Now, as I looked around at my companions — Spilkin and Bogey brooding on the price of ostrich eggs (painted, for the tourist trade, I discovered afterwards), Mevrouw Bonsma and Darlene on the care of the cuticles, Mrs Hay somewhat crestfallen, a herd of Olé ’Enries, Wessels agleam like a toby jug — my ambitions shrank to even more modest proportions. I would be satisfied with a simple announcement. Do you remember ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’? Well, it’s finished. I’ve done it, as I said I would. If any of you want to take a closer look, I have copies. You only have to ask.
And this is the moment to do it, I concluded, with just the few of us here, the originals and the less disruptive late arrivals.
But Clotho put a spoke in my wheel. As I gathered myself to speak, there was another rumpus at the door, and Errol and Co spilled off the escalator, laughing and swearing. The New Management rushed to defend the buffet.
*
The newcomers came rolling in. ‘Yo!’ they said. Raylene, Nomsa, Floyd. The new girl — she hadn’t been hardened yet, I thought, she might still be redeemed if someone showed her a good example. A new boy too, so black he would have served quite well as a printer’s devil. He would scarcely have required inking.
‘Huge,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Huge Semenya.’
‘Phil, Phil Harmonic.’
They were toting cardboard boxes full of bottled lager. ‘The invite said BYOB,’ Raylene explained.
Boy backwards to the blood group. Boy backwards. They should have ‘Yob’ on their caps instead of ‘Boy’. I should find some entrepreneur and suggest it as a new range. Yobs and slags: backward children. It would look good on a baseball cap, especially when they wore them back to front on their silly heads. Wessels says it’s because they don’t know whether they’re coming or going. Sometimes they wear their trousers back to front too.
As their contribution to the ‘graze’, they presented an enormous plastic bag of fluorescent ‘Cheesnaks’. Floyd was carrying this fodder over his shoulder.
‘I see you brought the Cheese Snacks,’ I enunciated, not that I expected him to get the hint. ‘No nutritional value whatsoever. You may as well eat this newspaper.’
Spilkin piped up: ‘That’s a very unhelpful attitude, Aubrey. Some snacks will tide us over nicely while the buffet is out of bounds.’
Unhelpful? Aubrey?
Floyd took a dagger from his pocket and cut a corner off the bag. He was wearing one of his playsuits with cartoon characters on it, odd creatures, hybrids of human and hound. You’d think he was on his way to a pyjama party. Errol, by contrast, was wearing a tuxedo.
‘Where did you swipe that?’
‘Don’t be like rude, Mr T,’ Raylene said. Evidently they had all taken it upon themselves this evening to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do. ‘He bought it at the Jewish Benevolent in Yeoville.’
‘It makes him look like an assassin.’
‘He’s going to get a job as a bouncer.’
‘And he’s gonna practise tonight, keeping out those what wasn’t invited.’
Floyd began to make a circuit of the room, spilling the garish doodahs out on the tablecloths.
The ‘invite’? Had Wessels gone so far as to print invitations? And if so, why hadn’t I received one?
*
‘Have you got any tassies?’ Another new one, going by the name of Ricardo. He’d mistaken me for the proprietor. I suppose I did look rather authoritative in my collar and tie.
Tassy? Tassie? It rang a bell. I looked it up: small cup, a Scots term. This Ricardo had unexpected depths of vocabulary. His preference for small measures was encouraging too; the others were drinking straight from the bottle as if tomorrow would never come. Where had he sprung from, I wondered, as I steered him towards the paper cups. Perhaps there was a Highlander in his colourful background? I should find a way of testing his capabilities later on. He might even be ripe for ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ — and wouldn’t that be a turn-up for the books?
*
In the clutter behind the counter was a bottle of Pfeffi, the Pfiffiger Pfefferminzliqör, green stuff as thick as cough mixture. The neck of the bottle had been stretched by some clot of a glass-blower into a screw a yard long, and it had stood unopened on the top shelf, with its cap brushing the ceiling, since the reign of Mrs Mavrokordatos. Floyd climbed up on the counter to fetch it down — they just wanted to see the label, they said, and that bumpy thing in the bottom that looked like a gallstone — and before I could say a word, he had seized the floating trophy for ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ as well, and they were passing it around and cracking jokes. Lascivious comments about the little gymnast on the lid and their own reproductive prowess.
‘Where’d this come from?’
‘Ask old Churl,’ Wessels said.
Another opportunity to introduce ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ came and went. It would be madness to raise a serious subject in the company of this rabble. I should bide my time until Errol and Co grew bored and wandered off into the streets. When the old crowd was left, in the lull, I would produce my fait accompli.
As for the trophy, much as it pained me, I must let them have their sport, they would tire of it soon enough; not one of them could concentrate for more than five minutes at a time on a single activity, pool excepted. At an opportune moment, I would recover the trophy and put it somewhere for safe keeping. While I was musing, the trophy had already been discarded on table No. 2, and they were beginning to drift off in the direction of the pool room with the Pfeffi in hand. Then that blasted Darlene sat straight up in her chair as if she’d been bitten by a horsefly.
‘What’s a champoin?’ she squeaked.
Stupid woman. No social graces whatsoever, all flaking varnish and crooked pri-horrities. She showed the trophy to Wessels, who buffed it with a forefinger like a maulstick and guffawed. I ought to have cleaned it.
‘What is it now?’
‘Put on your spectacle and you’ll check.’
Spilkin stuck his nose in and smirked, ‘This is rich. A corrigendum.’
‘Cham-poing!’ said Wessels, as if one of his inner springs had finally broken.
They were pulling my leg and pinching a nerve. Spilkin thrust the trophy at me, almost gleefully, and I glanced at the inscription, still touchingly familiar, although I had not examined it closely in years: Transvaal Gymnastics Union — Senior Ladies — Overall Champion. Except that it did in fact seem to say: Overall Champoin. I would have been grateful for a more palatable explanation, I might even have stomached a practical joke — but the simple transposition of i and o was irrefutable. Champoin. Engraved in metal. I had missed it. I saw at once what had happened: those io’s in ‘Union’ and ‘Senior’ had lingered on the retina and the after-image had bamboozled me. Then again, the whole inscription had been an irritation. Was it because I’d wanted too badly to wish it away that I’d overlooked a blunder so elementary even Spilkin’s illiterate lady friend had spotted it?
I felt my cheeks burning as if she’d slapped me.
‘I’m glad you noticed that.’ A melting ice cube jammed in my throat for a breathtaking instant and then slid down. ‘That’s half the reason I bought this particular cup. To test the mettle of the champion. Or should I say: the champoin. At the prize-giving.’
She was looking at me blankly. Suddenly, I couldn’t remember whether she knew about ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’. She must have, they all did. Surely Spilkin would have told her. When exactly had Darlene come among us? I looked at Spilkin, for whom my rather clever explanation had been intended. If he could be convinced … He looked back with a sceptical smile on his cherubic lips, but said nothing. I’d never noticed before quite how curvirostral he was, for a cherub.