The Folly Read Online Free

there with his hands in a knot behind his back and his nose quivering when she carried in their plates, drew the curtains in front of his eyes and switched on the TV .
    “The rice is dry,” she said. “I can’t concentrate with all this going on.”
    “I’ve been studying our friend and his camp,” said Mr as they ate. “It looks quite jolly.” He was thinking, too, that it looked almost – what?… Brave. But the contemptuous dimple in one corner of her mouth warned him against voicing that observation and he remarked instead, “We should have a braai one of these days.”
    “In this weather?”
    They both chewed and stared into the TV set, where they saw the same collapsing shanty they had seen the night before, now captioned ARCHIVE MATERIAL . Mrs shivered and put her hand in Mr’s. His fingers remained open, like an unsprung trap. She put her fork down and curled his fingers over one by one with her free hand.
    Mr reappraised the iron roof, which fell interminably in slow motion. He picked up his fork in his left hand and said, “This is delicious. Fit for a king. Never mind a king – an emperor.”
    Nieuwenhuizen lifted a chop from a polystyrene tray on the end of a piece of wire, carried it up to his nose and sniffed it. Full of goodness. He dropped it on the grille. He sprinkled the blood from the tray over the chop and suspended his hungry face in the smoke. Then he sat down with a sigh on one of his hard chairs.
    He looked at the windows of the house behind the wall and tried to imagine what the occupants were doing. He saw Mrs at a wooden sideboard lighting a candle in a stainless-steel candlestick. He saw Mr, in slippers and gown, glass in hand, pipe in mouth, darkening a doorway. She fluttered at the wick. He stepped out of the door-frame into the warm embrace of the candle-light. He took two steps towards her, and paused. She looked over her shoulder, and smiled. He put one hand on the back of a chair and raised the other towards her hair. He stopped. He would go no further.
    Nieuwenhuizen lanced the chop with his wire and flipped it over. He looked at the windows of the house and tried again.
    Mr stepped out of the frame and took two steps towards Mrs. The ruby liquid in his glass glinted. She looked over her shoulder, which was sheathed in crimson taffeta, padded within and sequinned without, brought the match up to her mouth and blew out the flame. A puff of smoke drifted into his eyes. He blinked rapidly, put one hand on the back of the chair and raised the other towards her lips, which still held the softly rounded shape of her breath. His hand hung in the air, O! He would go no further.
    Nieuwenhuizen ran the chop through and put it down on a ledge.He levered the grille off the fireplace with his foot. He spat on his fingers, picked up the chop, chewed the fat off it and stared into the coals.
    An ornate citadel, in which were many golden chambers, with corridors and staircases of copper and brass, and silver and lead, and bronze and pewter and aluminium foil, and other metals too numerous to mention, took shape in the heart of the fire, endured, and crumbled away.
    The pockets of Mr’s trousers yielded up a screw, a one-cent piece, a receipt from the Buccaneer Steakhouse (1 × Dagwood, 1 × Chps, 1 × Gngr Beer), a soiled serviette, a fatty deposit slip from the United Building Society, a shirt button, a length of twine and a toothpick chewed at one end. Mrs stuffed the trousers into the washing-machine, jabbed a button to start the cycle and carried her finds to the lounge, where she arranged them on the coffee-table. She examined each of them in turn, as if each had a story to tell.
    This exercise gave her an appetite for conversation. She went to her prize knick-knack cabinet and surveyed the exhibits. Budgie. Paper nautilus. Plastic troll. Worry-beads. Dinner-bell.
    In the end it was a glass paperweight with a guineafowl feather aflutter in its heart that spoke to her.
    Nieuwenhuizen