It’s all going to happen right here, in this room. But he must first get rid of the rubbish. All these boxes and things. And that heap of Watchtowers.
He grabs a handful from the stack in the back corner. But then the whole pile starts tilting over and it comes crashing down all over the place. Fuck! He grabs bunches and bungs them into empty crates. Now he’s got six crates full of Watchtowers. Just going to have to burn them. Later. Let him first find a space on the wall to write down his list. He sees half a painting sticking out where the Watchtowers used to be. What was that painting, again? He’s forgotten all about it. He pushes the Fuchs to one side so he can move the Tedelex and look at the painting. Bottles and boxes come crashing down around his ears and on to his feet. When he gets everything out of the way, he sees two paintings, both badly faded. The one’s called THE JEW IN THE WASHING MACHINE. The other is THE MOLE IN THE FRIDGE. The Jew’s for real. You can see his glasses and his nose and his little hat behind the washing machine’s glass. The machine’s running and the Jew’s spinning. He’s singing ‘Fare thee well, my own true darling’ upside down as he spins. It’s a jolly painting.
As for THE MOLE IN THE FRIDGE, that’s another story. It doesn’t look like his mother, but it’s her. Her body fills up the whole fridge. Her head’s stuffed into the ice-box. There’s a gap for her neck to go through. Her head’s blue from being frozen so hard and her two front teeth stick out of her mouth. She doesn’t have a chin, and her belly’s fat and pink. She looks like she’s been slaughtered. There’s a Peking Duck inside her, at the bottom, with a fuse sticking out and flames shooting sparks at the tip. On top of the painting it says: BIG BANG 1970.
He remembers. He painted it that time when he came out of hospital, after the fire. His mouth was bitten to bits, and he had to lie around at the back here for weeks on end. He wasn’t allowed anything except soft things like milk and stuff. It was all his mother’s fucken fault. His mother, who let his spanners get lost in the long grass. She fucks everything up. But he’s not going to think about her now. He wants to write his list. He’s going to write it on top of the Jew. He shifts the Tedelex in front of THE MOLE IN THE FRIDGE. Pop will complain if he sees it, and his mother will tell him he’s got no decency. Right now he doesn’t want any more trouble with anyone. He just wants to keep things going, so everyone will stay cool.
He takes his ball-point and goes to the wall. He starts high up, so he’ll have enough space. He knows that lists can go on and on forever, like that time he made a list for the Guy Fawkes party, and the list of everything he needs to do on Flossie.
When he’s finished, his list looks like this:
1. Bags (20) check for leaks
2. Lawn-mower weld clean blades (time will tell)
3. Put postbox up
4. Gutters on
5. house white
6. Fill holes lounge (1 box Polyfilla, 2 litre high-gloss)
7. lampshades (4)
8. pelmet panelbeat
9. glue all blocks (31 new ones) or more – check
10. new cat (Shoprite) chuck old one away
11. patch hole front door (12” x 12” plywood single)
12. scrub linolium kitchen clean (Ma)
13. drain (Buster)
14. flush horsepis. always/immediately (gentle reminder!)
15. Toilet seat (Spur?)
16. Mirror bathroom (measure) bath plug
17. den (sweep burn wash)
18. everything must work fridges (Kneff too)
19. Change mattress? bedding? (Treppie window sheets!)
NB 20. Lambert: toenails push ups
underpants …???
20. burn Ma’s housecoats
21. zips for Pop’s pants (Ma)
22. Money. (6 Spur tickets?)
(R50 NP?) fuck them!
Take empties back
23. dip Toby.
He takes a step back and looks at his list. He rubs his eyes. Fuck. It’s a lot. But now at least he knows what he has to do. Now things are properly lined up. Now it’s first things first. One thing at a time. Every day a few.
He walks out the door to the tap in the backyard. He washes his feet. Then he tiptoes back over his dirty floor. He takes the T-shirt from behind his bed and dries his feet. He almost puts the T-shirt back in its old place, but then he stops and stares at it. Fucken piece of rubbish! Out with it! From now on, it’s out with everything that’s rubbish around him. He chucks the T-shirt into a crate next to the Watchtowers. He’s going to have to stop pulling his wire so much. Fuck that. He’ll wait. Save himself up. If it gets too much for him, he’ll just do some push-ups. Or paint. Or make a fire with all the rubbish. Just watch him. He wasn’t born yesterday.
