It’s a Monday night. The Benades sit in the lounge in front of the TV. It’s tuned to TV1 but they’re not really watching. Everyone’s there except Lambert, who left just after five. Monday night is rubbish night, and Lambert’s gone to search in the rubbish bags for wine boxes. He promised he’d put Raiders of the Lost Ark into the video machine for them when he got back. Only Lambert’s allowed to touch the machine, so now they just have to sit and wait.
Mol’s knitting Gerty’s belly piece from scratch. When she let Gerty try it on this morning, it was miles too big. So then she had to pull the whole thing apart again. Gerty needs about twenty stitches fewer than she did last year. And now she’ll have to make Gerty try it on again when she gets to the middle piece. She hasn’t got a clue how much smaller to make it. Poor Gerty. She won’t eat on her own any more. She only eats when Mol feeds her little pieces of food from her hand, begging her to take a few morsels. And she coughs so bad she can hardly breathe.
‘Put her down. Put her down, so this misery can come to an end,’ says Treppie, but Treppie’s got no heart. Pop says he’s got a heart, but she thinks if he’s got one it must be a very strange kind of heart.
Treppie’s sitting here now on his crate, reading a Star. One that he took from across the road’s pile this morning before the lorry came to pick them up. First he read the classifieds and now he’s reading the main news right from the beginning. Every now and again his lips move as he reads something but she can’t make out what he’s saying. The TV’s too loud. She sees him lose his temper about something that he reads there. His shoulder twitches and he pages wildly without finishing anything he starts. Then he shakes out the folds violently like he wants to hit something right out of the paper, knocking the page in front of him with the back of his hand. Like he wants to smack the news back into shape. Treppie never gets like this with the classifieds. Then he reads all afternoon long, turning the pages nice and softly. And he chuckles all the time when he reads them. She wonders what’s so funny about the classifieds. Funny or almost funny, ’cause Treppie laughs a little half-laugh through that twisted mouth of his. Sometimes she asks: ‘What are you laughing at, Treppie?’, and then he reads her an advert about something, or someone. Like the last time, about someone called Alex, who had just died. It was something like ‘we all loved Alex as he was’, and that he also ‘loved everyone’. He loved all his neighbours and his friends and fish pies too. Her favourite part was when it said: ‘Let God be with him and bear with us through our never-ending troubles, happiness and sadness.’
‘That message is from Maggie Rip,’ Treppie said, laughing his little half-laugh. So she asked Treppie who Alex and Maggie Rip were. Did he know them? She thought maybe they were connections of the Chinese. No, Treppie said, he didn’t know them, but he could guess. Guess what? she asked. Then he said he could guess Alex was probably just another lost case, and Maggie was worn-out from letting rip so much. Treppie’s full of nonsense. She still doesn’t know what’s supposed to be so funny about that. And then there was the time Treppie almost laughed himself to death over Frieda’s wedding dress. This Frieda was also someone he didn’t know.
‘Hell, just look at all these wedding dresses for sale,’ Treppie said, reading up and down about the dresses with a bigger and bigger smile on his face, until he burst out laughing: ‘“Wedding dress off-white. Very large. Veil and train. Satin shoes size 11. Instep supported. Brand new. Personal tragedy. Contact Frieda or leave message.”’ Poor Frieda, whoever she is, she thought, but Treppie walked up and down the house and pissed himself. Pop said Treppie had delicate nerves. That may be so, she said, but he wasn’t delicate with her. Then Pop said she should just be thankful she wasn’t Frieda, who didn’t have anyone in the whole world. At least they still had each other. Treppie heard what Pop said, ’cause he’d stopped laughing now, and then he told her she must listen to Pop. Pop had a sense of perspective.
Well, whether Pop’s got one or not, that’s one of Treppie’s favourite words. Perspective. It’s the one word she remembers Treppie using over and over when they worked out the story for Lambert – that’s now the story of their family set-up and about where Lambert actually comes from. It was all Treppie’s idea. He said they should tell Lambert a story that would give him a perspective on the matter, one that both he and the rest of them could live with. And that’s how they came upon the distant-family story. That Pop was a distant Benade from the Cape. A Benade who stole her heart at a garment workers’ dance when he played a solo on his mouth organ, the only thing he still had left from his late father. And how they were married in community of property by a magistrate, ’cause that was the quickest and cheapest way to do it, even though they had far more in common than just property. And how afterwards there was a dinner and dance in the backyard at the Vrededorp house. And how Treppie was the master of ceremonies, making an unforgettable speech. About ‘the holiness of marriage’ and ‘the godliness of the generations’. ’Cause he had to play minister as well. The magistrate seals the community of property, not the joining of souls.
Treppie practised that speech over and over again. That was the meat of the perspective, he said. Mind you, they all practised like mad on that perspective. Treppie said it had to be drilled into them so hard they’d also start thinking it was true after a while. He said a person needed that kind of perspective in life. No, he said, it was more. It kept you alive. Otherwise you wouldn’t have a hope in hell. Actually, he said, the whole world and the whole business we called life and everything that went with it was just one big war of perspectives. One big circus – it just depended on how you looked at it. It was all in the mind, anyway. The point was you had to have one. A perspective, so you could fight. Or a different one, so you could laugh. Treppie says most people’s perspectives are just bubbles to keep their heads above water. That’s what you call a ‘saving perspective’.
