17

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PEACE ON EARTH

To shit is a fine skill, that’s for fucken sure. And, if anything, a turd is a work of art. So help him God. Some are water paintings of Sahara sunsets, and others are statues in the park. But a masterpiece of a crap is one that works its way down from your guts in one piece like a tapestry, evenly textured and solidly braided, not too light but also not too dark. With all the colours blending but not so much that it gets boring. Delicate, bright flowers shining against the grass and the white horse resting his horn meekly on the Madonna’s lap.

Treppie sits and pages through an old calendar he found among the dykes’ newspapers yesterday. There’s a broken guitar painted by one Braque, and a rough-looking oke with a bandage around his head. It’s a Van Gogh, by Van Gogh, who cut off his own ear, it says at the bottom.

Well bric-à-braque and all a-gogh. The stranger the name the stranger the dog.

He’ll take the holy virgin, any time, with her poor old horse and its single horn. All of it in invisible stitching. At least it looks like something. And he doesn’t mind the fact that they don’t know so nicely any more exactly who made it. If you asked him, a whole swarm of nuns must’ve sat working on those little flowers till their tongues started hanging out from tiredness and they got completely cross-eyed from concentrating on all the tiny stitches. So that after a while they began to see visions, and that was when they started stitching in the Mother of God in her blue dress, and her weird little horse, on top of the flowery lawn. Mystics can’t be choosers. And neither can the constipated. It’s a cross and it’s a calling. To look at what doesn’t exist, and to sit without results – both are ways of escaping the fine-grinder.

And it gives rise to shithouses full of art. God be his witness.

And the world is evidence thereof.

That’s why he buggered off from the lounge to come sit here with his newspapers. He doesn’t feel he’s got the slightest chance of producing a turd today, never mind art, but what the hell. To sit quietly on the toilet is a million times better than listening to those horny Jehovahs preaching to that fucked-up family of his, who sit there like obedient little dogs.

It’s not even March and the Jehovahs are into Exodus again. Every year they make the same mistake. They try to get through the whole Bible, piece by piece. But their timing’s way out. They start too quickly, and then at the end of the year they have to read Revelation twice in a row, verse for verse, ’cause they hit the end too soon. Many’s the time he’s told them, spare us the Revelation, dears, we’ve heard it all before. But before you can say Jack Robinson, the sun’s become black as sackcloth of hair and the moon’s become as blood, for the umpteenth time.

What they’re reading today he already knows off by heart. About how He led them from the land of the Egyptians and took them to a good, wide land, a country flowing with milk and honey, where the Canaanites and the Hittites and the Amorites lived. Then Mol goes ‘ites-ites-ites’ with that flabby mouth of hers as she tries to say all those names. She thinks it’s funny, the old bitch.

The only thing that’s different about this year’s Exodus is the musical accompaniment. Lambert’s sitting there on his crate and playing ‘tingtong, ting-tong’ on that thumb-piano of his. As they get to the pests and the plagues, he plays it quicker and quicker. What works on Lambert’s tits the most are the frogs that jump from the rivers into everyone’s beds. And the tabernacle puts him clean on to a high, about Aaron’s robe, with its bells of pure gold and pomegranates on the hem so he’ll tinkle and stay alive when he goes before God. Lambert’s got a horse-high hard-on for that woman again. Ja, shame, the poor bugger, he must be playing on that thing to stop himself from getting another fit. He looks quite worn out from all the fits he’s been having lately. Fits for fuck-all nowadays. Three, four times in January alone. And he won’t take his pills either; he says he needs to have all his wits about him so he can fix everything he’s still got to fix. He’s working himself into a bigger and bigger state as it gets closer to his birthday. But everything he touches, he breaks. This Benade is no Midas, that’s for sure.

Like the other day, when he found out the bathroom mirror was too big. A ghost of a millimetre, but still too big. Then of course Lambert tried to cut the mirror himself. Broke the thing to pieces. He told Lambert those pieces were still quite okay for pasting on to the hardboard, but of course he went and lost it again. He took a hammer and smashed those pieces one by one until there was nothing left but grit. So now he sits there and plays a tune without end, for the sake of his fits, for the pillar of cloud and the Red Sea and the bitter waters of Marah. ‘Pe-ting, pe-teng, pe-tong.’

So he can’t bear the sight of Lambert either.

Not to mention Pop. He sits there with his fly gaping ’cause the buttons that Mol sewed on have all come off again and Pop keeps losing his safety pin. The trouble started early this morning when Pop was shoving his shirt and vest into his pants so he could cover his shame, as he puts it. Mol kept pointing there with her finger. Then he, Treppie, asked them if they thought they’d just been kicked out of paradise or something, and if they reckoned their shame sticking out all the time was likely to bother anyone.