He puts on his lace-ups. It’s his only pair. He bought them ’cause Pop said that’s what he needed for his weak ankles. But they look funny when he wears them with shorts. What he really needs is a decent pair of takkies. North Stars with soft soles. But if he’s going to walk to the rubbish dumps now to look for bags, then he must walk, whether he looks funny or not. He usually walks barefoot around the streets near their house, but the dumps are too far for bare feet. He looks at the list. It’s great. He salutes his list. Then he remembers something. Under 23. dip Toby he writes: 24. paint the gallery! Ant termite wasp, Mole II, bat, etc.
That’s to entertain his girl. If all else fails, he can say to her: look at my painting on the wall, the one in the middle. Look at those stings, curling round the cloud in three different directions. That’s the many-headed Superbee. And then he’ll say: you want to know why that Mole there is called Mole the Second? Well, come, let me show you Mole the First. Just don’t get a fright, hey!
’Cause what happens if she’s very nice and everything, but she doesn’t say a word? Like Pop. What’ll he do then?
He must just not make a fool of himself. Then all the trouble and everything will be for nothing.
He gets up. He doesn’t even want to think about that. That it could all be for nothing. He walks through the den’s inside door and into the house. He fetches a municipal rubbish bag in the kitchen, folding it carefully into a nice little square. He feels around on top of the dresser for the Spur tickets, where Pop said he must leave them. He’s not sure why he wants the tickets. He just feels he has to be ready for anything. Then he walks down the passage, ‘click-click-click’, over the loose blocks – the whole fucken floor’s full of loose or missing blocks. He counts twenty-three loose blocks by the time he gets to the end of the passage. He must check again. Maybe they need more than thirty-one.
Treppie’s out, at the Chinese. Pop’s sitting in his chair, looking through one of those Homemakers they keep throwing over the fence. His mother sits and looks where Pop’s looking. Or she looks like she’s looking. Since Gerty died, Mol keeps looking where everyone else looks, but she sees nothing. She’s fucken blown away, that’s for sure. Pop says his mother lived for that dog. Well, she must wait, she’ll still see what to live for. With those fused-out eyes of hers. She’ll see how he fixes this place up. How he scores a proper woman. No one fuckenwell tells him he’s a miscarriage. No one tells him his brain is fucked. No one tells him he’s got a dick like a dinosaur, so why doesn’t he go fuck dinosaurs. There’s nothing these two hands of his can’t do. He just gets fits, and sometimes he misses out on chances – that’s all. It could happen to anyone. Who does his mother think she is? What makes her think she’s better than him? Her fucken arse, man!
‘Right, I’m going now,’ he tells them.
‘Where to?’ It’s his mother. She looks, but she doesn’t see him.
‘Where to? Where to?’ he mocks her. ‘Why don’t you fix Pop’s zips, Ma, then you’ll be doing something useful. And, Pop, measure the space for the mirror in the bathroom, so we can get one cut the next time we go to Newlands. At the mirror shop. I can’t see my face any more when I shave.’
‘Okay,’ says Pop. ‘I’ll do it.’
‘Where you going, hey, Lamb
ert?’ It’s his mother again.
‘That’s my business, Ma.’ He squeezes between them and the sideboard so he can get the NPs’ fifty-rand note out of the headless cat, where Treppie stuffed it that night, right next to the plastic rose. Pop said they must put it there so they could give it back to the NP, just in case the NP wanted to take them to court or something. He pulls out the rose.
‘Keep your hands off!’ says his mother.
Pop doesn’t notice. He’s staring at a picture in the Homemaker. It’s a wooden house that looks like a king-sized dog kennel.
‘Off what?’ he says. She must shuddup. He shakes his finger at her, stuffing the money into his back pocket.
