‘But what’s written there is fuck-all!’ Lambert roared.
‘Well, exactly,’ Treppie said, ‘that’s exactly what I mean. Fuck-all!’
It was Pop who saved Treppie from getting a drubbing that day. He told Lambert it wouldn’t be worth his trouble, ’cause Treppie’s answer didn’t qualify. It was a spoilt answer, Pop said. You could say it was like an illiterate person handing in a ballot paper with scratch-marks in all the squares.
A vote like that got counted as a spoilt paper, and all it showed, Pop said, was that there were lots of people who couldn’t make up their minds, people who actually belonged in a circus.
Lambert was still angry. Hadn’t Pop just said it was a good thing when people couldn’t make up their minds? Hadn’t he said it was a talent?
It was a wonder that Pop kept his head that day, every time, and that he said, yes, but if Lambert recalled correctly, he’d said people shouldn’t just make up their minds about bugger-all. And it was as clear as night from day that this here wasn’t bugger-all, this was something definite. Something important. And that Lambert shouldn’t confuse clowning around in a circus with the real thing, with life as it was. After all, Treppie was allowed to say what he liked, if what he said was actually fuck-all, if all he was doing was playing Tickey. It was all a game and games were fuck-all.
Lambert stood there with a cock-eyed look from all Pop’s talking. Treppie was laughing so much he was on the floor. After a while he rolled his ‘answer’ into a little ball and began chewing it like gum until it was small enough to swallow. He blew up his cheeks and used his finger to make a popping noise like a champagne cork. He went on like that for five minutes, popping champagne corks into Pop’s face, to show him his mouth was empty and everything that happened that day was fuck-all, completely fuck-all.
She could see the whole business was making Treppie upset. He didn’t have a good grip on himself. If you ask her, Treppie chewed and swallowed that silly answer of his ’cause he felt bad. He felt bad about poor old Lambert, with all his sores, studying so hard for his exam. Lambert was pale and sickly from trying so hard, from trying like that all his life long. And he felt bad about her and Pop, who praised Lambert so nicely and stood up for him when things got out of hand, ’cause most of the time they just tried to stay out of his way. She knows. Treppie’s not the kind of person who can show he’s sorry the way other people can. He’s scared of feeling sorry. She remembers, at Old Mol’s funeral, he didn’t shed a single tear. And he didn’t even try comforting her and Pop when they cried. But when the minister asked if anyone wanted to say a few words on behalf of the family, Treppie was quick to present himself. That was the first time he really put a few sentences together after Old Pop’s death.
But actually they weren’t just feeling bad and sorry for each other, that day of the exam. They were also scared. Scared about allowing Lambert to be the hero, and about the fridge book passing into his hands. That book that was now his, alone. It had been a family trophy and where the trophy used to be there was now just a big hole, a hole she knew none of them would ever be able to fill again. They were scared ’cause they knew this – and she could see Treppie and Pop knew it too – and ’cause they knew there were still lots of other things in that hole, and the whole caboodle was now making its way straight to Lambert. They wouldn’t have a leg to stand on any more, never mind a perspective to live from.
Treppie was looking a bit shot after he washed his face and came back into the lounge in his old clothes. No more red nose. He poured himself a stiff drink and threw it back just like that, clean, standing there next to the sideboard. She and Pop gave each other one look, as if to say: Treppie took a big knock today.
And he knew that they knew, ’cause when he turned around again with his second tot in both his hands, as if he was looking for something to hold on to, he gave them a wink, not a devil’s wink, but a half-mast wink, like he was half-sad. He cleared his throat and he put on a face and he said: ‘Well now, people, fasten your seatbelts, the playing fields have been levelled for a miracle, whether you believe it or not.’
Early the next morning, just after she and Pop woke up, Treppie came in and hurried them up. They must come now, he said, this thing began with witnesses and it had to end with witnesses. They couldn’t sleep at a time like this. When they got to the lounge, Lambert was already there, sitting and waiting in Pop’s chair. Excuse me, he said, but Treppie had told him to stay put. Pop pulled Lambert’s crate to the other side. Treppie sat in front of him.
