‘Yippeeee!’ shouts Treppie. He grabs the fifty-rand note and jumps up and down with Lambert on the blocks. ‘Click-click!’ they go.
‘Afrikaners like parties, no doubt about that,’ they sing, with mad faces.
Treppie suddenly comes to a dead-stop. He pulls his clothes straight with furious little plucks. All of a sudden he’s dead serious.
‘Fix your face,’ he says to Lambert. Lambert does as he’s told. Treppie shoves the money into Lambert’s shirt-pocket. He slaps the pocket.
‘See how easy it is?’ he says. ‘That’s how a person makes money from talking a lot of crap.’
‘We made hundreds of rand profit that night,’ says Lambert.
‘Inbetween the speeches. It was lots of fun. Very jolly!’ Mol nods her head up and down.
‘And if you want to see some more sports, then you must come again some other night. But you’ve seen enough for one day, not so?’ says Treppie. He unlocks the door.
‘Treppie, give them back their money.’ It’s Pop. Treppie pretends he didn’t hear.
He opens the door. He makes a deep bow. Then he waves them out as if they’re bits of fluff. Strangely enough, Van Zyl is standing out there on the little stoep, still in his helmet. There’re a few bees on the net over his face.
Dammit, there she’s gone and let this man give her a fright again. Where’s Gerty?
‘Not to worry,’ says the bee-catcher, ‘they’re nice and tame from the smoke, madam. We’ve got the queen. Now we’re taking the swarm away. You must just close up that hole, otherwise they’ll come back. There was lots of honey.’
He hands over the yellow bucket. ‘I washed it out nicely at the tap first,’ he says. ‘I’ll say goodbye then. All the best, folks,’ he says, waving a white glove behind him.
When he goes, they all look into the yellow bucket under the stoep-light. It’s half-full of wax-pieces. A few larvae stir in the honey.
‘I’m not eating any of that,’ says Lambert.
‘Let them take it,’ says Treppie, ‘then at least they’ll have something for all their trouble.’
‘And their fifty rand!’ says Lambert, laughing.
‘Thanks very much, but no thanks,’ says the girly.
‘Sights. They’re full of sights!’
The girly looks at her with big eyes. Good, good. She’s the one who wanted to come here and say nasty things about them in their own house. She pulls Blazer by his sleeve to the front gate. He still wants to turn around and say goodbye.
‘Come, missie, don’t be so high and mighty. There’s strength in the sweetness. You might still need it!’ Treppie shouts at their backs, but they’re already in their car. It’s pasted full of I love FW bumper stickers. Then they step on the gas, down Martha Street.
‘The last of the great pretenders,’ says Treppie. Pop says they must bring the bucket into the kitchen. He wants to work the honey. He tells her she must collect some bottles from under the sink. From those days when Lambert wouldn’t eat anything but pickled onions.
They work until late. Pop piles up the pieces of wax on a tin inside the bucket, so the honey can run out nicely. Meanwhile, she washes the bottles in boiling water to get rid of the onion taste.
She washes those bottles over and over. Pop smells every bottle carefully before filling them with honey. After a while they’ve got twelve bottles. Enough for a whole year, says Pop. He’s so tired of golden syrup.
At eleven they’re finished. She cuts two pieces of bread for everyone and spreads them nice and thick with Sunshine D and honey. Then she makes coffee.
It tastes good.
‘Mmm,’ says Lambert. ‘Tastes a bit wild.’
Ja, says Pop, it does. He just wonders what could be so wild, here in Triomf. Tastes almost like khaki-bush, or no, like flowers, the kind that grow on the island in the road, there next to Shoprite.
‘Afrikaners,’ says Treppie. ‘Stinkafrikaners.’
9
COUGHING
Gerty’s coughing so much Mol can’t sleep. The poor little thing stands next to her side of the bed, staring at her. Every now and again she makes a noise that sounds like something between a cough and a long, drawn-out clearing of the throat. It’s like the noise Treppie makes in the bathroom in the mornings, only worse. But Gerty doesn’t spit. If she could just gob out that thick slime, like Treppie does, it might help.
Instead, she stands there and lets her head sag, as if she’s lost heart. Her tongue hangs out. Thick, sticky tears drip from her eyes.
