It’s ten o’clock in the morning. Lambert feels hot. It should rain but it won’t. The sun-filter curtains, which he ripped down last night, hang over the pelmet in tatters, where Treppie chucked them afterwards. The window’s open, but the curtains don’t move. Yesterday it wanted to rain but it didn’t. Dust and flies swim around in the broad strip of sun slanting into the room.
Everyone’s in the lounge. It’s Sunday and they’re listening to the Witnesses of Triomf. A Boeing flies overhead and the house trembles. As the plane passes, the Witness who’s reading keeps moving her lips but they can’t hear a word she’s saying. Then the Boeing passes by and they can hear again. It drones further and further away. Must be heading for Jan Smuts.
‘“Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand”.’
Lambert tries not to look at the Witness as she reads. He looks at his hands, at the lines on his palms, his fingers and his three missing fingertips. They got caught in the escalator when he was six years old. He didn’t actually see Treppie doing it, but he’s always known it was Treppie who pushed him. On purpose. Now he lifts his head and looks past the Witness in the pink dress at Treppie. Treppie’s sitting on a beer crate, squinting at the big aerial photo of Jo’burg that hangs from the wall just above Mol’s head. It was on a calendar he brought home with him one day. Must’ve been another thing he got from the Chinese.
‘But it’s last year’s calendar,’ his mother still said. ‘What rubbish is this now?’
‘It’s for the picture,’ Treppie said, ‘so we make no mistake where we live.’ Then he took a hammer out of the toolbox and started banging a nail into the wall.
‘You’ll crack the plaster,’ Pop said.
‘Then let it crack,’ said Treppie, hanging up the calendar on its hard little plastic loop. His mother later cut off the part with the dates on. Now the bottom edges are curling up.
Lambert narrows his eyes to slits so he can see the little crosses Treppie made on the picture. A cross for Triomf, where they live now, and one for Vrededorp, where they used to live. No, it was him who made the crosses, with a red ball-point. Treppie showed him where, pointing with the sharp end of his pocket-knife. ‘Here!’ he said. ‘There!’
Vrededorp wasn’t there any more, not the part where they used to live. And he couldn’t, not for the life of him, make out from above, on such a small photo, where Vrededorp ended and Triomf began – it was somewhere in the area of Westdene and Pageview and Newlands and Bosmont. Everything just started swimming before his eyes.
Treppie shifts on his crate. He takes out his pocket-knife and slowly opens it up. Lambert can see Treppie’s checking out the Witness. He, Lambert, also can’t help looking at her, even when he tries not to. She’s wearing a smooth, shiny, pink petticoat that shows right through her cotton print dress. The dress is full of red and purple roses. They also show through. In front, where her knees come together, he can see the petticoat. He can also see it along the side where the roses got scrunched up as she sat down in Pop’s chair, the petticoat pulling tightly around her thighs.
He drops his eyes and looks past his knees, at the floor. Then he sees a lost ant. It runs first this way, then that. Lost. He looks for the others, but they’re on the far side of the room, in a line on the wall. When ants get lost like this, you know it’s going to rain. Lambert cups his hand in front of his crotch. Then he pulls his toes into an arch and slowly lifts up the balls of his feet. Loose wooden blocks from the parquet floor stick to the bottom of his feet. They go ‘click’ as he lifts them up. He could at least have washed his feet. Just look how dirty they are. But that doesn’t help either. Dirty feet or not. Lost ants or ants marching in a row. It cuts no ice, as Treppie always says, ’cause he’s already got a hard-on. When he looks up, he catches his mother looking at him.
The Witness reads: ‘“Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so, Amen.”’
Treppie says that the girl they’re going to get for him won’t be wearing a petticoat. Her kind don’t wear petticoats. Or rather, he says, petticoats are all they wear. He must remember to tell Treppie he doesn’t mind petticoats. Or dresses with petticoats. As long as it’s not overalls, or a ‘housecoat’, as his mother calls it. He hates the sight of housecoats.
He sticks a match into his mouth and frowns, like the cowboys on videos do as they pull their horses around when they get up the hills, so they can check where the Indians are, far below on the plains.
He looks at the lounge and everything in it.
Pop’s sitting on a crate with his back against the wall. Toby lies between Pop’s feet. His eyebrows and ears twitch as he listens to the Witness. Pop’s braces hang over his knees. His white hair stands up in little tufts on his head and his mouth hangs open. Any minute now he’ll fall asleep again. Pop’s almost eighty, and the closer he gets to his birthday, the more he sleeps. Treppie says Pop’s different to all the other old people he knows. They lie wide awake, he says, waiting for death.
