MAN OF STARS
They walk to the den, each with a glass in hand. She holds the candle on its little lid. Pop’s got the Coke and the Klipdrift. He pulls up crates so they can sit on either side of Lambert. He puts down the candle next to Lambert’s head. The flame throws funny, dark little patches over Lambert’s face, and long, pointy shadows on his painting; the one of their house and the things in Africa. Toby sits near Lambert’s feet.
They sit down. Washed clean and done now with their crying, they look at Lambert lying there on his back. Only his head sticks out from under the worn old blanket. Funny shadows play on his face. He snores quietly. Pop sits back a little.
She holds out her glass for Pop to pour. He pours for both of them.
‘Well then, cheers,’ he says, clinking his glass against hers, just above Lambert’s chest. He does it very carefully.
She points. At least he’s not blue in the face any more. She takes a sip.
‘Strong as a horse,’ says Pop. ‘He’s sleeping nicely now.’
She remembers that Lambert’s shorts are still on the line. Pop waves it away, she mustn’t worry, that’s the least of their problems.
‘Tomorrow’s another day,’ he says.
‘Should we wake him up?’ She looks at Lambert’s fat cheeks going in and out as he snores.
‘What for?’ Pop looks scared.
‘For a sip of Coke.’
‘The game’s not worth the candle. It’s best to leave him.’
Mol suddenly feels silly. ‘Not the candle, the Coke. And not the game, the watermelon! The watermelon’s not worth the Coke.’
‘Don’t play games, Mol, God can hear you.’
Pop points a finger at her, but he can’t help it, he also smiles a bit.
‘Shsssh!’
Lambert stirs. His arm pushes off the blanket. Now his big fat forearm lies across his chest. It’s full of scorch-marks. His mouth opens and closes. He’s mumbling something. She signals to Pop he must come closer so he can also listen. They bend over to hear what he’s saying.
‘Light blue, my beloved, for ever and ever,’ he says in his sleep. Back and forth he turns his head. His lips are pouting and his cheeks tremble. There’s a deep hollow between his eyes. It looks like his face was assembled from many different pieces, as if it’s not one face but many faces. Mol looks at Pop, as if to ask, will he ever be okay again? Pop looks like he wants to run away, like he wants to scream. He looks the way he looked that time when Lambert put on the video of Frankenstein’s monster, when that terrible creature got up from its bed with its pasty face and then walked right through the door, killing live electric wires with its big paws. That was a horror. Pop doesn’t like horrors.
Lambert’s talking again.
‘Orion washes my feet,’ he says. Now it’s his legs that tremble. His blanket slides off on one side. His stomach looks blown up. His thing moves a little. Then he lets out a big sigh.
‘He’s dreaming,’ says Pop.
She motions to Pop, he must straighten the blanket.
‘No, you,’ says Pop.
Carefully, she pulls the blanket over him. She imagines he grabs her right now and strangles her to death, in his sleep. She’s getting the creeps here!
She sits back. Lambert’s quiet again. Pop pours another drink.
‘Light blue, my beloved.’ Does Pop know what it means? Yes? No?
‘Orion washes my feet’? Pop shakes his head.
‘Who’s Orion again?’
‘I’ve shown you before, Molletjie, it’s the man in the stars, the one with three shining jewels in his belt.’
‘Where is he?’
‘In the sky at night. I’ll show you. He’s easy to make out among the others. You can recognise him by his belt.’
‘I thought the stars were burnt out.’
Pop reaches out to her over Lambert’s belly.
‘Don’t worry, Molletjie, if the light from their fires reaches us, you can be sure they’re still full of life. Even though Orion is worlds away from us, his light will always reach Triomf. For ever and ever.’ Pop squeezes her hand.
Poor Triomf. Endlessly far beneath the stars. A very sad business, if you ask her.
‘You could say it’s heaven’s fireworks, Mol. Our Father in heaven’s Guy Fawkes. And it carries on and on, across the generations.’
