‘Sorry, gentlemen, I’m NP.’
‘Oh, my God,’ says Van der Walt, smacking himself on the forehead with a flat hand.
‘What you think the NP’s going to do for your kind, Lambert? Tell me, what?’ asks Du Pisanie.
‘They’re going to protect me, ’cause I’m a minority,’ he says.
Why do they say ‘for your kind’? What’s wrong with him? He is who he is, full-stop.
‘Some more Oros?’ offers Van der Walt.
‘No thank you.’
They’re not laughing any more.
Du Pisanie shakes his head. ‘It just goes to show,’ he says to Van der Walt. Then he turns back to Lambert. ‘We want to help you to protect yourself, Lambert. We want our people to be independent. And to look after themselves. We want our people to stand on their own two feet, in peace as much as in war.’
Now Van der Walt’s very serious. He taps the table as he stands there next to Du Pisanie. ‘Independent’, tap, ‘look after themselves’, tap, ‘stand on their own two feet’, tap.
‘Listen nicely now, Lambert,’ says Du Pisanie, ‘can you peel potatoes?’ He sounds like he means even if Lambert can do nothing but peel potatoes, he’s made for life.
‘Or wash dishes, or scrub floors?’ says Van der Walt. Van der Walt sounds like he means if Lambert can do nothing but wash dishes or scrub floors, the world is his oyster.
‘Listen to me,’ he says to Du Pisanie, ‘I’m not your kaffirgirl.’ He takes a step back. ‘I’m not your kaffir that you can order around. Peel here, scrub there!’
‘It’s for the task force, man!’ says Van der Walt. ‘Not everyone can do the shooting.’
‘Says who?’ he asks.
‘Lambert, listen to us now, man.’ It’s Du Pisanie. Now he sounds like he’s begging. He winks at Van der Walt. Van der Walt must play along nicely now. ‘Can you fix things, things that are broken, machines and things?’
‘Volkswagens,’ he answers.
‘And what else?’ asks Van der Walt.
‘Lawn-mowers, fridges, washing machines, video machines, fans, you name it,’ he says.
‘Excellent!’ says Du Pisanie.
‘There’s nothing that these two hands can’t do,’ he says. He shows them his hands. Van der Walt and Du Pisanie look at them – Lambert’s big hands with their funny, bent fingers, some of them too short, with knobs on the wrong places. Then they look at each other.
‘But we can certainly use you, old friend!’ says Van der Walt. Du Pisanie looks quickly at Van der Walt, shaking his head hard, just once.
‘He means you’ll be an asset to the AWB’s task force, sir,’ says Du Pisanie.
But no one’s going to ‘old friend’ him and then ‘sir’ him in the same breath – he heard what he heard.
‘No one uses me. I’m my own blarry boss. I don’t do kaffirwork. Take your fucken AWB and stick it up your backsides, man!’ He takes a few steps back.
‘Hey!’ says Van der Walt, taking a step closer. ‘What did you say there, hey? Come again, let’s hear you say that again, hey …’
‘Leave the rubbish alone, man,’ says Du Pisanie. ‘We’re wasting our time with him, he’s just a piece of rubbish, man.’
‘He’s worse than a kaffir, the fucker. Just look at him!’ says Van der Walt.
‘Jesus,’ he hears one of them say behind his back as he walks away, ‘I really didn’t know you still got people like that around here.’
Lambert walks away, fast. He’s limping. His ankle got sore from standing so long there under that big umbrella. He’s so spitting mad he could scream. He could chew up a car he’s so pissed off. Give him a car and he’ll bite right through the bumper! Fuck! His throat burns. Their fucken arses! Their fucken mothers’ arses too! Them with their fucken Oros! To hell with their fucken task force! They can peel their own fucken potatoes. They can go down on their own fucken knees and scrub their own fucken floors. What fucken floors, in any case? They’re the kind of people who piss on carpets. That’s what Treppie read in the papers. The AWBs pissed on the carpets at the negotiations. Just like Toby. If he sees a carpet, he pisses on it. That’s why they chucked all the carpets out at home. They stank too much from Toby’s piss. Fucken dogs! As if he’s going to wipe up their stink piss. He’s not their blarry servant-girl! And he’s not rubbish either, he’s no one’s rubbish. Just fuck them, man. Fuck them to hell and back.