He actually just said that to cheer them up a bit after last night. It was Saturday and the grass had to be cut in the middle of the night again, and there was almost another fuck-around with the people next door.

But then Pop suddenly decided to get difficult, and he let rip right there in the passageway.

Didn’t he, Treppie, know that death was the biggest shame of all, and that nothing whatsoever could cover it up? Just look, he said, raising his eyes to the ceiling of the passageway, just look at the state in which he would have to meet his maker – with empty hands and not a single button on his fly. And surely it wasn’t asking too much that your shirt at least cover your shame while you were still alive? That was the least a person could do, he said. And, he said, the ones who survived him had better make sure he got washed decently and laid out nicely for his final journey to the pearly gates.

Pop’s been making these heavy speeches lately, at the funniest times and in the strangest places. Like this one, in the middle of the passageway, on an empty stomach. Or in Shoprite. Like when he started giving the baked beans in tomato sauce a sermon the other day.

He was looking everywhere for Pop and he couldn’t understand where he’d got to – all they needed was dog food. He found him standing in front of the specials shelf. That day it was baked beans.

You beans, Pop said, you might fancy yourself in your tomato sauce. But I say unto you, let someone just add some pigfat and then you’ll be worth bugger-all. ’Cause it’s all just a matter of pigfat and pulses. Which means it’s all about nothing. Poof! The next thing you know, someone farts, and then someone else says sis, what’s that smell, and then that’s it, you’re finished. Nothing! Finished, out, gone! Pffft! No one, but no one can escape this trinity of beans, farts and death. Amen.

Not bad, not bad at all. He didn’t catch everything Pop said, just a word here and there, but from what he could make out it sounded nice and sharp.

What he didn’t like was Pop’s face and Pop’s voice. Pop didn’t laugh and he didn’t smile, and his voice sounded like something rattling in the wind. He sounded completely different from the way he, Treppie, would’ve sounded if he’d suddenly started giving the beans a talking to. And God knows, he preaches a lot, whether his audience is on special or not. But it’s always a game. This speech of Pop’s was different. It wasn’t a game. ’Cause the next thing Pop went and swept those beans right off the specials shelf. First he swept them off the top two racks, with his right arm to the one side and his left arm to the other. Then he put his foot to the tins on the bottom rack. They went crashing far and wide. It was so bad he had to drag Pop to the car kicking and screaming. You would’ve sworn it was Lambert carrying on like that, not Pop. Or even him, Treppie, ’cause he gets unhinged pretty bad himself sometimes. But Pop’s a softie, never allows an angry word to pass his lips. Yet here he was lecturing at the beans. Kicking tins around in Shoprite and swearing his head off. Not that he was completely sober, either. The two of them had thrown back a couple earlier that afternoon, but most of the time the Klipdrift just makes Pop sleepy. And wine makes him silly. He’d never seen Pop go off the rails like that before.

When they got home, he sat Pop down in his chair and switched on the TV full-blast, so Pop could fall asleep. Then he went and told Mol what happened.

It was Lambert, she said. Pop was worried about Lambert going backwards before he even started going forwards. And it broke his heart that things always seemed to go like this with the Benades. Generation upon generation. Lambert wouldn’t even have a generation to come after him. What would happen to him one day when the rest of them kicked the bucket?

Well, yes, that’s surely enough to make anyone want to preach to the beans.

He, for one, really doesn’t want to be around the day Lambert finds himself all alone in the world, without any children he can call his own. The day he has to make a polony sandwich on his own. Or mow the lawn.

In January alone, that postbox came off three times. And every time it happened, the whole lot of them had to jump to attention, or else. Then Lambert lifted all the loose blocks from the parquet floor, even the ones that were just half-way or quarter-way loose. Dug them out with a screwdriver. He said he wanted to sand the things underneath so they’d stick properly the next time, once and for all, but then he made another fire and burnt the lot of them. Now the passage is full of potholes and everyone’s feet keep catching. Now it’s not just Lambert who suffers from the falling sickness here in Martha Street.

Take Mol. She tries to get into the kitchen with her Shoprite bags, but she’s down before she can get past the kitchen door. Then it’s just plastic bags all over the passage. Or Pop. He tries to switch off the TV after the peace song, but he trips over his own two feet and knocks his head against the sideboard. Then the sideboard falls off its brick. And the cat off the sideboard. Now they’ve got a headless cat again. Some things never change.