When Pop starts like this, then it’s the Klipdrift talking. Then he tells her far-fetched stories about heaven. And it always makes her sad. She fights back her tears. Enough crying for one day. They must go sleep now.
Should they take their blanket? she wonders.
No, he says, he’s got a plan. He finds the old greycoat in the trunk on top of their cupboard. The one Old Mol used to wrap the dough in after the first kneading, so it would rise in the night. They can sleep under it, says Pop. It’s not so cold tonight, anyway.
TO SLEEP
When she blows out the candle, it’s very dark in the room. She lies on her back with her eyes open, like Pop, lying here next to her. Now that her eyes are used to it, she can see a bit.
The wind starts blowing outside. She feels funny in her stomach. It must be hunger. They didn’t eat a thing all day long.
‘That’s rain coming,’ says Pop.
The loose panel in the dressing table suddenly shakes, ‘cheeree-cheeree’. There’s a rumbling noise somewhere deep under the ground. The house shudders.
What was that? She puts her hand on Pop, under the coat.
‘Just a little mine tremor,’ he says.
A sinkhole, more like it.
Then they lie and listen to the wind and the first thunder, rumbling in a different way now. They watch the flickering against the wall as the lightning gets closer and closer.
‘Kabam!’ it strikes, right above them, so hard that the windows rattle in their frames.
‘Good God!’ says Mol, almost jumping out of her skin.
‘Never mind,’ says Pop, ‘we’re lying on rubber. And the house is earthed.’ He puts her hand back where it was.
Now the first loose drops of rain start falling, ‘plop! plop! plop!’, here and there on the corrugated-iron roof. The room is white from all the lightning. The sounds of the storm begin to fill up the whole world.
‘There it is, now,’ Pop says when the rain finally comes down.
‘Shorrr’ it runs off the gutterless roof.
‘It’s from all the trouble today,’ Mol says, ‘this rain.’
Pop gives the hand lying on top of him a little squeeze. Mol gives him one back. Then Pop’s breath starts to come more evenly. He’s almost asleep now. She hears the first drips all over the house. She forgot to put out bowls. Too bad.
Just before Mol falls asleep, she feels Pop’s little thing moving slightly under her hand.
She smiles in the dark.
He rises in his sleep, she thinks, just like Old Mol’s bread. The rain on the roof makes her sleepy. It feels like her eyes close all by themselves.
15
URBAN ANGEL
Lambert looks up at the helicopter. His mother and Pop and Treppie stand next to him. He went out early this evening, and when he got back from doing his rounds, the helicopter was there. Then he went inside and told his people they must come out on to the front lawn. So the neighbours and the people in the helicopter could see the Benades had nothing to hide.
Now the helicopter dips and turns, flying low over the houses of Triomf, block by block. Its blue searchlight shines into everyone’s backyards. The whole street’s full of people who want to know what’s going on. They stretch their necks this way and that to see if they can catch a glimpse of someone running away or climbing over a prefab wall. Everyone leaves their front doors open. Some of the houses have little Christmas trees with lights that switch on and off all the time. It’s two weeks into December already. He’s told them he wouldn’t mind a tree like that in their own lounge, with little lights and things. For putting on the sideboard. Treppie says it’
s kitsch, but then he says it actually depends on your class. What’s kitsch in Houghton is art in Triomf, he says, but his heart bleeds for anyone, never mind his social standing, who spends so much money on material things. Whether it’s kitsch or art, a tree like that costs a shithouse full of money. And the fuckers who get rich from selling those trees know all too well it’s not an electrical trick their customers are looking for. What they want is Jesus on an automatic time switch. Jesus on, Jesus off. And it’s been a bit rough on that poor Son of Man, Treppie says, inbetween all the onning and offing. For years on end. But no one seems to want to know anything about it. That’s why angels are so blessed, he says. They’re permanently switched on to ‘Hosannah in the highest’. But not with electricity. With holy current. That must be quite something, he says, but he doesn’t look like he believes what he’s saying.
Now the helicopter’s blue light shines right into their faces.
‘Ow!’ says his mother. She holds up her hand in front of her eyes. Pop looks the other way.
