Treppie smacks him on the back. It burns, but he says nothing.
Then Treppie picks up the glasses one by one and makes as if he’s wiping off dust. Full of shit again! He polished those glasses himself. There’s no dirt on them.
‘Look, all the little buck!’ his mother says. She’s looking at the bowls that he lined up in a row on his bench. He turned all the bowls so the stags’ feet point to the bottom and their heads to the top. What’s so funny about that? He wishes they’d just fuck off.
On the bed, on top of the white sheets, lie his clothes. A light blue shirt from Jet, and a dark blue, double-breasted blazer that Pop found on special at the Plaza. And a brand-new pair of white pants with funny pleats on both sides of the zip. Pop bought everything with his own money. He’s already looped his belt, with its extra hole, into the pants. And there lies his new, blood-red Speedo, on top of the pants. His polished boots stand at the foot of the bed with a pair of Pop’s socks in a ball on top.
They stare at his clothes. He feels naked.
‘Phew!’ Treppie whistles. He picks up the Speedo, stretching it open with his hands.
‘Hey, Lambert, how you going to get your whole pedigree into this, old boy? Pit bull terriers! Njarrr! Looks a bit small for champion stock, don’t you think?’
‘Hands off!’ says Pop, taking the Speedo away from Treppie. Pop puts it back on to the bed. He motions with his hand. He’s trying to tell him he must just hang in there, it’s almost over. They’ll be out of here any second now. They fuckenwell better.
But now Treppie’s trying a new angle, sticking his fingers into his shirt-pocket with only his pinky sticking out. Like a poofter. Sometimes he thinks Treppie should’ve been a poofter. It’s only poofters on TV who throw scenes like he does. He’s got a lot of fucken airs, this Treppie.
‘I almost forgot!’ Treppie looks round to see if everyone’s eyes are fixed on that shirt-pocket of his. ‘Rough Riders. Look, Lambert, a cowboy on a horse! We don’t want you to go and get the load, hey.’
His mother grins.
He wants to tell Treppie he’s a fucken poofter, but his voice gets stuck. He looks at Pop. Please, Pop, please. Pop takes Treppie and his mother by the arm.
‘Right, Lambertus, get yourself ready. We’re leaving any minute now.’ Pop nods at him as if to say everything’s okay, he needn’t worry.
He watches them as they cram through the door. Fucken bunch of sheep. He looks at the alarm and then at his watch. Only quarter past seven. God, help!
He calls after his mother. She must come here, he wants her to tell him something. He hears her shuffling back.
‘Yes?’
He points. ‘Does everything look all right here?’ He can hear his own voice. It sounds panicky. He doesn’t want to sound panicky. What for?
He says it again: ‘Everything’s ready, right?’
‘All ready,’ his mother says, nodding her head up and down. ‘Just perfect!’
She’s also on her ear. He saw her pouring herself shots all afternoon long. She doesn’t usually drink alone. Seems like she’s also got the jitters. What for?
‘What else do I need?’ He points to the room.
‘Beauty sleep. Hic!’
Hiccup or no hiccup, he wants to try this just one more time.
‘Pleased to meet you.’ He shakes his mother’s hand.
‘The pleasure, hic, is mine,’ she says, just like he taught her.
But he can’t sleep. He baths and shaves and puts on his new clothes. Then he puts out his dips and chips and lemons on the service counter. All in a row. Pop and Treppie have been away for more than an hour now. Wait, let him quickly go and see if everything’s still okay in the house. His mother’s fast asleep. Huddled on the bare mattress in her and Pop’s room. Toby’s lying behind her back. Now Toby lifts up his head and pricks his ears. ‘Swish-swish’ goes his tail on the mattress. The blue lampshade with its silver stars throws strange spots and shadows over his mother. And across the mattress and Toby and the floors and the walls. Weird.
Let him just leave her to sleep, even though he really wanted her to tell him a story, to get him right and ready. ’Cause he doesn’t feel ready.
Maybe it’s just as well. Now he can go pick the yellow bud on her rose bush without her seeing. It’s the first bud. He’s been eyeing it all week. That rose bush is still sitting there in its plastic bag.
