Triomf

by Marlene van Niekerk

  Treppie said he shouldn’t overdo things, that girl they were getting for him was a saucy little dip herself. She was the one who was coming to get dipped. Lambert should remember that he had to do the dipping, and if he wanted to get his chip properly dipped, then he shouldn’t be too stuffed with all kinds of snacks. But Treppie saw he was going too far again and he quickly tried to cover it up with all kinds of talk about dips and chips and chips and dips. He listed them, all the kinds of chips you get, from salt and vinegar to boerewors and barbecue, and all the dips he could think of, from garlic to angel-fish to avocado pear. All he was really trying to say, he said, was that Lambert should get on with it and make up his mind.

  After that, they could all breathe more easily. Pop said Treppie might be an expert in dips and chips, but he’d better behave himself, or he’d give him another dose.

  ‘If we only had love,’ Treppie sang.

  They carried on like this until very late last night. His mother mowed the lawn, with him supervising to make sure she kept in straight lines and cut evenly. Pop hammered the pelmet in the lounge straight and Treppie helped him put it up again. They even got the curtain hanging after a fashion. Treppie sawed the hole in the front door evenly, and then they swopped his mattress around with Pop and his mother’s inner-spring mattress. He managed to get that buggered old bed of his back on to its legs again but the bed springs were sticking out all over the place, so he just snipped them off with wire-cutters. He didn’t have time to mess around any more with that kind of thing. When they all went to bed last night, he wrote out his shopping list for Pop and his mother, and he made a list for himself, a short one from the long one, which was now longer than any list he’d ever made in his life before. It was so long it made him cross-eyed.

  When he eventually got to bed, the sparrows were already singing.

  It was the end of that long day. It was actually today already, the 25th, and he swears he slept only about four hours before he woke up again. And then it was still today.

  And now, as he sits here, it’s the night of today, but it already feels like tomorrow.

  Except that tomorrow only begins after twelve tonight, and it feels like all the watch-hands and the church clocks are depending on him. It’s like he has to extend himself to the utmost to make tomorrow come, his birthday. He has to make his own birthday happen. Then he’ll be forty. That’s if he can get it all together. But it’s actually a misnomer, as Treppie says, ’cause after twelve he’s already past his fortieth year. Then he’s into his forty-first year. That’s ’cause when you have a birthday, you don’t count what it is now, you count what’s already been, and then you’re actually on the way to the future again. But you don’t say it out loud, and you don’t add it on when it’s your birthday, which is actually a mistake, but you pretend for the sake of the party spirit. In the heat of things you just go ahead and say that, for the time being, you’re so many years old, but actually you’re always so many years old and a bit more. Forty point nought nought one into the next year. And if your watch is good enough, like an Olympic sprinter, you can even try keeping up with the facts of your lifetime, but it would be so fucken boring, keeping up like that. Tick-tick-tick-tick all day long, and between the ticks even more ticks, going even faster, and still more ticks and faster ones between those, until after a while time just zings by without even stopping for the ticks any more. Head first into your glory like a shooting star. Whoosh! Make way!

  Lambert feels dizzy from thinking about time. He sits wide-eyed and stock-still, watching the things in his den. All the things stand there so quietly, you wouldn’t say time was zinging to hell and back in their insides, in their guts and in their seams.

  ‘Click’ goes the Tedelex as it switches itself on.

  ‘Clack’ goes the Fuchs as it switches itself off.

  Suddenly a terrible fear grips his body. It pushes up from his tail-end like a wall of water. He wants to hold on to the bed but all he gets is a fistful of sheet in each hand. There’s a flashing behind his eyeballs. His head feels like a TV that’s busy fucking out. Lines and snow. Crash! Bang! Christ!

  No, it’s not a fit, or anyway it’s not him that’s fitting. It’s a general seizure. He’s sitting wide awake right inside it and there’s no black-out to take him away, no blowing of fuses so he won’t know anything about anything. Everything is quiet and clear. The quiet convulsions of all the things in time. On and on it goes, forever. He feels like he’s shrinking down to the size of a pin-point and, at the same time, swelling beyond the walls of his den, shot through and blasted by time zinging through him.