Flossie stands out here in the back like a beetle without its shell. At least her wheels are on again. Now Lambert’s talking about using not one, but two cars when the shit starts flying. He reckons that he and his girl are going to ride in front, in Flossie, with no roof and no doors, hair blowing in the wind. He, Treppie, and Mol and Pop must follow, in Molletjie. Lambert says they’ve got more chance of getting to the border with two cars than with one. The one must be a travelling spare part for the other, in case of a breakdown. That’s what he says.

Which one for which one, he can’t say.

Sounds more like a travelling disaster, if you ask him. He’s already told Lambert, travelling under any circumstances is really looking for shit, let alone in times like these with loose bullets and things flying all over the place. All you do is expose yourself. As if you’re not exposed enough as it is, with your soft human skin and its holes for seeing and smelling and tasting and farting – that’s if you’re lucky enough still to do all those things. And with your two little legs and their forward-facing feet, and your hands each with their five little twigs. Always trying to grab on to things in the void here in front of you, never knowing what’s coming next. Or what’s likely to trip you up.

All the more reason for sitting quietly and waiting for the perfect shit. Reading helps. Not the world’s headlines, and not the main cats’ moves, either. That’s fucken boring. What he looks for are all those odd little fuck-ups in the lives of the underdogs. If it proves one thing, it’s that the Benades aren’t alone in the world. They’re not the only ones who’ve turned out funny.

Like the story about the spinster and her goldfish. It was winter in England and it was so cold those fish were about to freeze. So she put the goldfish bowl on top of the heater to warm them up, but then she went out and clean forgot about the fish. When she came back they were all over the floor. The bowl had burst. The biggest one, whose name was Jonah, was still moving around on the carpet. She gave him the kiss of life, blowing into his mouth and gills, but nothing could bring him back to life again. So she swallowed him whole, so she could share in her little fish for life ever after.

The only conclusion he can draw from this story is that small fry always land up in the bellies of bigger things. Makes no difference if it’s people or fish.

Now that kind of story really gets his guts moving. Maybe something will still happen here today.

And what else? The story about two newly-weds who wanted to show some guests their engagement video. Made by the groom and his friend, the best man. That was in America. They were still standing there with their mouths full of wedding cake when the best man started screwing a pit bull terrier on the video. And the groom was holding the dog down by its head, ’cause a dog won’t just stand still for something like that. Oops! Wrong video. The bride flipped so bad she’s still in the loony-bin today. That accomplice and his best man are now smitten with remorse. They go to the loony-bin every day with a bunch of white roses for the flipped-out bride.

He doesn’t even want to start drawing conclusions about that Dog-Day Wedding. Too many of them.

In Harare, he reads, the main telephone exchange is so full of cockroaches no one can get through any more. In India, Kentucky Fried Chicken’s going bankrupt ’cause the coolies’ chickens are so thin the Colonel’s secret chicken batter won’t take on those oriental budgies. Never mind the mudslide in the mining town of Harmony. This time he just hopes they’ll give that place its rightful name – No-Leg-to-Stand-On or Slip-’n-’Slide or something like that.

So, all in all, the Benades haven’t got too much to complain about. That’s just the way things go in this world. In-out, on-off, here-there, dirty-clean, dog-dog. Two of each kind in the ark. One continuous two-stroke activity. And so everyone buggers along, living it up, killing time. From the days of the Israelites already.

Take the piece the Jehovah woman was reading just now about the tabernacle’s candlestick. God knows, those desert wankers had lots of free time on their hands! That candlestick thing was so full of bowls and knobs and flowers, totally excessive if you remember a candlestick is actually meant for putting candles in, for light. Six arms, three on each side, and three bowls made like unto almonds on the one arm, plus a bud and a flower. And on the other arm three bowls, plus a bud and a flower. Etfuckencetera. And under each arm as well, and on the candlestick, four bowls made like unto almonds, with their knobs and their flowers. All of it one ‘beaten work’ of ‘pure gold’. And then there were still all those curtains and things, too. Just loops and tassels wherever you look. It’s as if the poor fuckers thought decorations and embroidery could save your soul.

He’ll put his head on a block that redemption is granted to the idle. To those who do completely fuck-all, with an open mind about the comings and the goings. But that’s high-powered stuff. You have to have your wits about you for that. Who’s he anyway to try going big on bugger-all? So he chooses the lesser of the two evils, and that boils down to shit-stirring. Not that his little bit of shit amounts to ‘beaten work’ of ‘pure gold’, but it’s better than nothing. Now and again it’s Quality Street shit and that’s the best he can hope for. For an oke like him, sitting in a place like Triomf, it’s quite good enough. ’Cause to tell the honest truth, Triomf doesn’t even have the redeeming features of a desert. It’s just a dump. Like the rest of Jo’burg, mind you.