It’s for the little bottle next to his bed. ’Cause if you ask him, a real flower’s the only thing he’s short of.
SERMONS ON THE MOUNT
Mol wakes up. She’s not altogether sure where she is. ‘Tip-tip-tip’, she hears. It’s raining. Where’s it raining now? She sits up. Here’s Pop, next to her. There’s Treppie, on the back seat. Pop and Treppie are both sleeping. Toby’s awake. He looks at her with big shiny eyes from where he’s sitting in the dicky at the back. All she can see through her window are drops of water. She winds down the window. It’s the Zoo Lake parking lot. That’s where they are.
First they were on the koppie. That’s right, now she remembers. With sermons. And Klipdrift. She touches her head. It hurts. Too much Klipdrift today. The stuff just makes her feel sleepy, but what could she do, with all the nerves in the house about the girl who was supposed to be coming, and everything. So when they finished looking at Lambert’s den, she helped herself to another shot. And then she went and lay down, ’cause Pop and Treppie just couldn’t get themselves going. Before she knew it she was fast asleep. The next thing, Pop was shaking her. All she could see were little stars.
‘Get up! Quick!’ Pop said. He was standing in the door, looking down the passage towards the den and then back into the room. In and out, in and out he kept looking, completely white with nerves.
‘She’s here!’ Pop said. ‘Quick! We must go!’
So she dragged herself to the front, even though she wasn’t properly awake yet. She only really came to when they got to the koppie. And not by herself. The sermons did it.
Pop stirs in his seat next to her. He looks all broken-jointed. His head lolls over the back-rest and his knees are jammed at an angle against the gear lever. Shame, he must also be tired after all the fuss. He was wiped out even before they left the house.
They had to stand on the pavement next to the car, waiting for Treppie. He’d taken the girl through to the back. Pop was pacing up and down, blowing out clouds of smoke. They told her later they’d looked high and low to find a girl, and in the end they decided to pick one up off the street. With a touch of the tar-brush, Pop said. Shame, a little touched. And Lambert himself is also a bit touched in the head. She wonders when they’ll be able to go home again. What’s the time? Probably early morning already. Lambert should surely be finished by now? Finished! God help her!
Pop said the girl cost a packet. He said Treppie tried to bargain with her, asking if they couldn’t first pay her a deposit. Then that girl told Treppie she may be a rent-piece, but she wasn’t yet a lay-by. Not slow on the uptake, Pop said. A real livewire. Well, so far, so good: that’s what Lambert said he wanted. Now he’ll see how things really work. Not everyone’s just going to do what he says. She hopes the whole thing doesn’t turn into a big fuck-up again. Pop said Treppie told the girl a lot of stuff and nonsense that she had to spin Lambert. That she was a high-class whore, a Cleopatra or something. And that she should keep a close watch, ’cause Lambert sometimes got wild. And if Lambert did get a bit wild she should pull his pants down over his feet and get the hell out of there. Pop said Treppie almost ruined the whole business with his horror stories. In the end they had to pay all the money in a lump sum, more than a hundred rand, just for an hour. Mol has her doubts. This woman is a stranger to Lambert. She’ll have to know her stuff, ’cause sometimes Lambert takes a while to get going. It’s a good thing they got out of the house. She told Pop, she really didn’t want to be there if the whole thing blew up, ’cause then she’d be the one to fix what that whore went and stuffed up. She could just see it coming.
/> She’s never before seen Pop in such a hurry. Treppie had hardly gotten into the car when Pop took off so fast that her head nearly jerked off her neck. They were thrown sideways, this way and that, as Pop wheeled around the corners. And when he skidded to a stop outside Ponta do Sol, she almost bumped her head in front. Pop was in a state all right. They bought Cokes and things and rushed back to the car. Then she asked him where was he taking them, but he just leant forward and stepped on the accelerator.
Treppie sang: ‘Up, up and away-y-y in my beautiful balloon!’
By this time, he was in high spirits. Mission completed, he said, now they could relax with a drink and a wide-angle view. So that’s where they were going – to the Brixton koppie.
Why did they have to go there again? she asked, but Treppie was running off at the mouth. He told her she should see it as a visit to the Mount of Olives. They would pour Klipdrift into their cans of Coke and drink them down to the very dregs! Yes, that’s what he said!