  ‘And now? Why you sitting here like this with big eyes like you’ve just seen a ghost?’ someone suddenly says here next to him.

  It’s Pop. He didn’t hear him come in.

  How can he explain all this to Pop now? If he does, Pop will go tell the others and then they’ll all start saying something’s wrong with him again. He rubs his eyes.

  ‘Come see if you like what I did with the postbox.’

  Lambert feels Pop’s hand on his shoulder. Pop’s voice is soft. He’s not so bad, old Pop. He sees Pop looking at his chair, his and Mol’s chairs that he dragged in here today. Pop didn’t say a word, but he can see the old man doesn’t really like it. He looks where Pop’s looking. Yes, he has to admit the chairs do look a bit funny here, as if they’ve been shrunk or something. The light falls on them in a different kind of way. You can see the hollows in the cushions made by Pop and Mol’s bodies. Those chairs have been sat to death, but they’re better than nothing. After all, he can’t very well let his girl sit on a crate. Where would she put her drink down? He looks at the chairs’ arm-rests. They’re full of coffee rings and black marks, from cigarettes. Tonight he’ll put his red light on and then she won’t notice a thing.

  Pop sighs a deep sigh, here next to him.

  ‘Just for tonight, Pop, then I’ll take them back to the lounge.’

  Pop shrugs. It’s okay.

  He points to Treppie’s clock–radio next to the bed. Five past five, it says. Pop checks his watch to see if his time is right. Why’s Pop so worried about time all of a sudden? They worked everything out nicely, after all. When Treppie comes home, it’s just the finishing touches, then Pop and Treppie will go fetch the girl and drop her off here, and then, he told them, they must go out for a long drive with his mother. He doesn’t want to feel like he’s being spied on. He wants to be alone with his girl. That’s the least a person can expect of his own family.

  Pop prods him gently. He must come outside now. Pop walks in front, straight down the passage and out the front door. He points to the postbox. It’s up, but Lambert must go look inside to see exactly how he did it. Lambert looks in through the little door. Fucken sharp!

  Pop’s made the mother of all plans. He drilled a little hole through the bottom of the postbox and then he stuck some fridge tubing into the hole, twisting it on the inside so it wouldn’t slip out again. Then he stuck the other end of the tubing down the hollow gate-pole, till it almost reached the bottom.

  ‘Now it’s foolproof,’ says Pop, standing next to him.

  ‘Fucken sharp!’ he says again. But it’s not the engineering he’s praising, it’s the decoration. Light blue. Ja, just the thing. With its number painted pitch black in front: 127. ‘Not bad, hey?’

  ‘Ja, I saw there were some dirty old paint tins next door in the yard, from when they painted the roof. So I asked if I could have them. There was more than enough for a postbox.’

  Now only does he notice Pop’s got blue paint-spots all over his face. He looks like a bird’s egg with a thin shell full of spots, standing there with a big smile on his face.

  ‘Thanks, Pop, man! You’re a champ.’

  ‘Postbox for peace!’ It’s his mother. She’s also come out on to the little stoep, standing there with her hands on her stomach, watching them. Here she comes now, walking over the lawn. When she gets to the gate, she looks up the street.
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br />   ‘Treppie,’ she says.

  Right at the top of their block, where Martha Street crosses Thornton, they see Treppie walking towards them. Apart from his black working bag, he’s also carrying a big black rubbish bag full of stuff.

  Must be the lampshades. He makes a tick next to lampshades on the list in his head.

  Today he’s flying through his list like the wind. He even saw to the moles. Last night he borrowed next door’s hosepipe and then, first thing this morning, he connected the pipe to Flossie’s exhaust and connected their own hosepipe to Molletjie, filling up those holes one by one with exhaust fumes. Now there’s no danger that he and his girl will be eating breakfast here in the yard tomorrow morning and she suddenly spills her coffee ’cause a mole’s pushing up a hill under her nose. Moles are ugly things with whiskers and two teeth in front. He’s sure you don’t get moles in Hillbrow. Cockroaches, yes, and termites. But he reckons those have also been seen to, with all the fumes on that side.

