But halfway out of the house Mol forgets what she wanted to do. She’s thinking about the look in Pop’s eyes as he lay there, looking at her. It was almost as if he was looking at her from a far place, and he could see more than just what he was looking at. Like a circus elephant. The older Pop gets, the more that look in his eyes reminds her of an elephant. Heartsore eyes, as though he’s looking through a peephole. If she remembers right, Pop’s eyes began to look like that when he was still very young.
She remembers the day Pop came back from the shunting yard, after they called him to go see about Old Pop in the train. Then his eyes had such a faraway look that Mrs Beyleveldt made him drink sugar water before he left for the factory, to fetch Old Mol. Treppie kept dead quiet all day long. He’d never spoken another word to Old Pop after that beating in any case. If he was naughty before the hiding, he became even more hard-boiled afterwards. That’s when he developed the twitch in his shoulder. Old Beyleveldt used to say he looked like a donkey with an itch. Treppie didn’t shed a single tear at the funeral. And afterwards he began to act like he was boss of the house. It was also then that Treppie started running her into the ground. She tried to complain to Old Mol, but by then Old Mol was a broken woman.
‘Your brother was terribly hurt, my child,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing more I can do now. The three of you will have to sort out your own lives.’
By that time, Old Mol was very ill herself. She coughed terribly. And Treppie drank all her medicine, for the alcohol. He used to get completely knocked out from Old Mol’s cough medicine.
Maybe if she gives Gerty some Klipdrift, it’ll help. But the Klipdrift’s in the sideboard and the keys are in Treppie’s pocket. He’s the one who always buys the brandy. He says he doesn’t buy it for Lambert to throw it back in a single day. Not that it makes much difference. If Lambert wants to drink he just turns Treppie upside down and shakes him out like a pillowcase till those keys fall out. The only thing that keeps him away from the bottle is when she lies down for him in the back room. Or when Treppie says he’s going to have Lambert ‘certified’, so they can tie him up on a trolley and force-feed him till his liver’s big enough for export to Uganda. The kaffirs in that place are still nice and wild, Treppie says, they love eating white man’s liver. Treppie says they call white man’s liver ‘patydefwagras’ in Uganda. When Treppie says this, Lambert goes white in the face. And then Treppie says, yes, go catch a fit now too, then we can take you with your convulsions and all to the halfway house, so they can see with their own eyes what kind of lunatic we’ve got on our hands here in Triomf. Then Lambert goes back to his den and starts breaking things till he cools down. Or he makes a fire in the yard, throwing anything he can lay his hands on into the flames. She’s lost three housecoats like that. Or he goes and paints on his wall for three days running. That’s the best. Then he bothers nobody. Or he goes and looks for wine boxes. After that he’s so tired he lies down on his bed and sleeps all day.
Mol pushes open Treppie’s door. She stands in the dark for a while to see if she can spot where he threw his pants down. He and Pop both sleep in their shirts and underpants for a week before going to the laundromat in Thornton. Treppie says he can hardly believe it, they used to have a whole yard full of twin-tubs and now there’s not even a single washing machine for their own clothes.
She can’t see a thing. Treppie’s put those sheets up against the window again. He specially went and bought himself sheets to hang up there. He says people who live in glass houses shouldn’t take chances. When she asks what he means by ‘glass houses’, he says their house sits on a bare piece of lawn like a monument to fuck-all. All it needs is a pedestal. He says he wonders what people think they’re actually exhibiting here. Then he says he wants to plant a hedge in front of the house so everyone will stop looking at them. But Lambert says he wants no more plant-rubbish near the house. His spanners just get lost in the plants.
Mol turns on Treppie’s light. He’s lying with his face to the wall. He snores, ‘krr-phooo, krr-phooo’. And he’s still wearing his pants, but it doesn’t matter, ’cause the half-full bottle of Klipdrift is standing right here in front of her, next to the bed.