Now, said Treppie, if Lambert thought the family Bible was something, then he had news for him, ’cause that was nothing. There were still the family jewels.
Treppie went into his room. He huffed and he puffed and then he brought out a great big trunk, dragging it right up to Lambert’s feet in the middle of the lounge.
He went and dug around some more in his room and he came out with a long army bag that rattled with long-necked things.
He even brought out his black sling-bag, the one he took with him to the Chinese every day.
Treppie laid his long fingers on the lid of the trunk. His hands trembled and his shoulder twitched.
Theory, he said, was one thing. It was book-learning. A vexation to the spirit, as Ecclesiastes said.
Ecclesiastes, hmph, this Treppie can really lay it on thick.
But practice, he continued, was something quite different, full of its own pitfalls, which you never saw until you were up to your neck. But not without rewards, which you also didn’t see until they hit you full in the face. Like a rainbow, one minute everything was grey, and the next there it was, filling up the whole sky.
‘Ahem!’ Pop cleared his throat. Treppie must please get to the point now.
But Treppie was already at the point. With Treppie, there’s never just one, clear point. You first have to set the scene, as he always says. The setting itself is half the point.
It was dead quiet there in the lounge. She could almost hear her own heart beating. They all watched Treppie as he opened the trunk’s lock.
Then, with a wide sweep, he lifted the lid and opened it out. It was a broad, deep lid. Took her breath clean away.
Neat little rows of tools were hanging there, each one sparkling in its own leather clasp. All the tools of refrigeration work. An expert’s toolbox.
‘Heaven,’ said Treppie. ‘This is heaven.’
Even Toby stuck his nose into the box to smell the strange new smells in there.
‘Well, I never,’ said Pop, lighting up a cigarette.
Lambert’s eyes glittered. He rubbed his big hands round and round in the hollows of each palm. She’d never seen him look at anything in that way before.
Treppie’s tools. His pride and joy. Ever since that terrible fire when the fridge business burnt down, he’d never used them in public again. Before the fire, when he did use them, he used to bring them out one at a time, and no one was allowed to touch them. Then at night he’d take them back into his room again. And she could see from the condition they were in that he’d been cleaning them all these years, shining them with a petrol rag every night, taking them out one by one and putting them back carefully in their places, in the trunk’s lid.
‘Now, take note: the first commandment of the practice,’ Treppie told Lambert, and she saw he was keeping a straight face, but he was starting to play Tickey again. ‘Order, hygiene, discipline. You can work with these tools, all of them, but if this trunk doesn’t look like this every night when you’re finished, then I’ll take the whole lot back and keep it behind lock and key. Then I’ll withdraw completely from you and your fridges and you can see how far you get on your own.’
When he’s in a setting, he always comes up with grand words.
But when he began to tell Lambert all the names of the tools, and what each one was used for, he was back on solid ground again. Lambert played his part nicely. Every now and again he chipped in and told Treppie what that tool’s name was,
and what it did, ’cause he was ‘theoretically qualified’ now, as Treppie himself had said.
And each time they said a thing’s name, she said it after them, so everyone could see her head was still firing nicely. When it comes to the names of things, she knows she’d better pay attention, otherwise she’ll be gaga before her time.
They worked through all the spanners. From the nut spanner and the pipe spanner to the flarenut fittings and the other sockets and spanners, the six-point to the twelve-point box spanners. And then the punches, the centre punch and the starter punch, and the pliers, the cutting pliers and the squeezing pliers, the clipping pliers and the slipjoint pliers, and then of course the smallest and the finest, the needlenose pliers, which Lambert showed her with a little laugh. Pop squeezed her leg to tell her she must just smile now, ’cause this was a whole new beginning with pliers.
And the screwdrivers with their many different bits for different screws, the Keystone, the Cabinet, the Philips, the Frearson, the Clutchhead, the Allen and the Bristol. Treppie took them out, one by one, showing them to Lambert. And Lambert said their names, with her repeating them afterwards. It was like catechism, just nicer.