Well, it’s not like they’re exactly on top of things. They just muddle along through the rubble. But that perspective of Treppie’s saved their backsides on many occasions. When Lambert started getting old enough to ask questions, they could tell him all about that heart-stealing dance and the Vrededorp wedding. About the people who came, what they were wearing and what they had to eat. Doughnuts and peanuts and Swiss roll. And everything Treppie had to say, as brother of the bride and master of ceremonies. The family as the cornerstone of the volk, and the near and distant family as the stronghold of something else. A lot of rubbish, she sees now, but when children began pestering Lambert at school with all kinds of gossip about the Benades, they could at least tell him what to say.
Then they’d dish up that old story of theirs again. Just like they practised it all those years ago, when Treppie made her wear Old Mol’s marriage dress and Pop had to put on his black jacket with the black trousers. Not a suit, but at least both pieces were black. She used to wish Treppie would practise his speech and get done with it, ’cause that wedding dress was much too tight for her. She was already seven months pregnant with Lambert and he was a huge bastard. Treppie allowed them to practise the rest, about the distant family, in ordinary clothes, but for his speech he said they must dress up like a bride and groom. So they’d get a good grip on the perspective. It was like kissing someone with measles, he said. You had to expose yourself if you wanted to be immune.
Then Treppie would get up on a chair and hold up his hand for silence. Her and Pop had to shout ‘Speech! Speech!’ in their wedding clothes. And Pop had to whistle like lots of people, ’cause the way the story went there were almost a hundred people at the wedding. All of them garment workers and their fiancés.
Then Treppie would start: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, my dear sister Mol and my brother-in-law from the old colony – distant family, but still a shoot from the same tree …’ Sometimes he would say ‘pip from the same watermelon’.
And then they had to shout ‘Hear! Hear!’ and sing ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ all at the same time, the way lots of tipsy people do at a party.
When the applause was loud enough Treppie would raise his hand and carry on again. He always started with ‘Every family has its secrets’, or ‘Every family has its fuck-ups.’ The second sentence was: ‘But all that counts is that we have each other and a roof over our heads.’ His third sentence was addressed to them. He pointed his finger at her. At her belly. And at Pop in his suit, and then he said: ‘Go out and multiply and fill the earth, or, as we say in good Afrikaans, sow the seed – sow the seed, oh sow the seed of the watermelon.’
After every sentence they had to cheer. And after the last sentence he made them sing ‘How the hell can we believe him’.
Treppie told Lambert this was just the intro, nice and jolly, to make the wedding guests feel comfortable. The first duty of a master of ceremonies, he said, was to sweeten the audience so they could swallow the bitter pill.
The bitter pill was the serious part in the middle.
About how it was inevitable and predestined that these two people should come together, and how they had to stand by each other, come hell or high water. How they had to seek out their own destiny, live with what they had, and carry their own cross, the cross being the burden of the secrets and the weight of the fuck-ups that always came afterwards. And how they had to keep looking north. Look north, fuck forth! How the home was the cornerstone and the family the stronghold.
And how Pop had to understand he was now head of the house, and how, by the sweat of his brow, he’d have to reap what he sowed in the flush of his youth.
At this point in the practice Pop would pluck off his jacket and walk over to Treppie, who was still standing on a chair. Pop would tell him he’d better get off his pulpit now, ’cause he, Treppie, had played an equal part in the whole business, and who was he all of a sudden to make out he was so high and mighty?
Then Treppie told Pop he shouldn’t be such a spoilsport. Had he forgotten? It was just a perspective they were trying to stamp on to the fruit of their loins here. For their own survival. Fruit of their loins, yes, well.
Mol stretches the piece of knitting to see if it’ll fit. Maybe she should knit Pop a cap or something for winter. He says nowadays the part of his head that sticks out when he sits in his chair, right on top in the middle, gets the coldest. Ice-cold, as if there’s a draught on top of his head. Poor old Pop. He has to put up with so much. And when he’s done complaining about his head, Treppie says, jeez, he always thought death rose from the feet.
Pop’s sleeping again. When he comes to sit here in front of the TV he falls asleep almost straight away, no matter what they’re watching. Now and then she wakes him up so he can watch his favourite adverts. Both she and Pop have their favourites. What she likes about adverts is that they’re short, and then you can play them over and over again in your head. Like the one about the three beds. Big double beds with a woman sleeping alone and waking up quietly, on three different mornings. In three different places.
She would also feel nice if she could wake up like that, all on her own. And so peacefully. Alone on a beach with dolphins jumping out of the waves in front of her. In a field of flowers full of cooing doves. Next to a waterfall with ferns and rabbits. On such a nice big bed, with such soft, warm bedding. In three different nighties, too. Sometimes, when Lambert gets so wild with her, she closes her eyes and goes to sleep on those beds, one by one. On the beach. In the veld. Next to the waterfall. Over and over again. She sees the dolphins. She catches the doves. And she stares into the face of a rabbit, with his soft, shiny eyes, until Lambert’s finished. That helps.