But it feels to him like he’s the only one of them who actually clicks this little fact. One by one they trot like sheep after the fire in the cloud. And this fucken sheep-attitude comes a long way in his family.

Like that time all the wagons came through Fordsburg. That was in ’38. His mother still made little bonnets for herself and Molletjie just for the occasion. Genuine Voortrekker bonnets with big flaps in front. Tight around the neck.

That Solly-Jew who did the organising for them at the clothing factories also told them they were mothers of the nation. He told them they were made of the same steel as their descendants who’d trekked over the Drakensberg on bare feet. Clever fucken Jew, that. But of course he had his own Communist plans for them. He just used the regular story that they all knew. Everyone always has plans for them, some or other story. They’ve always been in some fucken person’s plan or story or horizon or background or adventure. Without ever wanting to be in it, or at least without him ever wanting to be in it.

Pop, for example, was completely into that ’38 story. But he was soft in the head even then. They recruited him in the yard at their house in Vrededorp. Made him buy a little waistcoat with a silly white scarf to put around his neck for when the wagons came by. And a hat with the brim turned up on one side. Old Mol still had to go and buy it from the coolies. Pop really fancied himself in those clothes. He spent hours posing in front of the mirror. After a while he even had chicken feathers in the hatband. But he, Treppie, wanted nothing to do with it, even though he was only ten. That was after Old Pop had beaten him to a pulp in the train that time and he didn’t speak to anyone for years on end. Soon afterwards, Old Pop hanged himself. Then he started talking again, but he still didn’t want to sing along when they sang ‘God of Jacob’ and ‘Afrikaners, children of the soil’, which they had to sing all the time in school in those days. Not his scene, that. If ever there was wallpaper, if ever you wanted interior decoration, that was it.

And there they walked down Fordsburg’s Main Street, cracking their whips! Whips with leather knots on the ends that echoed ‘ka-thack!’ among the houses. For crying in a bucket! And the Afrikaner bulls were shitting non-stop – Fordsburg’s Main Street was strewn with shit and the dogs were going berserk from all the strange smells and the commotion. One of those dogs got between the legs of the oxen. He was kicked to death on the spot. Not a good day for a dog. And no one even bothered to pick up the poor thing. He just lay there in the road. Everyone hypnotised by the wagons. High on the Great Trek.

The names of those wagons took the biscuit. Each one more ‘symbolic’ than the next. That was the day he learnt you can make any fucken thing you like ‘symbolic’, from a pisspot to a postbox. It just depends whether you’ve got enough power. Then you can even win an election with a symbolic pisspot. Or a hosepipe or a wheelbarrow or a monkey wrench. It’s all in the mind, anyway.

One wagon was called The Concentration-Camp Nurse. It had a tent pitched on top with its flap thrown open so you could see inside, and there, in the tent, sat the nurse, wearing a black dress buttoned up to the neck, her hair pulled into a tight bun. Her face was powdered completely white, with black rings painted under her eyes and rows of wrinkles drawn on her forehead. On her lap lay a child pretending to be sick unto death. He was made up all purple and yellow so he’d look ghastly and mortally ill. Next to them was an enamel basin for the fake water, and every now and again, when people looked into the tent, the nurse would dip a rag into that fake water and wipe that child acting half-dead on his powdered forehead. Except she couldn’t really wipe his forehead ’cause then she’d wipe off the make-up and the whole scene about the terrible suffering of women and children in the camps would go to glory. So she just dabbed at the air above the child’s forehead.

Now if that’s symbolic then it’s really very silly. That’s what he thought then, and that’s what he still thinks now. People mustn’t try pulling that kind of crap on him. About Jopie Fourie and Racheltjie de Beer and Johanna van der Merwe.

Johanna was also there, with her twenty-one assegai wounds, which you could count, one by one. Big red spots painted all over her body. All she needed next to those ‘wounds’ were some numbers, one to twenty-one in koki pen.

He remembers how that Johanna winked at Pop, with her twenty-one polka dots and all. She’d been placed on a bier, and she lay on her back, with her bonnet and her Voortrekker-dress lying under the wagon’s hood. The flap was left open so you could see her nicely. The heroine, resting at peace after the battle.

And then, just as Pop ducked under the wagon to smear some grease on his scarf – that was the big thing for the little boys that day, getting fake Voortrekker grease on their clothes – just as he did that, she winked and asked him if he didn’t want to take a ride to keep her company. It was so boring lying there on her back in state, under that canopy.

