After strenuous bouts of proofreading, the pages would cloud into negative, and I would see the solid space around the empty printed word, as if hot lead had been put down on the paper, burnt its way through, and plummeted into the void on the other side. The blocks of type drifted downwards in slow motion, with undeserved majesty, like commodities in television advertisements, like spacecraft or bombs.
Without warning, Mevrouw Bonsma pinned me in her arms and started gnawing at my ear. No amount of squirming could free me. The baked goods of my head. Plunge in the skewer. Something wet dripped onto my hand. Had the toothy tiara drawn blood? Or was the hairdo melting around her ears like a mousse? Then I felt her chest heaving, thrusting into mine.
‘I beg your pardon, Tearle,’ she sobbed, ‘in this instance, I am emotional.’
‘So are we all, Mevrouw.’
‘I am reminded that I made beautiful music once upon a time. Now I must type to make ends meet.’ She held one of her hands up for inspection, a clump of red knuckles and fingertips bruised with carbon-copy blue. ‘The minutes of meetings. The essays of students. The application for a licence.’
Pressing against me and swaying from side to side, in a swirl of noise, light and fumes, she went on brokenly about the Dorchester and the rotation of the dinner menus and God knows what else.
‘Poor old Merle,’ I said when the machines paused for breath. ‘When was the last time you saw her?’
But she just clung to me more tightly, with long tears and face powder turning to batter on her cheeks, until the music went on again, and then she squeezed me into a new shape and dragged me after it.
Over her shoulder, I caught sight of the improvable girl. Why should improvement be a dirty word? Or was Spilkin joking? Her chest said: Get funky. I didn’t mean to stare, but there was no way round it if one wished to read the message. Funkily. Funkiness. Whenever I’d seen her before, her hair had been caught up in a faggot on the crown of her head. Now that she had let it down, it proved to be in braids, as thick as monkey-tails and as spiky as cacti. They reminded me of some species of fern whose name I have forgotten. She was tossing them wildly as she danced. ‘Corybantic’ was the word that leapt to mind. Her gyrations drew my eyes to her belly — a musk-melon slice of bared flesh — and her navel. It was a proofreader’s mark: 
. Delete and close up. Stick to and part from (6). Cleave.
Steffi Graf went waltzing by with Max Bygraves in her arms. Stepping on his toes in her tennis shoes. The bulge on her hip, under the grass-green sheath of the evening gown, showed where a ball was tucked into the band of her knickers.
‘Umpteen.’ It belongs in the nursery vocabulary. Is there no mature alternative?
*
With a deft twist of my torso, I broke free of Mevrouw Bonsma’s pruinose embrace and made for the balcony. There were a couple of questions I meant to ask Spilkin before I excised him from my life entirely, like a swollen appendix.
‘Don’t worry, be happy,’ Wessels shouted after me.
There were crowds outside as well. I pushed my way through to the railing. In the grisly shadow of Patronymić, Spilkin and Bogey were leaning. Spilkin’s hair was standing on end like a clown’s, Bogey had a carrot jutting from his mouth like a cigar. Gifts and Novelties. He gave me an apple and suggested I throw it into the street. I looked over the railing at the people milling down below. How big a fool did he think I was? The missile was bound to enrage someone. I gave the apple to Errol, whom I found at my shoulder, and he let fly. Meanwhile, I took out a pencil and sharpener.
Bogey licked the end of the carrot and dipped it in Patronymić’s pocket. It came out sugar-coated. Crystalline ash.
‘Old Aubs-ss is quite a literati, when you get to know him,’ said Wessels at my side.
‘Literatus, you burr. Not that there’s a grain of truth in the accusation.’
‘He’s been working on that exam of his again. The other day he was telling me how you guys helped him with the papers and so on.’
‘Now that really takes me back,’ Spilkin mused. ‘“The Proofreader’s Derby.” I’ll never forget it. An utterly mad scheme. That’s when I thought: he’s a crank. Aubrey, I can’t tell you how pleased I was when you got that bee out of your bonnet.’