His mother says Pop’s tired. They must just leave him alone. Next to Pop is the sideboard with its bandy legs: three bandy legs and one brick. He can’t remember which night it happened, but there was a mega fuck-around here again. Last night’s glasses are still on the half-piece of tray on top of the sideboard. It’s been like that for a long time now. Ever since he broke the thing over Pop’s chair that time.
It was Treppie who started the whole thing, over stuff in the sideboard’s top drawer that he, Lambert, isn’t supposed to see or know anything about. Then there’s his mother’s library books from the Newlands library. Next to them is the china cat without a head. When it broke, his mother went and fetched a plastic yellow rose from the bunch on her dressing table and stuck it into the cat’s hollow neck.
‘There, that’s a little better,’ she said. That was a year ago.
His father might be old, but his mother’s over the hill. Completely. She sits with her legs wide apart under her housecoat. In-out, in-out, she moves her false tooth. She’s sitting there with Gerty on her lap. Gerty’s mouth hangs open. Above their heads he can see the coloured-in photo of her and Pop and Treppie. She’s holding a bunch of roses. Yellow, touched-up roses. All you see are teeth, the way they’re smiling. When she was in her prime, she used to sell roses. That’s after she stopped working at the factory. She sold them at bioscopes and restaurants.
‘Better days,’ she says every time she straightens the portrait following another earth tremor.
These days she swallows all the time, and the skin around her throat is beginning to shrivel. Now she’s staring at the bits of curtain in front of the window.
Treppie suddenly jerks forward on his crate and starts cleaning his nails with his pocket-knife. The knife goes ‘grr-grr’ as it scrapes under his nails. His face is blue from not shaving and he looks live, like an open electric wire. His shoulder twitches. Lambert’s not sure whether it’s him or Treppie giving off the Klipdrift fumes that he can smell all over the room. From last night, when the curtains came down. When Treppie started taunting him about his birthday again. They mustn’t taunt him. He gives as good as he gets.
The other Witness is a man. He clears his throat, preparing to take over the reading. His cheeks look like they’ve been planed down, and his hair’s oiled. Smooth, like Elvis. He’s wearing a brown suit with a pale blue sheen. He smells of mothballs and peppermints and shaving cream.
The smell makes Lambert feel sick to his stomach. It’s a strange feeling, the heat and the hardness all at the same time. He tries to look out of the window, just past the little carport where the Volla’s standing. He wants to see if his postbox that he welded on to the gate yesterday is still there. But all he sees are molehills. The heads of the two Witnesses are in his way. The tips of the sun-filter curtains hang down behind their heads and shoulders. From the front, it looks like wings are growing out of them: sloppy, faded old wings full of holes. Growing and growing, like dusty old cloths that keep stringing out and rising up into the warm air, up, up from their innermost insides.
Pink Dress looks at Elvis. She’s reading the last sentence of her turn.
‘“I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.”’
Lambert grabs his knees in front and squeezes his buttocks together. He must just hold it now, hold it tight, just think of his postbox that he made all on his own. From pieces of plate his father fetched for him at Roodepoort Steel’s scrapyard. That was after the fridge business went bankrupt. After Guy Fawkes. Pop went to fetch the steel on the day before Guy Fawkes, ’cause his mother had said: ‘Pop, you’d better do something to keep Lambert busy. He’ll be the end of me yet.’ He’d been out of school for two years by then. Eighteen years old.
A house looks better with a postbox in front in any case. It says: People live here and they’ve got an address. This is where you’ll find them if you want them. It helps, ’cause the houses in Triomf all look much the same, anyway.
So he took the steel plates, cut them to size and welded them together. He made a little silver house with a V-roof and a slot for letters and a round hole in front. He made it nicely, with a double row of welding spots all round the edges, and with their number, 127, in front. Nice and black in lead so you could see it from the street. Then he put it up on a nail against the prefab wall, just inside the gate so the postman-kaffir could lean over and put in the letters, ’cause they always lock the gate in front. But since then, every time Treppie turns Molletjie into the gate at the end of the month, he knocks that postbox right off the wall again. Molletjie’s been panelbeaten and spray-painted to death from driving into that postbox. So in the end he just took the thing and chucked it into his den. It was always full of junk anyway. Adverts and pamphlets and the Western Telegraph. That kind of thing doesn’t need a postbox. You just pick it up off the lawn. There’s nothing to read in that paper in any case, except the flying squad’s emergency numbers and all the new stuff in the by-laws. About making a racket, ‘noise pollution’, as Treppie calls it.