No, man, what are his people doing now, they must look straight into the light, with open eyes, so they can make themselves known to the protectors of the law. Let them shine their fucken light. If they want to interrogate him here in his own yard, then he’ll say to them, look, if it wasn’t for his regular patrols in the streets at night, which he does of his own free will, without expecting anything in return, then Triomf would be the same as all the other suburbs. Full of murder and robbery and killing. As things stand, Triomf is one of the safest areas in the whole of Jo’burg. You wouldn’t say it, with all the riff-raff and scum just a stone’s throw away, there on the other side of Ontdekkers. It’s all thanks to one white oke who can be seen regularly on the streets at night. They know they can’t just come and take chances here in Triomf.
That’s why, when he’s out at night and he walks past a munt, he shines his torch right into the munt’s eyes and then he says: Watch your step, my mate, I’m checking you out.
And nowadays he also tap-taps on his gun. Which he wears in his belt. Then their eyes go big, like saucers.
He sticks the gun in the belt that he took off his Man About Towns. He made a new hole right at the end of the belt, and now he can only just get it on again, under his belly. The stretched elastic in his shorts won’t hold the gun nice and tight. When he puts the gun into his belt, everyone can see it.
News travels. By this time, anyone who’s up to funny business will know about him. Especially now that he’s armed.
His family don’t know about the gun yet, but they stare at him like they do. ’Specially his mother. He figures that maybe they saw his list. And he thinks his mother saw more than just the list. He swears she saw THE MOLE IN THE FRIDGE. All his stuff was shifted away from the wall when he came to. But maybe he did it himself, when he was burning the rubbish. Or maybe they scratched around in his things when he was lights-out.
No respect for his privacy. But what can he do? He can’t remember so nicely any more. And when he woke up, he wasn’t wearing his shorts.
Lately, Treppie’s been holding his hands in front of his eyes like binoculars, and then he sings, in a deep voice:
‘I see a bad moon rising
I see trouble on the way.’
Or he pretends he’s pulling a gun out of a holster and then he does a crazy little dance with his mouth open and his tongue hanging out and his head pulled back into his shoulders. Then he pretends he’s shooting up into the sky, ‘crack!-crack!-crack!’.
And when he asks Treppie what now, then he says no, he’s just playing Lambert, the Sundance Kid.
Treppie’s arse. He doesn’t need to know about the gun. Nobody needs to know. He’s not going to start bothering about a licence now. In any case, nowadays it looks like every second kaffir’s got a gun, especially when they march up and down the streets and shoot off their weapons into the sky. No one can come and tell him they’ve all got licences. He’d thought it was against the law, but the policemen don’t do anything. They just lie on their tanks and watch. Treppie says that’s the official standpoint of the Ministry of Law and Order. Dis-cre-tio-nary po-li-cing. He says it’s just another word for shit-scared constables. But, he says, their shit comes in two different colours: one for when the Inkatha impis are on the march with their guns, and another when they think it’s APLA. When they reckon it’s APLA, they go on a raid across the border at night and shoot the APLAs full of holes in their beds. Never mind if they’re just apprentice-APLAs who’re still wet behind the ears. And with the ANC they don’t even bother any more. Treppie says that’s ’cause the ANC’s the biggest cannon of them all.
Well, all he knows is that if trouble comes their way, he’ll be on the right side. The police will still be grateful for people like him one day. People they can rely on. He stands for law and order here in Triomf. Like that little bloke in Urban Angel, who works for nothing and then gets a kick in the teeth for thanks. But in the end he’s still everyone’s hero.
So he doesn’t mind. He’s looking after Triomf, and he knows his day will come. Every dog has its day, no matter what Treppie says. Treppie says he mustn’t walk around so much on his own at night, ’cause he hasn’t got a groundswell behind him. He’s an individual, and the police are hard on lost individuals.
Well, he reckons the police are far too busy with discretionary policing to worry about people like him, never mind patrol Triomf. The only time they come here is when there’s trouble. And even then it’s a struggle to make them believe you’ve got a case. That’s if they ever get here. When they do come, it takes them hours to arrive.
