Pop sat dead still. He pulled the keys very slowly out of the ignition and put them into his pocket. The next thing, people were pulling them right out of their seats.
Lambert’s eyes went wild from not knowing what was going on, and he shouted: ‘Stay together! Just stay together!’ She remembers feeling in her housecoat pocket for a peg.
But they quickly got mixed up in the crowd. Treppie on this side, Pop on that side, Lambert on the far side, and her right on the other side. So many strange people around her. Then a black girl with a Chicken Licken cap on her head came over and said: ‘Peace be with you, Ma,’ and she smiled at Mol and pinned a light blue ribbon, with two doves on a bright blue pin, one white and the other light blue, on to her housecoat. Only then did she see what was going on – everyone was wearing ribbons and doves and holding hands. So that was the story! And all this time the young girl kept squeezing her hand and smiling at her with shining eyes. She smelt like Chicken Licken and her hand was a bit greasy, but then Mol squeezed the hand back, even though she’d never touched a black hand before, clean or dirty. On her other side was an old man with only one leg, leaning on crutches. He stuck one of his crutches under his arm and then he shook her hand. That hand was cold and the skin was loose. And the bones felt like they had come apart. But he held her hand nice and tight.
She saw the old man had no blue on, so she worked her hands loose to give him her own ribbon. He motioned to her: here, she must please put it on for him. And so she stuck it on for him, right there on his lapel where he showed her. That old man’s jacket was completely worn through, but the blue pin made it look nice and new again. And then she smiled at him, and she saw the young girl smile as well, and then all three of them were smiling much better, and they all took each other’s hands again.
She looked around and caught sight of Pop and Treppie and Lambert, all of them with ribbons on their shirts. All of them holding strangers’ hands. But they weren’t smiling. Only Pop had a slight smile on his face. He looked a bit panicky.
Suddenly everything went so quiet you could hear a pin drop. All around her people began to cry. The old man dropped his chin on to his chest and closed his eyes and then tears started rolling down his cheeks. Next to her, the black girl was sniffing. The next thing, that girl picked up her hand, with Mol’s hand still in it, and she used it to wipe her nose. Mol thought, ja, it’s hard to believe, but if that girl had rubbed her snot off on the back of Mol’s own hand, she would really not have minded. There was such a nice feeling in the air that she almost started crying herself. But then the silence was over and all of a sudden it was just hooters and bells and singing and people in taxis throwing peace signs. A young man in a striped tie grabbed her and they did a little two-step like she last saw in the days of Fordsburg’s garment workers’ dances. Eventually, she pushed her way through to Pop and said to him, with a smile on her face, ‘Peace to you, Pop,’ but she saw Pop was crying, too. Ai, Pop, he’s got such a soft heart, truly.
When it was all over and they got back into the car, Pop turned around and asked her if she’d ever in her life heard of a coincidence like this, but that old man with only one leg whose hand she was holding was the very same man he gave money to in his tin, the one who said to him: God bless you, sir. It just shows you.
Lambert was over his shock by then, thank God, and he said he didn’t know what it showed, but he also felt it showed you something.
Treppie was completely speechless.
But completely.
It was like someone had cut out his tongue.
When they drove past the Spar in Thornton – no one was in the mood for office furniture any more – Treppie suddenly popped up with the strangest idea. She could hardly believe her ears; it’s the kind of thing she’d expect Pop to say, but Treppie said it was such a nice spring day and it was almost one o’clock, and weren’t they also hungry? Why didn’t they go buy something tasty and have it for lunch at the Westdene Dam?
Oh yes, the Benades have their moments. Even if they first have to stumble into peace, in the full light of day. In streets full of pealing bells.
That day just got better. They bought fresh bread and Springbok viennas and oranges and a litre of Coke and a coconut macaroon for each of them. Treppie paid for the lot from his back pocket. Just like that. They went and parked at the gate in Seymour Street, but she felt something was missing. It was Gerty, of course. Gerty was still alive then. Old and sick, but still alive. Shame, she’s been dead almost a month to this day. She misses Gerty all the time.
