‘Not a muffler in sight,’ he said. ‘Not on the intake stroke, nor on the exhaust. No gas, no pressure, bugger-all.’ And he looked at her and Pop as if they were mechanics who knew exactly what he was talking about.
‘How do you save a fridge,’ Treppie asked, ‘with a condenser that won’t condense and an ice-box without ice? God’s own evaporator. One big heavenly leak.’
But, he said, there was always hope.
‘There’s still hope, Lambert, there’s still hope,’ he said, tapping his book with his fingers.
Lambert just stood there, saying nothing. He went completely dumb when he saw that book. He’d heard a lot about it, but he’d never been allowed anywhere near it.
He even stuck out his hand, the one that was shaking, as if he wanted to touch it.
But Treppie turned away, pressing the book even closer to his chest.
‘Uh-uh,’ he said, ‘first wash handies. Handies and footies, and while you’re about it you can wash the rest of you too. Then you must put on some clean clothes.’
Treppie stopped talking and looked around him to see if everyone was listening.
That’s when she allowed herself to take another breath, ’cause she saw Treppie was about to make one of his speeches again. And when Treppie starts making speeches, you know he’s okay.
‘This here is the family Bible. This is where you’ll find the writings of the prophets and the law, and everything else you need to inherit the earth, be blessed and live in eternal glory with your Fuchs and your Tedelex. But for that you must first do your catechism, my boy, before you can be accepted into the bosom of the congregation. The congregation of Triumph Electrical Appliances. Without the knowledge of pressure and gas, and without an insight into the temperatures of the high side and the low side, you’re not worth a straw. The holy Electrolux be my witness!’
He held the book in front of his face and blew on to it, and then he put it down on the sideboard and wiped his hand over its hard, shiny cover.
He’d give Lambert a week, he said, after which he’d conduct an examination. If Lambert studied properly, to his satisfaction, he’d have a look at those two antiques of Lambert’s. ‘Then we’ll fix them,’ he said, ‘you and me. So help me God!’
Ag shame, the next thing Lambert’s mouth began twitching into a smile, right through those spots of oil, like he wanted to start crying or something. And that smile just got bigger and bigger. He smiled at her and Pop, and then they smiled much better back at him.
Only then did she come out from behind the chair. And Pop shifted the toolbox back under his seat.
‘Go wash yourself now,’ Pop said to Lambert.
Yes, go take a bath, she also said, not that it worried her whether Lambert bathed or not, but this was a different story.
Treppie suddenly got all concerned about Lambert. No, he said, they must immediately go buy some ointment for those burns of his. It was too late for Prep. They must tell the chemist it was burn-out oil from a fridge. He’d know what ointment to give them. And something for his eyes too, Treppie said. She thought, hell, this was too good to be true, Treppie must be joking. But he saw what she was thinking and he said: ‘Honestly, it’s no joke. It’s chemistry, this.’
And that’s how Lambert came to be treated for his sores. He even got dressings on the worst of the burns. She picked up his dirty clothes outside the bathroom and threw them on to the rubbish heap, just like that. Then she nagged Pop and Treppie until they went to Pep Stores in Ontdekkers to buy him a new T-shirt and a pair of shorts. The only pair they could find were Extra Large, with little black blocks on it.
‘This is an expensive round,’ Pop still said, ‘it’s no use buying him shorts if he won’t wear them.’
‘He will,’ said Treppie, ‘he’ll even chew fucken ladybirds now if you ask him to.’
JESUS’ BLOOD NEVER FAILED ME YET
In those days of Lambert’s studying, Treppie had a funny look on his face. She couldn’t make out if he was sad or what it was. It was like he knew what was coming, but he didn’t know when. And he knew it was bad, but now it must just come and be done with.
He began to drink even more than usual and by early evening he’d already be singing such sad songs. Hallelujah songs like ‘Pass me not, oh gentle Saviour’ and others like ‘Red River Valley’.
