Triomf

by Marlene van Niekerk

  Treppie’s got that little shoe in his hands again. He throws it into her lap.

  ‘Try it on quickly, dear sister, maybe the two of you wear the same size. Wonders never cease!’

  Now Treppie’s on fast-forward again. He’s at the Tedelex. Open goes the door. Out comes the little white box.

  ‘So, my old hotshot,’ he says to Lambert, ‘do you also feel like a piece of birthday cake, old boy? People who swing from pelmets like Tarzan the apeman also need something sweet in their lives, don’t they? Me Tarzan, you Mary, low white, high brown!’

  ‘Chomp!’ goes Treppie as he bites into the side of the Swiss roll. He passes it on to Lambert in the same way he passed Lambert the gun – with the thick side to the front.

  ‘Hmmm, hmmm,’ he goes, his cheeks full. Now he’s a monkey, scratching the underside of his armpit with his loose hand.

  Lambert’s white in the face. Out, she signals to Pop. When Lambert looks like this, there’s a fit coming. She feels in her housecoat’s pocket. No peg.

  Lambert takes the Swiss roll, but he doesn’t eat. He just puts it down on the bed without taking his eyes off Treppie. Jam drips from the one side of the Swiss roll. Toby’s wondering who the Swiss roll belongs to. He puts his front paws on to the bed and takes a bite.

  Stupid dog. Sis! Off!

  ‘Yes, off!’ says Treppie. ‘That’s not your cake.’

  Treppie waves at them, as if he’s enjoyed his visit and he’ll come and see them again some time.

  ‘Well, then, cheers, I’m going now. All’s well that ends well, as they say in the classics, or, further west down the road of suffering, as ye sow, so shall ye reap, even when the harvest is in Martha Street.’

  ‘Biff!’ he hits Lambert on the back. Thanks for that nice piece of cake. Lambert must eat it now before it gets stale. Lambert says nothing. He’s looking straight in front of him.

  But Treppie’s forgotten something. Oh yes, Lambert must please let him know when he’s finished with the sheets. No rush, mind you, Lambert must take his time, ’cause life only begins at forty.

  At the door, Treppie turns around one last time. He looks at her and Pop, and then he shows them they must smile. What the hell, it’s all over now.

  Toby goes with Treppie.

  ‘Whoof! Whoof!’ says Toby as Treppie kicks blocks for him all the way down the passage.

  Let her also go now. She looks at Pop. Then she looks at the Swiss roll. Two bites. A human bite and a dog bite. On any other day she would’ve taken a bite too, from the clean side, but today she feels sick to her stomach. Any moment the ants will be there too. She points, but Lambert’s not looking. He’s just sits there on his bed. She really hopes he won’t have a fit now, too.

  Pop gets up. He looks like he wants to say something. He looks like he wants to say Lambert mustn’t worry, everything will be okay and next year they can try again. But he can’t say it out aloud. She takes him by his sleeve so he can come. He doesn’t want to. Come now, Pop. As they shuffle out, Pop wants to touch Lambert’s shoulder, but Lambert sees Pop’s hand coming. He turns away. She really hopes he’s not going to have a fit now. ’Cause his lips are trembling.

  Lambert takes the gun and shoots his list right off the wall.

  Items one to ten are hard to shoot, but the further down he goes the easier it gets, ’cause the plaster’s soft from a damp spot in the wall. After every shot big pieces fall out of the wall.

  He counts his bullets. He works it out. He’s got three for each of his gallery paintings, and then there’s still one left.

  First the wings. One bullet on this side and one bullet on the other side of SUPERBEE. Sorry, SUPERBEE, but I’m going to have to shoot you from close up. He puts on his welding helmet in case the bullets bounce back. Right, straight into the wall and out the other side again. Small holes. Cheap bricks!

  Now for the welding torch. He burns SUPERBEE’S wings with the flame till you can’t see any more of him, and also nothing around him, neither his heaven nor his earth.

  He keeps the last bullet for his mermaid, but as he points the gun, first at her silver fin, where the paint’s peeling off, and then at her yellow hair, which is too long and too much, he starts shaking so much that he shoots himself instead. A direct shot, right in the head. There’s just a black hole between the two ears in front of Molletjie’s steering wheel.

