It’s late. Lambert’s lying on his back in bed so he can listen with both ears to the hum of his fridges. They sound as if nothing’s ever been wrong with them. He smiles to himself in the dark.
They should start with the Fuchs, Treppie said, sniffing at the black shell of the Fuchs compressor on the workshop bench, ’cause if he remembered right, this wasn’t a burn-out, it was just a leak or two. Or a thousand and one, for that matter. After ’76 they sometimes took in fridges that leaked like they’d been in a riot. Birdshot, buckshot, that kind of thing. A fridge was a flimsy thing when it came to riots.
They put the compressor back into the engine and they bent the condenser tubes back into shape, the ones Lambert had ripped out. They welded the joints and cleaned everything up.
They also deep vacuumed the whole system, drained the oil and flushed the motor with R-11 before pumping new oil and gas back into the fridge.
When they started it up, Treppie showed him on the gauge how the pressure began falling to hell and was gone within an hour. The cycle ran all the time, without stopping inbetween, and the ice-box didn’t want to ice up properly.
‘This fridge is rotten with leaks. You must find them and mark them with a pencil on the joints and the tubing and the evaporator and everywhere else, the outside seals too. Then I’ll help you fix them. Then we simply fix them one by one till they’re all done.’
And he must remember, Treppie said, to open all the den’s windows, otherwise he’d get stoned from the gas. People who got stoned from fridge gas didn’t ever get liquid again. Their heads stayed solid until kingdom come.
He listened carefully to everything Treppie said, and he did everything Treppie said he must do. Working with Treppie was a big rave. They worked all February and March, and today’s the 17th April already. For more than two months they worked, morning, noon and night. The only time they stopped was when Pop brought them sandwiches. When Treppie had to go to the Chinese for a day there was always enough work to keep him busy in the meantime. He could see Treppie was also enjoying it. He’s been checking Treppie out. Ever since the fridges began working again he comes in here a lot, for this or that, he says, but he actually just wants to rest his hands on those two old fridges so he can feel how nice and steady they run.
Lambert feels for his cigarettes. He lights up and smokes in the dark, on his back. As he inhales he watches the little red coal glow. It’s good to think about how those fridges got fixed again. It’s so nice he just can’t stop thinking about it.
The first thing he tried using on the Fuchs was Sunlight, but the leaks were too big and there were too many of them. The soapy liquid was so runny that he couldn’t see very well what was going on.
Then he had a brainwave. He thought, let me send Pop to the big CNA in Melville to buy seven bottles of bubbles.
Late that night, after Treppie came and helped him pump more gas in for the test, he switched on his red light and asked the Good Lord and all the fridge fairies to please help him now, and he smeared every inch of that Fuchs with a thick layer of Fabulous Paradise Bubbles. Then he switched on the Fuchs at the wall.
The next thing there was a bubble bonanza like he’s never seen in his life before. The whole den was full of them. Big ones and small ones blowing from the holes. And all the sides of the bubbles shone with square pictures that bulged out as they caught the den’s reflections.
He must say, his jaw dropped when he saw that bubble bonus. He felt quite lame in the back as he stood there watching them. They just kept coming, one on top of the other, popping out of that Fuchs’ thick white body, some of them stuck together in five-bubble bunches, and then they separated and floated out the door and through the open windows, into the night, suddenly accelerating as the wind caught them.
The mouth of the ice-box, in front, was one huge bubble. When it came loose it was as big as his head. It floated there, in front of his face, wobble-wobble, like a big, hollow ball of jelly.
’Strue’s Bob, he walked right around that bubble. It just hung there. And with every step he saw a different angle of his room reflected on the bubble’s surface.
Everything looked completely different.
His bed, with all its rubbish-blankets and dirty pillows, looked like a lovenest full of secrets. And the painting above his bed, which was also in the bubble, looked like a masterpiece on a flowerpot, something he could never have painted himself. The Fuchs blowing bubbles was also in the bubble, like a magic machine in a science-fiction movie. And all the pieces of scrap iron, the tools, his steel cabinet, the crates full of empties, his painting of things with wings, looked like Treasure Island. He was also in the bubble. He looked like something from outer space, with ears that faded away to the back. His mouth and nose, popping out in front, like a goldfish in a glass bowl.
After a while he couldn’t take it any longer, but he also couldn’t snap out of it. So he took a deep breath and blew hard into that bubble as it floated there in front of him, like something in a nice dream. Then everything fell apart. The bed split into two floppy pieces against the ceiling, the Fuchs floated upside down into his eyes, his nose disconnected from his face. And then he followed his nose out the back door, weightless like an astronaut, up and away into the dark sky among the stars.
The bubble burst with a soft, cool, wet ‘plop’ on his face, like he’d walked with open eyes into a wet spider’s web.
Then he went and sat down on his bed, quite dizzy, and wiped his hand over his face. But there was nothing.
Lambert draws deep on his cigarette. That was really a special moment. From that moment on his den started feeling like a completely different place.
His mother said one minute she was standing in the front waiting for Toby to pee, and the next something suddenly began to bubble up from behind the house. She still thought, oh boy, here’s another big fuck-up, so she called Treppie to come and look. Treppie told her he reckoned that he, Lambert, had finally exploded, and what she saw there was his soul bubbling up to the heavens.
The next thing, Pop and his mother came running in from outside, smacking the bubbles left, right and centre. And then Toby came, almost running them right off their feet. His jaws went ‘clack-clack’ as he tried to bite the bubbles. Treppie waltzed in through the inside door, singing: ‘Tiny bubbles, in the air.’