And so Lambert talks to himself as he walks in the hot sun, towards the dumps. He talks out aloud. As he walks, he drags one hand along the prefab wagon-wheels on the prefab walls. He keeps his head down and looks at his feet. People mustn’t waste his fucken time like that. He’s got his own plans. He’s got a whole fucken list of things to do. And not enough time to do them in. Today it’s first things first. To the dumps. Get wine boxes. Take out the bags, so he can put petrol in when the shit hits the fan.
Treppie says petrol’s always the first thing that dries up when the shit starts flying.
He wonders what’s all this shit that’s going to fly so much.
When he asks Treppie what kind of shit he means, Treppie says shit is shit. You don’t specify shit, you duck for shit. And even when you’ve looked for it yourself, you still duck. You don’t just stand there. You’ve got a pair of eyes in your head, after all.
Treppie says that’s why there’s so much shit in the country. It’s ’cause everyone who looks for shit, stands for shit too. They think if they keep standing for shit, they’ll be heroes. But actually they’re just shits. After a while they’re so full of shit they can’t duck any more, even if they wanted to. And so everything becomes an even bigger load of shit. That’s why he thinks the Benades should just fuck off, ’cause he’s not going to stand for the shit that other people look for, and keep looking for. And it’s coming, he says, the shit’s coming, for absolutely sure it’s coming. It’s coming like lava from two sides.
When Treppie’s finished with the shit-story, he sings: ‘Tides of benediction!’
He can’t understand how shit coming from two sides like lava can be tides of benediction, but that’s Treppie for you.
And that’s how he knows Treppie. He wishes Treppie could’ve been with him today. He would have fixed those two fucken ‘task forces’, that’s for sure. Treppie doesn’t have to lay a finger on a person to fix him. He just does it through the air. He can make people feel so small it’s like they aren’t wearing pants any more, otherwise they lose their cool so badly they walk around for days in a sweat.
He turns right at the T-junction, to the dumps. It’s a Wednesday morning, so there won’t be so many people dumping today. But there’re a lot of kaffirs sitting and waiting for work. Loose kaffirs. You always find bunches of them sitting there. They sit in the shade across the road, against the rocks, and when a car comes, they all stick their fingers into the air. It means: ‘Take me, I’m a loose kaffir and I want piece-work’. The kaffirs inside the dump are fixed kaffirs – they work for the municipality. They wear overalls and they’ve got big, thick gloves. When people bring their rubbish, they throw it into big containers. They’ve got containers for bricks and containers for stones and others for grass and leaves and so on. They’ve also got containers for household rubbish. That’s now the rubbish that’s too much or too late for Tuesday. And that’s exactly where he wants to be. The kaffirs who work with those containers always open up the bags to see what’s inside. Sometimes they find old food. Then they eat that rotten food right there without even taking off their gloves. But it’s not just rotten food you find there, it’s all kinds of stuff. Radios, shoes, hairdryers, old clothes. He’s even seen whole fridges there. He once told Treppie he must come see the fridges, but Treppie says he doesn’t want to see another fucked-out fridge for the rest of his living days, let alone touch one. He says he’s done his bit for fridges. From now on he only wants to read about them in the classifieds. He doesn’t want to own them. He says it gives him great pleasure to see how far they travel
, second-hand, third-hand, fourth-hand. But once they’re beyond redemption he doesn’t want to see them any more. He’s had his fair share of lost fridges. That day in the yard when everything burnt down. He says there was so much fireworks going off into the sky he felt like he was in The Towering Inferno. It was bad, but it was also high drama. And a rubbish dump, he says, is not the final movie he wants in his head one day when he pops off, with fridges in the main roles, thank you very much. Treppie can talk a lot of shit. But at least he always has something to say.
He wants to go in at the gate, but first he has to wait for two container lorries to pass. One’s coming in and the other’s going out. They’re making a hell of a racket. It looks like they’re too high on their wheels. Pitch-black smoke pours out from the exhausts under their bellies. The smoke blows full into his face. He turns away his face and puts his hand in front of his mouth. The lorries are loaded to the brim with red-brick rubble and bits of plaster. The containers bump and grate against their frames. The lorries roar and blow. They brake and scrape their gears – the one to make its turn down the hill, and the other to get up the hill so it can turn into the road. The municipal kaffirs on top of the lorries shout and whistle and scream here above his head. The drivers sweat and swear. Their muscles flex as they turn the big steering wheels. Yellow-red sand sifts through the rims as the lorries turn, and the big wheels spin on all the loose gravel. Stones shoot from under the tyres.