  His head’s zinging from all the shooting. And his tail-end’s jerking hard. Let him put this gun away nicely now. In the steel cabinet. Let him go lie on his bed. Let him sleep.

  21

  NORTH NO MORE

  PARALLEL PARKING

  That was morning and now it is evening. Treppie stands on the little front stoep with a glass in his hand. With his other hand he clutches his shoulder. It’s jerking like mad, as if someone’s throwing a switch on and off inside his body, somewhere near his navel. But the current has nowhere to go, so it slams into his skull and shoots back down into his shoulder. He feels wired, from head to toe. Vibrating, all the way down to his guts. It must be that bite he took from Lambert’s cold Swiss roll this morning. Fucken cardboard roll from Spar. Smeared full of slimy jam, although that might also help a bit. Unfathomable are the ways of digestion. If the Holy Spirit ever descends upon him, he reckons, it will be in the form of gippo guts. Then he’ll be truly blessed. He should actually try going to the toilet now, try to tune it in for a symphony, but this business here in the yard is something he wouldn’t miss for all the money in the world – not even for a turd in the toilet.

  It all started this afternoon, when Pop woke up in his chair after sleeping like a dead thing right through all that shooting in the back. He’d hardly opened his eyes when he said, right, now Mol must come, he’d had a ‘visitation’. If there was one last task awaiting him before he was taken up into the house of the Father, it was to teach Mol to drive. Lambert wasn’t allowed to drive, and what would happen if there was suddenly a crisis and Treppie was ‘incapacitated’? he asked. Then Mol would be stranded. Believe it or not, that’s what he said, as if they were all quite happily on their way to paradise in the Drommedaris. And yes, he said, no matter how exhausted he was, the final driving lesson would have to start immediately. He just wanted to check, first, how things were going with Lambert there at the back. They said nothing about the shooting. He and Mol just sat there rolling their eyes at each other as Pop shuffled down the passage towards the den.

  After the first shot, Mol had started screaming. She wanted to go to the back to stop Lambert. But he sat her down on her chair and explained to her nicely that she’d just have to leave it now. History had to take its course and none of them could do anything more about it. By the thirteenth shot, when Mol began shivering and shaking, he told her it sounded like Lambert was shooting at a tin in preparation for tomorrow’s election. No need to worry, he said. But he didn’t tell her about the visions he’d been having of the whole of Fort Knox lying in a bloody heap in the backyard.

  So, he and Mol were both relieved when Pop came back and said everything was okay. Lambert was still sleeping. He said he couldn’t figure it out, but Lambert’s paintings were full of holes and there were chunks of plaster all over the floor.

  The bastard should fuckenwell have shot himself in the head, and the rest of them too, one after the other. Then all of their problems would’ve been solved for good. And then this whole blasted story could have ended in blood and guts and a smoking barrel. The perfect South African family murder. Then everyone would’ve been happy – common rubbish living their common lives, making the rest of the fucken scum feel good about themselves. He can just see the headlines: BLOODBATH IN TRIOMF, THE LAST OF THE POOR WHITES IN OLD SOPHIATOWN, MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. Take your pick. Better than any Western. Then, after their death, they’d maybe even become the flavour of the month with all the fools who think they’re bigger and better than everyone else. Well, no one’s going to get rid of them quite so easily. In any case, he’s far from ready. And w
hat’s more, he won’t just lie down for any old trick. He has his pride, for fuck’s sake. And just let anyone – let alone that wretched Lambert – try to run them down like they’re the Big Five (the fifth being the Klipdrift bottle). For that arsehole he’ll set a booby trap in which the bastard will get stuck for the rest of his goddamn life, right here among them. Under their roof. Then the sod can run up against the walls, trying to escape, north-south-east-west, until kingdom come. Like an ant in a saucer.

  And as a consolation prize he’ll see one hell of a performance every now and again. Like Pop in front here, for example. He’s busy putting up candles on a row of Dogmor tins, all along the prefab wall. He told Pop it looked more like a landing strip for a Dogmor-angel than a parking lot for Mol.

