It’s Monday morning. Treppie’s standing on the front lawn, checking out Saturday night’s damage.
Last night, Sunday night, he also came outside to look around. The only time he usually stands out here is when he gets home on the bus from the Chinese, ’cause Pop doesn’t always come and fetch him. Then, in the last red glow of the sunset, he screws up his eyes until he lines up the evening star with the top of the overflow pipe’s U-bend. He squints until he has the U-bend’s upright aligned with the foot of the aerial. Then it looks like a weird little tree or something.
It’s something he likes doing after the walk home from the bus stop in Thornton. It’s his own time, after work, before he goes back into the house again. It’s time that he uses to tune himself in, to organise the space in his head. He’s noticed that when he doesn’t first tune himself in, he’s off-centre for the rest of the night.
But last night wasn’t a work night and there was also nothing on the roof. Fuck-all he could use to get himself aligned with the evening star, and God knows, he needed it.
There goes my Christmas tree too, he said, speaking aloud to himself. But Mol had poked her head under the sun-filter curtains that he’d put up with nails, staring at him through the window. Then she came out and stood next to him, still holding the loose pelmet in her hands.
‘What Christmas tree you talking about?’ she asked.
Now how do you explain a thing like that to Mol? It would take a fucken year. So he just showed her the evening star.
Mol was quiet for a while and then she said: ‘Little star.’
Lambert came out to look as well. Pop too. It was the first time since Saturday night that all of them were outside again. They’d spent Sunday indoors after the fuck-around on Saturday night. The whole of Sunday, Fort Knox played its music full blast. Looking for trouble again. Everyone looks for fucken shit in this place. And that’s just about all you’ll ever get around here, too. He once told them Triomf’s name was all wrong, by a long shot. It should have been Shitfontein or Crapville. When he said that, Lambert asked him if he knew that there was a business called Triomf and that it made fertiliser. Lambert’s not stupid.
Then Pop said they should count their blessings. They mustn’t start looking for shit now.
Pop’s fuses are blown. ‘What blessings?’ he asked him.
‘Well,’ Pop said, ‘at least we still have each other, and a roof over our heads.’
That’s what Old Pop always used to say, too, way back in the thirties when they kept fucking up so badly in Vrededorp. Time and time again.
So when Pop came out last night and asked, ‘What you all looking at?’, he took the gap and said to him, very nicely: ‘We’re looking at each other, Pop, and the roof over our heads, ’cause that’s all we’ve still got left to look at.’
Then Mol said: ‘We’re looking at the little star on the Christmas tree!’
Suddenly Mol looked like she wanted to cry.
‘What shit you talking now again, hey, Ma?’ Lambert shouted.
Lambert always shouts when Mol looks like she wants to start crying.
In the end they all stood there like fucken zombies looking at the evening star, ’cause the overflow pipe and the TV aerial were lying on a heap next to the house where Treppie had chucked them, together with pieces of broken gutter.
After a while, Pop said: ‘Stars are very old.’
Lambert said Pop was talking rubbish, stars were fucken dead.
‘Dead from what?’ Mol asked.
Lambert told her they were dead from time. Can you believe it, he actually said that.
When they go to the Newlands library to get books for Mol, Lambert reads all kinds of things in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Then he repeats everything he’s read to Mol, but he adds his own little bits to the stories he tells. It’s easy to carry on like that with Mol. She swallows just about anything you say. Lambert learnt it by watching him, Treppie. He does it a lot with Mol, although he’s really doing it for himself. But his own stories never come from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. They come from newspapers, about things that happen to people. Lambert’s stories are about insects and engines and stars and things, about how everything works. His stories are about things that don’t work. Not because they’re broken, but because they are the way they are. Lambert tells Mol things ’cause he thinks it impresses him, Treppie. Lambert wants to show him he can also talk a hole into Mol’s head. But he’s not impressed. There’s just a hole where Mol’s head is supposed to be anyway.
