The bee’s got seven legs on either side. Lambert draws a narrow seam for the head. He makes connecting threads between the head and the body, and between the head and the other body. Each head gets two blobs where the eyes are. The middle head’s got the biggest eyes. Now for the wings. Four on either side. They’re the most difficult, with all those little veins. He finds a match. He chews the back end of the match until it’s soft, and then he pulls out a few threads until he’s got a point. He draws the veins on to each wing, showing how they get thinner and thinner. The veins hold the wing up. What’s a vein like that made of? Not bone, not wood. Maybe blood that’s gotten hard. Do bees have blood? Is it sweet? Does it run in veins? Do bees have hearts?
Lambert stands back a little from Superbee. His head feels like a joystick. He wants to fly.
It’s always like this when he paints. The smaller and flimsier it gets, and the more he has to screw up his eyes and hold his hand steady, the better it feels. It’s only when he tries to fix small things in fucked-up gadgets and stuff that he loses his cool so badly. In his paintings he can do what he likes with the flimsy little things.
Now, how’s he going to get the bee’s wings to shimmer with colour, but in such a way that you can still half see the world through them?
In that case, first the world. He takes his wax crayons and adds in daintily, between the bee’s legs and his wings, and between the veins in the wings, careful not to smudge the outlines – a blue mountain, a green aloe with three red aloe flowers, and a light yellow patch of grass.
But now the wings look completely see-through. He puts some spit on a clean match and works the colours of the world a little more densely between the veins – green and blue and light yellow and red.
Now for the final touches. That bee must gain some weight so it can stay put in the world. The three heads must shine pitch black and look solid. He leaves some white spots on the eyes so they can shine. Do bees’ eyes shine?
The two bodies get fat stripes: yellow-black, yellow-black, yellow-black. Golden yellow and pitch black.
He climbs down to look at the bee. It looks sharp. A black-yellow, black-yellow Superbee with veins on his wings that you can only just see through. But something’s missing. His bee’s got an earth, but there’s no heaven. Halfway up from the mountain, he makes a light yellow sun and slightly higher, a white cloud, with small pieces of light blue heaven inbetween.
He gets down to look again. How can it already be getting dark outside? He puts on the lights, the one next to his bed and the other on the ceiling, but the ceiling’s light doesn’t want to work. The bulb’s blown. Lambert smiles. He unlocks his steel cabinet and takes it out. Of course! The time has come for his red light.
His bee looks magic in the red light. What kind of honey will a bee with three heads and two bodies make? Mega-honey!
He holds his head at an angle. There’s only one problem with his bee: it looks a little stiff. Heaven and earth too, a little flat and a little stiff. Something jolly’s missing somewhere. The sting! Where does a bee’s sting sit? Well, this bee’s going to have more than one of them.
Coming out the left side of the middle head, he paints a thin, black sting, with a curl that goes around the aloe-flower. And out of the right side of the tail, a sting that splits three ways around the cloud, with arrows at the ends.
Now that bee looks wired! He looks like he fucken wants to spark right off the wall!
To frame the bee, Lambert paints fine black lines around the edges, where the calendar used to be. He paints ER underneath, in the middle, so he can paint SUP and BEE on either side, without going wider than the painting. Then he goes and lies down on his bed with a Paul Revere to look at his SUPERBEE. He leaves it to the darkness to quietly fill up the world outside. While the light in his room turns an ever brighter scarlet.
11
THE SAVING PERSPECTIVE
MEAT
It’s a Monday night. The Benades sit in the lounge in front of the TV. It’s tuned to TV1 but they’re not really watching. Everyone’s there except Lambert, who left just after five. Monday night is rubbish night, and Lambert’s gone to search in the rubbish bags for wine boxes. He promised he’d put Raiders of the Lost Ark into the video machine for them when he got back. Only Lambert’s allowed to touch the machine, so now they just have to sit and wait.
