a leader and chorus. Simon and Jude don’t sing it that way. They sing together, and sing everything twice. It is the only time in their lives they are ever in harmony.
Wolf Machabeus sits in his chair looking pleased and blind and old, flexing his swollen hands, not quite in time to the music.
Simon
Lunch on Sunday is chicken and roast potatoes, as usual. The family members bicker, as always. The southeaster howls in the afternoon, which is unexceptional. After lunch, the Machabeus family sit in the study drinking filter coffee, as they so often do.
Filter coffee is Archie’s latest preoccupation. He came home one day with a porcelain Melitta cone, a box of filter papers, and a paper bag of freshly ground coffee from Harrison’s. It has to be prepared with a pinch of salt, to bring out the flavour. According to Jude, it is the best way to drink filter coffee, though it never occurs to anyone to try it without a pinch of salt, in case the flavour might vanish. After two cups, Simon is high and slightly shaky, a condition he values.
The phone rings, disrupting the stupefied Sunday air. Eli picks it up, hands it over to Simon without answering, and takes up The Catcher in the Rye again.
“It’s for you,” he says.
“How do you know?”
“It’s for you.”
“How do you know?”
“Put the thing on your face and talk, for God’s sake,” says Jude.
Simon obeys. It is David Goldberg:
“Are you still reading Youngblood Hawke?”
“Yes, why?”
“So am I. Come over to my place, we can do a cheese and wine, and read Youngblood Hawke. My mom’s out.”
“Sure, I’ll come over.”
“I’m going to David,” Simon announces, putting down the phone.
“Make sure you’re home by five-thirty,” says Rose, looking up from the Sunday Times crossword puzzle. It isn’t necessary for her to say so. Five-thirty is when things end; it is indecent to stay away longer than that.
Simon walks through the warm and blustering wind to David’s house, slightly more than a ten-minute walk. It often takes him longer, because the Parkers three doors down from the Goldbergs have a grumpy boxer dog that always sits outside their gate. It has never bitten Simon – as far as he knows, it has never bitten anyone at all – but it is the bane of his life. It is aggressive, and growls at him even if he walks past on the other side of the road. He is scared of the dog, but it is unthinkable to say so. He would be mocked mercilessly if he told anyone. Knowledge of his fear worms through his body, filling him with shame.
From the corner of Tenth Avenue and Brighton Drive he can see if the dog is at its station some three hundred metres away. If it isn’t there, he might continue along Brighton Drive, straight to David’s house. But that will entail a frightening risk: the dog might be just inside the gate, which is always open, or just below the low wall, which it can easily jump.
This Sunday it is hunkered down on the warm pavement, snout resting on its paws. Simon curses. He will have to go down Tenth Avenue, take the crescent that curves into Marine Drive, come all the way up Eleventh Avenue, and approach the Goldbergs’ house from the other side. It will add at least ten minutes to the journey.
He does it, steaming with shame and resignation. When he reaches Marine Drive, he pauses and stares across the field at the choppy sea. Its surface is churned by the offshore wind to a mess of brown, aquamarine, white foam. He knows from the look of it that there will be bluebottles all over the place, and if it keeps up for a day or two more, jellyfish, their flaccid bells a full metre in diameter, their poisonous streamers hanging down the same distance.
He approaches the Goldbergs’ house cautiously from the other side, watching the boxer. It ignores him. He is too far outside its territory.
The Goldbergs’ gate is worn, and creaks open. He rings the bell. David lets him in. They pass through the lounge, where David’s father always sits, not only on Sundays, but every day.
“Hi, Uncle Rafe,” says Simon.
“Hullo, Simon.”
“How are you?”
“Fine, thank you,” replies Rafe Goldberg, looking down at his cigarette. Simon knows that this is all he will say. He has a lean, saturnine face and crushed eyes. He suffered a nervous breakdown several years ago and is unable to work. He spends his days sitting on that green chintz armchair, smoking, always dressed in a grey suit and a carmine tie. When he has adult visitors, he rouses himself to conversation, an effort that always leaves him visibly exhausted.
They go into the kitchen.
“Check here,” says David, taking a decanter of Sabbath wine from the grocery cupboard. “I got it out of the lounge when my old man went to the toilet.” He takes a block of processed cheddar out of the fridge and cuts about half of it into little cubes. He sticks toothpicks into these and lays them on a plate. “You take the cheese, I’ll take the wine and glasses.”
“What time is your mom coming home?”
“She’s playing bridge at the club. I reckon about five-thirty at the earliest.”
David’s room is small and dark, as the single window opens onto a deep covered porch. There are two beds in it, against opposite walls. They each take a bed and recline against the pillows. They read Youngblood Hawke, each his own copy. They eat cubes of cheddar cheese off the toothpicks, and sip syrupy wine out of crystal glasses, aware of their sophistication.
“One day,” says David Goldberg, looking up from the book, “I’m going to be a writer.”
“I’m going to be a dentist,” says Simon. “I’ll pull out all your teeth.”
“Maybe I’ll be an architect and design your surgery so that the roof collapses on your head.”
“Maybe you’ll design it wrong, so that the roof collapses on you when you make a tooth appointment for the wrong day when I’m not there, and kill yourself.”
“When I’m a writer I’m going to write a book about a stupid dentist who is never at his surgery because he’s worried that a writer whose teeth he wants to pull out is really going to be an engineer who will design his surgery so badly that it will fall on him and crush him to death.”
“Architect, not engineer.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You said you’re going to be an architect, not an engineer.”
“I said I’m going to be a writer, not an architect. Don’t you ever listen?”
They listen to the wind, and read Youngblood Hawke. The wind howls warm and strong, subsiding and gathering again. It blows across the Mozambique current and piles up bluebottles and deathly jellyfish into Algoa Bay, against the leonine sand of Pollock Beach, Bird Rock, Humewood, King’s Beach, where every animal and thing that beaches as the wind blows can be picked up and examined