A line of ants makes its way towards the bottle. Where do they come from? Mol wonders. She looks down at her feet. The ants are coming from the lounge. She switches on the passage and lounge lights. She bends over to look. Some of the ants are walking this way, some the other way. But they stick to the same line, knocking heads before carrying on again. Mol walks carefully into the room. She takes the bottle and wipes off a few ants. Ever since the day he fell off the roof, Treppie’s been drinking like this. He says his foot still hurts. The smell of Treppie’s rotten brandy breath fills the room. He’s lying with his head on a dirty white cushion.
No, he always says, you dare not use a pillow-slip in this house, they’re just nests for earwigs. Ever since Treppie told Lambert earwigs make holes in epileptics’ eardrums and eat out their brains, Lambert’s been scared to death of the things. One day, soon after Treppie told him about the earwigs, Lambert took all the pillow-slips and burnt them up on a heap of grass. Just in case, he said. Now they all sleep on dirty cushions.
Mol walks quietly out of the room and switches off the lights. As she opens the front door, moist air hits her in the face. Mist. A rare sight in Triomf, but she likes the feel of it. Nice and cool to breathe. Good for the blood.
She sits herself down on the edge of the stoep, with Gerty here next to her. What’s good for her must be good for Gerty too – thick mist and Klipdrift. Now she also feels like having a shot. She unscrews the cap and takes a sip. Her body shivers all the way down from her throat. Then she quickly takes another sip. The more you sip, the less you shiver. She prefers her brandy with Coke, but she’s not going to search for Coke and a glass at this hour. The house is making her ears zing tonight.
‘Come, my little doggie,’ she says to Gerty, ‘come take a sip here.’ She pulls Gerty’s head under her arm, and then with the same hand presses the corners of Gerty’s mouth to force it open. Gerty’s got no spirit left. She just opens her mouth. Mol lifts the bottle and slowly lets some brandy run down. ‘Swallow,’ she says, ‘swallow nicely now.’ She rubs Gerty’s throat. Gerty swallows. Then she coughs and coughs and coughs. Mol holds on to her tightly. Her eyes sting.
That’s also the way she held Old Mol at the end. Old Mol would never go and see a doctor. She was scared the doctor would see the black marks where Old Pop used to hit her. She also didn’t want to ask for more time off work. It was bad enough that she had to send one of them to say she was sick every other day when she wasn’t sick at all, just bruised from Old Pop’s fists. Old Pop always used to hit her in the face.
‘Hit me anywhere you want,’ she used to say. ‘I can put on long-sleeve overalls, but please, not my face.’
‘Shuddup! Shuddup! Shuddup!’ Old Pop shouted back. ‘Or I’ll give that jaw of yours some more panelbeating.’
To avoid bothering Old Pop in the middle of the night, Old Mol used to go cough in the bathroom. She coughed up blood, bending over the bath. Then she, Little Mol, went and held her tight. Sometimes Little Pop also did it, but not Treppie. Never. After Treppie got that hiding, he acted like he was deaf to the world. And after Old Pop died, Treppie got even worse.
‘That’s TB your mother’s got,’ Mrs Beyleveldt told Treppie. ‘You must do something about it.’
Mrs Beyleveldt also thought Treppie was the most intelligent of the children. He was at home a lot ’cause he was the youngest, which meant he took a lot of stick about the Benades from Mrs Beyleveldt and her cripple husband.
By then she, Little Mol, was going to the factory with her mother every day. She started when she was fifteen, working next to Old Mol and doing two people’s work. Old Mol was always behind with her shirts. She went too slowly through the thick parts, and then her needles would break. Then Old Mol would just pass it all over to her, and many were the days when she h
ad to do Old Mol’s work as well as her own. But at least they brought some money home. Little Pop began to earn a bit too, although all he could do was piece-work. He was slow, and weak, and he looked blue around the mouth all the time.
After Old Pop died, they gave Pop a soft job on the Railways, out of pity. A waiter or something on the Karoo train, but Pop did only one trip. He kept dropping things. After that he preferred to stay at home. Much later, he became a lift operator in a high building in Jo’burg.
That was okay, but it gave him even more of a faraway look, like an elephant.
Mol sits on the edge of the stoep, in the cool night air. She can feel their smell coming out of the house. The warm smell of people, slightly sweet. Sweat and drink and tobacco and something sour that she can’t put her finger on. A sour smell that’s very close to her.