Mol lies on her side. She’s looking at Gerty. All she can see is Gerty’s face in the light of the streetlamp. She gets up on to her elbow and turns round to look at Pop. He’s lying with his back to her. She can see the sharp points of his shoulders inside his shirt. His breath whistles. She keeps telling him he mustn’t smoke so much, he must eat more, but he just shakes his head. He eats nothing and he says nothing. When he’s not holding his head in his hands, he’s lifting it up to light a cigarette. Poor Pop. Poor Gerty. She holds out her arm and Gerty takes two steps closer. The little dog lifts her snout. It feels warm and dry on Mol’s hand. Then she hears the sound of Gerty’s breath between the coughs. It’s worse than the coughing. It sounds like it’s more than just a dog’s breath. It feels like the room itself is breathing, like a big in-breath that sucks all the air from the corners and the cupboards and from behind the dressing table, holding it all in.
Mol lies back on the cushion with Gerty’s snout still in her hands. Suddenly she can hear everything, all the noises, inside and outside. The sound of the mattress as she and Pop breathe, the ‘tick-tick’ of a beetle on the ceiling, and above the ceiling the ‘krr-krr’ of the mice. Treppie says they’re rats, but Treppie smells rats everywhere. The tap goes ‘psheee’ as it leaks in the bathroom and the overflow makes a ‘tip-tip’ noise on the roof. Then there’s the sound of running water from next door. She’s told Lambert it sounds like next door’s running bathwater all night long, but he says she’s imagining things. He’s one to talk! And the fridge rattling in the kitchen. First softly and then louder and louder until it switches off, ‘cheeree-cheeree-cheeree-kaplock’. It gets the shakes so bad from switching off that the Coke bottles inside the door start rattling.
She hears Toby wake up in the lounge and scratch himself. ‘Click-click’ go the loose blocks of the parquet floor as he comes walking down the passage to the back of the house. He always knows when she’s awake. Gerty coughs some more and takes two steps back, as if she wants to step right out of the cough. Then she lets her head drop.
Toby comes to look at her with pricked ears. He moves his head closer, sniffing Gerty around the mouth and ears. Toby’s been sniffing Gerty like this ever since she started coughing. In the old days he used to sniff her backside. Now Mol uses her elbows to push herself up. Both dogs look at her. The streetlight from outside shines right though their eyes, which suddenly look just like marbles. The sight almost takes her breath away. A big lorry changes gears in Ontdekkers, blowing ‘phff-phff!’ out of a hole in its guts.
Mol sits up straight. Dear Lord, what’s got into her now? She folds the flaps of her housecoat over one another and feels for her slippers, here next to the mattress. Now she’s in a hurry.
‘Come,’ she whispers. ‘Come, let’s go for a little walk.’ She picks up Gerty and walks through the dark, to the bathroom. She can feel Toby’s cold nose against her heels. Why can’t Gerty’s nose feel like that?
She puts on the light and tears off a piece of toilet paper so she can wipe Gerty’s eyes. But before she does it, she sees a great brown moth on the floor of the bath. As big as her hand. Dead still the moth sits there, as if it has every reason to do so, looking at her from two deep-purple eyes on its back. Like a hand that can fly, with eyes. What does it see? Mol wonders. How much can a moth see? And why’s it looking at her like that? What is she, to a moth? Under the light of the bare bulb she looks for her face in the last little piece of mirror. More pieces keep chipping out. She�
�s told them, one day someone’s going to look for his face in the mirror and then there’ll be nothing. Just a piece of hardboard. But they won’t listen to her.
All she sees is the area around her mouth. It looks like someone else’s mouth. Skew. It moves in a funny way, like it’s chewing something. She wipes her mouth with her hand. She’s trying to wipe it away. She bends over to look for her eyes, but she can’t find them. She must tell Pop he must get Lambert to fix the mirror. She wipes Gerty’s face and turns off the light. Then she turns it back on again. That moth mustn’t sit there and stare at her in the dark.
She walks to the kitchen. As she enters, cockroaches scuttle under the fridge. She opens the fridge door. It smells sour. She’s told Lambert it’s the fridge’s oils and stuff that makes it smell so bad, but he says the fridge is just dirty. She takes out the milk and pours some into Gerty’s bowl. Toby’s bowl too, otherwise he just drinks Gerty’s. Toby drinks his milk. Gerty stands in front of her bowl. Her mouth hangs open. ‘Aaraagh! Aaraagh!’ she coughs. Oh, dear God in heaven. What can she do? She picks up Gerty, but Gerty doesn’t want to be picked up.
