‘He’ll catch a cold in his kidneys,’ says Mol.
‘So what,’ says Treppie. ‘I wish he’d catch something else in his kidneys. He’s busy wiping us out here.’
‘Wiping,’ Pop wants to say, but just ‘ing’ comes out. He wants to clean his hand on his shirt. Lambert’s arm was full of slime when Pop dragged him. But Pop’s shirt isn’t there any more. All he rubs are his ribs. It feels like he’s got too many ribs. Can it be that he’s gotten more ribs from all the misery?
Treppie mops his forehead with his arm. He looks spent. Utterly spent. ‘I must get to the Chinese,’ he says. ‘I’m late.’
‘Late,’ Pop hears himself saying. His voice is back. But it doesn’t sound like his own voice any more.
‘Go,’ says Mol. ‘We’ll manage.’
‘It’s okay, go,’ Pop tells him.
But Treppie keeps looking around him, at the den’s walls. He throws his arms up into the air. Like the Witnesses do at the end of their sessions, when they pray. But Treppie’s not praying. He’s looking. ‘Look. Just look how mad the fucker is.’
They look where Treppie’s looking. He’s looking up at the wall, just below the ceiling. Where Lambert’s calendars used to be.
‘Creepies,’ says Mol.
The animals in the depths. Pop doesn’t know why he thinks this, it’s not animals, it’s creepies and pests. And they’re not roaring in the depths, they’re painted on the walls. The strangest things he’s ever seen. All of them with too many wings and too many legs and heads. Snakes and mice and things, but they don’t look right. They look deformed. You can tell what they are only from what Lambert wrote underneath. Some are still just names. Others have a bit of outline, or a piece of wing. It looks like Lambert wanted to paint everything at the same time.
TERMITE, EARWIG, COCKROACH, SNAIL, ANT, SUPERBEE, MOUSE, MOTH, RAT, WORM, BAT, SPIDER, WASP, MOLE II.
‘Mole the Second,’ says Pop.
‘Second what?’ asks Mol.
Pop shows her where on the wall.
‘I only see one,’ says Mol. ‘Where’s the second?’
‘It’s like the kings and queens of England,’ says Treppie. ‘Henry the Eighth, Elizabeth the Second.’
‘I don’t see any queen,’ says Mol.
‘Just shows you how mad he is. He thinks a mole is a member of the royal family. He must figure he’s a prince or something himself. Prince Lambert the Executioner, known for his fires, his fucking with the neighbours and his painting on walls. The only son and heir of Queen Mother Mol. He’ll be remembered for that.’ Treppie’s grinning. After everything that happened here this morning, he’s getting his bearings back again.
Pop grins back. Just to feel if he still can. It’s not that he thinks Treppie’s funny. There’s nothing funny going on here. He feels shaky. He’s over-exerted himself. He needs to sit down. He finds a crate. ‘What happened?’ he asks.
‘You were sleeping,’ says Mol.
‘I dreamt everything was white, meanwhile it was smoke all the time.’
‘We left you to sleep,’ says Mol.
‘I must go now,’ says Treppie.
‘First tell us what happened,’ says Pop. ‘I’ll take you to the bus stop in Melville.’
‘He started last night. First he tried to get the Tedelex going, but it didn’t want to work. Then he began fucking around with Flossie, but not a single part of Flossie wanted to co-operate. He said everything had to get fixed for his, er, birthday. Then, later, the noise woke me up. It sounded like a fucken canning factory in the back here. So I went out to look. I told him he shouldn’t expect miracles, times were bad. He said to hell with bad times, he was only going to be forty once and he wanted to face the New South Africa like a decent man, with a good woman on his arm. Then he showed me his list.’
Treppie shows them the spot on the wall where the list is. They read it. Treppie picks up a pen from the floor and scratches out (time will tell). He also draws a line through the words everything must work, as well as change mattress.
‘How do you know?’ Pop asks, pointing at number 18, the fridges.
‘I know,’ says Treppie, ‘they’ve been standing here all seized up since before the fire, before the previous big fire.’
Treppie turns slowly from the wall. Then he smiles a disbelieving little smile. ‘Come to think of it …’ he says.
‘What,’ asks Mol.
‘What’s the date today?’ Treppie asks.
‘November,’ says Mol.