She doesn’t bath a lot, and the rest of them tell her she stinks. Not a damn. She washes herself. But now that moth’s sitting in the bath and she wonders how long it’s going to stay there. If she goes into the bathroom now it’ll stare at her, and then she’ll start thinking things again. Like the night Old Mol coughed herself to death. She hadn’t woken up when Old Mol started coughing. It was a night when she’d fallen into a dead sleep after doing double work all day long. Then, early in the morning, she went to the toilet in the dark. And there she found Old Mol, bent over the edge of the tub. Two identical spots of blood lay in the bath, the way it looks when a blot of ink seeps through a piece of folded paper.
‘It’s the TB butterfly,’ Mrs Beyleveldt said when she came to look. ‘One wing of blood from each lung. And then away she flies.’ Mol will never forget that. The crimson TB butterfly.
‘Shut your fucken mouth, old woman,’ Treppie shouted. ‘I thought you were supposed to be blind.’ Mrs Beyleveldt held her hands over her mouth. She never thought Treppie would shout at her like that.
After Old Mol died, Treppie got worse than ever. Only the big fire, when all the fridges were destroyed, calmed him down a bit, and that was many years later. Now, ever since Peace Day, he’s become quite tame. How long it will last she doesn’t know.
Pop says Treppie took a bad knock when the fridges burnt like that. She took a knock too. More than a knock. Something inside her head cracked that day, like when eggs break and the stuff runs out.
It all started when Lambert couldn’t find his spanner in the long grass. The day before Guy Fawkes. By then, Lambert had been out of school for two years. He was so impossible at school that they eventually kicked him out. Then he spent all day and night at home and they were the ones who had to put up with him, non-stop. He was supposed to be helping Pop and Treppie with the fridges, but he broke more than he fixed.
In those days, it was just fridges wherever you looked. The ones that wouldn’t fit into the den had to stand outside. Lambert’s den was the workshop. And the fridges standing outside, the ones that were switched off, had to have their doors open so they wouldn’t go rotten. Quite a few of them were running on extensions.
The grass grew long between the fridges, especially in the yard where they kept old ones for spare parts, like vegetable trays or racks or other parts from the insides.
One day, when Lambert was taking the insides out of an old fridge, she put one of his small spanners down in the long grass. Then, later, she couldn’t find it again. Those days Lambert was even more impatient than he is now. She used to spend most of her time at his beck and call. Taking orders. Pass this. Pass that. Take this. Pliers and hammers and screwdrivers with different heads. She even knew their names.
Treppie and Pop were out on a job somewhere. They’d asked Lambert to take spare parts out of an old fridge for one that had to be ready that night. It was late. Lambert had already started looking for trouble earlier that afternoon, long before the spanner got lost. First he said her housecoat was ugly and why didn’t she wear panties. Did she want the whole of Triomf to see her thing? Except he didn’t say thing, he said something much worse. And how did she think he was going to entertain customers at his Guy Fawkes party the next day if she wasn’t even wearing panties? How was she going to light the rockets if she had to bend over all the time with no panties?
He’s mad, Treppie said earlier, nobody would come. But no one tells Lambert he’s mad. For months already, he’d been putting invitations into every ice-box leaving the yard, with details about the party.
Don’t mis it. Fireworks in the backjaart./Moet nie dit mis nie. Vuur werke in die agter plaas. Kom maak a dop virniet op Gaai Foks. Come in for a free drink for Gaai Foks. Support your local electric appliance Repair Services. Ondersteun u plaaslike herstel diens vir elektriese toe stelle. RSVP.
One of those invitations is still pasted up behind the kitchen door. She sees it every time she hangs her housecoat up on the nail.
Lambert was ready for the party long before it was supposed to start. He spent all his savings on fireworks, boxes of the stuff that he got from the Chinese. They were called ‘Peking Ducks’. Treppie stood there, checking out those boxes. He said he couldn’t wait to see if it was true they went off ‘rack-a-tack-tack-tack’ in the sky with subtitles in Chinese.
By then the whole den was full of the boxes. On top of the fridges, inside the fridges, stacked up to the ceiling. There were boxes of fireworks everywhere.
