The Folly (4 page)

“We have to be realistic about this,” Mrs said to Mr on a Friday evening when the conversation turned inevitably to Nieuwenhuizen. “We have to act like responsible adults and stop thinking about ourselves alone. He’s dangerous. Ask yourself: Where does he go? Does he dig a hole and squat over it like a dog?”

“A cat,” said Mr irritably.

“I’m talking about the principle. Where does he get his water from? He’s got a drumful there, for washing and cooking and all his household needs. Probably siphons it out of our pool in the dead of night, when normal people are sleeping.”

“We could offer to supply him with a drop of water. We’ve got plenty. I could run a hose over to his place easily enough.”

“What does he eat? What’s cooking in that two-legged pot of his? Four-legged chickens? Pigeons? Cockatoos and budgerigars?”

“There’s another neighbourly thing we could do – if you didn’t dislike him so: we could give him a square meal from time to time.”

“Where does he get his money? He’s got money, surely?”

“Sigh!”

“How many times must I ask you not to say that? You know how much it annoys me!”

“It’s just an expression.”

“Why can’t you sigh like everybody else? How would you like it if I said ‘Laugh’ all the time instead of laughing?”

Mr thought about that as he slipped out into the garden. Only the night before he had chanced upon a picturesque view of Nieuwenhuizen’s camp, framed between two spokes of a wagon-wheel, and he was anxious to recapture it; with luck he would pick up a wholesome aroma and a snatch of some melody or other. A welcome breeze stirred a ripple of applause in the shrubbery. He smelt chlorine, creosote and mint. The swimming-pool’s Kreepy Krauly was silent, asleep in the
depths below the diving-board, but the water echoed the slapping of his sandals against the soles of his feet as he made his way to the side of the house, along a Slasto pathway he had laid himself.

Mash through strainer da-da-da. Return pulp to stove, bring back to boil and simmer for 30 mins. Add seasoning.

Mrs Malgas shook Mixed Herbs into her palm and tipped them into the pot. She pinched salt and pepper, she dashed Tabasco, she squeezed lemon. She stirred and tasted. Bland. She spiked the mixture with a handful of cloves as piquant as upholstery tacks.

As the days had passed Mr Malgas had developed a conviction, which his wife was well aware of although he had not chosen to share it with her, that he was connected in some important way to Nieuwenhuizen – “Father,” as he named him to himself with difficulty. They had not spoken since their first meeting, which Mr Malgas rehearsed constantly in his mind, but when he left for work in the mornings and when he returned home in the evenings he would give a few cheerful blasts on his hooter and Nieuwenhuizen would invariably pop up somewhere on the plot and respond with a wave. Such simple reciprocal gestures struck Mr Malgas as a form of co-operation with his new neighbour, foreshadowing a more meaningful relationship, which presented itself as a series of words all starting with “c,” each one a node on a scale of intimacy: collaboration, coexistence, collusion.

Yet the distance which now prevailed between them, a distance familiarity was bound to bridge, seemed necessary, even desirable.
Concealed behind his ambiguous wall on this unprepossessing evening, with the breeze bearing the woody tang of the great outdoors to his nostrils, Mr Malgas was shaken by a thrill of suppressed excitement the likes of which he had not experienced since he was a boy playing hide-and-seek.

Nieuwenhuizen’s head quivered, as if Mr Malgas’s greedy gaze had joggled it, and seemed about to swivel in his direction.

But a bowl of brazen light dropped suddenly over Mr as he knelt in the shadow of the wall. Mrs had slammed the curtains open like two sheets of metal and stood in the garish window-frame brandishing a serving-spoon and looking down on him disdainfully.

“You’re making a fool of us,” she said while he was dusting the sand off his knees on the back step. “He pitches up out of nowhere and you, of all people, welcome him with open arms. You should be ashamed of yourself. We don’t have a clue who he is. He has no history. Are you listening to me? We don’t even know his name.”

“We know that,” said Mr, brushing past her and sagging down at the kitchen table. He watched her mangy slippers twitching impatiently. “He told me, when I was over there last week. Why don’t you dish, it’s getting cold.”

“You didn’t say anything.”

“I was going to.”

“Well?”

“It’s ‘Father’.”

“Father?”