  This is now going to be a lesson in the dark. ’Cause this afternoon it was party-time in the street again. He’d half hoped they’d forget about the driving lesson. It felt to him like they’d all been in a long nightmare for weeks now, with Lambert’s birthday and everything. Like they can’t wake up, no matter how hard they try, and it’s just night all the time. And now, on top of everything, there’s one bomb after another.

  First, this afternoon, he felt the ground rumble under his feet and he thought, this had to be the bomb for Jo’burg-West. Then Mol called him from his room. He must please come, there was a roof-removing machine outside in the street. Poor Mol, all she can worry about is whether they’ll still have a roof over their heads. The fact that it’s been leaking like a fucken sieve for years doesn’t seem to worry her at all. She spent half the past summer walking up and down with pots and pans and things. When they get full, she empties them. Then she puts them down again, over and over, like she’s scared the house will sink if she doesn’t. As if the threat’s coming from below. Anyhow, the thing outside had nothing to do with the roof, it was a helluva show the NP was putting on here in Triomf for the election. That’s what he calls a last-ditch attempt – in a fucken crane, can you believe it! He feels like declaring tomorrow his own personal holiday and fuck the rest. He’s already told them, if only he had the money, he’d fuck off to the Lost City and spend a few days there, they’ve got bed and breakfast on election special over there. Then he could have settled himself comfortably in those artificial little waves and forgotten about everything else. The whole business is working badly on his tits. He has to drink himself almost paralytic every night just to get some sleep.

  He rubs his jerking shoulder. He sees Toby looking at the candles on the tins, inspecting them one by one as Pop puts them up. Must think it’s Christmas all over again, the poor dog, like he’s in a time-warp or something. He’s been completely mad recently, barking at fuck-all half the time. Must be the bombs going off all over the place, and the shooting in the middle of the night. More and more bombs going off by the day. And now it’s guns with hand-pump action, he reads in the papers. When Toby hears those things going off at night he runs round the house like he’s got a Guy Fawkes movie in his head. Not to mention all the cars that race and crash and the sirens and things on Ontdekkers, a wailing and a gnashing of teeth. The dogs feel it the worst. This afternoon again, when that thing came wheeling down the street, the dogs thought it was coming for them. A monster of a yellow crane with a small head and a long arm. You just saw dogs barking and teeth snapping at those tyres. The wheels were half a house high. So he decided to let Toby out so he could also blow off some steam.

  And guess who was sitting up in the cab, along with the kaffir who was driving? None other than those two little lapdogs from RAU. Waving their little white hands from a dizzy height behind a tinted windscreen, as if they were fucken royalty or something. Colour-combined too, like Christmas trees – margarine suns on her ears, and him with a fig-leaf tie in NP colours. Underneath the tie, his stomach was sticking out like a plump white pumpkin.

  They all went down to the oak tree at the bottom of the street. The crane stuck out its arm a little further, ‘bzzzt!’, with Jannie White-Pumpkin strapped into a little chair at its tip. He stretched a big banner right around that tree’s crown. It looked like a bad joke, like an ancient creature with a sore head. The banner said, in big, fat letters: THE TIME HAS COME TO CHOOSE BETWEEN THE BUILDERS AND THE BREAKERS! Underneath, someone had written in, just for the occasion, in slanted writing: F.W. LOVES TRIOMF. FORWARD WITH OUR MINORITY! KEEP OUR NEIGHBOURHOOD CLEAN! Pop asked him what he thought it all meant, but all he said was, no comment. He was listening out for his stomach.

  So, that was diversion number one. And, he must say, they needed a little break after the shock this morning when they got home and found the house looking like a ghostbuster had ripped through it. Not that he was surprised after all that build up. He’d promised Lambert he’d bring the girl, and there was no way he could go back on his word. He was too deeply dug into the whole story. That’s how it goes in this place. You plug one hole with a story and then the story blows up in your face. Then you’re left with an even bigger hole. Now even the lounge window’s got a fucken hole in it. Well, it keeps him busy, that’s all he can say. Deeper than a hole you can’t go.