Lambert said if you wanted to do something you had to do it properly. He also bought six bottles of brandy, a crate of Coke and lots of plastic cups. Now only the people still had to come.
Treppie told Lambert if he wanted his party to look like an ‘evening cocktail’ he’d better cut the grass. He didn’t want Parktown Prawns crawling up his customers’ legs, did he? But Lambert hadn’t gotten that far. In those days they had a manual lawn-mower with blades that jammed all the time. And Lambert wasn’t so worried about the state of the lawn in those days.
So the grass was long that day before Guy Fawkes. Lambert was in a hurry to get the fridge finished and he shouted at her to bring his small spanner. Trying to find a little spanner in the long grass was just too much for her. So she gave him one that she thought would fit the tiny nuts he was trying to loosen. But it was the wrong spanner and he threw that one into the grass as well. It wasn’t long before he took all the tools from the box and hurled them by the fistful into the long grass.
‘This fridge must get finished! Now!’ he shouted. ‘Bring me my Phillips screwdriver.’
Now, finding a Phillips screwdriver in long grass is no joke. Each time she thought she saw it and bent over, he shouted: Ma, I can see your twat! Stand up! And when she stood up again, he shouted: Find my goddamn this! Or, bring my fucken that! After a while she was so confused that when he asked for pliers she grabbed the first thing she could lay her hands on and passed it to him, even if it was a hammer, or a nail, or a screw.
That’s how she lost her bearings with the names of tools and things. After a while she was crawling on all fours in the grass, crying. It was dark and Lambert had put on the extension light. He said he was finished with things that didn’t work, things that didn’t run, things that didn’t wear panties and things that got lost in the grass. And he was finished with fancy larnies who didn’t RSVP to say they were coming to his party. Finished. Then he lost his head completely. He said if Triomf hadn’t seen a Big Bang before, today was the day. And if people thought they made history in this place by bulldozing kaffir-houses, then they were in for a big surprise. Now they’d see what real history looked like. It wasn’t bulldozing that made history, it was fire. Guy Fawkes. He took the spare can of petrol from the Austin and threw it all over the grass where the fridges stood. He told her to bring the boxes out of the den and pack them on top of the fridges. And then he poured petrol over the fridges, too.
She began to scream, but he said that if she didn’t shuddup at once he’d see to it that she made such a big noise she wouldn’t say another full sentence all the days of her life. He dragged her into the den and stuffed the pockets of her housecoat
with Peking Ducks, shoving some into the front of her dress as well. He said it was a pity she wasn’t wearing panties, ’cause then he could’ve shoved them in there too. It was actually under her backside that he wanted to make a fire, and her cunt that he wanted to shoot into its glory. Disgusting mouth he’s got. He shoved her arms and her legs and her feet into the old fridge, and he slammed the door closed, knocking her knees silly.
That fridge was still running when the door closed. The light went off right there next to her head. It was cold. She remembers thinking this must be what hell feels like – sitting with squashed knees in a place that’s so cold it makes your teeth rattle. And then, moments later, you take off like a rocket into the sky. ‘Rack-a-tack-tack-tack!’ Into the outermost darkness, with subtitles.
Other than that, she remembers nothing. Pop says Treppie found her inside the fridge, knocked out cold.
When Pop and Treppie got home that night, the whole street was outside, watching the fireworks. By then, the den was burning brightly, but the fire brigade came and killed the flames. Lambert was completely stuffed up. Lying in the grass, filthy dirty from soiling himself as he gave in. He’d bitten himself and his mouth was full of blood. Both of them had to be taken to hospital in an ambulance. She was given oxygen. Afterwards, she coughed non-stop for almost a year. The doctor said her lungs had been injured by the fridge-gas leaking into her blood.
Treppie took it badly. Pop too. He began to stare out of his eyes with an extra faraway look, like he was riding up and down in a lift all day long. Only Lambert still had some kick left in him when he came back from hospital. His mouth was so sore he couldn’t manage anything but milkshake for a whole month. They had to spend their days making sure he was busy.
She told Pop they must give him things to fix, things that work in the end. If things don’t work, Lambert gets a fit or he begins to smash everything to pieces. Or he makes fires.
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