Like when he phones about the people next door. If that bunch at Fort Knox isn’t making trouble, then it’s Fish-Eye and his lot on the other side. That Fish-Eye’s beginning to look just like his blarry fish, with his one flat eye and his scrappy little moustache-beard. He says he eats those fish of his. Sis! Carp. He keeps them in a Penguin Pool, with a pump that goes through seven phases. Carp have got to have bubbles, he says, otherwise they die. The pump starts off low, then it gets higher and higher. ‘Eeeeee!’ At phase five it starts shaking. ‘Drrr!’ It gets so bad that he, Lambert, can’t get to sleep in his own den from all the noise. Never mind the poor fucken carp. But he supposes carp don’t ever sleep.
He’s already told Fish-Eye, he knows all about machines. There’s nothing that these two hands of his can’t do. He’ll tune that pump for him in two ticks so it runs as smooth as a sewing machine, ‘zick-zick, zick-zick, zick-zick’, all day long, through all its phases. But then Fish-Eye told him he must fuck off. Just like that. Uneducated bastard.
And then the shit started again, just the other day. It was a Saturday night. That machine was making such a noise his mother began to think the whole of Jo’burg, all the way from Sandton to Bosmont, was falling into one big sinkhole. She started running up and down with her housecoat open and her stomach wobbling, screaming that she wasn’t ready, the Lord must forgive her and protect her from the jaws of the animal in the depths.
Then he thought, no, enough is enough, now he’s going to phone the emergency number. So he went across the road and asked the dykes very nicely. They were in a jolly mood, and they said okay, he must just stay there, they’d bring the phone to him. So they brought the phone to the lounge, with an extension.
‘Disturbing the peace,’ is how he began his story. Then he mentioned the carp and he explained about phase five.
But he was connected to the Flying Squad and they were using a radio telephone. Other people kept talking on the radio. The men from Murder and Robbery in Brixton were saying they’d run out of wet bags and wires, and where did you get wet bags after one in the morning in the New South Africa, and how did things look there at Johan Coetzee station, didn’t they maybe have some bags and wires to send over? And while they were at it, they could also send their little red Hotnots along so they could clean out their gills for them. They were sitting around in Brixton with nothing to do. Every tim
e Lambert got a word in, he had to start the whole story all over again, and each time the constable couldn’t understand what carp and phase five had to do with disturbing the peace. Likely blarry story, if they knew what wet bags and little red Hotnots and boredom had to do with each other. But he supposes every oke has his own way of frying fish.
That’s also what he said to the dykes, and then the tall one told the short one she would put this story of his before Lawyers for Human Rights, and the short one started laughing so much she had to go sit down and hold her head in her hands. He couldn’t figure out what was so funny, but he kept quiet. It was then that he clicked why Treppie says they’re so dilly. Treppie says you get two kinds of dykes, diesel dykes and dilly dykes, and these two across the road are definitely the dilly kind, if you ask him.
Anyhow, then the police came. They stood there next to the wall and they listened, but they said they could hear sweet blow-all, and he, Lambert, mustn’t waste their time like this. They were the Flying Squad and all they really handled was serious crime.
By that time the pump, of course, was a long way past phase five. It was running softly on phase one and all you could hear was ‘plop-plop’ as the carp took bites out of their bubbles.
Meanwhile, Fish-Eye was standing there behind his aloes, smoking and listening to everything they said, acting like he knew nothing.
Lambert tried to explain what happened each time the pump got to phase five. And how many hours it took to go through the whole cycle. If the Flying Squad came back at about six in the morning, they’d see exactly what he meant.
Then the policemen said, with their hands on their hips, ‘Mr Benade, do you or don’t you want to lay a charge?’
So he said no, ’cause by then Pop and Treppie were outside, pointing angry fingers at him behind the policemen’s backs. He said no, he just wanted them to put some pressure on Fish-Eye about his pumps that were making such a noise.
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