Double Negative (15 page)

The pamphlet spurred me into the darkroom to print up the photograph of Mrs Pinheiro at her gate, and I had it with me the next time I drove over to Fourth Avenue. But I did not get to see her again. There was a For Sale sign attached to the fence and no one answered when I knocked. The house appeared to be empty.

A few weeks later, on a Sunday morning when a show day had been advertised in the property pages, I went again to Fourth Avenue, half-expecting to find Mrs Pinheiro in attendance, but there was only an estate agent reading a decor magazine in the lounge. She had brought her own camping chair, an elaborate contraption with canvas pockets for magazines and drinks. The house felt like a different place. The floors were newly varnished
–
every last scrap of wall-to-wall was gone
–
and the walls were freshly painted.

‘It needs a bit of TLC,' the agent said, following me down the passage, ‘but it's the perfect starter home. You couldn't make a better investment. We're in rainbow nation territory here, the area is about to boom. People want houses near the city centre, well-built places with features, character homes. Have you seen the fireplace?'

Dr Pinheiro's door was open. Through the sash window I saw the window of the house next door, as clear as a mirror image. The room was large and clean, the walls were blindingly white, and panels of soft, perfectly normal light lay like bolts of silk on the pine floor. I stood in the doorway laughing.

‘Are you the big grey wall?'

‘That's
me.'

‘Then I'm here, Neville. I'm a bit early.'

‘That's okay. I'll let you
in.'

I put down the phone and went outside. When I opened the street door she was paying the taxi driver through the window. A younger, softer-looking woman than I'd pictured from her telephone voice, but dressed tough in cargo pants and a denim jacket with biker embroidery. Her backpack had a hard shell like a piece of body armour.

‘You don't have a doorbell,' she said, as the pink Cabs for Women taxi made a U-turn and went back up Leicester
Road.

‘No, I had an intercom but it was swiped.'

‘I scratched around there on the pillar, in case it was under the ivy, but then I thought, no, I'd better phone.' Holding up one of those thumb-and-pinkie telephones the comedians
use.

‘Good idea.'

‘Oh, I'm Janie,' she said, as we went inside. ‘Obviously.'

‘Neville. I was just finishing breakfast. Would you like something? Coffee? It's Ethiopian I believe.'

‘Juice would be nice.' She'd seen the split oranges next to the juicer. ‘Before we do that though, would you mind letting me in again? I want to get something on my arrival.'

She unzipped a pocket on the bag and took out a digicam.

‘I thought it was a print interview.'

‘Ja, that's the idea, but I also need something for my blog. Just a clip, you know, to introduce you and direct people to the article. Nothing major. Do you mind?'

‘I guess not.' I could already see her taking the camera out on a street corner in Bertrams. I didn't want to feel responsible for her. But the quip about introducing me hadn't gone over my head. On the strength of a single showing at an unfashionable gallery, and that in a group exhibition full of amateurs
–
not excluding myself
–
the
News
had sent a journalist to talk to me about my photos, someone who was prepared to spend time with me and do a piece with substance. A little fish in a full pond should count the crumbs.

I led her back down the path. She went into the street and I shut the door behind
her.

‘I'm going to ask you about the bell again,' she said through the
door.

Shit. Five minutes and I'm already being asked to play myself. This whole thing is a bad
idea.

She knocked. I opened. ‘You don't have a doorbell,' she said. I explained the situation to the camera, saying ‘nicked' instead of ‘swiped', for some reason, and then we went back into the house. ‘Nicked' is more nonchalant than ‘swiped'. Perhaps I meant to suggest that the loss of my intercom was no big deal, I understood what drove people to petty theft, I was not such a bad
guy.

While I was squeezing oranges, she shucked the jacket and looked around the kitchen. She did not seem old enough to be a journalist. But I am trying to resist the creeping fogeyishness that comes with middle age. Just because the economists on TV look like schoolchildren doesn't mean they don't know their onions, or whatever the vegetable measure of insight is these days. Portabellini mushrooms, if the markets are anything to go
by.

‘You're into cooking.' She was browsing along the shelf of cookery books in the dresser, making herself at
home.

‘I enjoy it, but Leora's the real foodie
–
that's my wife.'

‘I'm very into cooking. I did a bit of an internship at Lemon Leaf in Stellenbosch. I see your wife's got their book here.'

‘You can always get a job as a sous-chef if the journalism doesn't work
out.'