When he, Treppie, tells Mol things, it’s not to see if she can still think, but to see if she can still feel. He finds it hard to believe Mol can still feel anything. So he tries her out, every day. It’s a fucken miracle. He can’t figure out if he wants her to feel things or not to feel anything at all. That’s ’cause what’s better for Mol will be worse for him. Basically, he has to make sure Mol and Pop and Lambert still feel things, otherwise he, Treppie, will go to glory. It’s just that he has to dig deeper and deeper nowadays to find Mol’s feelings. First you get blood and shit and gore. Then only feelings. But it’s Lambert’s job, that. He doesn’t even have to open his mouth. All he does is wind Lambert up a bit and give him the tools. Then he runs on automatic. Lambert digs, and when the arteries are open nice and wide, then he, Treppie, can go and do some inspection, to see if there’s any gold-dust left in the dead mines. Pearls before swine. Who else can see them for what they are?
Sometimes Lambert says things that make Treppie think he’s got a clue. Last night he went and said stars die from time. Mol just stood there and gaped at him. Lambert said yes, the stars died a long time ago. What you saw now was their light, still travelling after so many years.
‘How far is it from here to there?’ asked Mol.
‘Light years, Ma. Light years,’ said Lambert.
‘What’s a light year?’ she asked.
Mol always asks more and more questions, until Lambert doesn’t know what to say any more. That’s what he, Treppie, likes, ’cause then he can spice up the story with lots of bullshit. That’s the real surprise package. Lambert thinks he’s fucken cute when he talks shit into Mol’s head. But this time, just when he wanted to start improvising, those two wankers from Fort Knox stuck their heads over the wall.
‘Just look how hard they’re looking,’ said the one.
‘They’re looking at their roof,’ said the other.
‘I suppose they’re going to fix it now,’ said the one.
‘They must think they can see in the dark like vampires.’
Then they all quickly went inside again.
It’s Monday today. A bright day, with no stars in the sky, dead or alive. The scum from Fort Knox left early to go and put up their take-away stands on street corners.
He knows he’ll have to lead the way here today. Repair the damage. Pop’s as good as dead and Lambert’s half-dead from all his stuffing around. God alone knows how much more trouble he’ll make if the television isn’t working by tonight. Next thing he’ll smash the TV to pieces as well. And then the whole lot of them will go to glory, ’cause TV’s the one thing that keeps Lambert quiet. He sits and watches everything. He watches so hard he even forgets his Klipdrift. He watches Thought for the Day and the flag blowing as they sing the anthem, right to the very end. And then, when the test pattern comes back on, he watches the rubbish that he hires from Ponta do Sol. Lambert should get a TV implanted in his brain. Then he’ll be fine. Then he can go lie down with a permanent car chase between his ears.
He told Mol and Pop, all those years ago: poke that child out with knitting needles, and then rinse yourself inside with Sunlight soap and Epsom salts. Before it got too big. But of course they didn’t want to listen. He told Mol there’s a fucken dinosaur coming out of her. At four months her stomach was already stretched to hell and gone. But they were nice and soft in their heads. Pop said: ‘Ag, Treppie, it’s someone who can look after us one day when we’re old.’
Stupid fucken fools! And look what they’ve got now! A fucken freak show. And who has to do the looking after? Them! And it’s not just a question of care, it’s cares. Worries.
He’s already warned them, one day the TV people are going to come and make a movie about them. He’s not sure what kind of a movie, a horror or a sitcom or a documentary. He thinks they’re too soft for horror and too sad for a sitcom, so maybe they’re just right for a documentary. Documentaries are about weird things like force-feeding parrots for export. He told Lambert he’d better behave himself, otherwise they’d come and ask him to make a special appearance on Wildlife Today. Lambert said only threatened species got shown on that programme. The poor fucker kids himself.
Now the front door opens. It’s Mol. Gone with the wind.
‘What you looking at now?’ she asks.
‘I’m looking at the damage.’
‘Damage,’ she says. ‘Terrible damage.’
‘So, are you going to help me this morning, Mol?’
‘Who, me?’
‘Yes, Mol, me and you. We’re going to play Helpmekaar and Reddingsdaadbond.’
‘Huh?’
‘Never mind, Mol, just help a little here, ’cause you’re the only who’s up and about this morning. Or would you like me to go wake King Kong and Rip van Winkle?’