But on that spring day Pop drove patiently back to the house to fetch Gerty and Toby. He knew they didn’t always get a chance to play at the dam. When they got back to the dam they parked at the same spot and the dogs began wagging their tails and it was all very jolly. They took their lunch and found a place to sit in the slight shade of the willow trees that had just begun sprouting, opposite the island, where there were some more willows and a hadida.
It was all quiet and calm. The only other people there were on the other side, having a braai.
‘Must be policemen,’ said Pop.
‘Maybe they work night shift. Shame, they must also crave a bit of sun,’ she said.
So they unpacked their food and ate in silence there on the grass. Every now and again someone said something. Like: Look at the ducks. Or: Look where Toby’s running now. Or: I wonder what kind of bird that is?
Except for Treppie, who didn’t say a word. He just sat there, writing on his cigarette box. He’d write something, scratch it out again and then write something on the other side. After a while he was even writing on the macaroons’ paper bag.
‘What you writing there, Treppie?’ Lambert asked after a while, and then she and Pop also asked. But Treppie just bit the back of his ball-point pen and scratched his head. He didn’t say a word.
Then, after a long time, when they were passing around the Coke bottle for last sips and smoking their second cigarette, Treppie asked if they were ready to pay attention now, ’cause he’d written something special, for a special day. It was called ‘This is not wallpaper’ and this was how it went.
He stood up and smoothed down his clothes, and then he recited his little verse. So all that time he was sitting there writing a little verse, on his John Rolfes box, and on the macaroons’ paper bag.
He put on his stage voice, gestured across the water, and read from the paper. It’s the same piece of paper she can see now, pasted under the aerial photo of Jo’burg:
2 September 1993
THIS IS NOT WALLPAPER
The African coot creases the water
And the Egyptian geese shout wha! to the sky
And the hadida, that old bachelor
sits there on the fronds of a willow.
He shakes his feathers and stretches his leathers
and shouts ha! to his friends on the bridge,
ja-ha! They must look,
this is not wallpaper
not this time, no, not this time,
it’s spring, yes it’s spring
at the old Westdene Dam—
and, not least,
at last there is peace.
Treppie’s little poem left them speechless. For a long while all you could hear were the birds. Toby began to cry, ’cause Treppie kept standing there in that funny way with his one hand up in the air and the other still holding the macaroons’ paper bag. So Lambert started clapping and they all joined in. Pop put his fingers in his mouth like he used to when he was young and he whistled a whistle with a wild twist at the end. And then of course Toby started barking and jumping around in circles.
They all wanted to hear the verse over and over again. Treppie had to recite his poem four times, and each time it sounded better, and different.
‘A poet and you don’t know it, hey?’ Lambert said to Treppie as they walked back to the car.
But Pop said: ‘He knows it, all right, he knows it,’ and he put his hand around Treppie’s sh
oulder.
When Pop took the turn into Martha Street, past the prefab wagonwheels, Lambert said: ‘“This is not wallpaper, not this time, no, not this time”,’ and when they got to the house and she climbed out to open the gate, Lambert shouted: ‘“And the Egyptian geese shout wha! to the sky”.’ And when they walked in through the front door, Pop said: ‘“And, not least, at last there is peace.”’
That’s when she said to Treppie he must give her that paper bag, she wanted to paste it up nicely on the wall under the aerial photo, next to Mister Cochrane’s security fencing. He looked at her hard and then she smiled back at him. She couldn’t stop herself. She said: ‘So we make no mistake about where it is we come from.’ Then he also smiled and winked at her, giving her a little hug around the shoulders. Ja, can you believe it, a decent, brotherly hug.
It just shows you.
What a day like this can do to a person.
Now she hears Lambert wants Treppie to write a rhyme for his girl, before even meeting her. In English, too. But she’s not so sure about this business, ’cause by that time there won’t be any peace left. Then it’ll be elections.
CHRISTMAS
Hell, but it’s a long wait for the Queen of England tonight. Still another quarter of an hour. It had better be worth the wait.