The postbox stayed in his den until yesterday, when he suddenly clicked: nowadays a person needs a decent postbox here in Triomf. Easily visible, and within reach of the pavement, so you can get the pamphlets, so you can keep up with what’s going on, so you can keep ahead, so you don’t wake up one morning to find that the kaffirs have already taken over, right under your nose. So they can be ready – Molletjie’s points grinded just right, and her front boot and roof-rack loaded with bags of petrol, for the great road to the North.
‘No, shit, I’m going to weld that postbox on to the gate now. It’s now or never,’ he said. That was yesterday.
‘But the rain’s coming, Lambert,’ his mother said.
‘If I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it,’ he said, making them run around under the blue lightning to bring his tools: the welding box, his helmet, his hammers, his pliers and his level. Rain or no rain, when a thing’s got to be done, it’s got to be done. Otherwise there’s always a fuck-around. When he, Lambert, wants a thing to work, then it must work. Come hell or high water.
But his mother was slow on the uptake, as usual. She gets like that sometimes, her head all haywire. He had to send her back to his den three times to get the level. First she came out with a monkey wrench, then the crowbar, till he finally told her it was the fucken plank with the fucken bubble in it!
He swears, she’s driving him nuts.
And then those fuckers from next door peeped at them over the prefab wall, as they stood there, struggling with that damn postbox ’cause it kept fucking off the pole. Till at last he figured he must actually just weld a flat plate on to the pole, and then fix the postbox on to the top of the plate. Then it worked. He, Lambert, can tell you all about never giving up. In the end, he gets everything fixed. Postboxes, lawn-mowers, taps, overflow pipes, geysers, you name it. Fridges and washing machines too. And Molletjie. He services her all the time. Drains her oil, greases her, grinds her points, the works.
It’s just his mother that he can’t get fixed up. You can still fool Pop. And Treppie needs the occasional smack on the head, then he’s okay again. But his mother is his fucken end.
Treppie’s his mother’s brother, but even he’s given up on her. No matter how much he carries on with her, she just takes it lying down, like a scared little dog. Never backchats. And the day she does open her mouth, then it’s to say the same thing he’s just said to her. Like a blarry echo machine.
Treppie says she’s their ‘valley of echoes’. And when he really lets her have it, your ears start burning, ’cause Treppie can say mean, bad things.
Like the day they went to buy the car. They first wanted to trade Flossie in, but the man there said no, she’s too far gone, they must rather keep her for spares. Then Treppie winked, with those slit-eyes of his. That devil’s wink of his, when you know he’s up to something.
Treppie said to Pop, right in his face, right there next to that garage man, they should name the new Volla after his brother-in-law’s ‘dear little wife’.
Mol, he said, should be the little car’s name, and then he started pushing Pop around. What for, Lambert still doesn’t know.
‘Old, but game!’ Treppie said, and Pop pointed his finger at him. He must go slowly now, but Treppie just fucked along.
‘For a man to come with, to the place where he needs to come!’
Still it wasn’t enough; Treppie went and fetched his mother from where she was standing among the scrapheaps and the write-offs, and he put his arm around her in an off kind of way, half-soft, half-hard, and then he said, still in front of the garage man, she wouldn’t mind, of course, ’cause all three of them rode her in any case.
Well, he can’t see how Treppie knows about him and his mother’s business, ’cause he spends just about the whole day at the Chinese, week in and week out. He says he does odd jobs. But he can swear Treppie’s got a thing going there. He always flattens his hair with Brylcreem before he goes to work, the whole car stinks of Brylcreem when they take him to the bus stop. And Pop sleeps day in and day out, so he knows nothing … and in any case, that just makes two, that is, if Pop still can, which he doubts … for the rest, Treppie and his mother are brother and sister, so they can’t.
But: ‘Three in one!’ Treppie said, talking at the top of his voice. ‘Services them all! Father, Son and Holy Ghost, into their glory!’
‘Three in one,’ his mother said.
