Triomf Read online

  ‘Good evening, people,’ says the man, smiling from ear to ear.

  ‘Good evening,’ Lambert and Treppie mumble. They haven’t done anything wrong, but they look guilty. Still, no one must come and bug them now. They stare back at the man. All the people around them turn to look as well.

  ‘Who’s the host tonight?’ asks the man.

  ‘The what?’ asks Lambert.

  ‘Who’s paying?’ he asks.

  ‘Me,’ says Pop, ‘I’m paying.’

  ‘Well, sir …’

  That’s the third time in one day somebody’s called him ‘sir’.

  ‘I have good news for you!’ the man says, smiling at the other people too.

  ‘It is my pleasure to announce that you are sitting at the lucky table tonight, the Spur’s lucky birthday table. Your bill is on the house tonight and here in this envelope I have six free meal-tickets worth fifty rand each for you and your family, accepted at any Spur restaurant right through the country and valid for the next six months. Give them a hand!’

  He hands Pop an envelope.

  And there the whole Spur starts clapping. The man winks at three waiters, who bring three huge bottles of champagne to the table. Corks pop, glasses are brought and the Benades get served before anyone else. Then all the other people also get some of the champagne. A girl in a tiny pair of hot-pants and Indian feathers on her head comes disco-dancing right here in front of them. She goes and sits on Lambert’s lap, proposing a toast to the Benades.

  ‘Hi, honey,’ she says.

  ‘I like your feathers,’ says Lambert. He touches the feather-stuff in the girl’s hair. ‘But your legs are cold!’

  ‘Check Lambert out, he thinks he’s in a movie,’ says Treppie, laughing.

  ‘In a See,’ says Mol. She takes a big sip of champagne.

  ‘Cut it out,’ says Pop. ‘Drink up, Lambert, we must go home now.’

  ‘With an Indian on his lap! I’m still going to wet myself here tonight,’ says Mol. ‘What shallow little glasses! Let’s use my float glass instead, it’s better.’ Mol grabs the champagne bottle and fills up the float glass. She takes a few more sips.

  ‘Mol, it’s not a cold drink,’ says Treppie, trying to stop her. But it’s too late.

  The champagne’s doing its job. Pop can see her coming loose at the seams, from the champagne, from today and from all the days that came before. ‘I can float to England on this stuff,’ she says. She laughs loudly, wiping tears from her eyes.

  ‘Come,’ Treppie says to Pop, ‘let’s fuck off now, before Mol starts seeing more roses.’

  ‘Yes, that’s enough of a good thing,’ says Pop. ‘My leg’s hurting.’

  Lambert’s rubbing his own legs. The girl’s gone. All you see of her are some feathers in the opposite corner, among a bunch of men.

  ‘Lambert,’ says Treppie, ‘you help Pop. Come, Mol!’ he says, pulling Mol out of the seat. She wipes her eyes with a serviette.

  Pop struggles to get up. He limps all the way to the counter. Treppie goes with Mol to the car. Pop leans heavily on the counter. The noise of the cash register sounds like it’s coming through a thick cloud. That’s where Lambert finds him.

  ‘Hey, Pop, we don’t have to pay tonight, remember. Give me those other tickets so I can keep them for you.’

  Pop just nods. He limps behind Lambert, who’s pulling him to the exit by his shirtsleeves. At the stairs, Lambert goes two steps down, pulls Pop closer, and then lifts him on to his back. Pop doesn’t resist. He feels like he’s rocking in a thick fog. He sags forward, right up against Lambert’s back. It’s a wide, fat back and it smells slightly sour. He feels how Lambert’s large, warm hands slide in under his bum to hold him up. He suddenly has no strength left, not even enough to hold on to Lambert.

  ‘Hell, Pop,’ says Lambert, ‘you feel like you’re nothing but air.’

  The stairwell lights and the Indian heads pass by Pop’s head at strange angles. He closes his eyes. His ankles knock first against this side of the wall, then that side of the wall as Lambert carries him down the stairs. It feels like he’s going faster than he really is.

  Pop pushes his head down a bit, into the space between Lambert’s shoulders. He feels like he’s slowly melting back into the place he came from, a place he doesn’t know any more.

  Where does he end and Lambert begin? He doesn’t know. This morning’s feeling is back again. But not just in his shoulders. He can feel it everywhere. Outside, on the pavement, he feels it in the air too. Pure honey syrup. Sweet, sweet, sweet. Without stopping and without end.

  6

  OH, IT’S A SATURDAY NIGHT

  Lambert stands on the front stoep, looking at the moon. It’s a golden-yellow ball floating just above the houses. He can smell braaivleis everywhere. People laugh and talk in their backyards and the air’s thick with smoke. It’s hot. Children play outside in the streets. It’s almost dark but the children carry on playing with their balls. Some of them have skateboards. The only time they ever give way is when a hot rod comes past. It’s policemen who dice like that; they think they’re big shots around here. As they come past you can hear the thump-thump of disco music, and when they turn the corner they leave a smell of hot rubber behind them. He can swear the inside of those cars reek of aftershave. He knows, he sees them on weekends at Ponta do Sol, all washed clean and shaved for their night out.