It’s hot outside. The sun’s sitting right on top of the sky. He stands under the little carport, next to Molletjie, with his hands at his sides. A cloud’s building up on the one side. Which way? He wanted to go to the dumps in Bosmont, but that’s too far in this heat. And the fucken Hotnots always stare at him, like he’s a fucken kaffir or something. Hotnots don’t like kaffirs, that’s something he knows for a fact. Still, he doesn’t know what their case is, and why they shout at him like that: What you looking for over here, hey, whitey? Not that they can talk. One Saturday he was in Bosmont’s Main Street, on his way home with his wine bags, when he suddenly saw these bouncy bunches of Hotnot-majorettes come marching past him, “boompity-boompity-boom”. They were jamming the whole street with their bands and everything, young Coloured girls, all of them in shiny dresses. Some of them were real white, a proper inside-bum white, but they’re still Coloured, you can see it. You can see it by their hair and those missing front teeth. He couldn’t get across the street, so then he had to stand there and watch the parade with all those Hotnots. They were jostling him from all sides, and then one of them said: ‘Ooh, watch out, this hillbilly’s getting a hard-on for our girls here!’
At the time, he pretended he didn’t hear, but afterwards he asked Treppie what a hillbilly was. Treppie said it was English for Ampie, and then he asked Treppie who Ampie was. Treppie said Ampie was a dirty oke with a rag-hat, stretched braces, rawhide shoes and khaki pants that were too short for him. He was a bit slow in his top-storey and he spent his time sitting in a ditch, eating a tin of sardines and a tin of condensed milk while conversing with a donkey. And somehow, this oke was still a big hero.
Sometimes Treppie can talk the biggest lot of crap. He told Treppie, rubbish, man. He, Lambert, didn’t eat bread with sardines or condensed milk, so how could he be like Ampie or a hillbilly? Sis, how was that supposed to taste anyway! But Treppie said bread with polony and golden syrup would qualify just fine. In the nineties, he said, an outsize dick hanging from fucked-up boxer shorts were the same as stretched braces and khaki pants that were too short. And what’s more, Treppie said, he should figure out for himself what he thought of an oke who looked for empty wine boxes on rubbish dumps, an oke who screwed his own mother till she hopped instead of talking to donkeys, and, to top it all, who lived in a place called Triomf with a big smile on his dial. Treppie was drunk as a lord when he said that, otherwise he would’ve finally smashed him to a pulp. Who the fuck does Treppie actually think he is? What makes him think he can talk, anyway? He also lives in Triomf. He boozes with the Chinese, and they’re not even white. As for the Hotnots, it’s true they’re getting whiter by the day, but they must just understand, once a Hotnot, always a Hotnot. They must keep their mouths shut about him and his private life. He has his pride. He knows his rights, even if he is a minority. He’ll vote for his own protection. And they will look after him, ’cause he’s not the only one.
He decides not to go to Bosmont. He’ll just go here, at the back, to the Martindale dump. The one behind the old jail in Long Street. They turned the jail into flats, but he reckons that anyone who lives there now must feel like a jailbird behind those tiny windows. All they did was take away the bars. He’ll go see what’s inside those containers today. Maybe his luck’s in. Sometimes the wine boxes get mixed up with plastic in the recycling bin.
He walks up Martha Street, across Victoria and into Thornton. Then he turns left and walks past Triomf Garage. Volkswagen experts. But the Benades prefer getting their parts from the Chop Shop in Ontdekkers. It’s cheaper that way. Anyway, they don’t need experts – he’s already one, for Molletjie and Flossie. There’s nothing anyone can tell him about those cars that he doesn’t already know. If only those two dykes across the road knew how completely daft they are for not letting him look at their Volla. But they’ll be sorry, they must just wait. They’re still going to be very sorry.
He walks past the entrance to Triomf Shopping Centre. On a blackboard next to the entrance he reads the advert for Roodt Brothers Forty Years Meat Tradition: YOUNG OX: R9 A KILO STEWING MEAT.
Sis, ox-meat for stewing. Sounds a bit off to him. Beef-braaivleis, now that’s what he wants. A nice thick T-bone or two, like next door had the last time. Haven’t had another braai since then. Maybe ice-cream sellers can’t afford braaivleis every other day.
He’s almost beyond the parking area when he hears someone calling out to him.
‘Hey, excuse me! Hey, sir!’ He feels wind blowing on to his face from all the shiny cars as they rush past him. They must wait, they’re all still going to run out of petrol when the shit starts flying in this place. Pride comes before a fall, he remembers from his schoolbooks.
He turns to see who’s ‘sir-ing’ him now. He’s not just anyone’s ‘sir’. People must be very careful before they start calling him things like that. Maybe it’s not even for him.
