Triomf

by Marlene van Niekerk

  The mouth of the ice-box, in front, was one huge bubble. When it came loose it was as big as his head. It floated there, in front of his face, wobble-wobble, like a big, hollow ball of jelly.

  ’Strue’s Bob, he walked right around that bubble. It just hung there. And with every step he saw a different angle of his room reflected on the bubble’s surface.

  Everything looked completely different.

  His bed, with all its rubbish-blankets and dirty pillows, looked like a lovenest full of secrets. And the painting above his bed, which was also in the bubble, looked like a masterpiece on a flowerpot, something he could never have painted himself. The Fuchs blowing bubbles was also in the bubble, like a magic machine in a science-fiction movie. And all the pieces of scrap iron, the tools, his steel cabinet, the crates full of empties, his painting of things with wings, looked like Treasure Island. He was also in the bubble. He looked like something from outer space, with ears that faded away to the back. His mouth and nose, popping out in front, like a goldfish in a glass bowl.

  After a while he couldn’t take it any longer, but he also couldn’t snap out of it. So he took a deep breath and blew hard into that bubble as it floated there in front of him, like something in a nice dream. Then everything fell apart. The bed split into two floppy pieces against the ceiling, the Fuchs floated upside down into his eyes, his nose disconnected from his face. And then he followed his nose out the back door, weightless like an astronaut, up and away into the dark sky among the stars.

  The bubble burst with a soft, cool, wet ‘plop’ on his face, like he’d walked with open eyes into a wet spider’s web.

  Then he went and sat down on his bed, quite dizzy, and wiped his hand over his face. But there was nothing.

  Lambert draws deep on his cigarette. That was really a special moment. From that moment on his den started feeling like a completely different place.

  His mother said one minute she was standing in the front waiting for Toby to pee, and the next something suddenly began to bubble up from behind the house. She still thought, oh boy, here’s another big fuck-up, so she called Treppie to come and look. Treppie told her he reckoned that he, Lambert, had finally exploded, and what she saw there was his soul bubbling up to the heavens.

  The next thing, Pop and his mother came running in from outside, smacking the bubbles left, right and centre. And then Toby came, almost running them right off their feet. His jaws went ‘clack-clack’ as he tried to bite the bubbles. Treppie waltzed in through the inside door, singing: ‘Tiny bubbles, in the air.’

  Meanwhile, he was crawling around that Fuchs on all fours, with his pencil, quickly marking with circles the places where he saw bubbles popping out. There were so many of them that he couldn’t keep up. After a while everyone began smearing bubble juice on to the Fuchs. And the next thing Pop was smearing Mol and Treppie was smearing Pop and everyone was smearing everyone else full of Fabulous Paradise. And so they ended up having a whale of a bubble party there in his den.

  Treppie said it just showed you what fun you could have with crocked stuff. Come to think of it, he said, where was the fun in a fridge that worked? Just ice and cold polony.

  THE SECOND MIRACLE: SHOCK TREATMENT

  It took them three full days, testing with bubbles, pumping out the gas, cutting tubes, making new joints and filling up with gas again. Then they’d test with bubbles again and close up little pin-prick holes before filling up and testing the pressure yet again. Over and over until they had that Fuchs sort of sealed up.

  But that was child’s play compared with the Tedelex. The Tedelex was a burnt-out case that had stood for years here in his den, stinking through its open valves.

  He filed open that compressor all along its join to see what was going on inside. He took one look at the suction and liquid line pipes, the ones that go in and out of the shell, and he ripped them out with his bare hands, the oil line too. That was when he burnt his skin so bad with acidbreakdown oil.

  ‘Jeez!’ said Treppie when he saw the inside of that compressor.

  Treppie made him put on gloves, and he put gloves on too, plastic ones that they hurriedly went and bought at the Spar, ’cause Treppie said he didn’t feel like being buried skinless one day. He didn’t see why he should have to be a take-away for the worms.

