For the Last Finger Supper. Cost me a packet, but one had to be prepared, one never knew what would happen. How many guests were we expecting? Wessels wouldn’t say. My budget stretched to a round dozen. I bound the copies with rubber bands and wrapped them in a plastic bag courtesy of the Okay Bazaars. Then I bore them to the Café Europa in my briefcase, pressed back into service specifically for this purpose.
In the bag I also carried the eighth edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, ‘the New Edition for the 1990s’, scarcely opened, edited by R.E. Allen, and proofread, hallelujah, honorifics in the original, by Mrs Deirdre Arnold, Mr Morris Carmichael, Mrs Jessica Harrison, Mr Keith Harrison, Ms Georgia Hole, Ms Helen Kemp, Ms E. McIlvanney, Dr Bernadette Paton, Mr Gerard O’Reilly, Ms J. Thompson, Dr Freda Thornton, Mr Anthony Toyne, and Mr George Tulloch, amongst others. (Thirteen, if you didn’t count the et alii. Was it wise, I wonder, to choose an unlucky number? Was it wise at all to employ a team? And eight of them women.) The eighth edition of the Concise was the current one. I do not care much for currency, but something told me the night would hold surprises it might be useful to define. And if the opportunity to administer a sample of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ arose, if it actually came to that, I would present the volume as a prize. The floating trophy would have to wait for the first fully-fledged competition.
The New Management was amusing itself in the pool room, stringing crinkle-paper decorations of its own manufacture, and I was able to march straight into the Gentlemen’s room and lock the door behind me. The little window opened onto a dirty grey well, veined with pipes for power and plumbing. I secured the plastic bag to a downpipe on the outside wall and closed the window again. The Concise I secreted on top of the cistern in the cubicle. Then I went home to freshen up.
*
When I set out for the Goodbye Bash a few hours later, I carried in the pockets of my blazer the original copy of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’, twelve sharpened pencils (pointing due south in the interests of safety), a sharpener, my current notebook and the Pocket Oxford Dictionary, in its berth over my heart. The particoloured tops of the Faber-Castells jutting from my breast pocket made me feel like a general.
I once read a newspaper article in which some so-called celebrities were asked what book they would take with them to a desert island. A surprising number, given the godless times we live in, said the Holy Bible. And several, including a star of pornographic films, chose the complete works of the Bard. But not one had the Condensed Oxford Dictionary, which was my choice, doubly sealed by the little magnifying glass in its velvet pouch, so useful for making fire. Much has changed since then. What would I choose today? My bosom friend the Pocket.
As I made my way to the Café Europa for the last time, I turned a few heads, I think I can say without exaggeration. A smartly pressed pair of flannels is not an everyday sight on the streets of the Golden City — Grubbier Johannesburg, to quote my pal Wessels.
There was an air of expectancy in the dusk, along with the volatile essence of newsprint and exhaust fumes. Luminous dabs of tail-lights glimmered and died on the smoky canvas of the street. Shop windows frosted with shoewhite and dusted with detergent snowflakes were aglow like nativities in the cathedral of the gathering darkness: the ruins of our grey Christmas. The new year in the offing was black as pitch. It made one want to hurry on to some place bursting with light.