Across the road, two men stand next to a caravan. They’re wearing khaki pants and maroon berets. Must be selling hot dogs. But no, there’s a little table with papers, under a red and white umbrella. And a bottle of Oros with glasses and a jug of water. Must be traffic cops. He wants to carry on walking. He hasn’t done anything wrong. He’s not even driving and he wants nothing to do with papers. But the men call after him again: ‘Hey, sir!’ and then they smile big friendly smiles at him. Smiles like he’s never seen on the faces of traffic cops or policemen. Maybe it’s hot dogs after all. Surplus army hot dogs or something. But there aren’t any other people in the area. So what’s their case?
‘Hey, good morning, I mean good afternoon, sir. Come see here please, maybe you’re interested,’ the one shouts, and the other motions with his arm: Come! The sun’s burning his head. It’s fucken hot. The whole street smells of tar and tyres. He’s not used to walking like this. And his one ankle’s starting to hurt already.
He looks up and down the road, left-right-left, before crossing over. Let him go and have a look, then. But he sees quickly it’s not him who’s doing the looking. It’s them. They’re looking at him. They look him up and down.
‘Howzit, China,’ the one says.
Now he’s a Chinaman. First he was ‘sir’ and now suddenly he’s a fucken Chinaman. These okes must watch out, he’s not feeling so cool today. Pop always tells him he mustn’t talk to strangers and he mustn’t trust them, ’cause they just use you for their own purposes. But he wasn’t born yesterday, he won’t let anyone just use him. And he’ll first ask them what they want. Both of them carry guns in holsters.
‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he says. ‘How can I help you? Lambert Benade.’ He offers the one man his hand.
‘Du Pisanie,’ the man says.
‘A pleasure,’ he says. The man laughs and signals to his friend he must also shake Lambert’s hand. The other one’s smoking. He puts his cigarette in his mouth and sticks out his hand.
‘Van der Walt,’ he says, squinting. He shakes Lambert’s hand just very briefly and then takes the cigarette out of his mouth again.
‘Glad to meet you,’ says Van der Walt, blowing out smoke. The men look at each other and smile. He wonders what they think is so funny. Didn’t they specially call him over? Why are they smiling so much, in that case?
‘Gentlemen, may I ask what you wish to achieve by talking to
me?’ he asks.
Du Pisanie goes and sits at the table. He sticks his head into the papers. Van der Walt suddenly starts coughing from his cigarette. He turns round and finishes his coughing. Then he turns back again. His eyes are full of tears from all the coughing.
‘Mr Benade,’ says Van der Walt, ‘can you shoot?’ He taps with a flat hand on the gun in his hip-holster.
Du Pisanie looks up from his papers. ‘Mr Benade, the real question is, do you want to shoot?’ He pulls his gun out of the holster and puts it down, ‘ka-thwack’, on top of the papers.
Lambert shuffles in his lace-ups. Now they’re asking him a question. What’s he supposed to say now?
‘Shoot,’ he says. He feels just as stupid as his mother.
‘A glass of Oros for you?’ Van der Walt asks.
‘Yes, please,’ he says. ‘Nice and hot today.’
‘Yes, hot,’ says Du Pisanie.
Van der Walt pours three glasses of Oros with water. They drink.
‘Aaah,’ says Du Pisanie, putting down his glass.
‘Aaah,’ says Van der Walt, putting down his glass.
‘Was nice,’ he says, putting down his glass.
Now what? First shoot, then Oros. What’s their case? He looks at them. But they’re looking at each other. They look a bit funny, if you ask him. He thinks he should rather get away from here now.
‘Well, then, gentlemen, I’ll be on my way. Goodbye, then,’ he says.
‘No, wait,’ says Du Pisanie.
‘We’re recruiting,’ says Van der Walt. ‘For the AWB’s task force on the Rand.’
Du Pisanie pats his sleeve. Only now does Lambert see the AWB badge. Red and white, with things that look like little black hooks.
‘Soldiers, chefs, cleaners, anything … medical, technical, telecommunications. Were you in the army, Lambert?’
Suddenly Du Pisanie sounds soft and friendly.
Now suddenly he’s ‘you’ and ‘Lambert’. These people want to use him, not for shooting, but for ‘anything’. No thanks, he’s no one’s skivvy. And he wasn’t in the army, either, ’cause of the fits. But that’s none of their business.
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