Pop was dead serious. He said this wasn’t the time and place for profanities. Didn’t Treppie realise how much depended on tonight? They should all hope and pray that everything went off well.
In for a penny, in for a prayer, Treppie said. They didn’t need to push him hard, ’cause when he had the city at his feet like this, he could pray a bird right out of a bush.
When they eventually settled down under the tower, she saw Pop would far rather drink than pray. ‘Ka-pssshhhtt!’ He ripped open the tab on his Coke tin, taking a big gulp – she saw his Adam’s apple jump and fall – to make space for a decent shot from Treppie’s bottle.
So there they sat, looking out at the view, the city’s lights shivering as far as the eye could see. More like candles than electricity. Far out to one side, they could see the Florida Lake water-organ and its lit-up fountain. Must be a lovely organ, that. She’s already told them she wants to go there and see it close-up, but they never get that far. Too many other things.
Then Treppie started up again.
‘All people that on earth do dwell
Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice’
he sang, just from seeing an organ in the distance. He’s got a head like a see-saw, that’s all she can say.
The next thing, Pop also started up, out of the blue: ‘What if you know you’re dying?’ he said.
She got such a fright she almost fainted. Pop wiped his mouth with an angry swipe and passed her his chocolate.
No, God, she said, there, eat your own chocolate, Pop. But he took the chocolate, ripped off the paper and flipped it right over his shoulder for Toby at the back. A whole half a Snickers. And Pop so loves his chocolate.
She thinks Treppie got a fright, ’cause he started talking about Toby being so spoilt and how he must think he’s part of a travelling church bazaar – if it wasn’t Snickers, it was Smarties. Treppie didn’t really want to change the subject. He made that speech of his about bazaars and things just to play for time. She could hear from his voice he was brimming with that topic of Pop’s. Meanwhile, Pop sat and looked straight ahead of him. She could see he was gritting his teeth. It was a long while before he started talking again.
No, what he meant was this: say you were dead certain you were busy dying, quite fast. So fast you could more or less count the days still granted to you. Pop’s voice was slow and dead even, like it always gets when he’s telling you what he’s saying isn’t small-talk.
She wanted to change the subject, so she said in the end everyone had to go, anyway – what was bothering him so much all of a sudden?
But by then Treppie was up and away already, running with that ball.
Ja, he said, pointing past her and Pop in the front seat, they must look at all those lights. ‘I say unto you, for every one of those lights, someone will either give up the ghost or give his first cry tonight.’ When Treppie starts with ‘I say unto you’, then you know he’s halfway up the pulpit already and you’re not going to get him down again so easy. ‘It’s one and the same thing. Breathe in, breathe out, eat, shit, eat, shit, poof, gone! No one asked for it.’
But Pop said, no, that wasn’t his point.
Well then, he’d better get to the point before the point got to him, Treppie said, and she said, yes, Pop should get to the point so he could get past it.
That’s what she thought, then. But it was a helluva long point, that.
No, Pop said, what he meant was, what did you do if you knew your time was running out. What should you do if you knew?
Now it was getting a bit too much for her. She switched on the radio ’cause she didn’t know what else to do, and the car suddenly filled up with a love song, something about ‘only a heartbeat away’. That turned out to be completely the wrong thing to do. Treppie stuck his arm past her and switched off the radio, shouting, ‘Shuddup! Shuddup with that fucken rubbish!’ right into her ear. Even Toby said ‘ee-ee’, he got such a fright. Then Treppie sat back heavily, his chest heaving. He tried to light a cigarette but he was striking the matches so hard they kept breaking. ‘Fuck!’ he said after each match broke.
It was Pop’s should that threw Treppie so badly. If there’s one word you must never say in front of Treppie, it’s ‘should’. It was like someone had poured turpentine on to his tail.
‘Should,’ he said. ‘The fuck with should! When you die, you die, period, over and out. You don’t owe anyone any shoulds ’cause you never ordered it. You never asked to be born, nor to live all the days of your life in this furnace pit.’