One thing leads to another. Nieuwenhuizen, rolling on the ground, yelping in agony, clasping his left hand between his knees, cursing himself, landed up in the remains of the cooking-fire. Just moments before, he had brought his hammer down on his thumb-nail. That opposable pain was forgotten now as he tossed and turned to shake off the clinging coals. The hair on his head crackled, budded into flame, bloomed – but he crushed the petals with an oily chamois. When the crisis was over he composed himself once again in front of his tent, sucking his thumb and nursing his blistered elbow, and through his tears, which were two parts pain and one part embarrassment, saw Malgas on the horizon.

Mr Malgas found the approach to the camp more welcoming this time: a teetering fence-post, emitting a tang of fresh creosote and surmounted by a scuffed cement shoe with a little stable-door, two sash-windows and a slot in its toe-cap, marked the beginning of a path through the veld, and he took it gratefully. Several twists and turns dictated by the geography brought him to an anthill, where he rested and enjoyed the prospect. Then he went on, in two minds about whether to announce his arrival.

Nieuwenhuizen saw Malgas coming down the path fending off spider’s webs with his hands and hacking away at lianas with a rusty panga, and in the event it was he who called out a greeting. “Malgas!”

Nieuwenhuizen was sitting in the mouth of his tent, on the untidy pile of his own long legs, busy with some handiwork concealed in his lap.

“Hello Father!” Malgas was pleased at how naturally the name flew from his lips. If Nieuwenhuizen was also pleased he did not show it, but merely waved a pair of pliers in the direction of a stone and went on with his work.

“This is coming along nicely,” said Malgas, turning in an appreciative circle. “Mind if I look around?”

Taking a shrug as permission, Mr Malgas made a tour of the camp and its environs, allowing the rudimentary footpaths that had appeared with time to guide his steps. He took a childlike delight in the signs he found everywhere that the plot had become lived in, that the newcomer had made himself at home. “A dwelling-place
carved out of the veld
,” Malgas thought happily, examining the bare, compacted soil around the hearth. A soothing smell rising up from below notified him that the earth had been sprinkled with water to settle the dust.

“Where the hell is my hammer?” Nieuwenhuizen asked himself.

Malgas hunted obligingly for a hammer at the foot of the tree, and discovered instead a pile of firewood and fence-posts, which he took to be the raw materials of fortifications that had yet to be constructed; next to that was a leather portmanteau, sturdily made but a little the worse for wear, probably imitation, plastered with name-tags, illegible, every one of them, and stickers – exotic destinations: Bordeaux, Florida, Eldorado Park – and spilling various items of clothing; then a metal drum, lipping with green water, and a tin ladle displaying in
its bowl the label of a popular soft drink. On an impulse he scooped a ladleful of water and poured it over his head, and although there was a nip in the air and he was required to suppress the lip-smacking, hair-tossing display of pleasure he associated with the gesture, he nevertheless felt invigorated.

“Here it is!” Nieuwenhuizen said. “I’ve been sitting on it all along.”

Malgas circumnavigated the tree and the tent, noting with approval the prudent depth of the moat and testing the tension of the guy-ropes. Some bulky objects hung in plastic bags from the lower branches of the tree. Malgas, who prided himself on his knowledge of packaging and its relationship to contents, could not resist the challenge. After an inquiring glance at the back of Nieuwenhuizen’s grizzled head he palpated one of the bags thoroughly, but to his surprise could not determine what it contained. Never mind, he moved on. Behind the tent he found some implements that were more readily identifiable: a row of rough-hewn wooden spoons dangling from a length of string (the stirring-bone was nowhere to be seen), a stack of misshapen plates and saucers, a tin of creosote with a brush resting across it, a hurricane-lamp, a slab of discoloured slate supporting a grey liver. He prodded this dismal organ with a blunt forefinger and found it firm. But in a cove under the hedge were yet other gadgets whose functions he could not divine, despite his many years of experience in Hardware.

“You’ve got some fascinating things here,” Malgas exclaimed. “What’s this?” He held up a contraption consisting of a luminous orange traffic-beacon mounted upside-down in a cardboard box and bound with copper wire.

Nieuwenhuizen’s head spun round. He looked at the eager expression on Malgas’s face and at his thick fingers gripping the gadget. “Bush rain-gauge,” he said sadly, “calibrated, measures rainfall. Horn also works.”

“Useful … And this?”

“Mousetrap. Field-mice.”

“This?”

“Cookie cutter.”

Nieuwenhuizen found the questions tiresome.

“What’s that you’re making there?” Malgas asked, though he was not insensitive to Nieuwenhuizen’s tone. As he spoke he rolled a stone closer and sat down on it. He was disappointed to find that Nieuwenhuizen’s torso blocked his view of the tent’s interior.