But it doesn’t work when he also wants to hear stories. Then it has to be stories from his videos. Then she has to concentrate on the story, which means she can’t think about her advert, about all those mattresses with springs. Their own mattresses are sponge. Her and Pop’s mattress lies on the floor. Lambert took the base for himself. He says he refuses to sleep on the floor like a kaffir. She doesn’t know where he gets his information about the way kaffirs sleep. She’s told him, he must look at the way they drink beer in the adverts – in suits, together with white people. If you ask her, they look like they all sleep in nice soft beds with legs. And would you believe it, the other day she saw her favourite advert again, but this time a brand-new kaffir was sleeping in one of the beds. Never saw him before. Must be a New South Africa kaffir, that one.
Pop’s favourite is the squirrel who wants to save his acorn at the bank. He says he likes to see the way every animal has its own little place. The round-eyed owl has a crack in the rocks. The ringed cobra’s got a hole. The jackal with his pointy nose has a hollow. That’s where they belong and everyone knows it, and they keep out of each other’s way. When the squirrel gives his acorn to the Trust Bank man, Pop whistles the song again, and then he says: ‘Go back to your tree, old curlytail! Trust Bank’s just for your acorn, not for you!’
Treppie says she and Pop are suckers for adverts. He says he doesn’t like adverts himself, but if he must choose, then the one he fancies is the elephant taking a crap on a shining white lavatory. He says he wishes he could also make a noise like that when he’s done. That sounds like a really good statement, he says. When she asked him one day what he meant by a really good statement, he put his hands behind his ears and flapped them like an elephant’s. Then he held his hands in front of his mouth, like an elephant’s trunk, and he shouted so loud, right into her ears, that her heart almost stopped: ‘I, Martinus Benade, have just shat out, at half past nine, what I ate at seven o’clock, and from now on for the rest of my days I’m going to eat, shit, eat, shit, over and over again, until one fine day I fall down and die. Praise the Lord with joyful fumes for all eternity. Amen!’
Treppie has a terrible time trying to shit. He spends hours on the toilet. Sometimes he sits there so long he reads a whole pile of newspapers, from top to bottom, all afternoon long. That must be what he does, ’cause he tells so many stories from newspapers, word for word, she can swear he learns them off by heart when he’s on the toilet. Treppie’s too clever for his own good.
Mind you, she also thinks he makes up some of the stories he says he reads in the papers. He thinks them up on days when he has to crap and there aren’t any papers to read. She knows. She wasn’t born yesterday.
Like the story about the mortuary assistant who screwed the dead woman. She’d been stone dead for three days, says Treppie. It was in Yugoslavia. She’d even begun to stink a little, ’cause they haven’t got fridges for corpses there in Yugoslavia. But she was unbelievably beautiful. Just a little blue around the lips. Treppie says that’s ’cause she died from blood that was too cold for one so young. Her heart stopped.
When that assistant sponged her down, there on the cold cement block, and he began drying her off, he suddenly got a big hard-on. From drying her long legs and her breasts that were lovely like marble, with dark, pink nipples. He got so horny he no longer smelt anything bad. But he held back and he held back, ’cause Yugoslavia’s a Catholic country and Catholics have to hold back until they meet the woman of their dreams. That mortuary assistant had already been married for thirty years. He’d fathered seven children. And then the poor man had to make her up for the funeral as well. When he put the red lipstick on to her lovely mouth, and the rouge on her pale cheeks, he just couldn’t take it any longer. So he ran off and locked the door of the mortuary, ’cause in Yugoslavia they cut your dick off right there and then, balls and all, if they catch you screwing a corpse. He climbed on to that corpse, there on the cold cement slab, and he rubbed some balm on, out of respect for the dead, and he made love to it, softly and carefully, with the fear of God so heavy in his heart that the tears were streaming down his face. Afterwards, he was so overcome he lay on top of her for a while, and then he kissed her mouth. ‘Smothered her with kisses,’ is how Treppie put it. ‘He smothered her fair countenance with kisses.’ Will you ever!
Treppie sometimes comes out with this kind of language. Then she knows he didn’t read it in any newspaper.
That man was still lying there, feeling his chest getting colder and colder from the corpse. Then it suddenly began to feel warmer, lower down. So he decided he’d better pull out now. He didn’t want to cause his soul any more damage. But when he pulled out, still on his knees there between her legs, she opened those made-up blue eyes of hers and she sat bolt upright. Right there on that block of cement. Like Sleeping Beauty, said Treppie, except he didn’t think it was the kisses that did the trick.
Then there was a major run-around, one thing upon the next. The doctor who wrote the death certificate in the first place came to examine the woman. When he found fresh blood on the mortuary slab, he immediately smelt a rat. He examined her carefully down there, and he saw that the young woman’s virgin had only just been broken.
Yes, said the woman’s mother, when she died she was still pure. Untouched. Let me just get my hands on the fucker who raped my daughter, the father said, laying a charge of rape against the assistant before he did anything else. By then, that poor tormented man had been with the priest for days already, crossing himself over and over out of sheer panic. It was the priest who eventually saw the point, ’cause for Catholics there’s always a point, Treppie says. The priest said the father and mother and daughter should actually praise the Lord for letting that God-fearing assistant get such a good hard-on. If he hadn’t broken the young woman’s virgin, then she’d still be a dead, cold corpse. Six feet under, where the worms would have violated her soft places anyway. Was life not more valuable, he asked, than a virginal membrane and a teaspoonful of blood?