Well, that garage man’s laugh dried up right there, and when he looks back at it now, that must have been what Treppie wanted with all his dirty talk. ’Cause in the middle of all his sales talk, that dealer had a fat we-love-Jesus grin on his mug, and he’d stuck fishes on to the bumpers of all the cars in his yard. Fishes, fishes, fishes wherever you looked, big fishes and small fishes, it looked like the blarry Sea of Galilee there under those awnings. That’s what Treppie said and what his mother also said, afterwards. And before he and Pop went to pay the deposit, Treppie told that salesman, who was now looking down in the mouth, that if there’s one thing that gave him a major pain in the arse, it was a second-hand car dealer who tried to tell him religion ran on ninety-three and fishes stepped out in Firestones.
‘Firestones,’ his mother said.
But all the time that Treppie and his ‘echo machine’ were busy working off that goody two-shoes’ smile, Pop just stood there and stared out into the distance. Only Treppie was laughing, and then Lambert saw how Pop took his mother’s hand and gave it a little squeeze, as if to say, don’t worry, and he knew she was just playing along for the sake of peace.
Then Treppie came with a new angle. He started singing a classical kind of tune in another language, something ‘-line’, something ‘-line’ and something else ‘-line’; he still doesn’t know what all those lines meant. And then the garage man asked Treppie what he was singing now, and Treppie said he thought he was singing a famous German SS hallelujah song, from something called ‘Der Rosenkavalier’, and it meant blood was thicker than water. All the way down the line.
‘Rosenkavalier,’ his mother said, squeezing Pop’s hand.
In any case, from then on the car’s name was Molletjie. Sometimes, when the car won’t start so nicely, then Treppie says, come now, little sister, or he sings her the hallelujah of the SS. He says he’s just glad it’s another Volla, the same model as Flossie, ’cause, unlike the saying, it’s actually the familiar that makes the heart grow fonder.
Now Elvis takes over the reading. His hands look all white and smooth as he sits there, holding his Bible. The woman leans back into Pop’s chair, and her petticoat pulls even tighter over her thighs. She follows Elvis’s reading in her own Bible. His voice is smooth, like his face.
‘“I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, saying: I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia: unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.”’
Triomf. That’s where they’ve always lived. At least that’s how it feels to him, cause he was six or seven when they first moved here. It was a big event and he still remembers it well, with all the fridges in the trailer behind the old Austin lorry. He was born in Vrededorp, but he knows nothing about that. His mother pulls a face when she says the word ‘delivered’. Apart from that, all he hears are stories about when he was young, and now he can’t remember which are stories and which the things he actually remembers, ’cause in this house everyone tells such tall stories you’d swear their lives depended on it.
His mother too, when she talks about his birth. She says it was a ‘rough’ delivery. He was a ‘whopper’ who refused to budge. Then they brought the forceps and they pulled him out by his head. Yes, by his head. Then she ‘tore open’, she says. ‘Never again.’ That’s what she’s fuckenwell supposed to have said after he came out and the nurses carried him away, with his lopsided, dented head. ‘From now on’ she told ‘those with ears to hear’, they ‘must stop eating the tart before they get to the jam’. He doesn’t know who ‘those’ are and what tart she was talking about. All he knows is that whenever his mother talks about his birth, Treppie always sings ‘Sow the seed, oh sow the seed’, and then Pop looks the other way. Lambert reckons his mother’s not all there any more. She’s lost some of her marbles.
Pop and them used to rent a house in Fietas; that was when his mother was still a garment worker at the factory in Fordsburg. But then the factory filled up with cheap Hotnot women. They were a lot cheaper than white women, so she had to leave. A little while later, they bulldozed the kaffirnests here in Sophiatown. Pop and Treppie came to see for themselves, they say. Some houses were just pushed down with everything still inside, so all you heard was glass breaking and wood cracking. Then Community Development started building here, right on top of the kaffirs’ rubbish. Decent houses for white people. Treppie used to work for the Railways in those days, and he asked for his pension money early so he could put it down for a deposit. Like this – ‘ka-thwack’ – he always demonstrates, in Pop’s hand, ‘tied with an elastic’.