Pop told that story for years afterwards, over and over again. To this day he still tells it. He says he’ll never forget how he rode with Johanna and her assegai wounds in the wagon. He didn’t ask her what her real name was, but he rode along all the way to Braamfontein. When they saw people looking into the tent, Pop made as if he was a young Voortrekker grieving over his beloved, with his head on her chest. That was something he did with great pleasure, he said, ’cause she was ‘a beautiful woman in the prime of her life’. That’s how Pop always tells the story. And what a fluke shot it was that the kaffirs didn’t stab her in her lovely face. That’s also what Pop used to say.

If you ask him, Pop’s a sucker for wallpaper. Nowadays it’s on TV instead of wagons, but nothing has changed about the way Pop sees life. Or how he wants to see life. Ever since the day Pop gave the baked beans a talking to, he’s been getting more and more difficult. The other day he even went and bought Mol a rose bush. Just imagine it – a rose bush with two yellow roses. He drove specially to the nursery just to get it, to the larnies’ nursery in Jan Smuts Avenue. He saw they had cheap roses there on special. Keith Kirsten’s nursery. Going to a place like that was quite a business, he said, but he didn’t mind how far he had to drive as long as it made Mol happy.

He, Treppie, didn’t go. He was at the Chinese. Pop took Lambert with him, and Lambert told them afterwards that people were staring at them so much there among the plants, like they were from Mars or something, that he just went and sat in the car. Pop stayed away for a long time. He was looking for a Whisky Mac. He said he wouldn’t come back before he’d found one. When he did get back, he had a rose bush in his arms and he was smiling from ear to ear. Got that rose completely for nothing, he said. It wasn’t a Whisky Mac. Keithy Boy had never in his life heard of such a thing. But it didn’t matter. The colour was right.

The people at the nursery wanted him out of there, he said, so they said here, take it and leave. And then of course it was a whole palaver again, ’cause Mol started crying when she saw that rose bush. It was 17 January, her birthday. Pop had remembered it for the first time in ten years.

If you ask him, Mol will say any day in January is her birthday. Their IDs have been locked away in the sideboard for so long now that none of them remembers exactly when their birthday is. They know more or less. Everyone except Lambert, who knows exactly. Twenty-sixth April. And that’s something none of them must ever forget, otherwise there’s shit to play. But they know their own birthdays only by month. His birthday is sometime in November, and Pop’s is in May. It’s a long time since they did anything about it.

Then of course that rose bush needed planting, but Pop was so tired he couldn’t lift a finger. Lambert said when he dug holes it was for petrol, not flowers. So Mol got on to his case. He, Treppie, must plant the rose bush. Pop even had a list of instructions from Keith-Buy-Now-Flower-Later about how to make holes for rose bushes. This wide, this deep, then you mix this, that and the other into the ground, with so much water and with this spray for that insect and he didn’t know what else. He told Mol this rose bush would bring her nothing but misery. And then she really started crying.

It’s almost a month now, and that rose bush still hasn’t been planted. He sees Mol watering it every morning in its black plastic. It’s getting yellow underneath. Why she doesn’t just dig the bladdy thing into the ground somewhere he doesn’t know. She’s got two hands of her own, after all. When she gets into the mood, she walks around the yard with that rose bush all day long, asking everyone where must she plant it, in heaven’s name, where?

Pop says in front, next to the postbox. Lambert says no, at the back, next to the fig tree. That’s the only other plant in the yard. He, Treppie, says nowhere. Toby pees all over the place and she should wait until Toby’s also in heaven before she starts fiddling with roses.

Then Mol just wants to start crying all over again. The older she gets, the more she cries. It makes him feel like his guts are tied up in knots. Then he spins her a lot of crap about how roses never die in heaven, especially not from dog-piss, and how the heavenly roses have different colours and fragrances, all on the same bush. The more the divine dogs pee on them, the more colours and fragrances they get. He embroiders one never-ending story for her until she shuts up and gets that silly smile on her face again. Then she puts the rose down in the shadow of the kitchen door, still in its plastic.

And that’s where it’s still standing, today, among all the stuff Lambert carries in and out of the house all the time as he tries to get through his list. So much rubbish. Next to the rose bush on the one side lies the bathroom cabinet, the one Lambert ripped right off the wall the other day when the mirror didn’t fit. And next to that, a few odd planks Lambert wants to use for a bigger and better bathroom cabinet. Always wants to be bigger and better, that’s Lambert for you. On this side of the kitchen, three used-up Dogmor tins and a crate of empties. And on the other side, three old GTX tins and a box of empty Klipdrift bottles. Also very symbolic, if you ask him, of how they struggle by the sweat of their brows to dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s and get the little mirror mirroring on the wall. Then there’s Lambert’s old bed, with its imploded legs and its exploded stuffing, pushed up against the other wall. He wants to fix it, he says. And the bathroom’s burglar-bars, which didn’t want to fit so nicely after they’d used them to braai their T-bones at Christmas. Lambert says they got twisted in the heat, so now he wants to bend them straight again. Just proves his point, it’s never too late to build a tabernacle.