‘Who? No, leave them,’ Mol says quickly. ‘I’ll help you. Leave them so they can get some rest.’
‘Fine,’ he says. ‘It’s nice that you want to help; just a pity it’s a bit late.’
‘Late?’
‘Yes, Mol, late, like a dead star. You should’ve helped when it could still have made a difference.’
‘Difference?’
‘Yes, it would have made a big difference if you’d brought him down.’
‘Who?’
‘Lambert, when he was still inside you. He’s caused us nothing but misery, right from the start. Look at the roof. Look at you. We’re all in our glory just ’cause you and Pop wanted to play housy-housy. Man and wife. Big happy family, I say. Next time Fort Knox will rip the whole roof down. And after that the walls. It’s just a matter of time.’
Mol looks at the heap on the grass. Gutters, the overflow, the TV aerial.
‘The poor bastard belongs in a madhouse,’ he says, shoving the gutters around with his foot. Most of the pieces are rusted through. ‘He should be strapped into a fucken jacket and put on to a steel trolley. Then the nurses can hose porridge down his throat with an enema pump.’
‘Sis, man, Treppie!’ says Mol. ‘Sis!’
‘Don’t come and sis me,’ he says. He can feel he’s got her going now.
‘You’re a devil, Treppie,’ says Mol, drawing in more breath for the next sentence. ‘And he takes after you, Treppie, that’s what! It’s the truth. Look at Pop. He’s soft. Look at me, I’m also soft. You’re the one with the attitude. Stubborn! Devil’s blood!’
‘He’s not my fucken child,’ Treppie shouts. ‘I always pulled out. Aimed high, to the side, ’cause I know what comes from that kind of thing! So don’t come and talk shit here on a Monday morning!’
‘Evil seed can fly,’ says Mol.
‘What? What you say there?’
‘I said the devil’s seed can fly through the air. Devils can’t be put off. Once they’ve got their sights on you, it’s tickets!’
‘What rubbish you talking now?’
‘Lambert says it’s in the Britannica!’
‘Let me tell you something, Mol. It’s not in the Britannica, it’s in Lambert’s sick head. Together with all the other shit-stories he sells you.’
‘Well, if it’s shit, then he gets half of it from you, Treppie!’
He can see she thinks she’s got him in a corner now.
‘Ag really, Mol, like what?’
‘Like that you and Pop are going to get him a whore for his birthday.’
‘I see, and who told you that?’
‘Pop said—’
‘Trust him.’
‘I said to Pop he must tell you, you mustn’t do this kind of thing to Lambert. If you promised him, you’d better do it, otherwise …’
‘Otherwise what, Mol?’
‘You know bladdy well what, Treppie. In the end I’ll go lie down and die in a heap somewhere. I’m completely buggered down under. I can’t any more.’
‘Don’t come and moan at me, sister. I told you and that stupid fool of a Pop, long time ago, you must be careful. But the two of you thought you were playing leading roles in Genesis. Just like that first fucken batch – Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel – all in the same family, and Lot with his randy daughters, and Noah, whose own sons buggered him. No wonder the whole lot of them drowned in the end. They say inbreeding makes people’s bones so heavy they can’t even tread water.’
‘Really, Treppie? Where did you hear that?’
‘In the Britannica, Molletjie, in the Britannica,’ Treppie says, cackling.
Mol picks up one of the postbox’s broken struts and throws it at him.
‘Devil!’ she screams. ‘Satan’s child!’ The strut flies through the air in an arc. Treppie has plenty of time to duck.
He laughs at her. ‘You must aim for the middle wicket, old girl, the middle wicket.’
‘No manners,’ says Mol.
‘You’d better get your aim right if you want to help this morning, old girl! Go fetch the ladder behind the den’s wall so I can get up on the roof. Then drag the toolbox on to the stoep so you can pass me things I need. And when you’ve done that, go look on the scrapheap for a piece of pipe, about two fingers thick. Ask Lambert where he keeps his glue. And while you’re there, you may as well bring out the welding box and the helmet as well.’
‘Huh?’
‘Ja, Mol. Running repairs.’
