That’s how the postbox got there. But since the day Lambert first put up his postbox, it hasn’t stayed on its pole for more than a month at a time.
Mol looks at the gate. It looks faint in the mist. Gerty shivers softly in her arms. When Gerty coughs, it feels like she’s the one who’s actually coughing. If only something would come out. But it sounds like it’d be too much if it did come out.
It sounds like Gerty wants to cough her heart right out. Mol wonders what Gerty’s heart would look like if she coughed it out. Would it hang from her mouth by threads, or fall on to the bare cement and lie there, quivering?
She shuts her eyes tight.
‘Ughrr-ughrr,’ she helps Gerty cough.
‘Hrrraagh-hrrraagh!’ Gerty coughs.
‘Ughrr-ughrr, hrrraagh-hrrraagh!’ They sit there, coughing together on the stoep. Then Mol hears something else: ‘Who-Whoo!’
She looks up. Can you believe it? On top of the lamp-pole, etched against the mist, an owl perches. It’s got little ears. Must’ve gotten lost. The mist must be too thick for owls tonight.
‘Ughrr-ughrr, hrrraagh-hrrraagh, who-whoo!’ it goes in the front yard.
We’re singing in turns, Mol thinks, like Friar Jacob. ‘Ughrr-ughrr, hrrraagh-hrrraagh, who-whoo.’
10
THE NEVER-ENDING PAINTING
Lambert stands in front of the den’s inside wall with a can of spray-paint in his hand. He’s looking at his painting. The painting rises from behind his bed, filling up the whole wall.
Most of the time he sees nothing when he starts. It’s weird, seeing nothing where there’s so much.
But he knows he just has to be patient. If it takes too long, he can spray a spot or a line anywhere. After that he can always paint a tail on to the spot or a head on to the line. Then at least it looks like something.
’Cause not to know where to start, that’s the worst.
Then there’s just time and nothing.
Like when he left school. He was bored to death, especially between twelve and two in the afternoons. Time and nothing, like a draught down his neck. Without being able to close a door somewhere.
Then one day he began to draw South Africa with koki pens on the wall, copying from his history book.
The outer lines are green. They’re almost completely faded out now. Koki pens are like that. The little red peaks for the Cape mountains and the Drakensberg are bigger and you can see them better. Molehills, molehills, molehills. And the Orange River and the Vaal River and the Fish River and all the other big rivers are there too, in blue. The best was when he drew big thick arrows in black to show how the kaffirs swooped down on the country from above. And he drew big yellow arrows for the Voortrekkers, who occupied the country outwards from the Cape.
When he began to draw that day, it was just after twelve. Like now. Just after he got up. By the time he was finished it was pitch dark outside. That’s how the time flew.
The more things you’ve already painted, the easier it is to carry on. Until you’ve got too many beginnings. Then it gets hard again. Much harder than it was when there was still nothing. When he had nothing but the outline, it was easy to carry on. And he had to carry on, too, ’cause South Africa alone was too boring and empty. At first he couldn’t think beyond rivers and mountains. He just painted more rivers, more mountains.
Then one day he decided to paint the house. On top of everything. And across the whole of South Africa. That was a brainwave. And when the moles began to push up their little hills on the lawn that night, the Drakensberg mountains were already there. Molehills, molehills, molehills. Things like that happen sometimes. It’s just luck. But the black and yellow arrows didn’t want to work for the lawn.
‘What’s this?’ Treppie asked when he saw the painting.
‘That’s our house, 127 Martha Street,’ he said, scratching 127 on the postbox in the painting with a black ball-point, just to make sure.
But that’s not what Treppie wanted to know. He wanted to know what those arrows were. And when he told Treppie they were the kaffirs and the Afrikaners and history, Treppie said it looked more like piss-pipes and shit-pipes under the ground. Shit from this side and piss from that side. Then Treppie said same difference. Where you get people you get shit and crap going down the pipes, and he wished he was a dog, ’cause dogs were the only ones who got any love at 127 Martha Street.
Treppie’s plans for when the shit starts flying are also in the painting.
Just under Molletjie’s belly there’s a thick, red, broken line, with a figure eight going out of the driveway to show how she turns into the street. She goes right over the lawn, the shit-pipes and the piss-pipes, heading north. But the further north she goes, the more of Africa he has to add to the drawing. He made South Africa too big to start with, so there was only a small space left for the rest of Africa. Then he had to start drawing everything smaller and smaller to make it fit on the wall.