Mol’s knitting Gerty’s belly piece from scratch. When she let Gerty try it on this morning, it was miles too big. So then she had to pull the whole thing apart again. Gerty needs about twenty stitches fewer than she did last year. And now she’ll have to make Gerty try it on again when she gets to the middle piece. She hasn’t got a clue how much smaller to make it. Poor Gerty. She won’t eat on her own any more. She only eats when Mol feeds her little pieces of food from her hand, begging her to take a few morsels. And she coughs so bad she can hardly breathe.
‘Put her down. Put her down, so this misery can come to an end,’ says Treppie, but Treppie’s got no heart. Pop says he’s got a heart, but she thinks if he’s got one it must be a very strange kind of heart.
Treppie’s sitting here now on his crate, reading a Star. One that he took from across the road’s pile this morning before the lorry came to pick them up. First he read the classifieds and now he’s reading the main news right from the beginning. Every now and again his lips move as he reads something but she can’t make out what he’s saying. The TV’s too loud. She sees him lose his temper about something that he reads there. His shoulder twitches and he pages wildly without finishing anything he starts. Then he shakes out the folds violently like he wants to hit something right out of the paper, knocking the page in front of him with the back of his hand. Like he wants to smack the news back into shape. Treppie never gets like this with the classifieds. Then he reads all afternoon long, turning the pages nice and softly. And he chuckles all the time when he reads them. She wonders what’s so funny about the classifieds. Funny or almost funny, ’cause Treppie laughs a little half-laugh through that twisted mouth of his. Sometimes she asks: ‘What are you laughing at, Treppie?’, and then he reads her an advert about something, or someone. Like the last time, about someone called Alex, who had just died. It was something like ‘we all loved Alex as he was’, and that he also ‘loved everyone’. He loved all his neighbours and his friends and fish pies too. Her favourite part was when it said: ‘Let God be with him and bear with us through our never-ending troubles, happiness and sadness.’
‘That message is from Maggie Rip,’ Treppie said, laughing his little half-laugh. So she asked Treppie who Alex and Maggie Rip were. Did he know them? She thought maybe they were connections of the Chinese. No, Treppie said, he didn’t know them, but he could guess. Guess what? she asked. Then he said he could guess Alex was probably just another lost case, and Maggie was worn-out from letting rip so much. Treppie’s full of nonsense. She still doesn’t know what’s supposed to be so funny about that. And then there was the time Treppie almost laughed himself to death over Frieda’s wedding dress. This Frieda was also someone he didn’t know.
‘Hell, just look at all these wedding dresses for sale,’ Treppie said, reading up and down about the dresses with a bigger and bigger smile on his face, until he burst out laughing: ‘“Wedding dress off-white. Very large. Veil and train. Satin shoes size 11. Instep supported. Brand new. Personal tragedy. Contact Frieda or leave message.”’ Poor Frieda, whoever she is, she thought, but Treppie walked up and down the house and pissed himself. Pop said Treppie had delicate nerves. That may be so, she said, but he wasn’t delicate with her. Then Pop said she should just be thankful she wasn’t Frieda, who didn’t have anyone in the whole world. At least they still had each other. Treppie heard what Pop said, ’cause he’d stopped laughing now, and then he told her she must listen to Pop. Pop had a sense of perspective.
Well, whether Pop’s got one or not, that’s one of Treppie’s favourite words. Perspective. It’s the one word she remembers Treppie using over and over whe
n they worked out the story for Lambert – that’s now the story of their family set-up and about where Lambert actually comes from. It was all Treppie’s idea. He said they should tell Lambert a story that would give him a perspective on the matter, one that both he and the rest of them could live with. And that’s how they came upon the distant-family story. That Pop was a distant Benade from the Cape. A Benade who stole her heart at a garment workers’ dance when he played a solo on his mouth organ, the only thing he still had left from his late father. And how they were married in community of property by a magistrate, ’cause that was the quickest and cheapest way to do it, even though they had far more in common than just property. And how afterwards there was a dinner and dance in the backyard at the Vrededorp house. And how Treppie was the master of ceremonies, making an unforgettable speech. About ‘the holiness of marriage’ and ‘the godliness of the generations’. ’Cause he had to play minister as well. The magistrate seals the community of property, not the joining of souls.