Then they started from scratch again on the fridges. Washing machines and fridges, but mostly fridges. They went and fetched them with the old Austin, stood them up in the yard at the back here, fixed them up and then took them back to their owners. And his mother took up her roses again. One thing he still remembers from Vrededorp is that he grew up around fridges and plastic buckets full of roses in the little backyard. His mother used to leave him behind, with Treppie, so she could go out and work. She says she doesn’t trust Treppie further than she can throw him, even though he is her brother, but what was she supposed to do? she always asks. She had to help bring in some money, especially when they first came to live in Triomf. Pop used to drive her up and down all night long in the Austin, to the grand hotels and bioscopes and restaurants and places. By the time they got home, it was late already, and by then Treppie was drunk as a lord. It was a real balls-up. He’s still got the marks on his backside where they say Treppie burnt him with cigarettes. ‘So he’d shuddup,’ Treppie always says about those days. Treppie says he, Lambert, was full of shit when he was small. Then he grins spitefully at his mother and Pop, and he says he wonders who Lambert really takes after. Takes after or not, he knows his worth, and he proved it by helping them out with the fridges when he got older. By the time he reached standard seven, he was head and shoulders above Pop, and he’d developed a helluva strong pair of arms. ‘Like tree trunks’ Pop used to say. He could pick up a fridge and shift it on to the back of the Austin lorry all on his own. That Austin’s long gone now. The fridges and washing machines too. That time with Guy Fawkes. The day before Guy Fawkes, when he couldn’t find his spanners in the grass. Now it’s just the old Fuchs and the old Tedelex out there in the back. Real old heavies. Treppie says they don’t make them like that any more. You can stuff a whole cow into just one of those fridges. And the washing machine from the war. The Industrial Kneff. It’s an antique, he says. When he gets pissed, he tells the story of how Hitler used to wash the Jews in the Kneffs before sending them to the camps. Whole laundries full of Kneffs, full of Jews. Clothes and all. They had to go through the whole cycle, from pre-wash to spin-dry. Treppie says Jews are dirty. Even a spotless Jew is good for one thing only, Treppie says, and that’s the gas chamber.
He’s never been able to figure out this business of the gas chamber. Must’ve been a helluva contraption.
When Treppie finishes the story, he lets out a little sigh and then he says: It’s all in the mind. And sometimes he also says: We should’ve had Hitler here, he’d have known what to do with this lot. But he doesn’t sound like he believes it himself, and then he strings together a whole lot of words that he, Lambert, can’t make head or tail of. Holocaust, caustic soda, cream soda, Auschwitz.
Treppie’s the only one who’s still got a job. At least, that’s what he says. Pop’s been on pension for ages now, and he, Lambert, gets disability, over his fingers and everything.
Treppie goes out on jobs most of the week. His mother says what work, he just sits and boozes with the Chinese in Commissioner Street. Treppie says, bullshit, he won’t touch that rotten Chinese wine. He says he’s the only expert the Chinese can afford; they’re not the richest of people, and their fridges are old. And he doesn’t always get cash from them, either. They give him take-aways or some of their old stuff. Like the video machine, which he, Lambert, fixed from scratch. Never touched something like that in his life before, and then he actually went and fixed the damn thing. With his own two hands. He looks at his hands. Then he looks at Elvis.
Elvis is reading about the seven candlesticks. He takes out a white hanky and wipes his forehead.
That’s Triomf for you. People sweat around here. The houses lie in a hollow between two ridges. On days like this it smells of tar. Tar and tyres. And if there’s a breeze, then you also smell that curry smell coming from the Industria side. Pop says it’s not curry, it’s batteries. But it’s not nearly as bad as on Bosmont ridge, where the Hotnots live. When he goes there on Saturdays, to scratch around on the rubbish dumps for wine boxes, there’s a helluva stink. It smells of piss and rotten fish. Treppie says it’s coloured pussy that smells like that. And when he, Lambert, then tells Treppie it’s all in the mind, Treppie wants to kill himself laughing. Why, he doesn’t know. Treppie’s also got a big screw loose somewhere. But it’s a different kind of screw to the one that’s loose in his mother’s head.
The chappy from the NP also wipes sweat from his forehead like that, with a neat little hanky he takes out of his blazer pocket. Five minutes of talk about the election, five minutes explaining the pamphlets and then he’s in a sweat. Last time he was talking about the pamphlet with the NP’s new flag on it. Treppie said it looked exactly like a lollipop in a coolie-shop. The sun shines on all God’s children, the bloke said, and Treppie said, hell, after all this time, the NP still thought it was God, with the sun shining out of its backside. God or no God, Pop said, he was going to miss oranje-blanje-blou a lot. How was a person supposed to rhyme on the new flag? But the NP-man’s girl, who always comes with him on his rounds, suddenly said, ‘The more colours, the more brothers!’, and then she quickly straightened the straps on her shoulders again. That silly little sun on the pamphlet, his mother said, looked more like the little suns on margarine and floor polish, if you ask her. Now she’d really hit the nail on the head, Treppie said. The little sun stood for grease, for greasing. The NP was full of tough cookies, and you had to grease a tough cookie well before you could stuff her, he said. And then he looked so hard at that girl’s tits that she got up right there and then, and walked out, dragging the NP chappy behind her.