I'd found the designation amusing ever since a client told me the sous-chef was the person in charge of gravy. The joke might have sounded merely mean, but she laughed and said, ‘I'd like to have my own restaurant one day. The Lady of Shallot. You heard it here first.'

She tipped the Lemon Leaf book back into its slot and leaned over an old black-bound exercise book opened on a fretwork reading stand like a museum exhibit.

‘That's more my style,' I said. ‘I'm the one-pot specialist. You won't catch Leora cooking out of there.' It was a home-made cookery book, full of handwritten recipes and yellowed cuttings from newspapers and magazines, splashed with the ingredients listed in its pages, seasoned by use. ‘It belonged to my mother. She gave it to me a couple of years ago when she stopped cooking for herself.'

‘Some of these are ancient,' she said. ‘Charlie's chicken marinade. My God, it's got condensed milk in it. Cheese straws. Rum baba. Lamb chops jubilee.'

‘Half the recipes were passed on by someone after a dinner or a tea party or whatever. If you could piece it all together, you'd have a memoir. And a family tree.' I joined her as she leafed through the book, stopping occasionally to laugh at something
–
‘Baked Alaska!'
–
or look at the pictures. ‘It's a bit of social anthropology too. The eating habits of the white middle class … under apartheid. You could make a study of it. Chuck-wagon chowder. That was a big favourite when I was a strapping lad of
ten.'

‘This must be your mom's handwriting, the copperplate.'

‘One of the lasting benefits of a convent education. Can you believe she learned to write with a dipping pen? She's a very precise woman. If it says 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, that's what you use, and if it's a flat teaspoon, you smooth off the excess with the back of a knife. She doesn't appreciate the theatrical style of cooking promoted by domestic goddesses and scooter drivers. A good glug of olive oil, slap it in the fuckin' mortar, bash it around a bit. What's that about?'

‘Food hall hooliganism,' she said distractedly and went on paging. ‘Do you actually use these?'

‘I hardly need to: I've known a few of them by heart since I was a kid. But sometimes I look in the book anyway. The food tastes better when the ghosts adjust the seasoning.'

She sat down at the dinner table and unpacked the utensils for an interview from various zippered pockets: translucent pens with a skinny vein of ink in them like the thread in a thermometer, pinstriped erasers, for some reason a plastic ruler. Chattering away all the time. A trio of notebooks in the primary colours labelled in a tiny hand I couldn't read upside
down.

‘It would make a yummy cookery show. Celebrity sons and their not-so-famous mothers cook the family favourites. Fathers and daughters too, famous or not-so-famous or famous-until-teatime. With lots of wine between the paring and dicing so we learn all about their special relationship. Virtuoso demonstrations of the mezzaluna. Think Take Home Chef meets Prodigal
Son.'

She was a talker. Good. It relieved me of the burden. Talk talk talk. And quick movements of her hands to put a word in quotes
–
‘celebrity'
–
or italicize an aside. Cheese straws? I don't
think
so.

I put the juice and a rack of toast on the table and sat down. She'd flipped the fruit bowl over to make a podium for her recorder, leaving the displaced apples and oranges arranged on the table top like a platitude. Good thing Leora was out. She was fussy about the bowl, which was the one acknowledged masterpiece from an otherwise undistinguished pottery class.

‘Shall we start?'

‘Please.'

‘Cool. It's April the whatever 2009. This is Jane Amanpour reporting live from Somewhere Dangerous. Can you see me under this thing? No seriously, I'm with Neville Lister at his home in Kensington, Johannesburg. Just to fill you in, you're part of a work-in-progress series
–
we call it Riding Shotgun, not my idea
–
so I'd like to focus on what you're up to now. But seeing that people won't necessarily have heard of you, I thought we could start with some basic stuff about your background. I googled you but I didn't find much. You seem to have sprung to life in this group show at the Switch Box last year.'

‘I'm a late starter.'

‘Cool. Then you're ready to be discovered.'

She tweaked the recorder and looked at me through her fringe, which was styled to fall over her eyes without obscuring her vision. ‘Fire away.'

I did the potted biog, including my misspent youth
–
‘Is it really possible to misspend your youth in Bramley?'
–
and my inglorious academic career. The London chapter came down to a line. When Leora reads a novel, she skips the boring descriptions and concentrates on the dialogue, and that's how I feel about my other life. I'd rather not go into detail.

‘How long were you in exile?'

‘No, no, that is a political fate I never had to suffer.'

‘You left the country though.'

‘I went away, yes, and after some time I came back again.'

‘Why?'

‘Why did I
leave
? To avoid the army and other unpleasantness. We had conscription then and I didn't feel like going to the border. The killing never appealed, to say nothing of the dying.'