Maybe she should start throwing away the Christmas cards on the sideboard – if they’re still there by New Year she can just see the trouble it’ll cause again. Not that she meant anything by putting them there in the first place, one at a time, as she found them in the postbox. She stood them upright with their pictures showing to the outside, all of them with houses, houses, houses, except the one with a path to heaven and a little sun. She stood them there so Christmas would at least look like something, for a change. Most of the time their Christmases are just miserable bugger-ups.
But this year they were lucky. Christmas turned out much better than for a long time. They got together in threes and gave presents to the fourth one. Lambert carried on and on about wanting to have a braai with T-bones and watermelon, so they could all learn to be nice and sociable. He said that was something the rest of them were going to have to learn fast in the New Year, once he and his birthday-girl started going steady. They’d have to learn how to treat visitors nicely, and they’d have to start eating some decent food, too. They also needed to learn the meaning of hospitality. And no, she wasn’t allowed to fry those T-bones in the pan, on top of the Primus. They had to be done on a proper wood fire, in the backyard. Lambert actually went and bought five silver balls at Shoprite, and then on Christmas Eve he hung them up on the fig tree in the yard. He told them they must all come outside now, he wanted to practise making a jolly fire. He said he knew how to make big fires, but a braaivleis fire was a different story altogether. For a braaivleis fire you needed an audience.
He bought three bags of firewood, one and a half for practising and one and a half for the real thing.
Then he wanted old newspapers to put under the wood, but Treppie said, uh-uh, he wasn’t finished reading them yet and Lambert should’ve thought about this when he burnt all his old Watchtowers. The next thing, Lambert tells her she must go fetch those stupid Christmas cards from Seeff and Johan Bekker and Nico Niemand and De Huizemark and Aribal whatshisname so he can use them to make his fire. She said no way, Christmas wasn’t over yet and his Christmas fire would die for sure if he went and sent the season’s greetings up in flames. Then he said season’s foot, they didn’t mean it, it was just estate agents’ sales gimmicks. Gimmick himself, she said. What about the NP’s little Christmas card, did he want to burn that one too? No, he said, she must leave that one. The NPs had been in their house so many times they were almost family by now, and in any case the NP was safer than houses.
Then of course Treppie couldn’t keep his mouth shut again. He told Lambert if he went into the election believing those two snotnoses from the NP were any better than estate agents looking for a commission, then he’d learnt nothing in all his forty years.
Treppie said Lambert must ask himself this: if the DP paid its workers one rand for every black vote they could get, and the ANC was willing to pay as much as fifteen thousand rand for just one bankrupt white cop with a drinking problem who’d seen the light, then how much more wouldn’t the NP pay for all the Ampies of the nineties who still lived in Triomf? Hadn’t he noticed the smart car that nosepicking Groenewald drove around in, and did he perhaps think the NP got money like that from selling doughnuts at church bazaars? He could assure Lambert now, without a doubt: money like that came from one place and one place only – the taxpayer’s pocket. It was a fucken shame.
Treppie said he was even tempted to go and join the Inkathas – that was at least a kaffir party whose doors were wide open to white people. At least then you knew you were dealing with a kaffir who was sick to death of being used by the NP, someone who kept to his own path, even if he did still dress in skins sometimes. Served them right, Treppie said, he wished old Mangope and Oupa Whatshisname and that cocky little Bantu from the Transkei and all the others who sold out would also bite the NP’s hand. Its backside too. Would the NP never learn?
Treppie was so worked up he started getting the shakes, and Lambert wanted to knock him sideways with a piece of firewood. On the very eve of the holy Christmas. But she told them that unless they calmed down she wouldn’t ‘marinade’ their T-bones, not a damn. The closer Lambert gets to his birthday, the fancier his words get. She said if they didn’t stop, she and Pop would go across the road and ask the police to take Lambert in a straitjacket to the nuthouse. Treppie too, ’cause she didn’t want to sit through another Christmas with people who were full of the horries, never mind the election. That was if they ever made it to the election. Pop said he agreed. He begged them, didn’t they want to try getting through just one Christmas without another big hullabaloo. Maybe this would be his last.