Christ almighty! Suddenly it looks like the lorries want to open up their jaws here in front, at the grids. Like they want to bite him with teeth of yellow, dusty iron. He feels pain shoot into his tail-end. No, not that! God in heaven, please, help! Not here. Just keep a hold, now. Fucken lorries. They’re all over him in his fucken head. He can feel himself going white in the face. Foamy spit bubbles up inside his cheeks. And now his mother’s not here with her washing pegs, either. He wipes sweat off his upper lip. Down, down, he wants to fall down, to the ground.
‘Hold on, Benade! Hold on!’ he says to himself.
Then everything feels like it’s on top of him. He goes down on one knee. The lorries roar, now this way, now that way, like demons straight from hell. They look like they’re floating on air, with flames under their wheels. Then he feels someone grab him by his arm. He looks up but he can’t see properly. Sparks blow up in front of his eyes. The man pulls him up and away, across the road. Away.
‘Sit, sit down, man!’ says the man. He sits. He can’t see where he’s sitting.
‘Here, my man, drink some Coke, man!’
He gropes for the bottle in front of him. He swallows, but his throat feels tight. He takes another sip. Open up, throat, open, please! His eyes feel stiff. He rolls them around. His tongue is lame. He licks his lips. Jesus, fuck, that was close. That was close, fucken close! Thank you, God, Jesus thanks!
He opens his eyes. In front of him, sitting on his heels, he sees a kaffir. The kaffir’s got a faded, sloppy hat on his head. And he’s wearing reflector shades. There’s a cut on his cheek. His face is sharp and yellow. He looks rough, like he’s a rough, loose kaffir or something. But Lambert’s not sure. The kaffir’s wearing a faded denim shirt with holes where the sleeves used to be. Dirty threads of denim hang down on to his arms. There’s a green band around his wrist and a copper bangle around the other arm, high up, just above the elbow. Long, thin arms hang like sticks from his shirt. His pants are too short and the skin sticking out underneath is rough. As far as Lambert can make out, the man’s legs are like broomsticks, with a string of beads round one ankle. Red and green and yellow. Almost ANC, he thinks. Almost Inkatha. But not quite. He wonders what this yellow kaffir’s case is. He’s a different kind, this one. He looks clever, and it looks like something’s tickling him. God knows what’s tickling him so much. He looks at the kaffir’s takkies. No socks, no laces. This is not even a loose kaffir.
This, he thinks, is a tsotsi-kaffir. As thin as a wild dog. What does he want with me?
Lambert wants to get up, but his back feels lame. He can’t get up nicely. The kaffir presses him softly against his chest, back down again.
‘It’s okay, my bra. I’m just checking for you here. Wait, sit, it’s okay. Are you feeling better now? You faint or what? Those lorries nearly got you, man. You were nearly squeezed flat, my man, flat like a pancake. But I watch out for you, my man. I pick you up, I bring you here. I give you Coke. I’m your friend, man. Don’t panic.’
‘I’m not your friend,’ he says. ‘I want to go home now.’ But he can’t get up.
The kaffir stands up. He takes a big step backwards. He motions with his hands. This kaffir’s full of sights.
‘Okay! Okay! Okay! You’re not my friend, hey, you are my boss, right? Big boss, ja baas. I’m just a kaffir at the dumps, boss, okay? I catch whiteys who faint here. That’s my job, yes? Here a whitey, there a whitey, faint. Faint left, faint right, faint centre, all day long. I’m the fainting boy, right?’
The kaffir turns his back to him. From behind it looks like he’s laughing. Then he turns around again.
‘Okay? Relax, my bra, just relax. Boss, king, president, chief, caesar. Whatever. God in heaven, anything you want, I say. Any way you want it. At you service. Excuse me boss, please boss, thank you boss, ja baas, no baas, sorry boss that I live boss!’ The kaffir turns away again. His hands are at his sides. He drops his head and makes little shaking movements.