  And talking about breakfast, the breakfast cake is also ready. It’s a small Swiss roll, just enough for two people, in a closed white box in the fridge, together with all the other snacks for tonight. His stomach churns.

  His mother was fine about everything. When they arrived back here this morning with all those chips and dips and things, she helped him pack everything into the back of the fridge. Then she said he must wait, she had a surprise for him – she didn’t think he should display all those fancy eats in shop-packets and plastic bowls. So last night she asked Pop to get the key for the sideboard from Treppie, and she unpacked all the stuff that was inside there. Those things, she says, are all she’s still got left from her mother, Old Mol – two thick wine glasses with patterns, two round-bellied brandy glasses, and lots of plates and bowls in old cream china, all of them with a red stag in the middle, jumping among pine trees across mountains white with snow.

  And now everything’s standing there neatly on his work bench, which he tidied up so nicely. His whole room’s been swept clean and dusted down, with planks covering his petrol pit. They washed and ironed two of Treppie’s window sheets and pulled them neatly over the bed. As Treppie said, a man couldn’t ask for more. And his mother found two cushions and covered them with bright pieces of cloth, ’cause he’d burnt all the slips in that fire to kill the earwigs.

  No, he must say, his mother co-operated very nicely. She even washed the kitchen floor twice. After she finished cleaning it the first time, the silly old cow went and threw a whole bottle of drain acid down the kitchen sink, just like that. It bubbled and bubbled and then it exploded, ‘kaboof’, shooting up from the bottom of the sink right across the lino floor, all the way to the other side of the room. Sis! Dirty brown goo.

  But his mother just went down on her hands and knees and cleaned the whole floor all over again.

  He had to use plastic tape to close up the pipe under the sink, ’cause that acid burnt a couple of holes right through the pipe. That drain stuff is almost as bad as fridge burn-out oil.

  That was all this morning. He’s just glad the smell has gone. It was a whopper of a pong. And he’s also glad Treppie wasn’t there when it happened, ’cause then of course he would’ve had lots to say.

  Here he is now, at the front gate. He looks pissed.

  ‘The burghers of Triomf!’ he says. ‘Why you all standing here like you’re going to church? It looks like you want to get baptised or something.’

  His mother points. The postbox.

  ‘Light blue.’

  ‘Yes, I see, it’s breaking out like pork measles, the national peace epidemic, vote blue, vote pig, the Benades are going aboard the peace brig! Coor-doo, coor-doo!’ sings Treppie, flapping his arms like a dove.

  ‘Now the postbox is fixed for ever and ever.’ Pop winks. He can see Pop’s telling him he must just stay cool. He’ll handle Treppie.

  ‘Sure thing,’ says Treppie, ‘hope springs eternal. Go fetch the ladder so we can start. I’ve got lampshades for Africa here, and you can choose between a yellow or a blue toilet seat.’

  ‘Blue,’ says his mother. He agrees. Blue’s better. Blue or pink, but not yellow. Yellow’s too close to shit.

  Treppie says he’ll hang the yellow one behind the bathroom door as a spare. That’s cool, he wants to say. If he, Lambert, spent as much time on the toilet seat as Treppie, then he’d also want a spare. But he doesn’t say it. He holds back. He doesn’t want to rub Treppie up the wrong way. Treppie’s on his ear already.

  And he’s full of tricks, too. No, they can’t touch his bag. He wants to unpack the stuff himself, inside, not here. They must come into the lounge. His mother closes the door behind them.

  Lambert feels Pop pulling him by the sleeve. He must sit down on his crate so Treppie can start. Treppie’s wired. He acts like that rubbish bag’s a king-size lucky packet. He must just be cool tonight. The closer they get to the election, the more crazy Treppie gets. Like the other day, when they heard someone say the voting would now be over three days – the first day for special votes, and the next two for ordinary votes – Treppie started spouting rubbish again. Seeing that he, Lambert, was in the special class at school, Treppie said, he should by rights bring out a special vote on the 26th, which was also a special day for him – his birthday. But he needn’t be afraid, Treppie said, he’d go with him, they didn’t allow special cases to make their crosses without the guidance of an adult. He was just about to give Treppie another smack when Pop explained a special vote was something people made in ‘exceptional circumstances’, like drought or a plague, but then Treppie said, in that case the whole of South Africa should go vote with Lambert, so he wouldn’t feel lonely. Then they could all make one helluva big cross with white stones on RAU’s rugby field, right inside those new walls. Then maybe a few UFOs would come land there. Treppie says UFO stands for United Foreign Observers. Typical Treppie rubbish.