That shut them up nicely. It was the first time they’d heard Pop say anything like that.
So, she almost didn’t stick around for Lambert’s fire practice.
But it would’ve been a great pity to miss the giving of presents. And that business with the presents was a jolly affair, from start to finish.
They worked out that if they bought in groups of three for the fourth one, they’d save money and they could give each person a nice present. And they could also make sure everyone’s present was worth the same money. In other years, someone always cheated, and someone else always felt done down, and that’s where the Christmas trouble always started. The new plan was Pop’s idea. Treppie said it sounded to him like a real New South Africa idea.
It worked like this: she and Pop and Treppie had to give Lambert something, and she and Lambert and Pop would give Treppie something, and then Lambert and Pop and Treppie had to give her something. Then she and Lambert and Treppie could buy something for Pop. And all of them gave Toby a packet of soup bones. Ag shame, why couldn’t Gerty also be here this Christmas?
A proper negotiated settlement is what Treppie called it. That’s now what he called transparency. And she said yes, transparent, that’s the way she’s always known Pop to be.
On the Thursday before Christmas they all went to Shoprite. They reckoned Friday would be too busy, but it was busy on Thursday too – so busy you could hardly swing a cat in there, never mind a trolley. So they took baskets instead.
The one whose present was being bought had to stand around at the magazine rack at the entrance with his back to the shelves, and the other three were given fifteen minutes to find something. Those three paid for it at the farthest till and took it back to the car. After that they could come back for the next round.
They worked out beforehand where each one’s plastic bag would be kept to avoid a mix-up, ’cause all the bags looked the same. Pop’s bag had to go in the bonnet, Lambert’s in the dicky, hers behind Pop’s seat and Treppie’s in the front, at her feet.
Lambert was the youngest, so he had t
o wait first. She and Pop and Treppie bought him a new pair of shorts and a packet of Gillette blades for his razor. That’s when she saw the passion meter. Treppie said it was rubbish, Made in Taiwan, but she said, no, this was really just the thing for Lambert, and in the end they all agreed. For Treppie, she and Pop and Lambert bought a short-sleeve shirt, a golf cap with Michael Jackson written on it and a packet of peppermint humbugs.
Lambert said the humbugs were for the smell, ’cause nowadays Treppie’s Klipdrift breath was so bad it was enough to get the lawn-mower started.
For Pop, she and Treppie and Lambert bought a pack of four hankies. White ones with curly blue Ps in the corners. They also bought him two pairs of socks and a new set of braces. His old ones were so stretched they couldn’t hold anything up any more, neither his pants nor his bum, although his bum’s been shrinking to nothing lately. And a big tin of Ovaltine, just for him, so he can build up his strength. For strength you need more than braces.
As for her, she knew there was at least one thing she’d find in her bag from Pop and Lambert and Treppie. And she was right, too. It made her happy to see Pop could still make his influence felt.
It was a new housecoat. The same kind Pop always gave her for Christmas. But this time it was a yellow one, golden yellow, her favourite colour. With two packets of cigarettes in one pocket and a surprise in the other – a new cat for the sideboard, to replace the one with no head, which has been like that for more than three years now.
Treppie and Pop and Lambert all stood there and smiled at her. She still doesn’t know whose idea it was, but it was a good one.
The best present of the night, by far, was Lambert’s passion meter. She wished she could’ve taken a picture of him as he stood there, reading what it said on the box. Something to do with demonstrating the ‘principle’ of being hot and how it relieved stress and boredom in just three seconds. ‘The perfect gift’.
Lambert hardly had that glass ball with the red stuff in his hands before it began boiling all the way up the little neck, and of course Treppie couldn’t keep his mouth shut again. He said, no, instead of messing around with his paintings all day, Lambert should spend his time sitting quietly in the Tedelex so he could cool down a bit before his girl came. Otherwise he was going to crack her radiator, for sure.
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