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Michael Vines
is twenty-four years old. He was born in Cape Town and now lives in Johannesburg. His stories have appeared in Botsotso and in an anthology called Unity in Flight. He works as a scriptwriter for television and is very, very tall.

The Mr van Vuuren Affair

Mike Vines

Sophie moved in at the end of summer when she broke up with her boyfriend. It was June and getting very cold. We’d snuggle up on the couch together and watch TV and play Scrabble. She was much better at Scrabble than me and would always win and I’d end up having to pack away the board.
      But I was glad she had moved in, even if it was just for a while. It was nice to have someone around. She’d make coffee and clean the kitchen floor and after I had made supper, do the dishes. I wasn’t a very good cook, but the first time we ate she said it was the best meal she’d had cooked by a man. Which was a compliment, I suppose. She wondered naked around the flat in the mornings after she’d had a bath and that made me uncomfortable and I told her so. She said that I had seen her naked more than any other person, except maybe her mom, but that she’d stop if I so wished. And although, to be perfectly honest, I quite liked her walking about my place with no clothes on, I thought it more polite if I said that I would rather she stayed dressed.
      Silly of me.
      I carried on as usual, shooting nude models in my mom’s old bedroom. I think it was good that Sophie was there, the girls who came by seemed more comfortable to see another girl. Indeed, she had an effect on my work too. Even Mr Quilty commented that my photographs had taken on a subtle, feminine quality. And not only because the presence of the big purple dildo had declined.
      “I always hated that fucking thing,” said Sophie to me.
      “Why?” I asked.
      “Well, shall we use it on you for a while?” she asked me. “While I take pictures?”
      “No, thank you.”
      In fact, Mr Quilty liked my new period so much that not only did he compliment me on my newfound maturity as an artist but he also gave me a raise. I would now receive one thousand five hundred rand for every edition of five pictures.
      I took Sophie out for dinner to celebrate.
      “Your pictures,” she told me over a plate of steaming Thai food — her choice — “are great.” They have become very sophisticated. You should buy yourself a new camera with the extra cash Quilty is giving you to compliment your genius. A really nice one with all sorts of lenses and filters and things.”
     And although every photographer knows that lenses and filters make no real difference to the quality of the photographs they take, I had to agree with her.
     After a few days of meticulously searching the classifieds, I found this ad:
     FOR SALE Canon camera barely used! Competitive price!! Call 011 804 2288. Buyer Collects!!!
     I called the number and someone picked up the phone and cleared his throat.
     “Yes?”
     “Hello. I’m calling about your ad.”
     “Yes, sir. The wicker chairs. You do understand that they go as a group of six.”
     “No, I mean the camera.”
     “Well, I don’t have six of those to sell, I’m afraid, young man.”
     “I only need the one.”
     “That works out well then, doesn’t it? When are you coming by?”
     He told me his name was Mr van Vuuren and when I told him I’d meet him at his house later that afternoon, he said, “Super, super,” and gave me his address.
     “Good for you!” said Sophie, when she got home from varsity. “I’ll come with you.”
     When we pulled up outside Mr van Vuuren’s house, we saw that he ran an antique shop from home. There was a large metal sign hung over the lounge window that said, Kalahari Antiques: Restored Furniture in thick cursive letters. Beside it was a line drawing of a man with a moustache hitting an old chair with a hammer. It looked like the man was breaking the chair up into kindling, but I guess he was supposed to look as if he was restoring it.
     We got out of the car and walked up the driveway. The garden was a mess of old chairs and tables, bookcases and dressers and chests of drawers. It was like a graveyard. An old black man was sitting at an ageing dining table, rubbing at it with a tiny square of sandpaper and a bottle of turpentine. He looked up at us and waved slowly at us like it was an effort. He was thin and he wore blue overalls. We raised our hands, to say, “Where is Mr van Vuuren?” and the man pointed towards the dark house, saying, “He’s in there.”
     The house was gloomy. It took my eyes a while to adjust to the dim light. I saw that it was a large room, bigger than my lounge at home, and it was stacked to the ceiling with furniture. Dressers stacked on top of chests, headboards on top of chests of drawers. All of the furniture was made of wood and most of it was a dark mahogany. Sophie and I navigated our way through the narrow spaces between the furniture, admiring the intricate brass handles on the drawers of various bureaus and the delicate carvings in the doors of some of the cupboards.
     “Can I help you?” a croaking voice asked us. We looked though an archway into a second room, where a frail old man stood, with his arms on his hips, but stretched inwards, as though his back was troubling him. “What sort of furniture are you looking for specifically?”
     “Well, no,” said Sophie. “We aren’t here to buy furniture, although you have some beautiful things here.”
     “Then I can’t help you,” said the man, turning around very slowly.
     “We’re here about the camera,” I said.
     “Oh, I see,” he said. “You telephoned earlier, didn’t you?” He approached me very slowly and shook my hand. He had a strong grip. He looked at Sophie and she offered him her hand. He took it and she flinched as he squeezed it.
     “I must be honest, the camera is very old, but I have hardly used it.” He began to shuffle back to the room he had been standing in earlier. “This is my office,” he said, holding his arms out.