Treppie doesn’t like visitors.
His mother even takes off her overall for them. Her housecoat. She’s got a blue one and a pink one, and it doesn’t matter which one it is, when the NPs come, she takes it off and hangs it up on the nail behind the kitchen door. And then she fidgets with her bun and all to make sure she still looks decent. He wishes the NPs would move in here with them, so his mother would never have to wear the overall again. She says she keeps it on so she won’t mess up her clothes. That’s what she said when he was little and she still says it now. ‘Mess up,’ she says, pulling a face. But he saw, long ago, when Pop still wanted to, how she used to take the housecoat off for him.
The only other time she takes it off is when she and Treppie go sit in the back room to talk about family matters. What family matters? he always wants to know, but Treppie just winks that devil’s wink of his. ‘Family secrets,’ he says. And then he smacks her on the bum as they go in through the door.
Not that there’s ever much discussion behind that door. But then family secrets aren’t things you go around announcing from the rooftops. Like the fact that his mother doesn’t wear panties. It’s that kind of secret. Treppie told him that. He says it comes from when they were children and there wasn’t enough money for women’s panties. They’ve got dresses after all, and no one needs to know.
Lambert doesn’t mind that either. It’s that housecoat of hers that gets him down. It smells sour, like the dishrags in the kitchen.
Lambert gets up. He pulls his shorts up over his bum and then switches on the fan standing on top of the sideboard. It makes a soft zooming sound, but it doesn’t budge. He looks back into the room first, and then he smacks the fan behind its head. The blade and the head immediately start turning, back and forth. Pop half wakes up, almost falling off his crate.
‘Lambert,’ he mumbles. Lambert shifts the fan so the Witness with the pink dress gets the most wind. Her hair begins to fly about and her dress blows against her body. She takes over the reading. Her voice is a little higher now and her shoulders lift as she breathes between sentences. She’s drawing on her spirit.
Lambert touches the front of his pants. Christ, if this dick of his would only stop playing up like this. He bends over double and walks back past the Witness. Then he sits down and tries to concentrate on what she’s reading, about the Son of Man in the midst of the seven candlesticks, clothed in a garment down to the foot, with a golden girdle around the chest. Funny place to wear a belt. Must be something like the president’s oranje-blanje-blou sash that he wears across his chest. He wonders how they’re going to get all the new flag’s colours on to the president’s sash. They’ll just have to make it broader, or the stripes thinner. Treppie will say it’s all in the mind. That’s just about the only thing he says nowadays, no matter what you talk about.
The fan’s another thing Treppie got from the Chinese. Its head was jammed with rust and the wires were burnt into each other. But he fixed it. Now all it needs is a little smack and then it works. He, Lambert, knows what he’s talking about when it comes to machines and gadgets and stuff. He knows how to make them work. A thing that won’t work gets his goat. A thing that won’t work is almost as bad as a thing that gets lost, something you can’t find no matter how hard you look.
It does him the hell in. He fixes things. Or he searches till he finds them, even if he has to turn the whole house upside down or break things. Pop says it’s the cross he has to bear in life, the fact that broken things get on his tits: fans, tape recorders, video machines, the lot. That’s why he makes sure the lawn-mower is always tuned, and the grass is kept short, and that Molletjie’s timing is set and her oil gets changed. That other Volla standing on blocks here in the back is his fucken end, but one day he’s still going to kick it until it’s fixed, kick it right into its glory. And he struggles like hell with the Fuchs and the Tedelex. The Kneff is completely seized up, but he’ll still get the whole lot of them fixed and working again. Before his birthday. Before the election. And even if the election gets postponed for ten years, like some people say, he won’t let it stop him. ’Cause his birthday can’t be postponed.
The same goes for his birthday present.
Pop and Treppie will park around the corner and then bring her in quietly around the back so his mother won’t see. His mother’s the one who says he wasn’t born to mess with women, he must ‘make peace with his lot in life’. Who the hell does she think she is? Raquel Welch or something? He’ll show her. He’ll fucken ‘make peace’ with nothing. And he’ll mess around as much as he likes.