  The pump inside was completely eaten away by acid. The insulation was perished right through, the windings were in their glory and the coils were burnt pitch black. When they opened it up some more, they saw that the gaskets on the cylinder head and the valve seats were totally non-existent.

  Treppie said he wasn’t the god of fridges, so he couldn’t fix this kind of fuck-up, but then he saw Treppie’s eyes sparkle and he schemed that maybe he could push his luck a bit here.

  He got Treppie to go as far as to order some of the most important parts for the Tedelex along with the orders he wrote out for the Chinese’s fridges. He even bummed some spares from the workshops around Triomf, West End Electrics and Century Appliances.

  They spent weeks reassembling that compressor. The whole den was full of cut-up Dogmor tins filled up with parts and oil.

  Every now and again Pop looked in, and he’d whistle between his teeth and say, goodness, it looked to him like Triomf Appliances was back in business.

  But the day they welded up the compressor shell, reconnected the wires and tubes and tried to start the Tedelex, that compressor just sat there, jammed. Completely seized up.

  ‘Ag no, man,’ Treppie said after they’d cleaned it up for the umpteenth time and gone over everything again and checked the volts. ‘It’s like trying to get blood from a stone.’

  ‘What about a capacitor?’ he asked. ‘Then we can reverse the thing.’ That’s what the fridge book said you do with compressors when they get stuck. In Modern Refrigeration and Airconditioning, on page 355, middle of the page.

  ‘Christ, no, I won’t touch one of those things,’ Treppie said. ‘Once I saw a Chinese trying to reverse a compressor. He blew himself up, together with the compressor and the capacitor and everything else too. All that was left of him was a hole in the wall and a wet spot!’

  ‘Yes, but that must have been a big pump, a commercial systems pump, for one of those helluva big walk-in coolers full of sweet and sour.’

  He kept on nagging Treppie about the capacitor. He knew he’d give in eventually, even though Treppie stood there and looked at him in that funny way.

  ‘Come now, Treppie, man, we can reverse it just a touch, and then a bit more. You must just organise a capacitor for us.’

  He’d think about it, Treppie said, wiping off his hands with a ball of cotton waste and walking out of the den’s back door.

  But Treppie spent too much time thinking about it for his liking. And then, that same afternoon, he had a second brainwave. One that made his hair stand on end.

  He pulled Flossie right up to the den with its battery side next to the outside door, and then he pushed the Tedelex close to the door as well.

  At the very last minute he figured out that he’d better pull the Tedelex’s plug out of the wall, otherwise he’d shock the whole of Triomf into a different blood group.

  He took out the jumper cables and connected them to the runningwinding and the starting-winding wires on top of the compressor shell. He tied the other ends of the cable to Flossie’s battery.

  And then he climbed into Flossie and started her up, putting his foot down.

  That was how he jump-started the Tedelex, there and then, Model 104, burnt out for almost twenty years and reconditioned under doubtful circumstances, as Treppie said. Just like that. One shot, first try!

  It was a miracle. Neither Treppie nor Pop nor Eddie at West End Electrics had ever in their lives heard of a thing like that. Lambert had to explain over and over how he did it, and Treppie just stood there, shaking his head. ’Cause a car battery gave a straight current, not one with waves like a fridge needed, he said. Treppie asked him again what he’d done before jump
-starting the Tedelex, and he said he’d kicked the fridge five times up its backside until it shat itself, and then Treppie said, aha! Now a light went on in his head, but he never said what kind of light he meant.

  Light or no light, just hear how they run, both of them, like the terrible twins there next to each other on the den’s cement floor. He puts out his cigarette. Then he swings his legs off the bed and walks carefully through the dark, in bare feet, to his fridges. He opens both doors at the same time. Just check how bright those inside lights burn! He feels the ice-trays in the ice-boxes. Ice for Africa! He puts his head against the sides of the fridges, first one, then the other. Running as smoothly as a healthy heart, without a hitch. He feels behind for the condensers. Both are warm.

  ‘My ma bakes roly-poly’

  he sings as he climbs back into bed

  ‘My daddy combs the goat

  My brother rows the leaky boat

  And I fix Frigidaires.’