  Here comes another one. Lambert checks out the policeman. His shiny hair hangs down in thin, curly little points on his forehead. He drives fast but he’s not even looking at the road. He’s looking out from under his hair, checking out the houses, left-right-left-right, with a kind of a fuck-you-fuck-me look on his face. His elbow sticks out of the window and he works the gears with his other hand. Big shot!

  Lambert knows what he’s looking at. He knows what you see through bedroom windows on Saturday nights. Girls. Putting on make-up in front of their three-panel dressing tables from Morkels. They pout their mouths to put on lipstick and then they bend over with their bums up in the air, resting their feet on little dressing table chairs so they can paint their toenails. That’s before they slip into their flimsy little white sandals. They’ve all got dates.

  Sometimes Treppie comes and stands next to him, so he can also check things out here from the stoep. But Treppie doesn’t look at the girls in their rooms. He looks at the wallpaper. At least that’s what he says. Lambert doesn’t know how he can see so far, but Treppie says all he sees are trees and dams and bridges, bunnies jumping on green grass and ducks and things. And blue hills in the distance. That’s now supposed to be all on the wallpaper.

  For fucking crying in a bucket, Treppie says, how can people lie to themselves like that, with walls full of mock paradise? But that’s what happens, he says, when you take a place like this, full of prefab wagonwheels and aloes, rotten with rubble, and then give it a name like Triomf. Then people think they’ve got a licence to bullshit. But that’s a lot of crap, Treppie says, ’cause the only licence that counts is poetic licence.

  He’s already asked Treppie what poetic licence means. Treppie says it’s the liberties poets take with life to make some things rhyme with other things. But, he says, those same poets have to live with poetic justice, ’cause words can boomerang badly, especially when they rhyme. He says there’s fuckenwell nothing in the world or the stars that actually rhymes. So, you have to watch your step and tread carefully if you want to play around with rhymes.

  So why rhyme, he asks Treppie, if it’s such a lot of trouble?

  But Treppie doesn’t answer. Sometimes he just shrugs and says it keeps him on the go. Other times he winks that devil’s wink of his and says it’s a family secret.

  Another hot rod comes past. A blue one with its arse up in the air and loud music blaring from the windows. Lambert feels the bass from the disco-beat vibrate low down in his back. All day he’s been walking around with a hard-on from looking at the Scope centrefold – a blonde girl with big cans that she pushes
out. They don’t even put stars on the nipples any more. Funny, he actually used to like those stars. Nipple caps. He burps. His throat burns. Heartburn. From polony and white bread. He wishes his mother would cook something so he can eat properly for a change. Potatoes and meat and sweet pumpkin. But she’s gone bad. Doesn’t give a shit any more. Just look at her kitchen. The other day he stuck some pictures of pretty kitchens on to the fridge. He took them from the Homemaker magazine that he finds in his postbox. But Pop took them off before his mother could see them.

  He looks at the moon. It’s light yellow and a bit higher in the sky now. That fucken moon works on his tits. And just listen to the flying squad and the ambulances. Sirens all over the place, in and out of the Saturday night traffic.

  Next door they’re playing Cat Stevens. They’ve been playing it the whole night. ‘Oh, it’s a Saturday night and I ain’t got nobody.’ Loud. They think they’re the only ones in the street, as if Martha Street belongs to them.

  When he walked through the house from the back just now, he looked at his people sitting there in the house. They act like nothing’s wrong. His mother’s in the back, knitting Gerty’s jersey. Treppie’s in his room reading the Saturday Star classifieds. What Treppie thinks he’ll find in the classifieds Lambert still doesn’t know. Pop’s fast asleep in his chair in front of the TV, in the lounge. The TV’s playing loud.

  He feels pushed. Pushed from fucken underneath and from fucken above. He goes back in through the front. Then he looks around Treppie’s door.

  ‘So, what’s new,’ he says. He lights up. Maybe Treppie’s got a story to tell. Or a plan.

  ‘So, what does that Jew-newspaper say tonight?’ he tries again.

  Treppie looks him straight in the face. Here comes shit.

  ‘Just look at you again. Sis, yuk, go pull your wire so you can get some rest!’

  ‘Your arse, man!’ he says. What else can he say? He wishes he had something else to say. Something that Treppie’s never heard in his whole fucken life. Something that’ll make him sit up and be cool on a Saturday night. Something that fucken rhymes. How’s he supposed to help it if he gets a hard-on? He burps. Fucken hell! What now?