     He led us to a small kitchen. It was dirty and cramped. He opened a cupboard that was filled with cans of varnish and tins of paint. With a sigh he pulled out a leather case from the back of the cupboard and handed it to me. It was fastened with two surprisingly shiny popper buttons. I snapped them open and pulled out a stocky little Nikon camera. It was silver in colour with a black trim. I weighed it in my hands. It was comfortably heavy.
     “It’s perfect,” I said. “Why are you selling it?”
     “I’d forgotten I had it. I was cleaning the kitchen out the other day and found it right there. I doubt that I’m going to be using it any more, so I thought I may as well make some money off it. Kalahari Antiques isn’t as successful as it once was. This isn’t a particularly good area to have a shop.”
     “How much do you want for it?” I asked him.
     He told me the price and I must have looked surprised because he said quickly, “We can negotiate, though.”
     I looked at Sophie to see what she thought, but she only shrugged.
     “Why don’t you look around the house for a while and think about it,” he said.
     So Sophie and I returned to the big room at the front of the house. We picked up porcelain figurines of dainty girls tending sheep and looked at our reflections in silver serving spoons.
     “There are more rooms round to the left,” called the man from his study. “Take a look round there too.”
     There was a doorway at the end of the room, diagonally opposite the front door. Leaving Sophie studying a bleached watercolour in a thin wood frame, I went though to a dark passageway and found another, smaller room. Buckling shelves were mounted against the walls from floor to ceiling. A single rectangular window running along the top of the far wall provided the only light in the room. The shelves were filled with more objects. I picked up an old red tin car and wiped dust from a gramophone. The room was, I decided, just filled with old junk the old man couldn’t sell. There was nothing there of any real interest.
     And then I saw, on the topmost shelf above me, a large jar. It was filled with a pale green liquid and there was something inside it. I stood on tiptoes and reached for it. Gripping it tightly, I pulled it off the shelf. It was heavy and I almost lost my grip on it. I set it down on a lower shelf and shouted for Sophie. I put my hand into the front of my shirt and dusted the glass. I heard Sophie gasp.
     “Look,” I said.
     “Jesus Christ, dude,” she said. “A foetus in a jar.”
     The little baby inside the jar was curled up, its hands tucked under its chin, its knees pulled up to its chest. Although it was only a tiny baby, it must have been older than me or Sophie. Maybe it was even older than the old man. Its skin was waxy and almost the colour of butter. It reminded me of the skin of a dead frog I once found in the swimming pool at school a long time ago. The baby’s face looked peaceful and calm. There was almost a smile on its little pasty prune face.
     I don’t know why, but it made me think of ... me.
     From behind us, the old man cleared his throat. “Oh,” he said. “You weren’t supposed to find that,” he said, smiling.
     I was overwhelmed by a curious impulse.
     “How much do you want for it?” I asked him. I really wanted to have the baby.
     “I’m sorry. That particular item is not for sale. I’m sorry,” he said again, staring at the baby in the jar with an expression that was close to adoration.
     “Are you sure?” I said. “I’ll give you as much as you want.”
     “Relax,” said Sophie to me.
     “It’s okay,” he said. “I really couldn’t part with him. I get very lonely here. It’s nice to know he’s in the back, keeping an eye on things.”
     “It’s a boy?” I asked.
     “Yes,” he replied, but he didn’t continue. All he said was, “Let’s go back to my office, shall we?”
     We navigated our way through the piles of dark furniture and the old man asked me if I had thought about buying the Nikon.
     “It’s a bit expensive for me,” I said. “But I really would like it.”
     I ran down the driveway to my car and collected my wallet. I had left it on the back seat. Sophie was out on the lawn looking at a dining room table made of railway sleepers. Back in the old man’s office, I placed all nine crisp bank notes that were in my wallet on his desk.
     “Yes,” he said, after a while. “That’s fine.”
     He wrote me a receipt on a page torn from an exercise book, which he stamped with a stamp that said, Kalahari Antiques on it.
     “Now that’s over,” he said. “You can call me Dorian. I don’t want you bothering with all that Mr van Vuuren business.”
     “What Mr van Vuuren business? I asked, alarmed. What had this man gotten himself into? “What happened to him?”
     “No,” he said, smiling kindly at me. “I mean you don’t have to call me Mr van Vuuren. You can call me Dorian.”
     “That’s very kind of you,” said Sophie, interrupting us. “I’m Sophie.” She was a little breathless. Perhaps she was still freaked out by what we had seen in the back room.
     I introduced myself.
     “It’s a pleasure to meet you both,” he said.
     We got into the car. I proudly put my new camera in my lap and started the car. I pulled away, waving at old Mr van Vuuren who stood out on the stoep. Sophie watched me intently as I drove. I couldn’t work out why. We stopped at a red light.
     “What’s wrong?” I asked.
     “Haven’t you noticed yet?” she said.
     I looked at her and then around the car. On the back seat was a large jar. I was so excited I stalled the car.
     “When did you do that?” I asked.
     “When you were paying him.”
     I leaned over the handbrake and hugged her. My seatbelt tightened around my waist. It was the kindest thing I think anyone’s ever done for me. My eyes were moist.
     “Thank you,” I said. “That was so nice of you.”
     The car behind us started hooting because the lights had changed. I shifted the car into first gear and pulled away, feeling really, really happy.

boontoe

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