Free The Restless Supermarket by Ivan Vladislavic Page B

wobbled in and started waving Mr Fatso/Mnr Vetsak under my nose. ‘I’ve nearly got everyone,’ he smirked, as if the party were no more than a confidence trick, and ran a smoke-stained forefinger down a row of ticks. ‘Even Merlé, see? Still dossing out in Illovo with her daughter, who might be able to bring her. No promises at this stage. Mevrou Bonsma’s still at the Dorchester, but it’s becoming a bit rough. She’s got a school now. Only ones I can’t find is Everistus, who’s gone off to his rondavel in the hills for a week or so. Someone died. But I left a message. You know he’s grafting at Bradlows. And Spilkin and Pardner, natch, who’s back in Joeys but lying low.’
    Lying low? Like Apaches. Apache here, Apache there (punchlines, Wessels). Something to do with beards.
    ‘What you got there? Looks familiar.’
    I closed the file on his finger. He knew exactly what it was, but he was the last person I felt like discussing it with. It was a selection from the fardel of notes and jottings and clippings and scribbled-upon typescripts that represented the raw material of ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’. This unfinished business had chafed at my peace of mind for too long. I had made a bargain with myself: if I finished ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ before the end of the month, I would take it with me to the Goodbye Bash and present it to the sceptics – I might even make photostatic copies, one for each to bear away as a souvenir. If not, I would stay home, and a plague on all their townhouses!
    *
13 December 1993
    Dear Sir,
    An able-bodied man might wear a T-shirt, though why he would choose to, when proper shirts with buttons and collars are freely available, is a mystery to me.
    But what manner of monster would fit into a ‘t-shirt’ of the style advertised in your newspaper on 11 December (Hyperama Festive Season Bonanza)? A one-armed bandit, I suppose, some twisted wreck of a human being, the sort who would live in an a-frame house made entirely of i-beams …
    Would the sub-editors care to explain?
    Yours faithfully, etcetera
    *
    In the first weeks of my acquaintance with Spilkin, I always arrived at the Café Europa to find him already there, seated at one of the little tables against the wall. And I always sat down at the other, with the big round one in between, as if each encounter was the first between people who had never met before. We seemed to be participating in the primary activity that the café as a social institution made possible: being on one’s own in the company of congenial strangers. Another stranger, looking on, might have thought that our conversation had a cultured quality about it as well, carried on at intervals from a seemly distance while we each went about our own business, revolving around niceties of expression and quibbles of logic, anagrammatical teasers, aqueous humours, questions of craft, specifications of lenses and lemmata, headwords, grades of graphite, presbyopia and strabismus, occasionally politics – this was before change beset us and made the subject so tiresome. I say, Tearle, you don’t happen to have a pen-wiper handy? Why not use a serviette, Spilkin? Capital idea. Spilkin this and Tearle that. It all helped to cultivate a sort of formal bonhomie between us, the polite and companionable ease that someone who had never been in an officers’ mess might expect to enjoy there.
    But happening to arrive one day at the same time, we fell into conversation on the escalator, and happy as I was with our arrangement, it seemed absurd to part and sit at separate tables. We should sit at the round table, obviously, we should meet one another halfway; but we both hesitated, with our hands on the backs of our chairs.
    ‘Alfresco, perhaps?’ Spilkin said, nodding towards the balcony.
    ‘“Fresco” is a relative term, Spilkin.’ He brought out a slightly haughty tone in me, which I was rather pleased about. ‘Sit out there and you’ll be breathing exhaust