‘November the what?’
‘Fourth. No, it’s the fifth,’ says Pop.
Treppie claps his hands. ‘That’s it!’ he shouts.
‘That’s what?’ asks Mol.
‘Method in the madness! It was Guy Fawkes the last time too, remember. When he made that fire. Fifth of November. He wanted to have a party in the back here.’
‘To advertise,’ Mol says.
‘Then his spanner fell in the grass, and then there was that big fuckup.’
‘So we fuck along, so we fuck along,’ Treppie sings to the tune of ‘Sow the seed, oh sow the seed’.
‘Just look what’s been ticked off here,’ says Pop.
They read:
25. gun
26. binoculars
27. umbiera (Kaffir-harp)
‘Which he gets where?’ Mol asks.
‘He’s lying, man! Prince Lambert, the Prince of Lists, says he’s got a gun!’
Treppie writes 28. list underneath Lambert’s list. And under that he writes: 29. fit (the prince is dead, long live the prince. Guy Fawkes 1993).
‘He’s not dead,’ says Mol. ‘Leave his list alone.’
‘And then?’ asks Pop.
‘And then what?’
‘When Flossie didn’t want to work, what happened then?’
‘Then he started raising hell, all through the night. He didn’t sleep a wink. Me neither. Then I thought, let me just watch, ’cause here comes big shit again.’
‘It was you, Treppie,’ Mol says. ‘You went and stirred him up again! I know you. You torment him, just for the hell of it!’
‘He doesn’t need tormenting, Mol. He fucks out all on his own. Like a thread stripping on a jack. Strip! Slip! Kabam! If only he’d take his fucken pills.’ Treppie shakes a plastic bottle full of pills that he finds in the Tedelex’s door.
‘“Epanutin. L. Benade. One tablet three times a day. With meals”,’ he reads.
‘Meals,’ says Mol.
‘Yes, Mol, meals, like the food you cook in this house. Fit for a king, isn’t it? Bacon and eggs for breakfast. Pill. Rice, meat and potatoes for lunch. Pill. Wors and baked beans for supper. Pill.’ With each would-be meal Treppie throws his head back like he’s swallowing a pill. He smiles a silly smile at Mol, knocking his knuckles against his head, as if the pills are making him feel better.
‘Leave them alone!’ says Pop.
‘He says those pills make him feel dull,’ says Mol.
‘He can do with being a bit dull. The bright spark of the family,’ says Treppie, laughing through the side of his mouth.
‘Stop it,’ says Pop. ‘And then what?’
‘Then he started smashing up everything and dragging things outside. By seven o’clock this morning he was ready for fireworks. He threw petrol over everything. You were still sleeping. And from then on, we’ve been feeding the fire. Shoes, mats, Watchtowers, you name it! Blow high the flame! Hoist the flag! Trumpets away! Brothers and sisters, now there goes a man. His name is Lambertus Benade!’
Suddenly Treppie’s mouth is full of spit. He spits, ‘plop!’, and a mouthful of gob lands next to Lambert on the cement floor.
‘Sis!’ says Mol.
‘I’m going now,’ says Treppie. ‘Otherwise tomorrow we won’t eat again. Coke and bread and polony, polony and bread and Coke, bread and Coke and polony. For what we are about to receive, may we be thankful, Lord, praised be thy name, amen,’ Treppie sings.
‘Okay.’ Pop’s feel
ing sick. He looks at Lambert lying there without pants, and with arms that look like they’ve been turned inside out. With a flat box sticking out from between his teeth. He can feel Mol looking at him. He knows that she knows he’s feeling sick. He feels white. Treppie’s also looking at him. Treppie’s talking so much ’cause he knows Pop saw him crying when he was upside down.
‘Go fetch the cushions from the chairs in the lounge,’ Mol tells them.
‘Let’s first straighten his arms out,’ says Pop.
WATERMELON
Mol stands in the lounge doorway. Pop’s sleeping in his chair. Mol’s just been to the back to look at Lambert again. For the third time tonight. At least he moved. He turned his head this way and then that way, shifting on to his side, with his fat, white bum facing her. Then she went and fetched the bottle of Coke in the kitchen and put it down next to his head. And she went to check the washing line to see if his shorts were dry yet. But they weren’t. What more can she do? She turns around and goes back to their room, where she fetches the faded old blanket, full of holes. Let her go put it over him, over his naked bum.