So the father withdrew the case against the mortuary assistant. And that same man is still washing corpses, in that same mortuary, to this day.
Except that no one in Yugoslavia wants to marry the resurrected woman. Even though she’s not dead any more, she’s also not a virgin for the man of her dreams.
Can you believe it, Pop says when Treppie tells stories like this. Pray, can you believe it. Or: Who would’ve thought it possible.
But Pop has also learnt by now that you don’t talk about believing things in front of Treppie. Or about praying, for that matter. So when Treppie reads something from the papers, like the Inkatha woman who put a tyre round an ANC woman’s neck and set her alight, and then put another tyre around her waist because she didn’t want to burn so nicely, then Pop just says: Really. And when Treppie says it looks like the necklace is out, but the hula-hoop’s coming back in, then Pop just says: Really, hey!
One Sunday, Treppie gave the Jehovahs such a ticking off she thought they’d never come back again.
It was worse than Lambert’s fits. When the Jehovahs took out their Bibles that day, he went and fetched a pile of old newspapers from his room. He threw the papers down in the middle of the lounge and said that was where the afflictions of suffering mankind were reported. They mustn’t come and talk shit here about walls of jasper and streets of gold. He stood there, telling the Jehovahs he believed what he read in the papers and he hoped it would all come to an end as soon as possible. He said he didn’t pray for God’s intervention, he prayed for the End itself, without any mediation. And when they came and told him the End had hair like wool and a voice like many waters, then all he could say was, no, the End had eyes that were white with fright and it was running down a dirt road with a panga through its back, or it was jumping into the air with a bullet in its head, and pots of ferns and palms in its hands. ’Cause it was a gardener.
And then his voice went all strange and sharp, and he said he’d learnt to know the End when he was still young. It was hanging in a stoker’s overall from a belt in a Railways truck, with a tongue sticking through its teeth. Completely humiliated in the struggle with death. Then he said he just wished he could understand how it all began. How, and why.
‘Why? Why? Why?’ he shouted, and the dogs began to bark. He shook the two Witnesses by the shoulders, first the one and then the other, so hard that their heads bounced on their necks. And then he let them go, suddenly quite calm again. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It’s all in the mind. Just go and find yourselves a better story. I’m going to buy myself a paper now.’ And then he winked at them and drove off to the café in Molletjie.
Pop says Treppie’s come to the end of his tether. In that case, Lambert must be close to his breaking point too, ’cause he also shakes her by the shoulders like that when he doesn’t like the stories she tells. He shakes her till her head bounces on her neck.
She does her best. She starts at the beginning. About the cowboy-girl standing on the stoep with her frills, waiting for the cowboy to arrive out of the distance. Hat over his eyes. She tells it all, just like in the cowboy movies. And if Lambert wants to hear them, she embroiders the parts she doesn’t see in the movies. In English, too. ‘Honey’ this and ‘darling’ that, so he can just get on with it and be done. So she doesn’t have to take too much punishment.
But she should never have let Lambert start saying things inbetween, ’cause now he’s really full of nonsense. Now he keeps telling her what to say in the middle of everything, and then she loses her thread.
After a while, the cowboy who kept coming over the veld wasn’t good enough any more. Then it was the Indian who had to come from behind. Through the kitchen window.
Lambert thought it up and then she had to play along. She simply had to learn the story and tell it like he wanted, otherwise he wants to tell it all on his own. What does she know about Indians, anyway? She told him it was against the Immorality Act in any case, but he said no, it wasn’t. Indians were yellow, not black. Then she said she thought they were red, but Lambert said it cuts no ice, red wasn’t black, so it was okay for the Indian to fuck the cowboy-girl. In any case, Indians did it from behind. Like dogs.
Like Treppie, she thought, but didn’t say, ’cause that would’ve been like a red rag to a bull. Lambert wants to do everything Treppie does.
And she wouldn’t be able to take that. It’s bad enough as it is. Treppie says it’s ’cause she closes up like a clam. He says stupid people clam up like that for fear of clever people. Then she asked him if he thought his intelligence was lodged in his thing, and hers in her backside. He laughed and said he was glad to see she wasn’t really as stupid as he’d thought she was. He says he loses his bearings when he thinks too much with his head. So he rather keeps it under the belt. Those kind of thoughts are ‘easily digestible’. Everyone can understand them, it’s the ‘basics’. Everything else is ‘fancy footwork’. Well, Treppie must be using his head a lot nowadays, ’cause he’s been losing his bearings in a big way recently. And he’s been trying it less and less with her. Since Peace Day, not at all. He says she’s worn out on all sides. But those are just excuses. He can’t get it up any more. That’s why he winds up Lambert against her. It’s about all he can get up these days.
Mol smiles at her little joke. She must remember it, so she has something to say when he starts niggling her again. Whether he likes it or not. But it’s not just with them that he’s so touchy. He also lets strangers have it when they rub him up the wrong way.