Then they’ll knock softly on the back door of his den and say: ‘Lambert, she’s here.’ And when he opens the door, she’ll be standing right there. With blonde curls all the way down to her shoulders and a pink petticoat and make-up and high-heels and the works. It will be the end of April, so maybe she’ll be wearing a coat over her shoulders. Then he’ll stand aside. And as she walks past, he’ll say, ‘Allow me.’ He’ll take off her coat and hang it up behind the door. His red light will be on. And he’ll say: ‘Take a seat. Would you like something to drink?’
Just like that. He’ll take the ice out of the Tedelex’s ice-box, and the nice cold Coke out of the inside door of the Fuchs, and he’ll open and close the doors slowly so she can see. Yes, see. ’Cause even their inside lights will be working. She’ll see how those fridges are stacked full of Castles and polonies. And the Spar’s fancy dips, fish dip and cheese dip, and maybe even a box of wine. Enough for a week. He’ll have his Simba boerewors chips and his Willards cheese-and-onion crinkle cut ready. And lemons for the Coke. Right there on his work bench. And peanuts, too!
Later, when things are going dandy, he’ll switch on the Kneff for her, with nothing in it but water and washing powder, just for the hell of it. And then he’ll tell her about Hitler’s dirty Jews, and they’ll stand on a beer crate and look down at the foam it makes, that Industrial Kneff from the war. And they’ll put their hands on the Kneff and feel how nicely she runs, ‘wish-wash-wish-wash’, non-stop, without a hitch.
Lambert stares at the Witness in the pink dress. She’s also got curly hair. But her curls are brown, not blonde. Now if her hair was blonde, she’d be dead right. All she needs is a little more make-up. He feels himself getting hot and cold, but he holds on. He tries to look at something else. He looks down. A mouse runs across the floor.
Mouse, his mother points. Her mouth opens wide, but she doesn’t make a sound.
Just the Witness’s mouth makes sounds. ‘White like wool’, ‘as a flame of fire’, ‘unto fine brass’, ‘as the sound of many waters’, ‘the Son of Man’.
Elvis’s lips move as Pink Dress reads, but you can’t hear him. His eyes are on the mouth of the Witness who’s reading. He rubs his hands softly over his legs.
Suddenly Lambert clicks. These two Witnesses are fucking each other. That’s it. When they finish reading here, they go fuck their heads off. That’s what they do. Fuck. She doesn’t even take off her clothes. She just pulls up that pink dress of hers, with the petticoat and everything still on. Him too, he doesn’t take anything off, he just unzips and pulls out his dong. Sticks it in. Nice and deep until she screams like a pig. That’s the way they scream. On the videos as well. His mother too, but she screams too hard, and then he has to close her mouth with his hand.
Just look how Toby’s hair is standing up. Toby’s lips pull away from his teeth. When people get horny, Toby’s hair stands on end. Come to think of it, Toby’s hair stands up even more when those two from the NP are here. The chappy with the blazer and the girl with her straps. From the Rand Afrikaans University, just up the road. She says she’s studying ‘law’, and he’s just finished studying ‘law’. What ‘law’, what ‘studying’? They just fuck all the time, that’s what. A person doesn’t have to study ‘law’ to know what’s what about fucking.
Gerty’s coughing, too. She’s coughing ’cause the Jehovahs are getting hot for sex. It makes Gerty feel like she’s suffocating. Him too. It fucken makes him feel like he wants to pop. He’s not stupid, and the dogs are also not stupid. They know when people are horny and they know when they’re kaffirs. Gerty and Toby get just as worked up when they’re around kaffirs, like that old woman with her cart: ‘Potatoes, potatoes, missus, potatoes and pumpkin’, up and down in the street here in front. Treppie says that old woman used to live here a long time ago, and now she’s just checking to see if they’re still looking after her place nicely.
Treppie can talk so much shit. But he always stops Toby and Gerty when they try to bite the kaffirs. No matter how full of shit they get.
Like that Nelson-kaffir with his brooms and dusters. Green brooms and pink dusters. He pumps them up and down in the air like he’s cleaning walls that only he can see are dirty. ‘Brooms, madam, brooms! Sweep your yard and dust your walls and prick up your ears when Nelson calls.’
Then Treppie says to his mother she’d better buy a broom, ’cause this is the New South Africa. But they never buy. They just go out and look when that kaffir starts shouting and whistling in the street. Then everyone comes out to look and all the dogs start barking and there’s just brooms all over the place.