The latest is that he wants to paint the house. Now it looks like 127

Martha Street has to be painted snow white for the fucker’s birthday. And as the devil would have it, they found a letter in the postbox about painting houses the other day, with a golden stamp in the middle and a number under the stamp. At the bottom of the letter they found a list of numbers, including their own, which meant they could have three thousand rand worth of free paint – a little present from Wonder Wall for the New Year. That’s what Lambert read there. And then he started going on and on about the paint until Pop filled in their address and everything to say yes, please, they’d be happy to accept the free paint. Lambert posted it the same day, like the letter said he must. He, Treppie, didn’t even get to see it. He was at the Chinese. They only told him about it later, and then he asked them if they’d read the fine print. This was going to cause shit. But they didn’t even know what fine print meant. Fat lot they know! Then, just a few days later, the shit arrived in the form of a little man in a striped shirt and a tie full of flowers. He measured the house with a little wheel that he pushed around by a handle. The ceilings too. He asked for a ladder and he climbed on to the roof, measuring: ‘katarra! katarra!’ all over the corrugated sheets. Pop and Mol and Lambert were at Shoprite, and so there he sat, all alone. Him and the man and his little wheel with its little meter, measuring their house inside, outside and on top.

The man took out his Wonder Wall letter and showed him the signature on the dotted line. He asked if Treppie knew whose signature it was. That’s when he should’ve said, no, he didn’t. But the man looked him straight in the face and so he said, yes, it was his brother’s signature. The man said, no well, fine. If it was a close relation, then he, Treppie, could sign these other papers while his brother was out. The man pulled out a long paper with three carbon copies, all of them so full of fine print it would’ve taken three days to read. Please just sign, here, here and here, he said. It was a mere formality, just to say yes, they confirmed they wanted free paint to the value of three thousand rand. He told the man he should leave one of those carbon copies behind so his brother could go through it, but the man was already halfway out the door and he said the carbon would come when they delivered the paint. It would take a month or two, ’cause they had so many pledges they couldn’t keep up. Next thing, whoosh, he was gone in his Uno.

Pledges, he thought, but what had they actually pledged? They won some paint with the right number under the gold stamp. That was all. Why would you want to pledge anything if you’d won something? Unless it was your faith in Wonder Wall. He could swear there was a fucken snag of sorts somewhere.

To tell the truth, that wasn’t the worst of it. What made him feel really sad were all those thousands of metres the man clocked up on his little wheel. All of it painted white, pure white, without a trace of their comings or goings.

He looks at the bathroom. The man measured in here too. It would make for a bit of an unsociable shit if paint was the only thing you could smell around here. He knows every little mark and crack in this room. In fact, if there’s one room in this house he can call his own, it’s the toilet. This is where he catches his breath, and this is where he figures out what’s what and who’s next. It’s the place where he scratches the monkey for fleas, as Pop always says when he stays inside for so long. Well, whether or not it’s fleas he doesn’t know, all he knows is that it’s a necessity.

Treppie looks around in the bathroom. There’s the soft rubber tube they use for siphoning petrol on a nail behind the door. Their toothbrushes, warped and lopsided, in the little blue plastic glass on the shelf. His and Pop’s and Lambert’s razors, on the window ledge. And Mol’s hairbrush, so full of caked, grey hair you almost can’t see the brush any more. Three bent-open hairpins. Two buttons.

In the same way, you’ll find their personal effects all over the house. Their spit and their blood and their breath. And paw marks, all over the walls.

Yellow afternoon light shines through the bathroom’s frosted window, making a dull spot of light on the wall. Just there, someone’s oily hand touched the wall. Must’ve been Lambert. King Kong was here.

What the hell, what will be, will be. From high-gloss to matt-finish in the space of a single lifetime. Maybe it’s also not such a bad thing, after all. With every face-lift you lose something, but what have they got to lose in any case? Not exactly what you’d call museum pieces. Just the collected works of wear and tear. The little bits of baggage from the Benades’ Great Trek, full of dirty marks. Burnt black, caked up, flopped out, moth-eaten, unstitched, sticky and rusted, with dog-hair on everything too.

Not quite wallpaper, this. And by no means a tabernacle. Just the blues of 127 Martha Street. The fine print of fuck-all. The dregs of Triomf!