Treppie looks at her, standing there with dazed eyes. He first saw that look on her face when he found her sitting in the fridge after she lost Lambert’s spanner in the long grass. The day everything burnt down. Ever since then, she shuts up like a clam the moment anyone asks her about tools.
‘Huh?’ Treppie mimics her. ‘Huh? Huh? Huh?
‘Come,’ he says. ‘Shake your head a little first, Mol, like this,’ and he shakes his head.
Mol shakes her head. Then she stops. ‘Why?’
‘Just shake a little more,’ he says, and he bends his head closer to her, as if he wants to listen.
‘What?’ asks Mol.
‘Don’t you hear anything?’
‘What am I supposed to hear?’
‘The loose screws in your head, sister, a whole assortment of nuts and bolts, all of them odd pairs – pop rivets, fissure plugs, wing-nuts, you name it!’
‘Wing-nut,’ says Mol.
‘Nice and scrambled, hey,’ Treppie says. ‘It’s hereditary.’
‘Scrambled what?’
‘Scrambled eggs, Mol, scrambled stories, scrambled genes, scrambled rails, we’re one big pot of scrambled Benades.’
‘One big pot,’ says Mol.
‘Yes, Mol, and they can put us inside a centrifuge and spin us till we burst, but we won’t unscramble.’
‘Centrifuge,’ says Mol.
‘Ja, old sister, we’re twisted into each other like the innards of a fridge; remember, like those fucked-up fridges we sometimes used to get for repairs, when their motors seized up from the wrong voltage.’
‘Voltage,’ says Mol.
‘Ja, from too little voltage. The motor gets too hot, and then it seizes. It’s from too few volts that they do that.’
‘Volts,’ says Mol. ‘We’ve got too few volts.’
‘Now you’re talking, sister. Now you’re talking.’
Mol goes and sits on the edge of the stoep. She takes the cigarettes out of her housecoat pocket and lights up. ‘First sit a little,’ she says, blowing out smoke.
Treppie looks at Mol, who first wants to sit. The sky above Triomf is blowtorch blue. He looks at the half-cut grass. Then he kicks at a fresh molehill, and remembers how, all those years ago, they came to the city as children with Old Pop and Old Mol. All the way from Bloemhof, on a Railways bus. He was very small then, five or six. All their possessions were squeezed into trunks behind them, on the lorry’s trailer.
He was still on Old Mol’s hip the day she let the screen door slam closed for the last time. She closed the outside latch and said: ‘Farewell, Klipfontein.’
Klipfontein was his grandma and grandpa’s farm in the Western Transvaal. The depression stripped them bare. There was no water, anyway. Just stones. That’s how his father explained things to him.
Then his father decided to write a letter to the Railways. He’d never been a Hertzog man, but he always said Hertzog’s Railways plan for poor whites was the best thing an Afrikaner had ever thought up.
He can still see his father sitting at the scrubbed kitchen table, chewing the top end of his pencil. Labouring over that letter. His mother rewrote it carefully in ink when it was finally done. A fucken movie, then already.
After a month they got word: they must come, the Railways were only too happy to help their people.
His mother caught all forty of her geese. She stripped them bare so she could sell the feathers and the down to the Jew trader. Then she slaughtered the raw and featherless pink geese, together with the chickens and the turkeys. She cleaned them and then she took them to town for selling. The cows and sheep and their few pigs had long since been auctioned off.
Those days he still cried for the poultry. He remembers the scene with his turkey, a big old bugger who could go ‘bifff! bifff!’ with puffed-out wings and shake his red wattles, making a ‘cooloo-cooloo-cooloo!’ sound when he felt horny. He watched through the kitchen window as his mother cut off the turkey’s head. It slipped off the block and out of his mother’s hands. Then, with blood spewing from its neck, it began to throw high jinks in the dust, right under his nose. He couldn’t eat for four days after that, not until they were in the city and their father bought them doughnuts at a coolie-shop. Grandpa put the turnploughs, forks and spades together in bundles, and a man from town came to write it all up. Then he loaded the equipment on to his co-operative van and took it away. The house’s movable goods were also on the van. Spot and Buster had to go live with Grandpa and Grandma on another farm in the district, with one of Grandpa’s brothers. Then, already, an inbred lot. He remembers how his Ouma, the first Mol, walked in slow circles around the house with a long-nosed watering can that she’d kept behind. She was spraying the last water from the rain-tank onto her stinkafrikaners. Her African marigolds. ‘Shame, she’s becoming a child again, leave her alone,’ his mother said, and his father wiped his eyes with his arm. ‘So, now the old people are becoming bywoners. Labourers on other people’s land. And the new generation are trekking to Gomorrah,’ he said.