  He sings the last line of the song a few times until he gets it to fit nicely with the tune and the beat of ‘Sow the Watermelon’. No one must ever come and tell him not to expect miracles. There it is, against all odds! ‘Click’ goes the Fuchs as he settles into bed. ‘Clack’ goes the Tedelex as he rolls on to his side.

  20

  SUNRISE, SUNSET

  FINISHING TOUCHES

  Lambert looks at the watch that Treppie got for him at the Chinese. It was to correct his sense of time, as Treppie put it, so his biological clock would stop running ahead of itself so dangerously.

  A cheap piece of Chinese rubbish, but at least it shows the time and date. Five o’clock in the afternoon. Twenty-fifth April.

  He’s sitting on a Dogmor tin, surveying his handiwork.

  Actually, he’s looking at his hands.

  They’re full of cuts and bruises. There’s still a plaster on the palm of one hand. It’s one of the spots that wouldn’t heal after the acid burnt him. Now the plaster’s black and frayed around the edges. He must remember to put on a new one before tonight.

  He turns his hands so his nails face upwards. His fingers are trembling and his back feels lame from all the running around. And God, how his feet ache. But he’d rather not start looking at his feet now.

  It’s Treppie who hurried him up so much. He thought he’d be getting his girl on the night of his birthday, which is the 26th. But then, yesterday, Treppie came with a new story, in front of his mother too, the bastard.

  Actually, Treppie said, he was born just after midnight and it was ‘therefore’ already the 26th, and it was then that his birthday should begin, and ‘therefore’ his birthday present should be handed over to him on the night of the 25th. Handed over, he said, making curves in the air with his hands like a woman’s body. Handed over in good time, he said, so Lambert would be ready for the hour of reckoning.

  His mother said, hmph, what reckoning was this now, his birth was more like an hour of tribulation, God alone knew.

  No, Treppie said, she had to be positive now. For Lambert it would be an hour of triumph, not despair. And, he said, when you have a birthday, you rejoice the loudest, all the days of your life, the exact minute when someone held you upside down and smacked you till you said: Eh!

  And he, Lambert, had to be ready, and everything else had to be ready too, on that exact moment just after twelve, as the 26th got going, so he could perform at his very best.

  It was nothing less, said Treppie, winking that devil’s wink of his, than the bounden duty, nay, the heavenly command of a person who finally, on his fortieth birthday, gets to fuck someone who isn’t his mother. Or, mind you, someone who isn’t his father either, ’cause that possibility should also not be excluded – just look how the world was swarming with misfits who couldn’t let go of the apron strings, or for that matter, the braces of their parents.

  At that point, he, Lambert, decided he’d had enough of Treppie’s rubbish, standing there in the kitchen door with that holier-than-thou look on his face. He took a king-size swing to smash in that foul mouth of his, but Treppie ducked and he knocked his fist right through the door of the kitchen dresser instead. His mother cracked up when she saw him punch his fist through the dresser, so he gave her a couple of good smacks too to make her shuddup, but she just sat down on her backside on the lino floor and pissed in her pants from all the laughing.

  And then it was almost another big fuck-up here in Martha Street. But Pop quickly came and gave them all a shot of neat brandy. He can bet Pop doctored those shots with fit pills, ’cause once he’d swallowed his tot he suddenly began to feel calm again, and his mother’s laughing came out slower and slower, like a wind-up toy running down, and Treppie brushed at his face weakly, as if he’d walked into a spider’s web, or a thick mist.

  Pop said they must wipe up the mess on the floor. Everything was okay, they must just wait calmly. He was going to take Treppie to his room quickly, he said, ’cause it looked like Treppie wanted to fall over.

  When Pop came back he helped the old girl to her feet and stood her up against the wall. All this time she’d just been sitting there with her legs in that pool of pee in front of her, and all she could do was light up a cigarette.