“This is a teacup,” said Nieuwenhuizen, holding up a dented tin and turning it from side to side so that Malgas could admire it. “Almost finished. Just got to round off the handle here.” He perked up suddenly, shooting out one leg like a railway signal. “Let’s make a pot of tea and you may have the honour of testing out my cup.”

The coals in the fireplace were warm. Under Nieuwenhuizen’s attentive gaze, Malgas fetched kindling from the woodpile, built up a fire, ladled water into the pot, noting with relief that it had three legs after all, and, following instructions, measured the requisite quantity of dried leaves from a plastic bag. “What is this stuff?” he asked as he sprinkled the leaves onto the bubbling water.

“Herbaceous infusion,” Nieuwenhuizen replied. “Tisane, excuse the jargon. Very good for you. Purifies the blood and builds you up.”

When the tea had steeped to Nieuwenhuizen’s satisfaction, Malgas was instructed to strain it through a shop-soiled oil-filter and sweeten it with honey from a jar.

Malgas reported that the new teacup served its purpose adequately – it certainly didn’t leak – but its serrated rim threatened his lip and its ear was too small to accommodate his forefinger.

“I’m afraid it’s made for a less substantial digit,” Nieuwenhuizen explained with a good-humoured cackle, holding up his own skinny forefinger to illustrate the point. “Oh my.”

Despite the honey the tea tasted of oil and rust.

“This is the life,” said Malgas, when they were both ensconced on stones with their teacups resting on their stomachs and their legs stretched out to catch the afternoon sun.

A silty silence descended upon them. Malgas savoured its meaningful elements: the rubbery squeaking of his host’s boots against a grease-spattered stone; the hissing of the sticks in the fireplace; insects scurrying in the grass; dry leaves rattling in the hedge; his cup hiccuping as its joints expanded; a distant roar of traffic.

Through half-closed lids Nieuwenhuizen charted the outstanding features of Malgas’s face, ear to ear and quiff to chin.

When they had drained their cups, Malgas sighed contentedly and said, “So. When does the building begin?”

“Patience, patience,” Nieuwenhuizen murmured sleepily, screwing his eyes shut to make Malgas disappear. “I’ve got all the time in the world.” The breathless pause that followed insisted that further explanation was called for. “You can’t rush the building of a new house.
You’ve got to get the whole thing clear in the mind’s eye.” Another pause insisted. “Take it from me. I’ve been acclimatizing, building up my strength for the first phase: namely, the clearing of the virgin bushveld.”

“What do you consume, to build yourself up I mean?”

“Oh, birds, roots, that kind of thing. Berries. I’m living off the land. Naturally, I get my basics from the corner café, and the occasional luxury to keep me going. I’m especially fond of a chocolate digestive.”

The air thickened. Nieuwenhuizen kept his eyes closed. Minutes coalesced into hours, oozed by, and Malgas found himself dozing off. Perhaps it was the tea? Or was it Nieuwenhuizen’s husky voice, rising and falling like a wind through the treetop?

They discussed edible ground cover, drifted off, moulds, hydroponics, broccoli, market gardens, touched on barter (Nieuwenhuizen waved a bath mat woven from plastic bags), drifted off again, bumped against Hardware (Malgas revealed his
T
-shirt, which showed an overalled manikin, who bore a passing resemblance to Malgas himself, holding a huge spangled nail in one hand and a hammer in the other), hinges, handles, hafts, wallpaper, sandpaper, zinc, sink, sank, surfaced again into the niceties of skinning a cat, dropped off, slid in slow motion through spec housing and restaurant rubbish bins, recycled waste and domestic security gates, found themselves talking about the weather.

At length the sun dipped towards the red roof of Malgas’s house, which for some time had appeared to him through his eyelashes as
a distant koppie. Then the elongated shadow of his wall touched his toes and he awoke to an uncomfortable recollection of the purpose of his visit.

“You find out what his real name is,” Mrs Malgas had announced bitterly, “or don’t even bother to come back.”

Mr Malgas looked into the swampy bottom of his teacup and assembled a question.

The house, when it was emptied of Mr’s absorbing presence, seemed more full of objects. They multiplied and grew in stature, their edges became sharper, their surfaces more reflective. Mrs Malgas moved among them, running a finger along the scalloped edges of display cabinets, stooping to blow dust off polished table-tops, pinching fluff off the velveteen shoulders of armchairs. She felt lonely. Mr had been gone for hours, and she could no longer bear the sight of him, reclining at the fireside with his hands behind his head and his feet up, as if he was in the privacy of his own home.