At first Pop said nothing. He just looked in front of him out of the window. Treppie blew smoke into Pop’s neck as he talked. It looked like Treppie was about to start shooting fire from his nostrils, like that dragon on the video he brought from the Chinese one year for Guy Fawkes.
Then Pop said, ‘Furnace pit’, so softly you almost couldn’t hear what he was saying.
So she asked, what was a furnace-pit.
‘Yes, ask!’ Treppie shouted. ‘Ask!’ It was a hole full of bricks, he said. A deep, burning hell-hole where you sat and baked bricks, all day, every day, and when you were not baking them they sat and looked at you, stacks and stacks of those rough, red things.
Pop turned his head a bit, like nothing at all was the matter, and he asked Treppie how it was that he came up with this kind of thing.
He came up with what he came up with, Treppie said, Pop didn’t have to worry about coming up with anything whatsoever; all he had to do was look in a dictionary. There it stood, in letters as large as life, for anyone to read: furnace pit. And he was sure Pop knew all the other names for that pit. Arse-end, deep-end, furnace-hole, hell-hole, long-drop, Treppie said, hauling out all the names for holes that he knew, and he said the Benades were sitting in the lot of them. That was the one thing. And the other thing was it wasn’t their fault.
Her chocolate was sticking to the top of her mouth by now. She’s never been able to chew when people fight. She felt quite paralysed. ’Cause if there’s one word that she can’t stand, then it’s fault. Old Pop always used to say everything was her fault, and then Old Mol would jump in front of her when she saw a punch coming her way. Or she, Mol, would jump behind Old Mol. Then she felt it was all her fault, twice over, ’cause Old Mol was always looking black and blue from taking the blows meant for her.
Treppie must have seen her say the word fault, even with her mouth full of Snickers.
Yes, fault, Mol, fault, he shouted, making his mouth droop and saying fault in the same way she does when she doesn’t have her tooth in her mouth and she says something. It was so bad she put her hands over her ears, and when she took her hands away again, Treppie was still saying it wasn’t their fault, because of something.
Because of what? she asked. Now she was curious, but she had to ask Treppie three times before he gave her an answer. By then he was drinking the Klipdrift straight from the bottle, ‘ghloob-ghloob-ghloob’, as though it was water on a hot day.
No wonder he’s now fast a
sleep at the back here with his mouth wide open. ‘Gaaarrrgh-gaaarrrgh’, he goes. She can smell it from where she’s sitting. Lambert says Treppie’s breath is enough to fire off a rocket. Lambert. How will he know what to do with that woman he doesn’t know from a bar of soap? Maybe she should wake them up now so they can go and look. But then again, maybe not. Pop needs his rest. Let him sleep. And maybe Lambert’s still awake. Maybe he’s waiting up for them. In that case, she’d rather sit here until sunrise.
Pop also asked Treppie, because of what? It wasn’t their fault they were in the furnace pit, because of what? Not that he knew, Pop said, what that had to do with knowing you were dying and what you should do in the circumstances. Can you believe it, there Pop went and said should again. She thought something must have come over Pop. Once was enough, and she could see Treppie wasn’t even finished with the first should, not by a long shot. And here Pop came with another one. And it wasn’t as if you could duck out of Treppie’s way.
‘Everything!’ he shouted into their faces. It had everything to do with it, ’cause if their mother and father hadn’t been so backward, and if they had been raised better, and Old Pop hadn’t shouted at him, Treppie, so terribly before he even knew what went for what, and if Old Pop hadn’t beaten him to a pulp when he did know what went for what, then everything would’ve been different.
Then what would have been different? Pop asked, and she thought to herself, now Pop was really asking for trouble, he should know he can’t square up with Treppie. But she was wrong, ’cause Pop just pushed on. Then what would have been different? he asked again.
What would’ve been different, Treppie said, was that he might’ve had a choice. He might’ve been able to choose how to die and what to do if he knew he was dying. And with that he sat back, boomps, against his seat and said it may be that Pop had begun to die only recently but he, Treppie, had been dying ever since his eighth year, and it was the kind of dying you do twice over – in body and in soul. The ruination of his soul, and the blood of his limbs, he said, was on Old Pop’s hands. May Old Pop hear him wherever he was and may Old Pop gnash his teeth in the outermost darkness for ever and ever.
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