Would you believe it! And he’s sober as a judge. His guts must be full of gas. At least it’s a case of self-generated intoxication. Not like the hot air and the fine-tuning that gives Pop his kicks.

Take for example how Pop and Mol fell, hook, line and sinker, for Malan’s story in ’48. Another Great Trek story. This time it was on the wireless. Old Mol was no longer with them. Just the three of them sitting around the kitchen table in Vrededorp. He still remembers saying blah-blah-blah when that flat-mouthed old toad in a hat began croaking about the election. About how his party, the ‘Purified’ National Party, was depending on everyone to bring the Great Trek to its logical ‘conclusion’. Pure, undiluted shit! How his party would lead them through this new Great Trek, through all its ditches and drifts and its risks and dangers. And how his party would fend off every threat, how it would destroy the enemies at the Blood River of the labour market, fighting to the bitter end. Because this time it wasn’t a Great Trek upcountry to escape the English, he said, this time it was the rural Afrikaner’s Great Trek to the cities, and for those who were already there, the poor and the reviled, it was the Great Trek to the higher professions and big capital.

Come again, he said. It was a Great Trek back under the English yoke. Only now the yoke had a drill-bit and its name was Anglo. But Pop and Mol told him he must shuddup, they wanted to listen.

How they listen, if anything gets said about the Great Trek, the Promised Land, Everyone-Together-Through-Thick-And-Thin. How they listen!

Whether that place is full of milk and honey or full of petrol and oil and bricks and mine dumps, it makes no difference. And if, on top of it all, the voice promising everything sounds like a preacher, then they’re all ears. Fired up. Ready for take-off.

That’s why Mol thinks that Niehaus chappy from the ANC with his bedroom eyes is such a together little boykie. She says he reminds her a lot of Malan. In that case, he tells her, she should vote for the ANC, but she says not a damn will she vote for the kaffirs. Then he asks her, but what about Niehaus, he’s a white oke? In that case, she says, maybe she will vote for the ANC after all, ’cause Niehaus looks to her like the kind of leader you can follow with complete trust to the bitter end. What’s more, he looks like a man who’d follow his own leaders to the bitter end, come hell or high water, and that’s enough for her. Then it feels like the National Party.

Ja, the poor fools, it feels like. He wonders if the leaders of that party feel like anything to themselves, never mind National. When he tries to imagine what they feel like, he detects the stirrings of a bowel movement. And that’s a fucken compliment, ’cause they’re not even worth a good shit. Liars and thieves with their hands on their hearts. The plural lying party, here a coup, there a coup, meanwhile they’re cooped up with their own kind all the time, grabbing each other’s balls. State ball. A dance for this one and a dance for that one. Here a gun, there a prayer. Excuse me while I waltz all the way to the Nobel Prize.

Now it’s supposed to be ‘New’ National Party. New be damned. Turning their own ‘foreign’ partners back into internal affairs, digging out the bombs they planted themselves, firing their own big shots, and then state enemy number one becomes the state’s redeeming partner. Teach the Bushmen aerobics, give the Koevoets cabbages to plant. And they call it new! It’s not new, it’s the same old rubbish recycled under a new name. But the rubbish itself is a brandless substance. Nameless horror in sackcloth of hair, if you ask him.

That’s why he egged Lambert on to start throwing stones at those two new NPs the other day. They thought they could come here again with their crap in the middle of the day. Lambert was digging his petrol cellar, so he had lots of ammunition to hand. Old Sof’town’s bricks for stoning the new NPs. He hopes that was now a permanent removal. Those boy scouts couldn’t get away from here fast enough, ducking all the way. It’s a good thing they weren’t NPs from the old school, ’cause they would’ve stood their ground and took it like men. Good old times. Now they duck for a living. He’s seen on TV how things are going in the townships. That’s where they’ve learnt to become such experts in the art of ducking. Think they can barge in wherever they like. And now they scheme they’re suddenly good enough for the red-carpet treatment. Long live the Ducking Party. And so the pendulum swings. If FW learns the art of ducking in Meadowlands, then you can be sure old Meddlebones is coming back to Triomf to reminisce. It’s taken a long time, but now he, Treppie, has finally clicked this mathematics of history.