Until one night, when he went into his room and scratched around for the keys to the sideboard’s top drawer. He opened the drawer, took out Pop’s mouth organ and tried it out, with a hum on the high notes and a hum on the low notes. But the first hum sounded like a pain in the gut, and the second like a pain somewhere lower down. That’s what she said to him, but he just gave her one of his looks. He passed the mouth organ over to Pop and asked him to play something. Play what? Pop said, but Treppie wiped his hand over his face and said, anything, anything would do, thanks.
How Pop got on to it was a mystery, but he chose an old tune that the Salvation Army used to play in the streets of Vrededorp. By the time Pop had played the tune three times over, each time more smoothly with more and more notes in their proper places, Treppie began to remember the words and started singing along:
‘Jesus’ blood never failed me yet
never failed me yet.
Jesus’ blood never failed me yet
there is one thing I know
for He loves me so.’
They played that song and sang those words over and over again. The more Treppie remembered the tune and the words, the more trills Pop began coaxing out of the mouth organ. He played low notes like cellos and high notes like trumpets. After a while he played exactly like a harp in an orchestra. It was like the tune of a completely different psalm, but to the same words and the same song that Treppie stuck to. After a while it began to sound like some kind of a classic or something.
That Pop should have so much breath, and so much music left in him, and that Treppie should suddenly sing so much Jesus-stuff took them all by surprise, Pop too. What surprised them even more was that the music was so good, even though lots of Klipdrift had passed through their gills that night, and the mouth organ was so old, with missing notes here and there. After a while Pop and Treppie’s eyes began twinkling from making so much music together. Each time the song swung to a new verse they’d look at each other and wink. And then Treppie would raise his part of the tune by half a note, and Pop would catch that half-note clean out of the air, and there they’d go again.
‘Jesus’ blood never failed me yet.’
The next verse they’d take in a minor, and the one after that in a major, and so on, with all kinds of trills and frills as they went along. They’d play the song like a waltz and then faster again, and then like chapel music, and then jolly again.
‘… there is one thing I know
for He loves me so.’
They were playing Lambert through his catechism, she thought, they were playing sharp and clear air back into his head, so he could study well. For the fridges. They were singing and playing ’cause the family Bible had changed hands.
That was the fourth night of Lambert’s studying.
TICKEY
It’s exactly a week tonight since Lambert began his studying. And here he comes now, out of his den and down the passage. All three of them have been waiting here in the lounge. She’s told Pop three times already she wants to go sleep, but each time he says, no, she must wait, and Treppie also says she must wait, they’re still going to make history here tonight. She doesn’t want to miss out on history, so she thought she’d better sit and wait. She’s making all her buttonholes smaller, even though there’s only one button left. And here he is, at last, standing in the doorway with the fridge book under his arm. It doesn’t look like history to her, it looks more like trouble. She gets up and puts on her housecoat.
‘Now I’m fully swotted up,’ says Lambert. His voice sounds like it’s coming from a hole somewhere. He’s standing there with his legs slightly apart, swaying a little, like
he’s leaning into a strong wind. He looks thin in the face and pale and wan, with dark rings under his eyes. She can see scabs and sores all over his body from the acid. He doesn’t look so good. But he’s acting tough and he’s smiling. She smiles a little smile back at him.
‘Hell, Lambert, if you’d studied like this at school you’d have gotten far by now, my boy!’ Treppie says. Give with the one hand and take with the other.
But she can see nothing will put Lambert off tonight. He made a deal in front of witnesses, and now those witnesses had better stick up for him. She’ll do her part, she’ll bear witness. He doesn’t have to remind her. She buttons up her housecoat in the middle with the new, small button.
‘Stick to the point, Treppie,’ Pop says in a straight voice here next to her.
‘Ja, I agree,’ she says. ‘A promise is a promise, let him have his exam now and be done with it, so he can get his fridges fixed.’
‘Fridges that work are another chapter altogether. You two mustn’t expect miracles.’
Now Treppie’s talking like a preacher. She can see he’s about to take off again.
