I put my hand in my breast pocket and grasped ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’, my logical conclusion. But prudence caught my wrist. What if they thought I was fetching out a weapon? Nowadays, every second person was carrying a firearm. So I reached instead for Errol’s pool cue, which was leaning against the wall beside me. How was I to know they use these things to beat one another?
*
I reached, as I said, for Errol’s pool cue, his Helmstetter. An object lesson. It was my intention to screw it apart, to present them with Helm and Stetter, to screw it together again. Not with the arrogant ease of its owner, but with authority.
Errol tugged at my sleeve like a child.
‘Keep your cretaceous little fingers off my blazer.’ I jerked my arm free. The moment had given me unnatural physical strength. Errol stumbled back as if I had punched him, and banged into one of the marauders, a brute with boot polish on his hands, wearing his jacket inside out. They grappled and clinched.
Was that all it took, one act of will, one assertion, to rouse them from their torpor? They claimed afterwards that I made to attack them with the pool cue. Can you credit it?
And then pandemonium. Errol rose up in the air with his loose-limbed body rattling, as if an almighty hand had pulled his strings, and flew backwards through the stained-glass windows. It’s a miracle he wasn’t hurt. He can thank the Jewish Benevolent for giving him that tuxedo. Chaos all around, a full-scale bar-room brawl. They were trying to get at me, to tear me limb from limb. And in their midst Spilkin, the lord of misrule, stirring them up against me. Against himself! He was pummelling his own face, as if he meant to blacken it further, inciting them to do their worst. Why should he side with the mob? Why should he tar himself with the same brush? Was it a sign of how low he had sunk, or had he always been this way, and I as blind to his faults as he to Darlene’s? She was there too, egging them on.
Then the bootboy, the one who had thrown Errol aside like a rag, stood in front of me. In his paw, the knife looked like a bodkin of the kind the compositors once used to winkle out type. He fell upon me. The blade struck my chest with a thud and went in. The force of the blow hurled me to the floor. I looked down and saw the hilt jutting from my rib cage. Pierced to the pith. I waited for the gush of bloody words. I felt no pain, but that was normal. I saw a crush of legs and enormous shoes with treads like teeth, and the plastered foot of Wessels, the toes squirming vermicularly, like the party snacks come to life. Then, in the thicket of combat boots and gymnasium shoes, I recognized a pair of winkle-pickers, with golden chains and black buttons. Moçes. He seized me under the arms and dragged me backwards into a corner.
Black and white and red all over.
‘You mustn’t pull it out,’ someone said. ‘That’s what they say at the St John’s.’
The fighting raged all around us.
I lay there, floating between life and death, waiting for the red river to carry me off into oblivion. It was a pleasant feeling, I wished it might endure. Then I opened my eyes and the spell was broken. I could not bear to look at the knife, lodged so improbably in my being, but I had an overwhelming urge to discover the extent of my injuries, to explore the split flesh, the intimate gore, while my life ebbed away. I reached my hand inside my jacket. And that was when I discovered that the blade had gone straight into the heart of the Pocket Oxford Dictionary.
*
I am not prone to theatrical gestures, but I made the most of this one. When they saw me walking calmly among them with the knife sticking out of my chest, the more superstitious invaders ran away, with Errol and Co in pursuit.
It was during this final skirmish that Floyd stabbed himself in the head. ‘They stuck the old tawpy,’ he said afterwards (meaning me), ‘so I schemed I’d stick them back. But I stuck my own self by mistake.’ I heard Floyd bellowing like a fatted calf and saw him fall by the glass doors. The others set upon him and began tearing at him greedily, like children opening presents under the Christmas tree. Were they ripping off his labels? No, it was worse, they were like scavengers at a carcase. A foot flew loose and landed near me. Not a foot, don’t be ridiculous, only a shoe, one of the oversized bootees. The tearing noises came from Velcro fasteners — the buckles were all false.
The knife was a comfort to me. It made me feel young and healthy, invincible and immortal. I did a circuit of the room, enjoying the feeling. Not to mention the holy terror in the eyes of all who beheld me.
Then I strolled onwards to the Gentlemen’s room to see what I looked like in extremis.
*
The mirror had been stolen, of course, and all I could see in the tiles was a swarthy smudge. I went into the cubicle for some paper to clean the muck off my face. And there in the corner stood the floating trophy. I sat on the toilet seat and rested the trophy on my knees. I looked at my image in its tarnished surface.
I wished I might cry, but my eyes were dry as newsprint. A lifetime of poring over galleys had done my tear-ducts no good. Just as damaging as breaking limestone, if not so dramatic. And now this boot polish on top of everything. Perhaps I would need an operation, like The Madiba, to restore my sense of sorrow.
Better assess the other damages. No broken bones, thank God, but my pencils reduced to tinder. I pulled the knife out of my chest. One perfectly good blazer ruined. As for the Pocket, the blade had gone right through the alphabet. There was a course to be plotted from A to Z in wounded words, but the exercise struck me as merely technical, a forensic parody of lexical gymnastics.
With the knife in my hand, I became fully aware of how narrowly I had escaped. A salto mortale, a double tearle with a twist, unfolded in my brain. Here was the double tearle: jot (small amount, whit) and iota (atom, jot), both from the Greek iota, which is the letter ‘i’ without the dot. A jot is an iota. And here was the twist: tittle (small written or printed stroke or dot). Ergo: an iota is a jot missing a tittle or a tittle missing a jot. By distinctions as fine as these, I had cheated death.
*
The Café looked like a battlefield. I picked my way between broken-backed chairs, over the shattered kaleidoscope that was all that remained of the chapel, to the boneyard of the buffet. I was famished — it is common in the aftermath of combat — but there was not so much as a crust left. Mrs Hay passed like a ghost behind the blinds. In the doorway, Floyd lay clutching a bag of ice from the Hebcoolers, with a knot of people around him. Spilkin had the bloodied head in his lap, Darlene the stockinged feet. She glanced up accusingly as I approached. ‘Are you satisfied?’
‘By no means.’
‘You’ve got a lot to answer for.’
I’d expected a chorus of mockery, but the levity of the early evening had been replaced by a sombre calm. All these faces masked in black. Even Darlene, the mustafina, was as black as night. It was no longer amusing to anyone.
Mbongeni had surrendered the tea cosy as a makeshift tampon and let his hair down. Cotton-waste wads as long as my arm, the kind of thing that would come in useful at the printing works for wiping down the presses. I showed him the skewered Pocket. The word quickly spread that I hadn’t been wearing a bulletproof vest after all. It dispersed some of my mystique.