Like the other day when they went to the Newlands library. Most of the time she and Pop go there alone. Pop only goes ’cause she wants to take out books but she can’t drive. Nice books, like Roses for Alice and now, the last time, The Raven-Haired Girl from Hope Springs. Books about nice girls and their new boyfriends who’re better than their old boyfriends. Boyfriends who come visiting and look at the girls with ‘dark, brooding eyes’. Then they take them away to nice places, for picnics, with champagne in baskets. All just wallpaper, Treppie says when he sees her books. But sometimes when he’s got nothing to do he goes with them, and then of course Lambert also wants to go. She asks what for, people stare at her enough as it is when she goes there, and if Lambert comes they’ll stare even more. Then Treppie says, no, Lambert’s his ‘apprentice’. Where he goes Lambert must also go. Treppie does it just to make trouble. Him and Lambert stand around in the library and page through books, mostly the ones ‘just for adults’. You have to sign for them in a black book. The books go missing otherwise, ’cause they’re full of stuff about sex and naked people. They’re just randy, she tells them, there’s enough of that kind of thing in the café s. That’s if they really want to look. They don’t even have to read anything. It’s just pictures. But Treppie says he can’t concentrate in café s, there’s too much noise, and in any case there aren’t any Britannicas in the café s. He doesn’t just want to see pictures all the time, he also wants to learn. The same goes for Lambert. Lambert can’t live from bread alone, and doesn’t she, as his mother, also want him to broaden his horizons? Then she says Lambert’s broad enough as it is, and Treppie mustn’t start niggling her now. But Pop says it doesn’t matter, let them come along. What harm can it do, after all?
Pop’s always trying to keep the peace. But too much peace can also land you in trouble. Like the other day, when Treppie and Lambert stood there in the library, signing their names with red pens and asking the librarian to get them the most juicy books ‘just for adults’. The woman asked them what they meant by most juicy? Treppie said they meant the books with grubby pages from all the fingering. Those were the best, ’cause dirty was nice, he told her, winking. Then that woman raised her eyes and said, ai, a librarian also had a dog’s life in a place like Newlands, with this class of people. Well, Treppie lost it right there and then. But he didn’t swear. He began with those sharp little remarks of his. Yes, he said, he did come from Triomf, which used to be Sophiatown. He knew it was kaffirs who lived there, but in the early days Newlands was also full of kaffirs. That’s where the washerwomen came from. At least the kaffirs in Sophiatown used to play music on penny-whistles. Penny-whistles and trumpets. Altogether a better class of kaffir. And did she know, she, a librarian, who Satchmo was? No, said the woman, she didn’t. Oh, said Treppie, then she had a terrible hole in her education. Shame, said Treppie, and he made it sound like she had a terrible hole somewhere else. That poor woman didn’t know where to look any more. People who aren’t used to Treppie never know which side he’s going to come from next. Well, then he started singing a song at the top of his voice. ‘Hello Dolly’, in a gravelly voice. And he winked at her, playing trumpet with his fingers. Did she know whose song that was? No, said the woman, she didn’t. Good God, said Treppie, she must be analphabetic, and he raised his eyes the way she had earlier, the way she was still looking as he spoke. He told her a long story about Satchmo, whose real name was Louis Armstrong, a highly talented kaffir who came from America. One day, this kaffir came to visit Sophiatown, and he gave his golden trumpet to a boy called Hugh Masekela. Just like that, for keeps. Hugh Masekela was eight years old then. Did she know who Masekela was? No, said the woman. Treppie shook his head: ‘Tsk-tsk-tsk.’ She would have to get her house in order before the election, ’cause that same Hugh Masekela was now the best trumpet player in the country. And his sister, Treppie said, making big eyes at the librarian, Masekela’s sister was going to become the minister of libraries. Her name was Barbara, and Barbara didn’t take crap, not to mention ignorance, from librarians.
Treppie cornered that woman till she no longer knew whether she was coming or going. He asked her if she remembered how jolly it was in Sophiatown’s kaffir-shebeens. But no, she must’ve been too high class to go there. Which was a pity, ’cause the way she was looking now, it would’ve done her a lot of good to learn the foxtrot from a kaffir. That’s where he’d learnt ballroom, Treppie said. From the kaffirs in Sophiatown, and for someone of his class it was an education all on its own. To tell the truth, in those days he went there just to find a drink on weekends, when the bottle stores were all closed. And did she know that Triomf didn’t even have an off-licence any more, let alone a ballroom?
’Cause where the off-licence should be, in Sophiatown, there across the road from Shoprite, was exactly where the NG church stood now. And the NG’s church bazaars were so spiritless it was no wonder there were so many cracks in their edifice, and they had so few members. And what little devil was telling him now, the way she stood there in her floral print dress and her string of fresh-water pearls, that she, too, belonged to the NG church, and that she, too, thought dancing was a sin?
By now the woman was completely red in the face, all the way from the neck up. All she could manage to do was point to the sign saying QUIET PLEASE, with a cigarette and a red line running through it. But then Treppie took out his cigarettes and slapped them down, ‘ka-thwack!’ on to the counter. What was her problem? he asked. If she wanted a smoke all she had to do was ask, and now would she please just give him the most juicy book ‘just for adults’, like he asked. Then he winked at her.