There’s so much rubbish and scrap iron on the den’s floor, she struggles to reach Lambert from the inside door. Enough for another three fires. She looks up, at MOLE II, there on the wall. Where would MOLE I be, then? She looks at Lambert’s list again. Number 12 reads: scrub linolium kitchen clean (Ma).
Mol walks back to the kitchen. She sticks her head round the door and looks inside. The kitchen looks funny, but she can’t figure out why it looks so odd. Then she sees the bits and pieces of Flossie that they carried through here this morning – half-melted, half-burnt plastic. And rubber. Like monsters’ body parts, or something. Scales and tails. Let her just close this door, for now. If they get hungry, she can always fix their bread in the lounge. Later.
She finds herself standing in the lounge doorway again. The TV’s on but there’s no sound. A little while ago, when Pop fell asleep, she switched it on. The news. Shooting and talking. So she turned off the sound and watched the never-ending talking and shooting, and the corpses under blankets in the dust, and people pointing this way and then that way. It’s always the same. Now she walks up to the TV and switches it right off. She’s walking slowly. Her legs feel like they don’t belong to her any more.
She walks round the back of Pop’s chair to go look out the window. She doesn’t see anything. Every now and again she hears people shooting off their Guy Fawkes crackers, far away. Usually the Benades have crackers too. Lambert’s the one who shoots them off on the little stoep in front. Pink ones that whistle, or green ones that make a small fountain, or silver ones that go ‘whoosh!’ up into the sky, shooting sparks like rain. So pretty.
But tonight they’ve got nothing. Tonight they stay inside. Tired. It’s been a long day.
Mol walks around Pop’s chair, on the front side. She bends over to see if he’s still breathing. She can’t see anything, so she listens. She hears nothing, but his chest moves slightly, up and down, up and down. His eyelids look like two shells. He doesn’t move. He must be having a white dream again.
She goes and sits down in her chair. Without cushions the chair’s very hard. How can Pop just fall asleep? she wonders. And he’s so thin, too. But he hasn’t moved an inch since he came to sit here this afternoon, after they got back.
Before they took Treppie to the bus stop, they all helped to make Lambert a bed with cushions from the chair. It was a helluva struggle to get him on to those cushions. He was like a dead-weight. In the end Treppie said for a job like this you need leverage. So he and Pop used iron pipes to work Lambert on to the cushions. Then Pop put his torn piece of shirt neatly over Lambert’s bottom half again, and she took his shorts to rinse them under the outside tap, ’cause what she saw in there was more than just pee.
Did they think he’d come to again?
Give him a chance, Pop said.
‘Maybe he’ll become a vegetable,’ Treppie said. ‘A king-sized watermelon. Suits me fine if he dangles from a stem for the rest of his life. Under a leaf, nice and quiet, then all you have to do is water him every now and again.’
Sis, Treppie, she said to him. Treppie can be so cruel. But he can’t help himself. That’s what she wanted to say. Instead, she just kept quiet.
They put on some clean clothes and then they got into the car to take Treppie to the Melville bus stop. They all felt better after washing themselves.
All except Pop. Pop was white in the face. That’s why, after they dropped off Treppie, she said to him they must first go to Shoprite and then take a little drive up Ontdekkers.
Pop wanted to know why.
Just to get out a little, she said. She took Pop by the arm, but then she let go again. She could see he was far away. Too far. She could feel it on his skin.
So it wasn’t long before they were back home again.
At Shoprite they bought a tin of dog food for Toby. But not Butch, his usual. She said if Toby felt the way she did today, then he must also feel like he needs a holiday. And, as Treppie would say, a change is as good as a holiday, so they bought him some Husky instead.
When they got on to Ontdekkers, Pop remembered he still had the paper in his pocket with the measurements for the bathroom mirror. So they went to the Mirror Shop at the corner, ’cause they knew Lambert was dead serious about fixing that mirror. It was one of the things on his list.
They cut the mirror straight away. Sixteen by twenty-five. Ten rand fifty.
And then they just came back home again.