When Treppie saw this, he said Lambert shouldn’t make matters so difficult for himself, couldn’t he see he had the whole fucken ceiling for Africa? But by then it was too late, all the countries in Africa had already been squashed flat to fit under the ceiling. There was still enough space on both sides for the horn and the shoulder of Africa, except they were too big for the body. And when his mother came to see she said it didn’t look anything like Africa. Nothing he painted ever looked like anything, she said. Then he said, okay, in that case he was going to add titles, in capital letters. TENNIS BALL, CLOUD, HOUSE, DOG, MOLEHILL, SHIT-PIPE, PUMP, ROSE, DICK, CUNT, BEE NEST, HOUSECOAT, PLASTER CRACK, RUST, EVAPORATOR. Now all she needed to do was open her eyes and read what it said there.
Lambert looks at his painting. It’s ’cause things kept happening and he started painting new stuff over the old stuff. Once he gets going he hasn’t got the time for blanking things out. And now his mother’s standing there with a pink Day-Glo tennis ball in her mouth. He couldn’t help it. She was already there when he wanted to paint a ball for the DOG.
Gerty looks like she’s been tied to the lawn-mower, ’cause two black shit-pipes run between her and the mower like reins. The mower itself has WINGS, ’cause the WITNESS is just behind it. All you can see are her shoulders with the wings, and then her legs. The lawn-mower runs over her belly. She’s got JEHOVA on her forehead but it doesn’t all fit. The JE and VA fall down on both sides. They make her look like she’s wearing earphones. The EVENING STAR is in the sky above the house, its five points painted in silver hubcap-paint. HEAVEN begins just above the CAPRIVI STRIP. In that case, says Treppie, the Evening Star should be in Angola, not in Heaven, but then he says it doesn’t make any difference, ’cause for that matter 127 Martha Street could be hell itself, down here at the bottom of Africa. That’s Treppie for you. Everything has to be double upside-down before he’s happy.
The sun’s in Zaire. It first had rays, but now it’s got little red points like the National Party’s new sun. He’s written SUNSHINE D inside the sun.
His mother’s housecoat hangs from the horn of Africa, on the one side. It doesn’t look like a housecoat. It looks more like a piece of slaughtered human skin. That’s why he wrote HOUSECOAT there. Then, in brackets, he added (MOLE-SKIN).
CAPE POINT can still be seen at the bottom of the driveway. Then there’s TABLE MOUNTAIN as well. The postbox is planted on top of it. On the one side of the postbox, next to Table Mountain, he’s written HARRY THE STRANDLOPER. That’s also from his history book. On the other side of Table Mountain you can see JAN VAN RIEBEECK with a ribbon across his chest that says MAN ABOUT TOWN. He’s holding a bottle of KLIPDRIFT in his hand. Harry the Strandloper holds a bottle of COKE.
Jan van Riebeeck’s got a pink feather in his hat. Same as the tennis ball. That was a nice pink. He can’t find it in the hardware shops any more. It was Flossie’s first undercoat. He had just enough left over to paint a pink DICK and a pink CUNT and to colour in the Witness’s petticoat.
The last bit of pink
was for Tsafendas’s WORM. But the pink ran out halfway down the worm. Now the worm’s half-pink, half-green. He cut out the picture of Tsafendas from Your Family and You. Still in jail over Verwoerd. Very old now, but he’s still got the worm. He hung his Republic Day medal on Tsafendas’s chest, on to a nail going right through his HEART. He’d drawn the heart on to the picture himself. Treppie came and asked if that was the Lord Jesus there with his bleeding heart. Then he asked Treppie if he was mad or something, Jesus didn’t have a worm. ’Cause the worm starts in the heart and goes all the way to the guts, until you can’t make out any more what’s guts and what’s worm. He painted the guts at the bottom of the picture too. Tsafendas is pasted up against the prefab wall, a little man with a gold medal and lots of guts that are full of worm.
You can also see Treppie’s guts.
Treppie’s lying cut open across the shoulder of Africa, but he doesn’t know it’s him. His insides are hanging out. To the one side, in the little waves of the ATLANTIC OCEAN, there’s a huge, naked kaffir with a whopper of a black cock reaching right down into the water. He’s eating Treppie’s liver. ‘PATYDEFWAGRAS,’ the kaffir says. He’s got a silver bangle around his cock.