Mol walks back into the room and turns on the light. Pop’s still in the same position. She crouches at Pop’s side of the bed. Gerty and Toby sit on either side of her. They look where she looks. They’re all checking if Pop’s still alive. A little thread of spit dangles from his mouth. She turns her head to hear if he’s breathing. She has to listen for a long time, above the noise of Gerty’s breath and all the other sounds, before she can hear Pop’s breathing. It’s very shallow. She feels it more than she hears it. She feels it on her forehead. It’s faint. Lukewarm. Lambert says a person’s lungs work like a fridge’s evaporator, cooling down your blood so you can live longer. That’s why the out-breaths are warm. It’s the warmth of your blood coming out. Blood must never be too warm.
Pop’s blood isn’t warm at all. The point of his nose always looks white, with that drop hanging there, and his lips are so cold they look slightly blue. His hands and feet too. Often, when they go to bed, he asks her to rub them a bit. Summer or winter, just his hands and his feet. Good old Pop. That’s the only part of him she has to rub nowadays. His little old willy looks like a raisin, wrinkled and pulled back into a little ball. Pop says he’s dried up now, thank God. Thank God? she asks. Then Pop says he gives thanks to God that he can’t cause any more trouble. ‘It’s not so bad, Pop, we struggle, but we still have each other.’ Then he says ‘each other’, blowing out his breath. It’s not a sigh. It’s more like he wants to blow out all his breath. Pop says he doesn’t want to carry on. But she says he must want to carry on, otherwise what will become of her? Then he says that’s exactly what Old Mol used to say, and look at Old Pop, he also carried on right to the bitter end. But he, Pop, doesn’t have enough strength even to do what Old Pop did. In any case, where would he find a train? Old Pop wanted a train, Old Mol said, ’cause he was hoping the train would ride to hell and off into the Karoo after he hanged himself from his belt. So his loved ones would be spared the sight. To him, that still sounds like a good idea, Pop says. Spare your loved ones the sight. And the smell. And the expense. Anyone who’s been swinging on a belt for that long in a railway truck in the Karoo is going to end up as dry as biltong. Light as a stick. Then all they have to do is dump you on the other side of De Aar. Matter closed, fixed up. Neat and tidy. No hole, no coffin and no headstone. Nothing, not even birds of prey, ’cause they don’t eat biltong.
But she says that story’s a lie, and then Pop says, no, that’s what Old Mol said she was told by Old Pop, before he did it. Mol says it sounds to her more like the kind of thing Treppie would say, and then Pop says, mind you, he did actually hear it from Treppie. Old Mol told Treppie ’cause she thought he was the one with the most insight and understanding, and he also took after Old Pop more than anyone else. That’s what Treppie says. Then she says to Pop, yes, but he’s also Old Pop’s child and he doesn’t take after Old Pop or Treppie, so what’s the big deal? At that, Pop just blows out his breath and says, well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
When Pop gets his breath back, he says Lambert doesn’t take after him either. She, on the other hand, is unlike both him and Treppie. When Pop finishes saying this, he goes funny and quiet and then she knows he’s wondering whose child Lambert really is.
When they were small, Treppie used to give her sweets, in exchange. Sweets that he stole from the café. Then, one day, Old Mol caught them. ‘Why? Why? Why?’ she wailed, beating her head against the wall with each ‘why’. ‘Why, why do you do it?’ And then they both said, for sweets. Treppie told Old Mol he’d give her sweets as well if she’d just stop beating her head against the wall like that. Treppie took out his whole supply of sweets, a shoebox full, which he dragged out from under the bed. He told Old Mol she could have any sweets she wanted. But Old Mol knocked the box down on to the floor and began beating her head against the table. Then Treppie pulled down his pants and bent over. He said she should beat him rather than bang her head so hard against the table. Old Mol said she never laid a hand on anyone, but Old Pop would see him right. When Old Pop got home that night, he was already drunk. He dragged Treppie out from under the bed and took him all the way to the shunting yard, so no one in the house would hear. He said he was going to give Treppie the kind of hiding he wouldn’t forget for the rest of his living days. When Old Pop got back that night, Treppie wasn’t with him any more.