Treppie practised that speech over and over again. That was the meat of the perspective, he said. Mind you, they all practised like mad on that perspective. Treppie said it had to be drilled into them so hard they’d also start thinking it was true after a while. He said a person needed that kind of perspective in life. No, he said, it was more. It kept you alive. Otherwise you wouldn’t have a hope in hell. Actually, he said, the whole world and the whole business we called life and everything that went with it was just one big war of perspectives. One big circus – it just depended on how you looked at it. It was all in the mind, anyway. The point was you had to have one. A perspective, so you could fight. Or a different one, so you could laugh. Treppie says most people’s perspectives are just bubbles to keep their heads above water. That’s what you call a ‘saving perspective’.
Well, it’s not like they’re exactly on top of things. They just muddle along through the rubble. But that perspective of Treppie’s saved their backsides on many occasions. When Lambert started getting old enough to ask questions, they could tell him all about that heart-stealing dance and the Vrededorp wedding. About the people who came, what they were wearing and what they had to eat. Doughnuts and peanuts and Swiss roll. And everything Treppie had to say, as brother of the bride and master of ceremonies. The family as the cornerstone of the volk, and the near and distant family as the stronghold of something else. A lot of rubbish, she sees now, but when children began pestering Lambert at school with all kinds of gossip about the Benades, they could at least tell him what to say.
Then they’d dish up that old story of theirs again. Just like they practised it all those years ago, when Treppie made her wear Old Mol’s marriage dress and Pop had to put on his black jacket with the black trousers. Not a suit, but at least both pieces were black. She used to wish Treppie would practise his speech and get done with it, ’cause that wedding dress was much too tight for her. She was already seven months pregnant with Lambert and he was a huge bastard. Treppie allowed them to practise the rest, about the distant family, in ordinary clothes, but for his speech he said they must dress up like a bride and groom. So they’d get a good grip on the perspective. It was like kissing someone with measles, he said. You had to expose yourself if you wanted to be immune.
Then Treppie would get up on a chair and hold up his hand for silence. Her and Pop had to shout ‘Speech! Speech!’ in their wedding clothes. And Pop had to whistle like lots of people, ’cause the way the story went there were almost a hundred people at the wedding. All of them garment workers and their fiancés.
Then Treppie would start: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, my dear sister Mol and my brother-in-law from the old colony – distant family, but still a shoot from the same tree …’ Sometimes he would say ‘pip from the same watermelon’.
And then they had to shout ‘Hear! Hear!’ and sing ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ all at the same time, the way lots of tipsy people do at a party.
When the applause was loud enough Treppie would raise his hand and carry on again. He always started with ‘Every family has its secrets’, or ‘Every family has its fuck-ups.’ The second sentence was: ‘But all that counts is that we have each other and a roof over our heads.’ His third sentence was addressed to them. He pointed his finger at her. At her belly. And at Pop in his suit, and then he said: ‘Go out and multiply and fill the earth, or, as we say in good Afrikaans, sow the seed – sow the seed, oh sow the seed of the watermelon.’
After every sentence they had to cheer. And after the last sentence he made them sing ‘How the hell can we believe him’.
Treppie told Lambert this was just the intro, nice and jolly, to make the wedding guests feel comfortable. The first duty of a master of ceremonies, he said, was to sweeten the audience so they could swallow the bitter pill.
The bitter pill was the serious part in the middle.
About how it was inevitable and predestined that these two people should come together, and how they had to stand by each other, come hell or high water. How they had to seek out their own destiny, live with what they had, and carry their own cross, the cross being the burden of the secrets and the weight of the fuck-ups that always came afterwards. And how they had to keep looking north. Look north, fuck forth! How the home was the cornerstone and the family the stronghold.