Pop’s head only just sticks out above a cloud, over the same ocean. POP’S HEAD ON THUNDER CLOUD is what he wrote there, ’cause you can’t see very much of Pop. He first started to draw Pop rising up to heaven but then he painted the clouds over Pop, ’cause Pop suddenly began to look so lonely up there in the sky. You can at least see Pop’s feet. They’ve been burnt to little pitch-black sticks, ’cause Pop’s standing on a white flash of lightning that strikes from under the cloud’s belly.
He, LAMBERT, sits in the VOLKSWAGEN under the CARPORT. He’s smiling out the window. The roof-rack’s full of silver bags, and there, on top of the silver bags, is his GIRL. A naked blonde. It looks like she’s sitting on a silver waterbed. He used the silver hubcap-paint for that. It doesn’t take so nicely on PVA, and every now and again he has to touch up the waterbed. He has to touch up his girl’s silver fin as well, ’cause she’s a mermaid with scales on her tail. She’s got silver stars on her nipples. NIPPLE CAPS. On top of her head you can see the Volksie’s aerial. There’s a flag hanging from the aerial with DIAMOND LADY written on it. That’s what he saw on Ponta do Sol’s pinball.
If she comes back of her own accord and for free after the first night, then he’ll drive her to Ponta do Sol for take-aways. They can play a quick game of pinball while they wait for their food. And when they come back they can eat here in his den. Then she can play pinball on him.
Lambert gets his angle right. He wants to paint a white, spouting fountain from the dick, but he’s too worked up. He drops his hand into the front of his pants. Stabs of pain shoot through his tail-end. He closes his eyes and sits on the bed, feeling behind the bed for the T-shirt with which he always wipes himself. When he opens his eyes again, he sees his feet. They’re dirty. He always walks around in bare feet ’cause he doesn’t go anywhere in any case. The nails on his big toes are long and dirty. One is growing in. His other toenails are thick and skew from all the knocks. Dog-toenails, Treppie says. Why are his feet so big and his ankles so thick and knobbly? The skin around his shins looks thin. He can see dents there. His throat feels tight. He sees big, fat tears falling on to his feet. He’s crying. What’s he crying for? Fuck that. But the crying won’t stop. He wipes off the tears with the T-shirt, first from his face and then from his feet. Then he wipes off the rest.
He gets up so it can pass. His back feels lame. He must just start painting now, then it’ll pass. Suddenly he sees Gerty. She’s sitting there without a jersey. He sprays on a yellow jersey for her. The green ribbing will just have to wait. He hasn’t got any green now. He’s got yellow and brown and black and white. He sprays Gerty’s yellow jersey over and over, until Gerty’s almost covered in it. Well, she’s almost over the hill in any case. When she dies, all he’ll have to do is blank out her head and her paws. She hasn’t got a tail in the painting.
What else is yellow? He touches up his mermaid’s yellow hair. Now it looks like she’s got too much hair. This mermaid of his just doesn’t want to work so nicely. Her tail’s chipping off badly and now there’s no more silver.
Lambert stands back to look at his painting. He thought he had a start with the yellow. But all he’s got are dead-ends. The painting doesn’t want to work today. He can’t get the thing going.
Clouds work, stars work, the sun works. You don’t have to make them work. They all just work on their own. Moles, bees, termites, ants. They all work. And mice and earwigs and cockroaches. They’re pests but they do what they’re supposed to do. They don’t sit staring at their feet.
They don’t get stuck. They don’t wear out. They don’t use oil like pumps and cars and lawn-mowers. They don’t jam. They don’t seize up and their timing doesn’t go out like the timing of washing machines and fridges. And when they die, they die softly. They don’t first start backfiring or missing. And they don’t hum and rattle and click on and off in the night. They’re cool. They don’t just fade without a good reason. They don’t need captions. And you don’t have to struggle to get them started, ’cause when you find them they’re on the go already.