‘Did you think about becoming a conscientious objector?'

‘For five minutes. I didn't have the stomach for it. Religious objectors like the Jehovah's Witnesses had a very rough time. Objecting on political grounds was practically unheard of. Once the ECC was formed it became more of an option, but that was after I left.'

‘ECC?'

‘End Conscription Campaign. Even with their support, I should tell you, you had to be a tough customer to make a stand. Most objectors just left.'

‘What did you do in London?'

I told her how I worked as a waiter, not very patiently, until I fell into photography
–
‘without a splash.' I had been interviewed only once before in my life (for the Remarkable Residents series in the local knock-and-drop) and already I was repeating things I'd said then. Quoting myself. ‘Out of the firing line into the frying pan.' For crying in a casserole. Give me a bit of time and I'd work the quotable quotes up into a routine.

She turned to the second half of her question: ‘Why did you come back?'

‘I wanted to be part of the new South Africa.'

Glib but true. In all the years I was away, I felt interrupted. Despite my resolve to look in the other direction, the life I might have been leading flickered in the corner of my eye. In another place, unfazed, a potential me was going about his business as if I'd never cut him short. Once apartheid fell
–
or
sat down
, as Leora likes to say
–
I could finally look squarely at this phantom who was living under my name. And then I got used to the idea that we could change places. A clean swap: your elsewhere for
mine.

How I envy people who float around the world, resting their roots lightly on whatever soil they happen to be hovering above, dividing their time, and then dividing it again, until it's so thin they can see through it. The global citizens. Epiphytes.

Giving an account of my first years back home was harder. Grafting memory to experience had turned out to be painful. There was so much to be recovered, yet so little felt familiar, and the scraps that did had become resistant. A gap had opened up between me and the known world. When I approached the places and people I thought I knew, they took a step back, recoiling as if I meant to do them harm. It's no wonder I did not feel like touching a camera in the beginning. Nothing would keep still.

Eventually the world stopped fidgeting. The gap was still there but I gave up trying to bridge it, and then everything steadied itself sufficiently for me to get on with my
life.

My explanation must have been even more evasive than I realized. She got the idea that I was talking about taking photographs, my ‘process' as she put
it.

‘Are you a full-time artist?' she asked.

‘I'm not an artist at
all.'

‘You've had photos on exhibition.'

‘That's hardly a recommendation. Saul Auerbach is an artist. I'm just a photographer.'

‘What do you do then?'

‘Commercial work, movie stills and magazines, that sort of thing.'

While I was describing my latest product shoot, she opened the red notebook and leafed through it, and when I paused she said, ‘A new gig for Mr Frosty, quote unquote. I came across that in the
Viewfinder
. Why “Mr Frosty”, if you don't mind me asking.'

‘They're taking the mickey. The joke is that I'm known in the industry as the frozen moment guy. You know, the moment when things teeter, when they hover and vibrate, just before the fall. Capturing it in the real world is no longer a job for a photographer. Anyone can freeze an instant digitally and tinker with it and thaw it out again. You can take a slice of life and poke holes in it, change its colour, put bits in and take bits out until the cows come home. The results might be spectacular, but the magic is second-rate. We've all got the same smoke and mirrors.

‘When it comes to these things, I'm like some old geezer who insists on writing with a pencil. I'm no Luddite, I appreciate the technology, it's just not for me. I still want to stage it all, to set up something foolishly complicated and get it on film, hoping for a small, unlikely miracle. It's a craft.'

‘There's a demand?'

‘Only because it's quaint. It's like french-polishing or
…'

I went to fetch my magazine portfolio
–
my life's work
–
from the studio. When I came back she had the digicam rolling (in a manner of speaking) and she filmed me (ditto) making space on the table and opening the folder. Then she kindly dropped the camera in her bag and we paged through the pulls. What caught her eye, oddly enough, was a fashion series I did for Debenhams: the model's in loden green and chunky herringbone, according to the caption, perched in the bow of a Canadian canoe with her elbows on her knees, showing the camera a pouting mouth in which margarine wouldn't melt, while behind her a punter in a flat cap and a tweed jacket teeters over the water on the end of his oar like an overdressed pole-vaulter. The fall guy. In the next liquid moment, when this one unfreezes, there will be a splashdown. It was a long time ago, but I remember the job well: the canoe was supposed to be a punt, but what the hell, the budget was tight. I had to get the shot first time, because the stylist didn't have a spare suit of clothes.