That night, their last on the farm, they all sat around the oil-lamp on the wooden planks of the kitchen floor. By then the chairs were gone, too. In the middle, on a plank, stood a little bucket of milk porridge with cinnamon, and a pot-bread sent over by the woman on the next farm.
Treppie starts. What’s that noise across the road now? It’s that dykemobile with its loose bearings. When those two moved in here, the neighbours also came over bearing trays full of ‘tuisgebak’ for them. A Boer will be a Boer, dyke or no dyke. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
His father said he, Treppie, could have his mouth organ, only if he’d eat some of the milk porridge. But he didn’t want to. Later he got the mouth organ in any case. Actually, he inherited it after his father’s death. But he swore he’d never play it. It’s bad luck to play on the instrument of a suicide case. That’s what he said to Old Mol when she kept on so about it.
He actually meant murderer, ’cause Old Pop had beat the life right out of him, to say nothing of the little music that was left in him. So then he said Little Pop could have the mouth organ. Little Pop was musical, he had a good ear and he had the beat. But even though Little Pop learnt fast, playing the songs of old Hendrik Susan’s band, and the Briels and Chris Blignaut and all of them, and even though he once did a solo at the Garment Workers’ Union, he never played anywhere near as well as Old Pop.
Old Pop was a genius on the mouth organ. He remembers how Old Pop could keep a whole farmhouse hop-dancing with nothing but his mouth organ. Later, in Fordsburg, they didn’t have a farmhouse any more and there weren’t any people who wanted to dance with them anyway. But every now and again Old Pop still played. Most of the time he played sad songs or Salvation Army tunes. He used to play Old Mol into tears.
Old Pop played full-mouthed notes, with all kinds of trills and frills inbetween: majors on the out-breaths and minors on the in-breaths, the long notes stretched out on trills and then half smothered as he made a bowl-shape with his two hands, vibrating them on either side of the mouth organ.
Old Pop played all the way to Jo’burg. He played jolly songs. To give them courage for the City of Gold, he said. But Old Mol was already crying. A long day’s journey into night, if you ask him.
The bus took them to the Railways boarding house in Vrededorp, for poor white arrivals. And there they stood, with all their trunks and things, on the front stoep. Before Old Pop could even knock, a fat woman with a cigarette in her mouth opened the door.
‘You must be Mister Benade,’ she said in English, without taking the cigarette out of her mouth. She ignored Old Pop’s outstretched hand. She looked them up and down as they stood there and then she said: ‘Ah, thank God, no small babies. We have enough of them here.’
She took a little bottle from her apron pocket and held it out to Old Mol. ‘Before you do anything else, I want you to take a bath. Use five drops of this,’ she said, pushing the little bottle into Old Mol’s face. ‘I don’t want any vermin in my lodgings.’
Old Pop then said to the woman: ‘We may be poor, but at least we are clean, madam.’ But she said to him: ‘Do as you’re told. Beggars can’t be choosers.’
They did as they were told. First Old Pop and Old Mol shared the bath water, the three children going next. Old Pop was grinding his teeth so hard his cheeks began puffing up. When he put the three of them into the bath, he said: ‘Now we’re being dipped like raw kaffirs.’
They stuck out the boarding house for just three days. Screaming babies kept Pop out of sleep, and the stench of old floor polish and cooked cabbage made Treppie and Mol and Pop so sick they couldn’t eat.
After his third day of looking for a house, Old Pop came home with bright eyes. Oh yes, he’d found them a semi. The people who lived there were moving out in a week’s time ’cause the old woman, a garment worker, was blind, and the man had lost a leg on the Railways. They couldn’t afford the rent any more. The Benades could come straight away and help with the last week’s rent – they could certainly do with a bit of help.
