Читать книгу Life Underwater - Ken Barris - Страница 12

Simon

Jude and Simon have a job on Saturday mornings, manual labour at W. Machabeus & Sons. Their job is to load boxes of detergent or canned goods or sacks of grain onto a flat-bed truck. Archie pays them five rand a week, which is good money.

They leave at eight in the morning in Archie’s Wolseley 6/110. Less than twenty minutes later they are in North End, pulling up against the quay that fronts the huge sliding doors of the warehouse. The boys first go up to Uncle Saul’s office to greet him. Saul and Archie are the Sons in W. Machabeus & Sons, established before the war by their father Wolf. It was a thriving business when he retired, but now it is said to be in trouble. Saul has expensive tastes, and neither brother has any real business sense.

Jude presses the buzzer on Saul’s office door. A frosted glass pane lights up with the word ENTER, and the door clicks open. Saul is as fascinated by gadgets as his brother Archie, though his generally work. They also look more expensive, and more interesting.

“Morning, boys,” says Uncle Saul as they enter the wood-panelled office, his voice even deeper than Archie’s, and more bold. He has a small cup of coffee beside him, which Simon knows to be expresso. Saul is fanatical, and has a machine that produces this impossibly bitter drink. It is rumoured in Port Elizabeth that he is sophisticated. He is an excellent cook, and once used wild mushrooms in his cooking, whereas everyone else uses tinned mushrooms. Even worse, he is considered a pseudo-intellectual, a polemicist. Everyone knows that before dinner parties he bones up on the Oxford Dictionary, or Shakespeare, or the Commentaries on the Talmud, these being the three centres of learning, in order to stupefy guests with his erudition.

“I want to give you something,” he says to Jude. “You might find it interesting. I’ve nearly finished The Spectator, there’s quite a good article in it on Ben-Gurion. Not uncritical, but interesting. I’ll send it home with your father.”

That is exactly the thing about Saul Machabeus: other men read Time or Newsweek, or the Sunday Times.

“Thanks, I’d like that,” replies Jude, responding to his uncle with frank admiration.

Saul turns to Simon, and grins suddenly, as if he doesn’t believe what he is about to say and means it light-heartedly: “You might find it interesting too, boy, have a look at it. Tell me what you think.”

“Sure, Uncle Saul, thanks.”

Simon feels light-hearted himself, elevated by his uncle’s regard.

“Well, you chaps have to get on with your work, and I have to get on with mine. I’ve nearly finished this,” he says, raising his rumpled copy of The Spectator and dropping it on the desk. “See what you think.”

The brothers leave the office and go down to the dispatch warehouse. The directors’ offices are built into a mezzanine floor that overlooks the central warehouse, a dusty, echoing cavern filled with great rectangular islands of wholesale goods. This marketplace of smells includes cardboard and dust, curry powder and pipe tobacco, the grease on the floor, which has grown its patina over many decades of trading, and a tangy residue of the gas range which Archie keeps below the mezzanine. He sometimes sears rump steak for lunch or breakfast on a griddle pan, and flavoured smoke rises up through the dark trusses and curls down from asbestos roof sheeting to become atmosphere. “Best steak you can get in town,” he usually proclaims, and in Simon’s opinion it is.

They take a short cut through the truck garage to get to dispatch. The smell is different in this garage, because there is no toilet for the boys. All the Xhosa workers at W. Machabeus & Sons are boys. The back wall is lined with coal sacks, against which the boys urinate when they need to. Jude and Simon walk through this section as quickly as possible, trying not to breathe.

They report to Nelson, the foreman, who usually assigns them tasks light enough for youngsters. This morning they are to load a light truck with boxes of tinned goods, working on their own. When they have to load heavier items, sacks of grain, for example, they work together to lift the weight, and even then they struggle.

It is heavy going this morning. The boxes are compact, but bully beef isn’t light in bulk. The morning grows hotter and more humid. Sweat streams down Simon’s back and his shirt clings to it whenever he straightens up. He stands below the truck, passing boxes up to Jude. His brother stacks them with precision, pausing occasionally to consider how best to use the space. The dusty cardboard gives Simon hay fever. His eyes stream, he sneezes so often that the upper part of his throat behind his nose itches crazily. He hates this job.

He stops suddenly and puts down the box he is carrying, almost dropping it.

“Don’t do that, you little prick,” snaps Jude. “It’s a waste of energy to lift it and then put it down. You should rather have given it to me, and then rested.”

“It’s my energy,” says Simon defiantly. “I can waste it if I want to.”

Jude’s face darkens. He can’t bear contradiction.

“I know it’s your energy, arsehole. You can waste it if you want to. But it’s still a waste. That is an objective fact.”

“I don’t care if it’s an objective fact. It’s my energy and I want to waste it.”

Jude crosses a certain threshold: it would be more accurate to say that he falls over it. His face becomes congested, his voice grows ugly with an anger he cannot limit.

“I don’t believe you really mean that. You can’t tell me you really want to waste energy – that’s bullshit. It’s an objective fact that it’s bad to waste energy. You can ask anyone you like. You can ask Peter Berman, for example, you can ask Stanley Meyer, you can ask anyone – how can you say it’s good to waste energy? You’re talking shit! They’ll all tell you that, you can ask whoever you want.”

Jude’s voice makes Simon tired, with an ancient tiredness. How can he take on the whole of Port Elizabeth?

“I didn’t say that it’s good to waste energy. I said that it’s my energy and I don’t care if –”

“Now you’re contradicting yourself. First you say it’s good to waste energy, now you’re saying it’s not. You can’t even stick to a logical argument.”

Simon keeps quiet, knowing Jude is insane. There is no way he can win this argument. There is no way his brother might even understand what he is talking about. There is a danger too that Jude might hit him. He bends down to pick up the box again, and passes it up. I have to do this, he thinks, biting down his feelings. There is a lump in his throat, tears prick his eyes. But he will not cry. They carry on working in the suffocating air, and his rage is mute.