So when Mol let out a yelp one day last November, and called them to come see, Mandela was driving down the road in an open car, but he’d turned white overnight and he was wearing a black dress, he, Treppie, knew exactly who it was. And there stood the old dog-collar, in a black limousine, with a whole bunch of other Roman doggos in red and purple dresses in the cars behind him. They were smiling so much you saw nothing but teeth. He recognised him by his hair, still shaved close like in the old days when he used to run around here trying to save what there was to be saved. But now he was very old. He looked like a little powdered peach and he was smiling all the way down memory lane. Pointing here, pointing there with his shaky little hand, like he was sprinkling holy water, with everyone looking where he was pointing. And right at the end of the procession, on an open lorry, rode His Holiness Huddlestone’s private band. They were playing full tilt, jolly jiving music on saxophones and penny-whistles and things like that. The whole band was full of old-timers with hanging dewlaps from all the blowing, but they followed their lead player, who was blowing like mad on his little trumpet. AFRICAN JAZZ PIONEERS, it said in stencilled letters on the lorry. That lorry was swaying on its wheels from the way they were pulling and pushing those shiny, long arms on the trombones. ‘Viva Kofifi!’ one old bloke was shouting. ‘You are the captain!’ another one called. And then everyone sang a song for that papier mâché captain, standing there in front, pointing over the roofs of Triomf as if they were a tempest-tossed ocean. Was he imagining things, or did he even start liking him? He had the gift of the gab, and if there’s one thing you need to survive with a dress and a collar round your neck in this country, then it’s being able to talk yourself in or out of anything.

He’s still got the man’s speech from the newspaper. That was now truly a priceless piece. About the way Sophiatown used to look in the old days, how it was a place you could ‘look up to’, with its ‘grey-blue haze’ of fire smoke ‘against a saffron sky’. And the little red-roofed houses on top of each other, how it always made him think of Italy, and the ‘shapely blue gum trees’ all over the place. There you have it! But the closing line was the best, about the Church of Christ the King on the hill, its steeple visible from afar, north-south-east-west, ‘riding like a great ship’. Now there’s a tapestry for you. Stitched together with lovely words.

That’s his fucken end, this endless fucking with words. In this country everything’s got a name which is actually something else’s name. Pik Botha, Vleis Visagie, Slang van Zyl, Brood van Heerden. And just look at their own names. Pop’s truly never had any pop in him. And Mol can try as much as she likes, she’ll never push up a molehill. And if one considers that her real name is Martha, one could dub her Martha Street’s presently serving Martha. But that’s an altogether different kind of service and a different kind of Martha from the story in the Bible that the Jehovahs always want to read. Of all of them, only Lambert’s name sounds like something. Lambertus Benade. It sounds like an ambassador or someone like that, with a carnation in his buttonhole. But anyone can see that’s more than a misnomer, it’s a fucken miscarriage. His own name is a total fuck-up. Nothing left of Martinus, and according to Mol he should rather have been named Judas Iscariot. That’s also okay. Where would her soul have been without Judas, he asks her.

That’s not even to mention their dogs, who end up being named after streets. Toby and Gerty. He read somewhere that the streets here in Triomf were named after the children of the man who used to own the farm on which Sophiatown was built. Bertha and Toby and Gerty and Edith. And Sophia was supposed to have been the man’s wife. Then, just for the hell of it, he checked in the Britannica, and it said something about Holy Sophia being the name of a church in Turkey with a dome that looked like heaven.

For shitting through an icing tube, where will it all end? The whole world is just names and nothing is what it is and everything’s what it’s not, it’s all in the mind! And the mind’s a bottomless pit.

Legion as the Gadarene swine are the names of things, and then they all fall down in droves into that steep place, one on top of the other. A loose scrum in the depths. Not worth the breath it takes to utter them, never mind the paper they’re written on.

Treppie kicks the newspapers away. He throws them around a few at a time. Papers fly all over the bathroom. Fly away, Peter, fly away, Paul!

He’s fed up with the whole business, fed up, sick and tired of it all. Words swim before his eyes. Names whirl around in his head.

He folds the newspapers double and throws them up against the ceiling. ‘Kaboof! Kaboof!’

The Freedom Front’s got lead in its head. Hells bells in the house of Shell. And Goldstone’s teeth are but few. See how the train rides, how the train rides, all aboard the gravy train. Civil Co-operaton Chowder. Consensus-Atlantis-hortus-conclusus. The apple of his father’s eye, his mother’s darling, Sophia-Maria-Maryna, pretty girls in a row.

Noises start coming from his body. Hark the mighty roars. They hold much promise.

He feels his guts moving. Swing low, sweet chariot. Blessed is the stool’s motion, happy in its peals, its psalms to the end of all meals. He tears the newspaper into small pieces. He’s making confetti. Triomf, Triomf, here comes the bride, big, fat and wide.

He wipes his arse. Truly, when this happens, it feels like the seventh day, the day of rest. Emptied and unburdened. Everything well. Peace on earth.