Hell, she thought she was going to fall right through the floor that day, ’cause by then everyone in the library had gathered round Treppie to listen, and when he finally got his dirty books, he sang quietly to himself,
‘This is the way the boere ride
the boere ride, the boere ride
bold upright and legs astride
booted, spurred and hat-brim wide
this is way the boere ride, hooray!’
Everyone laughed. Why, she still doesn’t understand, ’cause she didn’t think it was funny, and neither did Pop. Lambert was so embarrassed he walked off to the Britannica cabinet on the other side, pretending he didn’t know them.
Oh yes, that was one day she was very happy to sign her books out and go home. Except they still had to listen to Treppie’s nonsense all the way back. He carried on like a pumped-up church organ, he was so worked up. About everything he’d read in that book ‘just for adults’. One of those books was full of ‘private parts’, he said, but only in Latin ’cause the book was about professors and students and so on. They didn’t say ‘arseholes’ in books like that, he said, it was ‘anuses’, and all the other parts were also named by their correct terms. Meanwhile, the ins and outs of those parts were described so well you’d swear the writer had looked from above and from below, through a magnifying glass, as the apostle says.
Pop said Treppie should go and read his Bible again. It said ‘through a glass darkly’. He shouldn’t twist the words of the apostle like that.
Ja, ja, said Treppie, maybe that was what the apostle said, but for him there wasn’t anything dark about private parts described from so close that you lost your perspective on the bigger picture. Maybe that learned oke who wrote the book should rather have taken pictures for Scope. In Scope there were at least bodies with faces, so a person could see what was what and who was who. Pop said the way Treppie was carrying on, you’d swear he was starved for sex or something.
Then suddenly everyone went quiet, and they rode like that almost the whole way home on Ontdekkers. She couldn’t find the courage to tell him her joke about all he could still get up, ’cause Treppie’s face suddenly began to look strange. It was only when they turned into Triomf again that Lambert said he’d read interesting stuff about clouds in the Britannica. Did they know clouds had names?
Yes, said Treppie, Cloud Nine was where he’d always wanted to spend his life, but he knows better now.
Knows what? she asked. Then he said he’d learnt it was all in the mind, the ins and outs of things. It just depended on what names you gave them.
No, said Lambert, he was talking science now, about the proper names for clouds. They came in classes, like people. High clouds and low clouds and middle clouds. The high ones made haloes around the sun and the low ones were thunderclouds, with heads like anvils.
Yes, said Treppie, and what was the academic term for that low kind of thundercloud?
Then Lambert said, um-um-er.
Treppie said it was okay if Lambert couldn’t remember the right name, he should just think up a name that wasn’t too academic. That would be better than nothing and he, Treppie, would certainly not hold it against Lambert.
So Lambert said in that case, the low clouds with heads like anvils were Columbus Pilatus. The right name sounded something like that, but next time he’d copy it down from the Britannica, if Treppie really wanted to know.
Treppie said, no, thanks, Lambert could save himself the trouble, that was enough for him. ’Cause if the low classes could discover new worlds and then wash their hands in innocence, he was quite satisfied. And he reckoned it was more than the high classes could say for themselves, sitting in universities and churches with haloes round their heads like the sun shone out of their backsides, just ’cause they’d given ordinary stuff grand names, like ‘anus’ for ‘arsehole’ and ‘culture’ for ‘fuck-all’ and ‘a man of sorrows’ for … for …
Treppie couldn’t get any further, so she thought she’d help him along a bit. His face was looking funnier and funnier. Then, without knowing how she got on to it, she mentioned Frieda Personal Tragedy who had to sell her outsize wedding dress in the classifieds.
‘That’s a woman, Ma, not a man,’ said Lambert.
But Treppie said Lambert should listen to his mother, ’cause for a change she was right. ’Strue’s God, that’s what he said. She, Mol, was right. Women could also have sorrows. Naturally.
She said, yes, Lambert should catch up. Sorrows were sorrows, whether it was man, woman or child, and in her opinion, everyone – the mortuary assistant in Yugoslavia, not to mention that poor stuffed corpse, and those women who struggled so with the tyres, the one who got burnt and the one who made the fire – all of them were made out of sorrows. The one no less than the other.
Now there’s a life-jacket for you, said Treppie.
‘What life-jacket you talking about now?’ she asked, and Treppie said it was one that would keep her on the go all the way to the North Pole, without food or clothes.
She told him she didn’t want to go to the North Pole, it was too cold there. She was very happy where she was, thank you, right here in Triomf. And then of course Treppie almost killed himself laughing.
They hear the front gate creak outside. Here comes Lambert. Treppie looks at his watch.
‘Half past ten,’ he says. ‘Fasten your seatbelts.’
Mol shakes Pop by the shoulder. He must wake up now, so he’s awake when Lambert comes in, otherwise he gets such a fright. Lambert usually comes home earlier on Mondays, after leaving early in the evening to look for rubbish.
The door opens. He stands there with a big smile on his face.
‘Christ,’ says Treppie, ‘are you the cat who got the cream or the dog with a bone?’
‘Cream,’ says Lambert. ‘Cream and sex and strawberries, I say.’
‘I say, take your pick, Uncle, it’s all in the mind.’
‘Where’re your silver bags?’ she says. ‘I thought you went to look for wine boxes.’
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘but you don’t always find what you look for, right?’