  Then Pop said he, Lambert, must apologise to his mother, and why in heaven’s name was all that necessary? He told Pop how Treppie had talked a lot of rubbish into their heads and how he’d wanted to punch Treppie, but Treppie ducked. So it was the dresser that got punched instead and his mother started laughing when she saw him miss, as if it was a fucken joke or something.

  She couldn’t help it, she said, standing up against the door with her legs wide open, right there where Pop had stood her up, with a cigarette in one hand and that doctored brandy in the other. She couldn’t help it, it was so funny, and then she started laughing all over again. She showed Pop in slow motion how he, Lambert, had thrown himself into that big punch. And then she ducked like Treppie, but in slow motion, putting her fist slowly through the hole in the dresser. ‘Boom! Crash! Ting-a-ling!’ she slurred, and God knows it looked so funny that he and Pop started laughing too, and then she laughed even more.

  So he said sorry very nicely to her and told her he hadn’t meant it. Then he began to feel sleepy again and Pop led him off to the den. When he woke up it was evening already, and it hit him like a bomb: if his girl was coming just after midnight tomorrow – that’s now today, which at midnight becomes his birthday, the 26th – then he still had a helluva lot to do. And ever since then his hands have been shaking.

  Come now, Lambert, Pop said, there was nothing to tremble about. They must just calmly see what they could still do with reasonable certainty and capable speed. It wouldn’t help to try and move mountains in the space of twenty-four hours.

  His mother made them all eggs on bread with tomato sauce, and then they sat down in the lounge with pen and paper and worked out what each of them could do to get things ready, even if it was just on the surface, ’cause it was appearances that counted.

  His mother said if he got the lawn-mower running nicely for her, she’d cut the grass, right away. That’s ’cause there was a full moon and next door wasn’t allowed to start complaining before ten o’clock. Tomorrow, she promised, she’d tackle the kitchen.

  Treppie said unfortunately he had to go work the next day, but he’d get some nice colourful Chinese lampshades, and then it would look like a jolly party. Pardon, he should say they would create a festive atmosphere, and he was sure he’d be able to get his hands on a plastic Chinese toilet seat as well.

  Pop said he’d make a plan to find a mirror for the bathroom. There was still a whole panel of looking-glass left in the dressing table in their bedroom. He’d take it out of its frame and stand it up on top of the toilet. And then he’d put up the postbox, too, but this time, he said, it would be for good. For ever and ever, his mother said, and Treppie began singing: ‘Sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset.’

  And what about the gaps in the wall where the cement was go
ne and the red bricks showed through? Lambert asked. But Pop said if his girl said anything he could just show her the Wonder Wall papers. Painters always fix that kind of thing before they start painting. Then she’d know everything was okay.

  Well, this morning he asked Pop for those papers and then he phoned the Wonder Wall people from across the road to ask when they were coming. The lady on the switchboard said, no, most certainly today, and if not today, then by the latest tomorrow, and thank you for your patience.

  More than that he couldn’t do. If they come tomorrow, on the day of his birthday, then maybe his girl will still be here and then at least there’ll be something interesting on the go. Then she’ll be able to see with her own two eyes that the Benades aren’t just any old Tom, Dick and Harry from Triomf.

  But what about the hole in the front door? he asked.

  Treppie said that was easy, all they needed was to take a saw and widen that hole a bit. Then, abracadabra, he could say it was Toby’s dog-door, so that Toby could go in and out during the night and then she’d think they were ‘thoroughbred dog-lovers’, and that their dog, despite his inferior origins, still had very good manners. It was manners that counted with dogs, Treppie said, not pedigree.

  He began to think Treppie was making fun of him again, but his face was completely serious.

  And what about stuff to eat and drink? He couldn’t very well let his girl sit there dry-mouthed the whole night.

  Treppie started to say that it shouldn’t be her dry mouth he worried about, but then Pop waved his finger at Treppie and luckily he shut up.

  No, Pop said, if Lambert made a nice list, he and Mol would go to Shoprite. But he said they must go to the Spar in Melville instead. The Shoprite in Triomf didn’t stock those nice dips he wanted for his girl.