Suddenly Lambert knows what to do. Where to begin. He smiles. He feels time slacken all around him. His dick hangs happily between his legs. He’s got a plan. He drags a chair closer and puts a Coke crate on top of it so he can get to the spot. He starts taking down the Tuxedo Tyres calendars. Pink Bikini. Yellow Bikini. Blue Bikini. Off with you! Halfway round the den, when he gets to 1980s calendars, he sees a little photograph of the manager of Tuxedo Tyres and his wife. It’s a round picture inside a tyre. Gavin and Cindy Viljoen, it says in small letters underneath. That’s why those damn pin-ups all look the same! It’s her, the manager’s wife, she’s just wearing a different colour bikini every time, and a different wig. Blarry rip-off! Think they can fool him! He steps from the crate on to the Kneff, pulling down four of the calendars in one swipe. And from there he steps on to the Fuchs and the Tedelex, and then on to the top of his cabinet. Off with the rubbish! Now for some things that work! Now for some bees and ants and moles!
He lets himself down from the steel cabinet. He pulls the chair and the crate back towards him so he can get to the last of the calendars, there in the corner. Funny how patient he gets when he knows he’s got a plan. Now he takes his time. He takes more than his time. He knows it’s a sure thing. It won’t go away now. He can linger longer. He can postpone it, it just gets better and better, ’cause it gets clearer by the minute. Or no, it’s not clear. It’s a plan without a plan. How can he say it – he knows it’ll work but he doesn’t altogether know how. It’s like coming in a dream, without those stabs of pain. And he smiles when he gets up. He doesn’t cry and his feet don’t bother him.
Now he starts getting his paints and things ready. The yellow spray-can. A few loose, wax crayons. And some half-finished kokis – a red, a blue and a purple. A tin of black high-gloss and two brushes, a wide one and a little thin one. And the white PVA that Treppie bought a year ago to paint the house. It didn’t get used in the end and now it’s half finished anyway. It takes nicely on the plaster. And then there’s the brown government paint. Treppie got that from the Chinese, who got it from the police at John Vorster Square. Treppie says the police there spend the whole day painting the walls brown ’cause they’re not allowed to manhandle the kaffirs any more. He says the police have become interior designers now. They have to sign three pieces of paper every time they want a baton. And ten pieces of paper for a gun. The batons and the guns have all been locked up in safes. He thinks Treppie tells stories the way he, Lambert, paints pictures. Most of the time it’s all mixed up and you can’t make head or tail out of it, but you can see a mile off when he’s got a good one. He likes it when Treppie gets like that. It’s just that Treppie never knows when to round off his stories. Most of the time he stops before the end and t
hen he says it’s all in the mind anyway.
He thinks Treppie just says that when a story doesn’t work out so nicely. Nowadays Treppie ends before he even begins. He ends without an ending. He says it’s all in the mind and people must just figure out for themselves what happened in the meantime. Stories give you a headache sometimes. His mother’s stories never want to work so nicely, but he’s not going to think about her now. He’s putting her out of his mind. And the only way to get her out of his mind is to paint.
Lambert stands back and looks at the row of open squares where the calendars used to be. They’re much cleaner than the rest of the wall. Such neat, pale, white squares. He smiles at his luck. Now he’s got frames into the bargain as well. Now he can paint nicely inside the frames. And all the things that work will be the same size.
What first? No, where first? In the middle, the middle block in the back wall. Then he can paint backwards to the end on the one wall, and forwards on the other wall to the beginning. But the middle is actually the beginning. Maybe he should paint one block that way and one block this way, starting from the middle. Then everything will fill up evenly. Not like a line that you draw, but like a scale with arms that you load evenly so it balances out. Suddenly he’s got a huge thirst from all the excitement. He grabs the half-full bottle of Coke in the open fridge without even looking, swigging a few big sips. He doesn’t once take his eyes off the wall. He can fucken see it! A whole gallery full of things that work. Pests! Moles! Ants! Creepies!
Now, what first? In the middle frame? A bee, he thinks.
How does a bee look again? He must know, there were so many dead bees after the fuck-up when he threw water into the hive.
A bee’s got two pieces. A head-piece and a tail-piece.
He gets on to the Tedelex with the narrow brush and the tin of black paint. He gets his angle right. First he paints the outline of the head, and then, a little bigger, the outline of the body. The outline comes out nice and smooth and shiny. But the bee’s too small. It doesn’t fill the frame so nicely. What now? He adds another piece of tail to the bee. And now? Now the head’s too small. Wait, he knows. This bee is going to become Superbee. It’s going to get two more heads, one on either side of the middle one. That’s easy. Lambert gets down from the Tedelex and looks up at his Superbee. It’s becoming a bee to beat all bees! He smiles. The more heads, the more legs and the more wings, the better this bee’s going to work.
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