‘What’s a semi?’ Old Mol asked, and his father said it was half a house. Then his mother asked, wouldn’t there be too many of them, living with other people in half a house? But his father said it was temporary – after a week they’d have the whole semi to themselves. Two bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom.
‘Are you sure?’ Old Mol still asked. She didn’t trust this business at all.
In the end they spent more than three full years sharing half a house with the Beyleveldts. And it wasn’t even a proper half-house. There was a passage linking it to the other half, where three more families lived. All with strapping big children who were so famished they stripped the Benades’ food cupboard bare. So in the end everyone was hungry, and they all stole each other’s food.
Old Pop worked long hours. He was a stoker on the Railways. Mrs Beyleveldt took Old Mol to the clothing factory and presented her there as a replacement for herself. So at least there was some money in the house, even if it was altogether too little to plug the gaps. Old Mol had to take on piece-work: shirts that she repaired until late at night on Mrs Beyleveldt’s old Singer.
They all lived in one room. The children saw everything the grown-ups did. And they heard every word the grown-ups said.
Old Pop and Old Mol fought bitterly. Mostly they fought over the Beyleveldts. Old Mol used to say the offer of the half-house had just been a trick to pick them clean.
They had to pay all the rent on their own, buy all the food and do all the housework, ’cause the blind woman and the one-legged man were incapable of doing anything for themselves. And Old Mol wasn’t allowed to use the sewing machine ‘for nothing’, she had to ‘hire’ it at a ‘per-day tariff’, even though she could use it only at night.
‘Now you listen to me, Martinus Lambertus Benade,’ his mother always said. ‘I didn’t come to Johannesburg to be a charity worker. In Klipfontein I could at least spend some time in my own house, with my own family. I could slaughter a decent chicken for the pot and keep us alive by selling down and soap.’
Then Old Pop used to slam down his lunch-tin and tell her she must stop complaining. She still had both her eyes. He still had both his legs. They should count their blessings. They had each other. They had a roof over their heads. Ja, the story of their lives. Then his mother would ask his father to name all the things they were supposed to have. All she could name were the things they no longer had. Many times she complained how she’d baked two loaves of bread and cooked a big pot of soup, just yesterday. Enough for the whole family as well as the Beyleveldts. Soup that she made from the cheapest soup bones and barley, and from vegetables she found in the dustbins. It took her hours to sort the vegetables and cut out the good pieces. She’d worked until late at night with her own two hands, which were full of holes from the Singer’s needles. And then, when she went to the kitchen the next morning, the pot was empty and both loaves of bread were gone.
Those days Old Mol used to knead the bread. For the first rise, she covered it with an old greycoat that someone on the Railways had given Old Pop.
But no one could live on bread alone, she used to say. When she started like this, nothing could stop her. She used to name all the things they would soon be needing but didn’t have. New shoes. Warm clothes for winter. A pair of glasses for her ’cause her eyes couldn’t take the poor light at the factory, and the light in their room, which was even worse. Doctors’ fees and medicine for Little Mol and Little Pop. Their chests were closing up again. How was she supposed to know what was wrong with them?
Then his father would tell her to shut her mouth this very second, he couldn’t bear it any longer. Wasn’t he, a white man, doing work that no white man should ever have to do? But his mother wouldn’t shut up. She said she wished they were kaffirs. Then at least she’d be able to give them porridge every day, with no salt or milk or sugar. Then they could dress in rags and no one would even know the difference.
At this point, Old Pop would thump her on the chest and tell her in that case she should go find herself a kaffir husband. So she could bring forth bastards, if that’s how little she felt for her volk.
His mother always said: ‘Not in front of the children, Lambertus.’
Later, Old Mol took to making their food on a Primus in the room. She locked the bread in a shoe cupboard. And she put up a sheet between the children and the grown-ups. But they still saw and heard everything. They watched the shadows on the sheet when Old Pop climbed on top of Old Mol and began riding her wildly, until she started crying and calling out the Lord’s name.