He had become a splinter in my flesh. What was it Wessels had once called him? … A chip off the old shoulder. To steady my nerves, I turned the pencil in the sharpener and watched the shavings carried away on the breeze.
‘As a matter of fact …’
Bee? A Cheese Snack buzzed out of the night and caromed off the side of my head.
‘Merle used to say that there was something almost Casaubonish about you and your “System of Records”. She thought you were never going to finish it. Not that one required special powers of perception to make that deduction.’
Spilkin’s expression drew me back to solid ground. ‘Of course not,’ I said, while ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ burnt a hole in my pocket.
*
My copies were still there, and so was the Concise. Funky. Presumably not ‘terrified, cowardly’ but ‘fashionable, unconventional’. Having a strong smell? Umpteen. Indefinitely many. How would one spell ‘Casaubonish’? Casualty department … catafalque … cat-and-dog … But I wasn’t dressed for fartlek. (I’ve since discovered who Edward Casaubon was, and it’s an injustice second to none that we should have been mentioned in the same breath.)
*
‘All this was mantled,’ Herr Toppelmann said sadly, wagging a pimply pickle at the four walls, ‘and now also dismantled shall be.’
*
They came shouting ‘Viva!’ and dancing the highveld fling. A mob. Capering about like baboons. From the Latin babewynus: an Old World monkey with naked callosities on its buttocks. To think that the Café Europa had once been a haven in an urban jungle, and now the jungle was in here too, on our side of the pale. I looked for a fist waving an apple as a credible excuse, but found no such comfort. Hunky Dory ran away. The hurdy-gurdy soldiered on without him. Patronymić flung Bogey down in a corner and lay on top of him. I hadn’t realized he was a bodyguard. Why should Bogey require the services of a bodyguard? There was a rushing to and fro the likes of which had never been seen before under that roof. The proofreader’s motto came back to me (in the illuminated version that hung on the wall behind Erasmus’s desk): ‘Widows and orphans first.’ So I stayed where I was, in my proper place, a model of dignified restraint.
‘Kill the bull, kill the farmer!’ I’d heard it on the radio. A native folk song. Obviously, if one kills the bull, one kills the farmer, figuratively speaking, by depriving him of his livelihood. Why make a song and dance about it?
In the green meadows of Alibia, the lion was not lying down with the lamb, exactly, but Frieslands were chewing the cud alongside Jerseys and Aberdeen Anguses. Not an Afrikander in sight. I was there, under a willow-pattern thorn tree, flat on my back in the sweet grass, in clover. The sward beneath, succulent and overgrown, the sky above. One could never lie down in the veld as such, it was too scratchy. A stile over a bony hedgerow. A humpbacked bridge over a babbling brook, running off at the mouth. Can the ocean keep from rushing to the shore? It’s just impossible. Mevrouw Bonsma, give the devil her due, had taken over the keyboard and was trying to restore order — If I had you, could I ever ask for more? It’s just impossible — but it seemed to have no effect. Her spotlit face was as soft and wan as a ripened Camembert. A full moon stooped over Alibia, broadening the daylight. In the market place, the grocers were crying the last shipments of bottled beer. On the canals, the boatmen were singing. Children were climbing trees and rolling hoops. Men were shaving boards and twisting nails, tilling the earth and reaping the harvest. A busy human noise burbled up. But it was not the music of the Alibian masses gathered to honour the champions of order: it was the invaders in our midst, clamouring for blood. One beggar at the banquet might be tolerated — but a whole crowd of them? Then a voice rose above the din, like an ark on the deluge. Spilkin. Screaming blue murder. It was enough to give a chicken goose-flesh. There he was fleeing, leaping over the furniture, scattering paper plates and bones. They ran him to ground in the corner by the Gentlemen’s room. I was shocked to see Darlene among the pursuers, grinning maniacally, her turban unravelling like a winding-sheet. They crowded in on him. I saw his mouth contorted, his eyes streaming. What were they doing to him? Their shoulders shook, their heads bobbed, their buttocks squirmed. Then the crowd scattered abruptly. There seemed to be more of them than ever. Spilkin had vanished. Had they consumed him?