And how Pop had to understand he was now head of the house, and how, by the sweat of his brow, he’d have to reap what he sowed in the flush of his youth.
At this point in the practice Pop would pluck off his jacket and walk over to Treppie, who was still standing on a chair. Pop would tell him he’d better get off his pulpit now, ’cause he, Treppie, had played an equal part in the whole business, and who was he all of a sudden to make out he was so high and mighty?
Then Treppie told Pop he shouldn’t be such a spoilsport. Had he forgotten? It was just a perspective they were trying to stamp on to the fruit of their loins here. For their own survival. Fruit of their loins, yes, well.
Mol stretches the piece of knitting to see if it’ll fit. Maybe she should knit Pop a cap or something for winter. He says nowadays the part of his head that sticks out when he sits in his chair, right on top in the middle, gets the coldest. Ice-cold, as if there’s a draught on top of his head. Poor old Pop. He has to put up with so much. And when he’s done complaining about his head, Treppie says, jeez, he always thought death rose from the feet.
THIS ONE’S FOR YOU
Pop’s sleeping again. When he comes to sit here in front of the TV he falls asleep almost straight away, no matter what they’re watching. Now and then she wakes him up so he can watch his favourite adverts. Both she and Pop have their favourites. What she likes about adverts is that they’re short, and then you can play them over and over again in your head. Like the one about the three beds. Big double beds with a woman sleeping alone and waking up quietly, on three different mornings. In three different places.
She would also feel nice if she could wake up like that, all on her own. And so peacefully. Alone on a beach with dolphins jumping out of the waves in front of her. In a field of flowers full of cooing doves. Next to a waterfall with ferns and rabbits. On such a nice big bed, with such soft, warm bedding. In three different nighties, too. Sometimes, when Lambert gets so wild with her, she closes her eyes and goes to sleep on those beds, one by one. On the beach. In the veld. Next to the waterfall. Over and over again. She sees the dolphins. She catches the doves. And she stares into the face of a rabbit, with his soft, shiny eyes, until Lambert’s finished. That helps.
But it doesn’t work when he also wants to hear stories. Then it has to be stories from his videos. Then she has to concentrate on the story, which means she can’t think about her advert, about all those mattresses with springs. Their own mattresses are sponge. Her and Pop’s mattress lies on the floor. Lambert took the base for himself. He says he refuses to sleep on the floor like a kaffir. She doesn’t know where he gets his information about the way kaffirs sleep. She’s told him,
he must look at the way they drink beer in the adverts – in suits, together with white people. If you ask her, they look like they all sleep in nice soft beds with legs. And would you believe it, the other day she saw her favourite advert again, but this time a brand-new kaffir was sleeping in one of the beds. Never saw him before. Must be a New South Africa kaffir, that one.
Pop’s favourite is the squirrel who wants to save his acorn at the bank. He says he likes to see the way every animal has its own little place. The round-eyed owl has a crack in the rocks. The ringed cobra’s got a hole. The jackal with his pointy nose has a hollow. That’s where they belong and everyone knows it, and they keep out of each other’s way. When the squirrel gives his acorn to the Trust Bank man, Pop whistles the song again, and then he says: ‘Go back to your tree, old curlytail! Trust Bank’s just for your acorn, not for you!’
Treppie says she and Pop are suckers for adverts. He says he doesn’t like adverts himself, but if he must choose, then the one he fancies is the elephant taking a crap on a shining white lavatory. He says he wishes he could also make a noise like that when he’s done. That sounds like a really good statement, he says. When she asked him one day what he meant by a really good statement, he put his hands behind his ears and flapped them like an elephant’s. Then he held his hands in front of his mouth, like an elephant’s trunk, and he shouted so loud, right into her ears, that her heart almost stopped: ‘I, Martinus Benade, have just shat out, at half past nine, what I ate at seven o’clock, and from now on for the rest of my days I’m going to eat, shit, eat, shit, over and over again, until one fine day I fall down and die. Praise the Lord with joyful fumes for all eternity. Amen!’
Triomf Page 22