Then there was the iron saw, with a thin little packet full of brand-new shining blades. The flaring tool, the tube-cutter and the tube-clamp, the different hammers with thick and thin heads, and, right at the end, the mechanic’s stethoscope, which you use to listen to the rattles and the hums of a fridge, as Treppie put it. What about the ‘cheeree-cheeree’ and the ‘click-click’? she asked him, but Treppie said those were noises you could hear with a naked ear. If you wanted to hear the music of the spheres, you needed a stethoscope.
Treppie put the stethoscope’s plugs in Lambert’s ears and said he should hold the probe to Pop’s chest so he could hear what music was playing in there.
Lambert listened and said: ‘Silence is golden,’ and he laughed ‘ha! ha!’ at his own joke. But there was nothing funny about that joke.
Pop said, no, maybe the little amplifier wasn’t working.
Treppie said everything in his trunk worked. He switched on the amplifier so Lambert could listen again.
‘Looba-doop-doop, looba-doop-doop, looba-doop-doop,’ Lambert mimicked Pop’s heart.
‘That’s a reggae beat you’ve got there, Pop!’ Lambert said.
She wanted to know what reggae was. All they could come up with was an argument about kaffir music. Treppie said it was music from the kaffir-paradise north of the equator, but Lambert said it was what Lucky Dube played in Soweto and, as far as he knew, that was on the western side.
North or west, that toolbox session didn’t pass before everyone listened to everyone else’s heart, and they all laughed about the strange beats and the blowings and suckings of valves in each other’s insides.
She was the only one who didn’t think it was so funny, even though she pretended to laugh along for the occasion. After a while she told them a person would swear they were a bunch of fridges standing in a circle. They shouldn’t make fun of sickness.
But who was so sick, then? Treppie wanted to know, and she said no one in particular, sickness was always looking for a place to slip in.
Treppie said she mustn’t be silly, sickness wasn’t something that floated around in the air, it was something that bred under people’s skin and in their marrow. Only lunatic germs survived in pure air and came in through people’s ears, like earwigs. Then Pop said everything was going so nicely this morning, Treppie shouldn’t start multiplying germs now, and she shouldn’t worry about what was in the air, or about his heart, and Lambert was hearing wrong, it wasn’t a reggae beat, most of the time his heart beat like a hesitation waltz, otherwise it went like a slow foxtrot.
That sounded like a hectic medley, Treppie said, but fortunately he stopped poking fun at sickness.
When he was finished with the things in the trunk, all the regular joints and fittings, the gaskets, rolls of soldering wire, flux, files, iron brushes, gum in bottles, the aluminium that you melt to fix ice-boxes, and right at the bottom, a heavy, black thing, the high-vacuum pump, Treppie opened up his army bag.
He began to take out long-necked things on stands, with heads that made the lounge look like it was full of spacemen. Cylinders for fridge-gas and service cylinders, and the multiple gauge with its black pipes rolled up like centipedes. The hand pump and the special cylinders for welding, one with oxygen and the other for welding-gas.
‘Oxy-a-ce-ty-lene,’ Lambert said slowly, blowing ‘tssss!’ through his teeth and making slow figure eights in the air as if he were welding. Treppie passed him the goggles so he could see if the rubber band fitted his head.
‘Watch out for that thing, hey,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Pop said, ‘when you were small, you took that hot flame and pressed it to your flesh.’
‘Never mind,’ said Treppie, ‘if he hadn’t started welding himself so early he wouldn’t have been Lambert the Iron Man today.’
The last thing Treppie took out of his bag was the volt-meter, which he showed Lambert how to work, as well as a set of thermometers with funny dials on curved stalks. That was for sticking into the places in a fridge where warm and cold need to be measured. Then Treppie wanted to stick one of those things into her, as if to take her temperature, and they all chased her around the house. Pop too, but she knew it was only a joke, and that all they meant by it was that she’s the only woman in the house. Who else can they chase around? They were glad she was such a sport. He wouldn’t try taking Lambert’s temperature, Treppie said, ’cause he remembered how that Passion Meter had boiled in two ticks and he didn’t have the money for new thermometers.