  Here he comes now with the first shade. Just a yellow square, really. What kind of a shade is that? But now Treppie’s unfolding it like a fan. It’s a great big sun with a wide, red mouth that smiles.

  ‘A sun! Good show!’ says his mother. She holds out her hands.

  ‘Don’t touch!’

  Treppie hotfoots it up the ladder. ‘Hold tight,’ he shouts.

  Pop holds the ladder. Treppie works the shade around the bulb till it fits nicely.

  ‘Ta-te-raa!’ he says. ‘Now it shines on everyone!’

  The second one’s a round blue light full of little silver stars.

  ‘Ooh! Give here!’ It’s his mother again. She sucks her lip, in-out, in-out. Doesn’t want to wear her false tooth. If his girl comes again, after tonight, he’d better nag Pop to find her a tooth that fits. She looks just like a worn-out old slut nowadays. And now she’s falling in love with those little stars. She’s getting soft in the head. Better just to leave her alone.

  ‘Okay, Ma.’ He tries to keep his voice even. She and Pop have helped him nicely today. They may as well have the stars for their room. He’ll even hang the shade up for them. As he walks down the passage, he hears Treppie mumbling something to his mother. Must be talking about him again. Let them, they’re still going to see a thing or two in this house.

  He has to stand on the mattress to hang up the shade. He struggles with the strings around the hole where the bulb goes in. Fucken frills! He can hear them dragging the ladder around as they hang things up all over the house.

  ‘Don’t fall,’ he hears his mother say. It sounds like she’s talking through a rag. She even stinks from her mouth nowadays. After tonight he’ll be finished with her. Then he’ll do his own thing, in his own way. He must just have the right touch with his girl tonight. Then she’ll come back again and, who knows, maybe this will become a decent house.

  He can’t get the bulb through the hole. It’s too small. So he just pushes it, ‘grrt!’, right through the paper. He ties the strings on to the electric wire. Right, it’s tight enough now.

  He walks thr
ough the house. Shades hang from the ceiling everywhere. Full moons and crescent moons and pointy little stars and things like that. Some of the suns are even winking at him. No more naked bulbs. The left-over shades have been hung up by their strings from the ceiling. They’ve put up two shades in his den. He heard Treppie telling his mother and Pop about the red ones being the hot planets, and how they had to keep watch over tonight’s other two stars. Treppie must watch his fucken jokes now. This is serious business!

  ‘Yippeeee! Party!’ Treppie shouts. He comes jumping up and down the passage, touching all the moons and stars and suns with his fingertips as he runs. They swing and turn on their strings. Toby ‘whoof-whoofs’ after him. He stands to one side. They must go slow, now! Slow!

  ‘Lights!’ Treppie shouts. ‘Lights!’ It’s already quite dark in the house. Then Pop switches on all the lights. Suddenly he sees yellow and orange shadows everywhere as the shades light up the walls.

  ‘Check it out,’ says Treppie, ‘the Orient is with us! Now all we need is some sweet and sour. Come, it’s time for room inspection. Step up! Step up!’

  Treppie pushes his mother and Pop down the passage, into the den. Lambert feels shy, he’s pissed off. It’s his stuff, this! Why must they do this, now? They just want to go and spoil everything again! He must act like it’s nothing, just stand there with a straight face and push out his chest. No one’s going to get him down now.

  First they inspect the den’s walls. The insect paintings are nearly finished. All of them got some new wings this morning.

  ‘Good enough for an opening night,’ says Treppie.

  In the deep, red light, the insect-things look almost real. His mother gets the creeps. ‘Yuk!’ she says.

  ‘Lost City,’ says Treppie. ‘It glows with eerie brilliance!’ He flings out his arms and prances around the room like a master of ceremonies. ‘Lost City or Cango Caves, and here comes the caveman, too!’