Meanwhile, he was crawling around that Fuchs on all fours, with his pencil, quickly marking with circles the places where he saw bubbles popping out. There were so many of them that he couldn’t keep up. After a while everyone began smearing bubble juice on to the Fuchs. And the next thing Pop was smearing Mol and Treppie was smearing Pop and everyone was smearing everyone else full of Fabulous Paradise. And so they ended up having a whale of a bubble party there in his den.
Treppie said it just showed you what fun you could have with crocked stuff. Come to think of it, he said, where was the fun in a fridge that worked? Just ice and cold polony.
It took them three full days, testing with bubbles, pumping out the gas, cutting tubes, making new joints and filling up with gas again. Then they’d test with bubbles again and close up little pin-prick holes before filling up and testing the pressure yet again. Over and over until they had that Fuchs sort of sealed up.
But that was child’s play compared with the Tedelex. The Tedelex was a burnt-out case that had stood for years here in his den, stinking through its open valves.
He filed open that compressor all along its join to see what was going on inside. He took one look at the suction and liquid line pipes, the ones that go in and out of the shell, and he ripped them out with his bare hands, the oil line too. That was when he burnt his skin so bad with acidbreakdown oil.
‘Jeez!’ said Treppie when he saw the inside of that compressor.
Treppie made him put on gloves, and he put gloves on too, plastic ones that they hurriedly went and bought at the Spar, ’cause Treppie said he didn’t feel like being buried skinless one day. He didn’t see why he should have to be a take-away for the worms.
The pump inside was completely eaten away by acid. The insulation was perished right through, the windings were in their glory and the coils were burnt pitch black. When they opened it up some more, they saw that the gaskets on the cylinder head and the valve seats were totally non-existent.
Treppie said he wasn’t the god of fridges, so he couldn’t fix this kind of fuck-up, but then he saw Treppie’s eyes sparkle and he schemed that maybe he could push his luck a bit here.
He got Treppie to go as far as to order some of the most important parts for the Tedelex along with the orders he wrote out for the Chinese’s fridges. He even bummed some spares from the workshops around Triomf, West End Electrics and Century Appliances.
They spent weeks reassembling that compressor. The whole den was full of cut-up Dogmor tins filled up with parts and oil.
Every now and again Pop looked in, and he’d whistle between his teeth and say, goodness, it looked to him like Triomf Appliances was back in business.
But the day they welded up the compressor shell, reconnected the wires and tubes and tried to start the Tedelex, that compressor just sat there, jammed. Completely seized up.
‘Ag no, man,’ Treppie said after they’d cleaned it up for the umpteenth time and gone over everything again and checked the volts. ‘It’s like trying to get blood from a stone.’
‘What about a capacitor?’ he asked. ‘Then we can reverse the thing.’ That’s what the fridge book said you do with compressors when they get stuck. In Modern Refrigeration and Airconditioning, on page 355, middle of the page.
‘Christ, no, I won’t touch one of those things,’ Treppie said. ‘Once I saw a Chinese trying to reverse a compressor. He blew himself up, together with the compressor and the capacitor and everything else too. All that was left of him was a hole in the wall and a wet spot!’
‘Yes, but that must have been a big pump, a commercial systems pump, for one of those helluva big walk-in coolers full of sweet and sour.’
He kept on nagging Treppie about the capacitor. He knew he’d give in eventually, even though Treppie stood there and looked at him in that funny way.
‘Come now, Treppie, man, we can reverse it just a touch, and then a bit more. You must just organise a capacitor for us.’
He’d think about it, Treppie said, wiping off his hands with a ball of cotton waste and walking out of the den’s back door.
But Treppie spent too much time thinking about it for his liking. And then, that same afternoon, he had a second brainwave. One that made his hair stand on end.
He pulled Flossie right up to the den with its battery side next to the outside door, and then he pushed the Tedelex close to the door as well.
At the very last minute he figured out that he’d better pull the Tedelex’s plug out of the wall, otherwise he’d shock the whole of Triomf into a different blood group.
He took out the jumper cables and connected them to the runningwinding and the starting-winding wires on top of the compressor shell. He tied the other ends of the cable to Flossie’s battery.
And then he climbed into Flossie and started her up, putting his foot down.
That was how he jump-started the Tedelex, there and then, Model 104, burnt out for almost twenty years and reconditioned under doubtful circumstances, as Treppie said. Just like that. One shot, first try!
It was a miracle. Neither Treppie nor Pop nor Eddie at West End Electrics had ever in their lives heard of a thing like that. Lambert had to explain over and over how he did it, and Treppie just stood there, shaking his head. ’Cause a car battery gave a straight current, not one with waves like a fridge needed, he said. Treppie asked him again what he’d done before jump-starting the Tedelex, and he said he’d kicked the fridge five times up its backside until it shat itself, and then Treppie said, aha! Now a light went on in his head, but he never said what kind of light he meant.
Light or no light, just hear how they run, both of them, like the terrible twins there next to each other on the den’s cement floor. He puts out his cigarette. Then he swings his legs off the bed and walks carefully through the dark, in bare feet, to his fridges. He opens both doors at the same time. Just check how bright those inside lights burn! He feels the ice-trays in the ice-boxes. Ice for Africa! He puts his head against the sides of the fridges, first one, then the other. Running as smoothly as a healthy heart, without a hitch. He feels behind for the condensers. Both are warm.
‘My ma bakes roly-poly’
he sings as he climbs back into bed
‘My daddy combs the goat
My brother rows the leaky boat
And I fix Frigidaires.’
He sings the last line of the song a few times until he gets it to fit nicely with the tune and the beat of ‘Sow the Watermelon’. No one must ever come and tell him not to expect miracles. There it is, against all odds! ‘Click’ goes the Fuchs as he settles into bed. ‘Clack’ goes the Tedelex as he rolls on to his side.