She and Pop helped to drag the trunk to the den, catching on loose blocks all the time. They felt it was enough of a business now. Things had to finish now.
Pop was very tired afterwards. He said the whole business of handing over the family treasures had exhausted him. But it was done now, and he felt light again, as if someone had taken a burden off his back. He said he felt reborn. Really. He even sings in the bathroom in the mornings. Not that she likes what he sings, ‘Nearer my God to Thee’, ’cause he actually feels further away from her than ever.
19
THE MIRACLE OF THE FRIDGES
THE FIRST MIRACLE: TINY BUBBLES
It’s late. Lambert’s lying on his back in bed so he can listen with both ears to the hum of his fridges. They sound as if nothing’s ever been wrong with them. He smiles to himself in the dark.
They should start with the Fuchs, Treppie said, sniffing at the black shell of the Fuchs compressor on the workshop bench, ’cause if he remembered right, this wasn’t a burn-out, it was just a leak or two. Or a thousand and one, for that matter. After ’76 they sometimes took in fridges that leaked like they’d been in a riot. Birdshot, buckshot, that kind of thing. A fridge was a flimsy thing when it came to riots.
They put the compressor back into the engine and they bent the condenser tubes back into shape, the ones Lambert had ripped out. They welded the joints and cleaned everything up.
They also deep vacuumed the whole system, drained the oil and flushed the motor with R-11 before pumping new oil and gas back into the fridge.
When they started it up, Treppie showed him on the gauge how the pressure began falling to hell and was gone within an hour. The cycle ran all the time, without stopping inbetween, and the ice-box didn’t want to ice up properly.
‘This fridge is rotten with leaks. You must find them and mark them with a pencil on the joints and the tubing and the evaporator and everywhere else, the outside seals too. Then I’ll help you fix them. Then we simply fix them one by one till they’re all done.’
And he must remember, Treppie said, to open all the den’s windows, otherwise he’d get stoned from the gas. People who got stoned from fridge gas didn’t ever get liquid again. Their heads stayed solid until kingdom come.
He listened carefully to everything Treppie said, and he did ev
erything Treppie said he must do. Working with Treppie was a big rave. They worked all February and March, and today’s the 17th April already. For more than two months they worked, morning, noon and night. The only time they stopped was when Pop brought them sandwiches. When Treppie had to go to the Chinese for a day there was always enough work to keep him busy in the meantime. He could see Treppie was also enjoying it. He’s been checking Treppie out. Ever since the fridges began working again he comes in here a lot, for this or that, he says, but he actually just wants to rest his hands on those two old fridges so he can feel how nice and steady they run.
Lambert feels for his cigarettes. He lights up and smokes in the dark, on his back. As he inhales he watches the little red coal glow. It’s good to think about how those fridges got fixed again. It’s so nice he just can’t stop thinking about it.
The first thing he tried using on the Fuchs was Sunlight, but the leaks were too big and there were too many of them. The soapy liquid was so runny that he couldn’t see very well what was going on.
Then he had a brainwave. He thought, let me send Pop to the big CNA in Melville to buy seven bottles of bubbles.
Late that night, after Treppie came and helped him pump more gas in for the test, he switched on his red light and asked the Good Lord and all the fridge fairies to please help him now, and he smeared every inch of that Fuchs with a thick layer of Fabulous Paradise Bubbles. Then he switched on the Fuchs at the wall.
The next thing there was a bubble bonanza like he’s never seen in his life before. The whole den was full of them. Big ones and small ones blowing from the holes. And all the sides of the bubbles shone with square pictures that bulged out as they caught the den’s reflections.
He must say, his jaw dropped when he saw that bubble bonus. He felt quite lame in the back as he stood there watching them. They just kept coming, one on top of the other, popping out of that Fuchs’ thick white body, some of them stuck together in five-bubble bunches, and then they separated and floated out the door and through the open windows, into the night, suddenly accelerating as the wind caught them.
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