‘OK,’ says Treppie. ‘Obviously you found something else. Tell us now and get it over with so we can see the movie. It’s late.’
‘That movie,’ says Lambert, ‘is fuck-all. It’s fuck-all compared to what I just saw. Truly fuck-all, I say.’
‘On the big screen between your ears, you mean,’ says Treppie.
‘No, in a bedroom, through the gaps in the blinds.’
‘Must’ve been wallpaper,’ says Treppie.
‘Lambert, you mustn’t peep at people,’ says Pop.
‘Yes,’ says Mol, ‘just now there’s trouble again. Just now you fall on to someone’s carport or their car or something, and then they break our whole roof down in front of us.’
‘Were they braaiing?’ asks Treppie, winking at Lambert.
‘No, they must be vegetarians. They were eating fancy cheese from a little box and biscuits. On a breadboard. And lots of nice fruit salad in black bowl, with a leaf in the middle.’ Lambert laughs a naughty laugh.
‘Who you talking about?’ asks Pop.
‘Across the road,’ Lambert shows, pointing his thumb behind his back. He sits down, smiling his smile.
‘Yes?’ says Pop. She can see Pop doesn’t believe him. Neither does she. There’s nothing but flowers to peep at across the road. Every winter the little round one sows pretty flowers in front of the wooden fence. Sweetpeas, says Treppie. And then she sows dark, pink ones, for summer. Treppie says it’s cosmos. He says he’s never seen such healthy sweetpeas or such colourful cosmos anywhere in Triomf. Those two look like the type with money to spend on fertiliser. He wonders what they think they’re doing here in Triomf, and why they’ve got so much time for gardening. If you ask him, they don’t exactly look unfit for employment.
She and Pop have told Lambert to leave them alone, there across the road. They’re not his class of people. But every time trouble breaks out he goes there and phones. Until the last time, when they told him their lives were private and they didn’t want him to use their phone any more. There was a pay-phone at the Westhoven Post Office, they said.
Lambert says the one’s Afrikaans and the other’s English. The Afrikaans one plants the sweetpeas. The English one drives the blue Cortina with those flat shocks. The one that never wants to start. Lambert always wants to go and help them, but Pop says no. A Ford isn’t a Volkswagen, and a Volkswagen mechanic like Lambert must stick to his own line. He mustn’t mess with other cars. That’s how Pop tries to console Lambert so they can keep the peace, at least with the people across the road, ’cause with the people next door, on both sides, it’s just one big crisis after the other.
But now the problem is the Afrikaans one drives a Volksie and Lambert’s dying to grind her points. Even she, Mol, can hear the Volksie across the road sounds rough. When Lambert goes and offers his help they always say no thanks, they’ve got their own mechanic. Can’t be a very good one, he says, but what can you do?
He always comes back with some story or another. He says they give their garden-kaffir a knife and fork to eat his bread and wors with. Then they all sit together on chairs around a plastic table in the back garden. He says after a while that poor kaffir doesn’t know where to look any more, what to stick his fork into, or what to cut with his knife. Yes, Treppie says, it comes from not being properly connected with the world. They think they can make their own connections, but all they’ve got is a silly mixed-up business. He says he thinks they must be Communists or something. Then she gets a fright, and she tells Lambert he mustn’t get mixed up with Communists. They’ve got enough trouble as it is. She bumps Pop. He must tell him.
‘Lambert,’ says Pop, ‘you must leave them alone there across the road. They’re Communists.’
‘Well, maybe they’re Communists, but that’s not all they are.’
‘Hey, Lambert,’ says Treppie, ‘have you got a story or haven’t you got a story? If you have, let’s hear it, ’cause you’re extremely boring with that knowing smile on your face.’
Ja, well, she’s tired now. She wants to go bath. She takes a clean lid from her pocket. It’s from the dog food.
‘No, wait, Ma, this one’s for you,’ says Lambert.
‘Well, then, tell and get it over with!’
‘Those two across the road. They fuck each other!’ Lambert says.
‘So what’s new?’ says Treppie.
Pop shakes his head at her. God knows what Lambert will come up with next.
‘How?’ asks Treppie.
‘With candles and things!’
‘And what if they see you,’ says Pop.
‘I was hiding behind the bushes. Those two have planted bushes all over the place, Pop.’
‘Ja,’ says Pop, ‘bushes and sweetpeas!’
‘They play classics and then they fuck each other. Check this tune, Pop!’ Lambert puts on his classical music face and then he whistles the Trust Bank tune. ‘And it’s just candles, candles, all over the place!’
‘Can you believe it,’ says Pop.
Treppie smiles. ‘And then?’
‘Squirrel.’ It’s her, Mol, who says that.
‘Mol,’ says Treppie, ‘that’s just the point. They don’t have one of those, neither of them. That’s why I want to know. How?’
‘How what?’ She presses her thumbs into the tin plate. It’s not completely flat. When they get like that, they don’t keep the water in.
‘How do they do it, Ma. That’s what Treppie wants to know. Well, let me tell you something here tonight. They do it with fruit salad!’ He sits down. ‘Ice cream and fruit salad!’ he shouts, slapping his hands on his legs as he laughs.
Now she also wants to know how.