‘The only thing I’m glad about,’ he says, ‘is that for once I’m seeing some real commitment from a Benade. ’Cause that’s the one ingredient we’ve been missing all our lives.’
She nudges Pop. Pop must be strict with Treppie now, before he really gets going.
‘Don’t start talking rubbish,’ Pop says. ‘All our lives we’ve been doing our best with what we were given.’ She hears him take a deep breath before carrying on.
‘Or with what we think we’ve got,’ he says, ‘’cause you don’t always know what your own possibilities are, and your eyes are not always open to your own talents. Anyone can look right past that kind of thing. It’s no one’s fault. It’s just the way things are.’
Pop looks Treppie up and down. She also looks at him. Up and down.
‘And you, of all people, should know what I’m talking about.’ Pop looks around to see if he’s got everyone’s attention.
Dear Lord, Pop mustn’t go and overdo it now.
‘You, for example, missed the fact that you should’ve been a clown. Yes, a clown at Boswell Wilkie circus.’
Pop holds up his finger to show he’s not yet finished. He must be careful with that finger. He knows what comes of it.
‘And don’t get me wrong, I mean it as a compliment. I don’t mean it in an ugly or funny way.’
Now she must help Pop a bit here. Now he’s taking big chances.
‘Tickey,’ says Mol. ‘Not Treppie, Tickey.’ They always laugh when she says something. They think she doesn’t know how to be funny. Well, she doesn’t know much about history, but she knows how to play the fool.
‘With a red nose,’ says Lambert. His voice sounds a bit better now.
‘Yes,’ says Pop, ‘a clown who laughs and cries at the same thing, so people can never make up their minds. And that’s a good thing, ’cause the last thing this world needs are people who keep making up their minds about bugger-all. You have to be patient and take each thing as it comes, good or bad. And, Treppie, my brother—’
She gives him a little kick under the chair. Pop’s brain is soft. He does it more and more these days. He forgets his perspective. He mustn’t go and lose his perspective now.
‘And, Treppie, my man …’ Pop says. He acts like it was nothing. But she saw Lambert’s eyes shifting uneasily when Pop said ‘my brother’. It’s her end, the idea that Lambert still hasn’t realised anything.
‘… let me just tell you one thing, and this is a piece of wisdom I picked up from you. You taught me this, and it’s not the kind of thing a person usually picks up from fridge mechanics.’
Pop’s looking at Treppie so hard that Treppie doesn’t say a word. There’s a sort of shy smile on his face. If you want Treppie in your pocket, just praise him. Ai, old Pop, he’s so smart tonight. In his own way.
‘It’s never too late,’ Pop says, ‘to recognise the talent you missed and to do something about it.’
Treppie gets up, with his shy smile and all. He tiptoes to his room, holding up his finger to show they must be quiet and wait a bit, he’s coming now. As soon as he’s closed his door, Pop tells Lambert to sit down. Now she can go and make him a nice mug of sweet coffee and a sandwich, ’cause a person can’t do exams on an empty stomach. She says nothing. The air’s full of surprises tonight, never mind history.
Mol sits on the stoep in front. She looks at the sparrows pecking the car’s hubcaps. They think it’s other sparrows, but it’s just themselves they see there. They go on and on, peck, peck, peck. After a while they’re just about falling over, but still they carry on. Then she says to Toby: ‘Fetch!’ and he chases the birds away. But they come back again.
There’s peace and quiet in the house now that Treppie’s helping Lambert with his fridges. It’s been more than a week already, thank God. Even Pop’s like a new man. He gets up with her in the mornings and they make sandwiches together in the kitchen. Pop takes Lambert and Treppie’s sandwiches through to the den, and then he comes and sits quietly here on the stoep with her. They drink coffee and look at the sparrows. And then they laugh all over again about the exam that Treppie gave Lambert.
Not that it was all fun and games. There was almost trouble, quite a few times, but in the end it all went off very well. It’s ’cause she and Pop kept their heads. Especially Pop. Pop was really on top form that night. Lambert too. Shame, she’s never seen him try so hard.