Pains shoot through his tail-end. He shifts on his crate. The grid cuts into his backside. He clears his throat. The air’s thick. The fan blows the thick air around the room. Suddenly a bee flies in through the window. Must have lost its way from that nest under the house. The fan’s air confuses the bee. When it gets caught inside the stream, it suddenly starts flying all over the show. But the Witnesses don’t even notice. They’re getting more and more worked up. The pink petticoat shows dark spots under the Witness’s arms. She wipes her upper lip with her hand. Elvis passes her his hanky. He holds her hand for a while. She’s getting hot. Too hot for any fucken fan or hanky. She holds her right hand up in the air with the hanky in it.
‘“And he had in his right hand seven stars”,’ she reads.
Her eyelids flicker. She looks like someone who should be bathed in red light. For seeing things, for wanting to fuck, for feeling pressed, for wanting to make or break, wanting out, anywhere.
When Lambert starts painting, he puts his red bulb in. Not straight away, but after he’s made a start, when he gets into it with his spray-cans. Into the never-ending painting. Then the red bulb has to go in. And when he digs his pit under the den to store petrol, he keeps the red light on, day and night, all the time, as that heap of kaffir rubbish gets higher and higher: bricks, bottles, window frames, drainpipes. The stuff even shines in the red light.
He feels the pain behind his eyeballs. It’s coming. He knows it’s coming. He tries to stop it. He focuses on the floor behind Treppie. On the line of ants. Some of them march this way, others that way. But they stay in one line, except the ones who smell rain.
The Witness is reading about a sharp two-edged sword that comes out of His mouth. About His countenance that was as the sun shineth in His strength.
Poor Son of Man.
Sounds more like a fuck-up to him.
Toby begins to growl softly. He stands up between Pop’s feet. His eyebrows twitch as he checks what’s happening. Lambert feels the sweat in the palms of his hands. His mother just keeps looking at him. The scar where he stabbed her with a knife when she threw his spanner in the grass has gone white. She’s got that funny look on her face, like she thinks he’s a fucken devil from hell. He’s not holding it together any more. He begins to shudder, down there in his tail-end where it always starts.
‘Fuck!’ says Treppie. He stands up quickly and walks straight out the front door. Treppie also knows when it’s coming. First Toby and then Treppie. Treppie walks to the carport and rips open Molletjie’s door. Then he starts her up and revs her until she screams like a pig. Lambert sees all this as the foam in his mouth goes hot and cold. He tries to hold it back. He feels his back arching into a hollow, and then he slides slowly off his seat. There’s a burn-out in his head.
It’s the beginning of October on the calendar. In less than six months he’ll be forty, at the end of April. On the calendar. And then it’s the election, the very next day. On the calendar. ‘A test for Triomf,’ as the girly from RAU says. When the sun’s going to shine on everyone, like time, like a flame of fire, like the sound of many waters. As he sinks to the floor, he sees Treppie reversing Molletjie into the gate. The postbox falls down. He hears it roll over once, twice, into the street. But he can’t see too well, the fan’s blowing the ends of the curtain up and down in front of his eyes. It looks like the curtains are growing out of the Witnesses’ backs, and the pelmet out of the curtains, the ceiling out of the pelmet, and the spot on the ceiling where the overflow leaks. The whole lounge looks like things running into each other, like each other’s insides, the insides of the Witnesses, the china cat with a rose for a head, the Chinese’s fan, the wall with Toby and Gerty’s rub-marks at knee-height, the sideboard, the floor-blocks that keep lifting up, the front door with the hole that he kicked in last week, the lawn cut to the quick, the little carport roof, the gate, the gate-pole with the postbox lying on its side in the road. Pop and his mother slowly rising from their seats. Treppie standing outside and looking at Molletjie’s dented backside. Everything a slow mashing of insides. The insides of the Witnesses running out of their spines and rising up like the ashes of paper above a fire. The insides of Triomf. Pink insides. His eyeballs are burning inside.
‘Happy birthday, honey,’ he hears her voice, on a megaphone, and it echoes away. ‘Happy birthday, honey, honey, honey.’
The floor’s hard under his head. He sees the Witness from underneath. Her shoulders are high. Her mouth’s the wrong way around. Her lips open and shut as she reads: ‘“the first and the last he that liveth”.’ Like a horse drinking water. She stretches her one hand out over him, as though she wants to pull something up from out of him: his insides, his brain. She hangs from wings in the warm air. She flies without moving, like a vampire. But he’s gone, disconnected. She speeds away into space, floundering among stars, a little Satan-bitch in Star Wars. The darkness rips open, white noise rushes into his ears, seven stars in his hand.