‘They stick it in, Ma. Don’t act like you don’t understand.’
‘Stick what in, where?’ She looks at Pop to see if he knows, but he just sits there with a silly smile on his face.
‘Christ, Mol, you weren’t born yesterday,’ says Treppie. ‘They stick it in the sweet spot, of course!’
Lambert laughs. ‘Well, Ma, let me tell you, those two stuff it with fruit salad wherever they can find a hole. Nose, mouth, ears, backside and frontside. And wherever they can find a split, they stick it in. In the bum, between the fingers, the toes. Behind the ears, you name it. After a while there’s so much juice on them they both look like tropical forests. Then they put the music louder.’
Lambert whistles the Trust Bank tune again, harder and quicker. Pop shakes his head.
Treppie pants with mock excitement. ‘The Amazons in Triumph, Part Two: The Revenge of the Fruit Salad!’ He rubs his palms together so hard they make sucking noises. No decency. Never in his life has he had any manners. ‘And then … and then … oh, what happens then?’ he asks.
‘Well, then they work each other up with their hands and they say Ooh! and Ahh! and they take all the fruit salad out again – banana, paw-paw, strawberries, the lot. They kiss each other with ice cream in their mouths. And then they lie down next to each other, with their eyes closed, and they sigh.’
‘Shit, Lambert,’ says Treppie, ‘now you’re lying. How could you have seen all that? Didn’t they maybe invite you inside, the Benade with the golden banana!’
‘What do they say to each other?’ she wants to know. If you ask her, fruit salad should come with stories.
No, he couldn’t hear so nicely. The music was playing too loud. And when the music stopped, they were already finished. Then they put new sheets on the bed ’cause the old ones were full of fruit salad, and he heard the one say to the other she thinks she’ll be able to fall asleep now.
‘“Are you sure?” the other one asked. And then the little round one moaned about the city grinding her points or something.’
‘Fuck, no, Lambert!’ says Treppie. ‘You must’ve been lying under the bed to hear all that. Which one did you want to do first, the little melon or the English rose? I must say, I admire your restraint, old boy.’
‘Treppie, I’ll smack you! I swear, man, the window was open. I was standing right in front of the window, in the bushes. I heard everything. You could almost say I heard it in stereo.’
‘What else did they say?’ She wants to know.
‘Well, then the one said something about being grateful, at least they still had a secret garden. And the other one said, yes, thanks a lot, the whole world’s a secret. Then the other one said or a bubble or something. We’ll never know.’
‘So much for the voice-overs,’ says Treppie. ‘What about the lighting? I thought you said they did it with candles.’
‘Oooh! Ouch!’ Don’t they burn themselves? she wonders.
‘Now that’s what I call burning desire!’ says Treppie.
‘No, man, Treppie,’ says Lambert. ‘They blow the candles out. It’s one of those affairs with seven candles on a holder.’
‘Seven?’ It sounds rather a lot to her.
‘Ag, come now, Mol,’ Treppie says. ‘There’s nothing that can still surprise you.’
‘Lambert means candlelight, Mol,’ Pop explains. ‘They do their thing by the light of seven candles. Then they blow them out. Then they go to sleep.’
‘Now how’s that for you, I say,’ says Lambert, lighting up.
‘Soft focus,’ says Treppie. ‘What do they know, anyway?’
Then everyone’s quiet for a long time. But she thinks what she thinks.
‘Well, it sounds nice and soft to me.’ The words come out before she can stop herself.
‘Oh my goodness,’ says Treppie. ‘Now Mol wants to become a lesbian as well. What do you say to that, old Gerty?’
‘Leave Mol alone,’ says Pop.
She wants to make her point here tonight. She doesn’t always get the chance.
‘No, I was just thinking,’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t mind if it was only strawberries that got stuck into me. With ice cream in my mouth. Then you must feel like an ice-cream float, with strawberry juice.’
‘But strawberry juice doesn’t have any fizz, Mol,’ says Treppie. ‘For a real float you need fizz.’ He laughs.
But Treppie’s not listening to her. He just shakes his head. ‘A bubble,’
he says. ‘A fucken bubble.’
‘Well,’ says Pop, switching off the TV, ‘it’s bedtime now. Too late now for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Tomorrow’s another day.
‘Mol,’ he says as he walks down the passage, with his back to them, ‘you can bath tomorrow. Otherwise the overflow drips all night. Lambert, go get some rest now,’ he says as he enters into the bedroom.
She puts the lid from the dog food tin back into her housecoat pocket. She looks at her thumb where the lid cut her. Try as she might in this house, no one listens to her. She’s a woman alone here, that’s for sure. She’ll just have to accept it. Stuffing it with fruit salad. She smiles.
Treppie locks the Klipdrift in the sideboard. He takes the glasses into the kitchen.
‘Stuffing it with salad, oh stuffing it with salad,’ she hears him sing, to the tune of ‘Sow the seed, oh sow the seed’.
Lambert’s gone out the front door again. He’s got a big grin on his face. She watches him through the window. He stands in front, at the fence, looking across the road. She looks where he looks. It’s pitch dark over there. Just night and bushes, she sees, and lots of small, white flowers. The secret garden. Ja, well, secrets remain secrets, with or without sweetpeas.