Lambert had hardly finished his sandwich that evening when Treppie came out of the room in one of Pop’s floppy old hats, striped pyjama pants, a vest full of cigarette holes, and red socks that were so old his toes and heels stuck out. He’d smeared his face white with Brylcreem, except for a wide space around his crooked mouth, which made it look much bigger than usual. On his nose was a plastic bubble they’d got for nothing at the Shell garage after Red Nose Day, when there were too many noses and not enough people with money for charity.
Treppie stood next to that box of red noses and said he wanted to take one for just in case, a person never knew. Charity was a house with many mansions.
He was right, too, ’cause here was that nose again, finding its day and its place. The place of Treppie’s lost talents. And the moment of truth for poor old Lambert, if you ask her.
‘Circus, circus!’ she and Pop called when Treppie came out, walking like a clown and sticking out his neck like a rooster.
‘No, no, no, there won’t be any circus tricks around here,’ he said, snorting through his nose.
‘Examination. Fridge exam. Fridge trial. So that the knowledge of the fathers may be passed on to the children. Triomf trials. And such occasions, as my brother, er, excuse me, er, my brother-in-law rightly said, such occasions deserve a special kind of approach.’ She looked at Pop, but Pop didn’t look worried. Pop always knows when things are okay.
At the word ‘approach’, Treppie smacked Lambert a hard shot on the back as he sat there on his crate. Lambert flashed him an angry look, as if to ask if that was really blarrywell necessary. But Treppie hiccuped like it was him who’d gotten the blow and he fell over. And then he just lay there on his back in the passage.
That was when she saw Lambert click that his exam wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Lambert was right. Everyone relaxed and they all felt relieved. She even took her hand out of her housecoat where she’d been feeling for a peg, ’cause in her mind’s eye she’d seen Lambert having another one of his terrible fits. From doing exams at his age.
But he didn’t look so old that night. You can’t be old in a circus. All you can do is jolly it up and play along. Fall down and stand up, take smacks and dish them out again, roll your eyes and stick out your tongue. Get kicks in your backside and have your arm twisted. Let out farts and eat your hat. Until you’re completely buggered.
That’s exactly what Treppie did with Lambert. When he saw Lambert was losing heart or getti
ng tired, he let him have the red nose for a while so he could also play the fool.
And that’s how they got through the whole business. It was jolly and full of fun, and even she learnt something. She’d thought parables were only in the Bible, like the sower and the seed and the wasted talents, but then Treppie asked Lambert to tell everyone the parable of how fridges worked. It was a good story, too, about the canoe that leaked. And Lambert told it so nicely.
About how the heat inside a fridge was like water that kept leaking into a canoe, and how the heat was soaked up by the fridge’s gas – just like you sucked up water from a leaking canoe into a sponge, and then squeezed it out over the side, back into the ocean. That’s why a fridge was always warm at the back. It was where the heat came out, from the inside, allowing the fridge to stay cool. And that’s why the sea was always full of water, Lambert suddenly said. It was from the leaking canoes that people were sponging dry all the time. Treppie said, no, that was enough now, he was taking the parable too far. He should remember a parable was a truth with a short shelf-life. There was nothing in the world that was exactly the same as anything else. Then Treppie said a funny thing. He said that’s why he wouldn’t mind if he didn’t go to heaven one day, ’cause heaven was a place where everything was exactly the same as everything else, so they didn’t need parables over there. It was just pure, undiluted, eternal truth, without words. That, he said, sounded terribly boring to him, in fact it sounded like hell itself.
Pop said Treppie mustn’t start losing his thread, but Treppie said he’d already lost it, there was nothing to be done about it, and if heaven was like hell, then hell had to be like heaven, and he reckoned that was a place where everyone sat around and told weird parables all the time and no one ever ran out of things to say. It was a place where the truth kept flashing behind your eyeballs all the time, like multi-coloured fireworks on Guy Fawkes.
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