Poor Pop. She watched him from behind as he walked over the loose blocks to go pee, with the mirror in his arms. The house stank terribly of smoke. And there was soot all over the walls. It looked like there’d been a war. Pieces of burnt, black paper were flying about everywhere, inside and outside. Pop waved his arms, trying to catch the stuff. But when he did catch a piece, it was like catching nothing. When he opened his hand, there was no more than a black smear on his palm. He showed it to her, as if she knew the answer. But what could she say? All she could do was wipe his hand with her own, and then she got the soot on her hand too.
When he finished peeing, he pulled the last piece of mirror off the cabinet and began fitting the new one. But it was too big. A hair’s breadth too big. Not even. So Pop put the little mirror down in the bath. He’d in any case forgotten to buy glue. He’d make a plan later. Or Lambert would.
So then they came out and sat down here in front. She tried to talk to Pop, to keep his mind occupied. About mattresses, how they should get a new one for Lambert, or pass theirs on to him and buy themselves a new one, ’cause they were two to a bed. And they were old. But Pop didn’t want to talk. He looked like he didn’t even want to live any more. His chin just kept sagging lower and lower on his chest. She was still talking when she saw he was fast asleep.
Now she looks at Pop, here next to her. He’s kicked off his shoes in front of him. He’s still wearing the same socks he had on this morning, when they were sliding and slipping around in the passage. It’s his only pair. Worn right through at the heels. All his toes stick out in front. The toes look like fingers. Black from soot. Shame, poor Pop.
As he sits there, she stares at all the bits of his body. He looks like his joints are too thin, like all the places where his hands and feet and head should be fixed to his body are joined by nothing more than the power of mercy. Mercy. Suddenly she feels she dare not look away, ’cause if she does, the mercy won’t hold any longer. And then Pop will break apart, right here next to her, all along his joints. And she would’ve been the only one who could’ve kept him together, just by looking. So she looks and looks. Her eyes get heavy. She must just not fall asleep now. Everything depends on her. The joints in Pop’s body. And what would she amount to, without him?
Suddenly the front gate creaks. It’s Treppie. Thank God, he’s back from the Chinese. Now there’ll be some life in this place. She fingers her bun at the back and pins the loose pieces b
ack into place.
HAPPY GUY FAWKES
‘Happy Guy Fawkes,’ Treppie says loudly as he walks in through the front door. Mol indicates he must shush, Pop’s sleeping.
‘Happy fuck-up,’ says Treppie, even louder. He pulls a handful of Tom Thumb crackers out of his trouser pocket. ‘Here, Mol, I got these from the Chinese. I thought maybe you’d want to salute the day. Twenty-one shots into the sky. For the heroes who died. And for the one who had a fit.’
She takes the crackers from Treppie and puts them into her housecoat pocket.
‘Has that fucker come to yet?’
She shakes her head.
‘Maybe you should put the crackers into a golden syrup tin and throw some matches in as well. Right next to his head. Shock treatment. Maybe then he’ll wake up. Off with a bang, on with a bang. Bang! Bang!’ says Treppie, pretending to shoot a pistol into the sky.
‘They say there’s no harm in trying your best shot,’ he says, ‘or do you really want a little melon in the house? Sorry, kaffir-watermelon!’ Treppie sits down on a crate. He takes out his pocket-knife and slaps it, ‘ka-thwack’, on to the palm of his hand. He looks at the knife. Then he looks at Mol. Slowly, he pulls out the smallest blade.
‘Frog-killer,’ he says softly, ‘a man’s best friend. Frog-skins, mole-skins, mole-necks, mole-tails!’
He looks at Mol again.
Mol’s looking hard at Pop. She wants him to wake up now. She leans forward, out of her chair, towards him. ‘Pop, Pop, wake up. Treppie’s here.’
‘Here I am again, with a pocket-knife to your brain.’ Treppie kicks Pop’s feet.
Pop wakes up. ‘Treppie.’ He swallows hard.
‘What you think, Pop? I was saying to Mol, she must stuff that, er, buster of yours full of crackers and bang him awake. Then she can get even with him for that time when he locked her into the fridge with the Peking Ducks. Then they’ll be quits, after all these years. Then they can start with a clean slate, all over again.’
Treppie gets up quickly. He pulls Mol out of her chair, holding the knife against her throat. ‘March!’ he shouts into her face, turning her towards the passage.
Triomf Page 31