When their mother and father were out working, the children stayed behind on their own until he, Treppie, was old enough to go to school. In the beginning, they all used to get up together, dress for school, and then eat the bread and jam their mother had made for them. Then his father used to say to his brother: ‘Look after your sister nicely, Little Pop.’ And his mother used to say to his sister: ‘Look after Treppie nicely, Molletjie, remember he’s the smallest.’
‘All we have in the world is each other. Us Benades must stand together,’ his father sometimes said with a crack in his voice. When his father said that, his mother’s head jerked slightly, just like it jerked when old One-Leg Beyleveldt used to say to them: You must do this, or, You must do that. Then Old Pop asked Mr Beyleveldt how many Us there were in his alphabet. They were trying to look after their own. He must please just leave them in peace.
Old Mol was also getting nice and mixed up. She knew ‘each other’ was too little to live by, but what else could they do? Everything was starting to fuck out, even then.
And so that’s how they learnt to look after ‘each other’. How he and Little Mol and Little Pop learnt to take care of ‘each other’.
‘Look after’ was supposed to mean they were valuable. More valuable than other people. Most other people couldn’t look after themselves properly. That was Old Mol’s opinion in those days. She clung to that belief, even though she knew there was something wrong with it. What’s more, it also meant that if they wanted to fight or look for trouble, they had to do it with each other and not with other people. A ‘well-looked-after’ person was someone who stayed the way he was, a person who kept to himself, to his own kind.
His father always used to say: ‘That which belongs together, must remain together.’ That’s why he voted for Malan’s National Party in the 1948 election. Out of family instinct more than anything else. There was no other choice.
And that’s why Mol still nods her head up and down so hard when those two snotnoses from the NP come and tell them how ‘valuable’ they are to the Party, how they belong heart and soul to the big National Family, whose members are now looking after each other ‘across the boundaries of race, language and culture’. Mol doesn’t hear the last part. All she hears are Old Mol and Old Pop’s words.
To him, those two sound more like far-fetched versions of Hertzog or Smuts, like margarine that has everything to make it spread but still isn’t butter. It’s a long time since he’s seen any butter. And he doesn’t feel at all looked after by the NP and their so-called canvassers. He feels they want to use him like they’ve always used people. He knows they talk behind his back. Fuck knows what gets pumped into their heads at headquarters. He just wishes Lambert would corner that girl with the airs and give her some of his treatment, so she can also learn what ‘belongs to’ and ‘look after’ mean.
In later years, the three of them often stayed in bed together after the grown-ups had left the house. School was shit – they were made to swallow spoonfuls of cod-liver oil, so they stayed in bed instead. Little Pop’s dick could already stand up nicely by then. He showed Treppie and Mol how to rub it. They killed time on those mornings by rubbing Little Pop’s dick. It took away the hunger. They were allowed to have their morning bread only once Pop had come three times; otherwise they’d get hungry for their afternoon bread too soon. And if that got eaten, they stayed hungry all day, until their mother came home from the factory at night.
Hungry time, time that you feel in your stomach, is a terrible thing. But what’s worse is how time feels when you see the same things happening over and over again. Like things that get broken and then get fixed again. Over and over again, fucken broken and fixed again. And nothing ever gets fixed properly.
Treppie suddenly sees Mol coming round the corner. She’s dragging the ladder behind her.
‘Pick the damn thing up, woman,’ he shouts. His voice sounds too high. He mustn’t think about these things. It makes him shaky. It causes accidents.
‘It’s heavy, Treppie,’ says Mol.
‘Yes, Mol, that’s what you call the effect of gravity.’
‘Gravity,’ says Mol.
‘Yes,’ says Treppie, ‘that’s the force that holds us down here in Triomf, in Martha Street, on our feet, in our skins, together, with a roof over our heads. Otherwise we’d all have floated away by now, one by one, and fallen to fucken pieces.’
Then, for the first time, he sees Lambert. He’s standing on the stoep with no shirt. He’s got that mad look in his eyes that he gets when he’s been lying on his bed for too long.
‘Ja,’ says Lambert. ‘That’s why stars pass out sometimes, pfft! Not enough gravity there where they are. A star,’ he says, ‘dissolves in time. In light years. In space, like an Aspro in a glass of water.’
And as he says this, he looks like someone with a sledgehammer who wants to beat something to a pulp.