‘I did not mean that so, man. Thanks for your help, man, many thanks. I just must go home now, that’s all. I’m not feeling right, you see.’
But he sags back against the rock. He sees now he’s going to have to wait. He can still feel the little stabs in his tail-end. Better to let it pass, otherwise it might come back again. Otherwise maybe it’ll happen in front of Shoprite, next to the stewing-meat sign. That’ll be fucken bad, even worse than here in front of the gates at the rubbish dumps. He sees the kaffirs sitting and looking at him across the road. But they’re sitting with their fingers up in the air. They want a job, that’s all they want. They couldn’t give a shit about him lying here on the other side of the road with a back that feels lame. Why should they? Well, he figures, he’s had some luck with this tsotsi-kaffir. If the kaffir hadn’t helped him, he’d be lying there right now having a fit in the dust. Pissing in his pants, with all the lorries and cars full of people waiting in a queue for him to get finished.
‘Hey,’ he calls out to the kaffir, who’s still standing with his back turned. ‘I mean it, you! You saved my life there, man! Thank you, man. Thanks again very much.’ And then as an afterthought: ‘I owe you one.’
The kaffir turns around.
‘Okay, okay, that’s enough,’ he says. Now he looks the hell in. He sits down next to Lambert. He takes a packet of tobacco out of his back pocket and rolls a cigarette. Then he shakes a few green crumbs from a matchbox into the tobacco.
Dagga, Lambert thinks. This kaffir actually thinks he can sit here and smoke a joint in front of him, a white man!
The kaffir makes the joint with his long, thin fingers. He licks the paper. He’s concentrating hard. You can see he’s been rolling joints for a long time. He folds the paper into a cigarette shape, twisting one end closed. Then he smooths the joint nicely with his fingers, pressing them together like a nozzle. He’s got two long nails on one hand. The kaffir lights up and takes a deep pull. He offers Lambert the joint. Lambert shakes his head. No thanks. The kaffir shrugs and looks the other way.
He stares at the kaffir who’s looking the other way. This is one cheeky fucken kaffir, he thinks. How does he know Lambert won’t go and report him to the police? How does he know he isn’t a policeman himself? He thinks about this. No, he reckons he doesn’t look like a policeman. He checks out the kaffir again. The kaffir looks like he’s forgotten about him. He’s looking into the street, now this way, now that way. He’s looking at what’s coming. He smokes his joint so hard the smoke floats around his head in clouds. He wishes the kaffir would take off those sungl
asses, ’cause he doesn’t know where to look when he looks at him. All he sees there is his own reflection. He feels the kaffir can see him better than he can see the kaffir. This is not a scared kaffir, he decides. This kaffir isn’t afraid of anything. He’s an okay kaffir, this.
‘I’ll take a pull now, thank you,’ he says. Why not? He’s sitting here on his backside, anyway, at the entrance to the rubbish dumps.
‘Sure, man, sure,’ the kaffir says. He passes him the stub.
Lambert takes a pull. He just hopes this kaffir hasn’t got germs. But so what, anyway. He, Lambert, is not always so clean himself. The joint makes him cough.
‘Easy,’ the kaffir says to him. ‘Easy now, my bra,’ he says, and Lambert feels how he smiles, right through the dagga smoke, back at the kaffir, as they sit there, across the road, in front of the gates of the rubbish dump. And he sees how the kaffir smiles back at him. And he, Lambert, smiles even more. And the kaffir too, all you see are teeth. Then the kaffir starts laughing. He takes the joint that Lambert’s handing back to him and he laughs and coughs and he smacks Lambert on the back so hard that he starts hiccuping. And then Lambert laughs and pushes the kaffir who’s laughing at him with his shoulder, and the kaffir loses his balance. He falls over on to the grass, on his elbow.
‘Hey, man!’ says the kaffir as he props himself up again.
‘I say, man!’ he says. ‘Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!’
‘Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!’ he and the kaffir laugh, there under the trees, next to the rocks, in front of the gates of the rubbish dump. They laugh so much they start crying. And when they’ve almost finished laughing, he says: ‘So now, what’s your name, hey?’
‘Ooooh!’ says the kaffir. ‘I’ve got many, many names. One for every occasion. But to you, my friend, I’m Sonnyboy, just Sonnyboy, plain and simple. And what’s your name?’
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