Old Mol began crying all over again. She asked Old Pop to fetch Treppie, but he told her she could go fetch that ‘piece of shame she brought forth’ herself if she wanted to. Then Old Pop turned to her, Mol, and gave her a look like he wanted to start hitting her too – she was very sickly those days and her chest was weak – but Old Mol jumped between them and said, ‘No! No! No! Hit me instead!’, and Old Pop slapped Old Mol so hard she fell right on top of Mol. They must make their own plan now, he said, ’cause he was buggering off. So she comforted Little Pop and Old Mol and they all went looking for Treppie, up and down between the railway lines, behind the warehouses and under the coal-wagons. After searching for a long time, they heard a little cry in an empty goods train, and there they found him, sitting in the straw. He was covered in blood. They had to half-carry, half-piggyback him all the way home. Old Mol laid him down on the kitchen table and began to clean him up with a towel. His face and body were badly cut up. Some of his teeth were missing and his eyes were so swollen he couldn’t see a thing. His nose was completely broken. It remains skew to this day. His backside was covered with puffed-up, purple-blue welts from Old Pop’s belt. And one of his ribs was cracked.
‘God help us,’ Old Mol kept saying, crying softly as she wiped the blood from Treppie’s face and body.
She and Little Pop felt bad, especially Little Pop, ’cause he’d also done it, and now Treppie had been forced to take the punishment. Her too; she’d allowed it long after it stopped being a game. But if she hadn’t, she’d never have seen a sweet in her life again and they’d never have taken her anywhere with them. Like the circus or the bioscope in the afternoons after school, or the horse races, where you could stand around the stables till someone asked you for something and then you said yes, but that will cost two bob, hey.
‘This child must see a doctor,’ Old Mol said to Old Pop the next day, but Old Pop said over his dead body, then the Welfare would be on to them again, and once the Welfare started with you, you had nothing but misery for the rest of your days. But they already had so much misery, Old Mol said. People who wanted to help couldn’t be all that bad. But Old Pop answered her with his fists. He hit her so hard that both her eyes closed up.
For two days, Old Mol stayed at home to look after Treppie. Her plan was to keep the three of them inside until Treppie looked better. She told everyone he had mumps, so they wouldn’t visit.
But everyone knew exactly what was going on. The children lay behind the closed curtain in the room, listening to everything the Beyleveldts
said.
‘A very weak kind of Afrikaner,’ said Mrs Beyleveldt.
‘Weak? They’re worse than kaffirs, if you ask me,’ said Mr Beyleveldt.
‘It’s easy for them to talk,’ Old Mol said when they told her what the Beyleveldts were saying. ‘They’re only two in their half. People go rotten from living on a heap like this.’
‘What makes people go rotten is loneliness,’ Old Pop said. By then he was drinking heavily.
‘People get lonely when they think they’re better than other people,’ Old Mol said.
She was right. Old Pop drank on his own. He didn’t mix with the people at work. He also refused to go with Old Mol to the garment workers’ concerts.
‘All the other husbands go with their wives,’ Old Mol used to say, begging him to come with her. But Old Pop just said no. He said he was too good for the city and its people. He was a man of the soil. He read to them out of newspapers about the government’s plans to put the poor whites back on their farms. She’d still see what happened to white women who fell in with the Communists and the trade unions. Communists loved kaffirs and there were lots of kaffirs, he said. Lambertus Benade was a Nationalist and the kaffirs must know their place. That was the way Old Pop used to talk.
Mol’s feet feel like they’re going to sleep from all the crouching in front of Pop. Gerty starts coughing again. Mol rubs her little back. Pop opens his eyes. He moves his mouth as if to say: What you doing, Mol? But nothing comes out. He tries again.
‘What you doing, Mol?’ He reaches out to her with his hand, taking hers. His hand feels cold.
Mol wants to say: I’m looking to see if you’re still alive, Pop. But she doesn’t. She can see on his face he knows what she wants to say. She just says: ‘Gerty’s coughing.’
‘Gerty’s old,’ says Pop. He closes his eyes again. ‘Mol, it’s the middle of the night,’ he says, turning over.
‘I’m coming now,’ she says. ‘I’m just taking her outside to pee.’
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