  Then it was time for diversion number two. Mol again. They must come see, she says, here comes Miss South Africa. But it wasn’t her, it was soft-serve with a difference, ’cause that ice-cream kaffir was covering his backside – the Ding-Dong was decorated with every flag under the sun. From the NP’s flag right through to the DP, the ANC, the PAC and the AWB. And, just for luck, he chucked in a zebra flag from Trek Petroleum, as well as a Vierkleur, a Red Cross, a flag with the Malawian rooster on it, and a Toyota horse. The works. On the aerial, of course, he had a blue peace-flag with little doves on it. Yes, he said, that was the only way. A kaffir couldn’t take chances with ice cream on a day like this, especially in Triomf. That man had a very good nose for business, not to mention a grand sense of occasion.

  The only flag he hadn’t seen on that Ding-Dong, he told them, was the flag of the New South Africa, thank God. Then of course Pop wanted to know why, ’cause Pop’s a sucker for adverts. As long as it’s new. So he told Pop he hoped to heaven that he, Treppie, would be six feet under when the New South Africa started to see its arse, ’cause he’d been forced to watch the old South Africa go down the drain and he couldn’t bear to see the new one dying on a life-support system while it handed out golden handshakes left, right and centre. With the bugles of the last tattoo in its ears and a Y-front flag blowing at half-mast in the wind of its last breath. Thank you very much. Two nationalistic fuck-ups, he told Pop, would be too much for a finely tuned and constipated mortal like himself to handle.

  All this time Pop just stood there, looking at him like he wanted to start crying. He mustn’t go and start blubbering now, he told Pop, ’cause he could see what was going on in his head. Pop must just understand, he said, a life-support machine was a lie against the truth of death. It didn’t save you from your unavoidable end. He was fed up with this whole show just for Lambert’s sake, he said, and that’s why he’d let the cat out of the bag this morning. Lambert must take the whole fucken lot now and get finished. If he was good enough to inherit all that they still had of any value, namely his fridge book and his fridge tools, then now was also the time for him to inherit the secrets of the fathers, so he could seek his own salvation with open eyes, like a man.

  Then Mol echoed him, of course.

  ‘Yes, fathers,’ Mol said. ‘That’s right. Lambert actually had two fathers, the good father who tried to keep him on the straight and narrow all his life, and the bad father who fucked up every inch of that road, as far as he went.’

  Well, what can a person say? Who does she think she is, anyway? So he asked her, in that case, what did she think of a house with no mother? But of course you have to say everything twice before Mol understands, and this time she was really looking for it. So he told her, maybe he was in fact the vital ingredient in their story, and Pop the saving grace, but she should just realise that she was the joy of their desire,
in other words the queen bee, and if it hadn’t been for her, then Lambert, club-footed cretin that he was, would never have seen the light of day.

  That shut them up. The sun was almost down and Pop said, well, maybe they should have the driving lesson now. In Flossie, he said, just in case. Why not in Molletjie? he asked. Then it would be Mol-on-Mol violence. But no one else thought his joke was funny.

  To tell the truth, it wasn’t funny, but these days he can’t help himself any more. It’s his stomach that’s jammed so badly. No one believes him when he tells them it’s enough to make a person write a whole book full of cheap one-liners. And it’s been like this ever since he can remember. What goes in, must come out. And what won’t come out of the one end has to come out the other end. Top-dressing, that’s what he calls it.

  Anyhow, then it was a whole palaver again to get Mol into Flossie, ’cause she’d seen in the past how the petrol pedal got stuck when Lambert played go-cart around the house, and how he bumped into things – so hard he sometimes fell right out. There weren’t any seat belts in that thing, either.

  So Pop first had to take her for a ride, up and down the lawn next to the house, around Lambert’s rubbish dump at the far end and down to the postbox again, just to give her the feel of it. And when she eventually got into the driver’s seat, Toby went ‘whoof’ and jumped right over her on to the bricks at the back, which Lambert had packed there for weight. There was no more back seat after that fire he made for Guy Fawkes. Toby’s breath on her neck made Mol feel more relaxed, and now Pop could show her exactly how the gears worked. First, second, third, fourth, reverse. Over and fucken over again. Later, Pop even made a drawing to show her how the gears went, ’cause the gear stick no longer had its knob with that diagram on it.