  He looks into the lounge and sees Pop sleeping in his chair. A drop of snot hangs from his nose and there’s slobber running down his chin. It drops from his chin on to his chest. Toby lies under the TV table. His eyebrows and ears twitch when he sees Lambert look at him. Pop shifts around in his sleep.

  He’ll still be sitting like that when he kicks the bucket one day, Lambert thinks. No, he doesn’t want to think about that. Fuck that. ‘Click-click’ goes the floor as he walks with bare feet to the back, to his mother. That’s another place. He knows when it’s okay to go in there. Now’s not really the time. It’s his mother’s room. Hers and his father’s, but more hers. He sticks his head around the door.

  ‘Nearly finished?’ he asks. ‘Can I see?’

  She ignores him. Like she’s been doing ever since the last time. That was bad. He could feel things breaking inside her. If she looks for trouble, she’ll get it. But now he’s looking for company.

  ‘Has she tried it on yet?’ he asks. She doesn’t look up. He takes a step into the room.

  ‘Gerty,’ he says to the dog, who’s sitting stiffly against his mother on the mattress, ‘Gerty, have you tried on your new jersey yet, hey, old dog?’

  His mother shifts away slightly. That means he must just not start looking for trouble again. Tonight it’s peace and quiet. He draws deep on his cigarette. It’s more than just trouble he’s got in his body.

  ‘What does the old dog say about her missus, hey? Also lost her voice, huh? Bad fucken company on a Saturday night, or what am I saying?’

  Mol lets her knitting fall on to her lap. She looks at Lambert.

  ‘So?’ he asks. She says nothing. She picks up her knitting and carries on.

  He takes a step closer. She shifts away some more. He squats next to the bed and pats Gerty on the head. Gerty looks up at Mol, making a little crying noise.

  ‘What does your old cunt of a missus say tonight, hey? What does she say, the cuntface with no teeth, hey?’ He’s whispering very softly to Gerty and scratching her between the ears.

  Mol suddenly gets up. She walks across the mattress and out of the door. Gerty follows. He stays right there, hunched on his heels. He hears her go into the lounge. He hears Pop wake up and say: ‘What now? What’s it, Mol?’ His voice is thin. It’s all that slime in his throat.

  She stays quiet, and then she says: ‘Lambert.’ Just ‘Lambert’. That’s all. Her fucken arse too.

  He scratches his head with both hands and then he scratches his arse. His arse itches. Everything about him fucken itches. He gets up. He’s more than just ‘Lambert’, that’s for fucken sure. He walks out, into the passage and through the doorway to his den. There’s his bed. The thing’s legs are standing skew. The mattress lies at an angle on the bed. Its stuffing sticks out on the one side. Slept to death. He, Lambert, doesn’t even have a decent bed to sleep in. Fuck that. He grabs the mattress and throws it, with the Scope and pillows and blankets all still on it, against the open Tedelex. The empty Coke bottle on top of the Tedelex falls and smashes all over the floor. Fuck that too. He smacks the cabinet a shot with his flat hand. He can also make a fucken noise if he wants to! All night he’s been listening to other people’s noise. ‘Oh it’s a Saturday night and I ain’t got nobody’ over and fucken over in his ears. No, shit! He kicks an empty Coke crate with his bare foot. It flies into the scrap iron behind the door. A long piece of pipe comes loose, falling slowly across the room. It scrapes his painting on the wall before falling on to the floor. Silver paint comes off his mermaid’s tail. This Saturday night doesn’t want to work. This Saturday night is a fuck-up.

  He walks out through the den’s back door. He wants to see what those fuckheads next door are doing. He stands in the long grass and peeps over the prefab wall, into next door’s backyard. The moon’s sitting higher now. It shines light blue all around him. Wherever you look next door it’s just yellow and red party lights, hanging from a wire between the gutter and the loquat tree. They’re fucken braaiing again. Them and their fucken meat.

  It’s chops. No, it’s not chops, it’s T-bones. He counts eight of them. They cover the whole grill. The grill rests on a half-drum with four legs. There’s another grill as well, also a half-drum with legs. This one’s full of rolled-up boerewors. The wors sizzles and drips fat over the coals. Every now and again the flames flare up. Then someone has to douse them again.

  He can’t see who’s killing the flames. All he can see is a hairy paunch and a hand going up and down. He can’t see so well ’cause he has to look over the prefab wall, and then over next door’s fast-food stands. That’s what they are, fast-food sellers. All of them. They sell hot dogs and hamburgers from their stands. He’s peeping underneath the flap of a plastic canvas sail and the stands below. All he can see is a strip of yellow light, some braaivleis and people’s bellies. Every now and again a hand with a can of beer goes up, and then drops down again to a hanging position next to a body. He can see seven bodies: men’s bodies and women’s bodies, thin ones and fat ones. Two women are wearing bikinis, a pink one and a blue one. They’re not so bad, even though they don’t look as smooth and as tanned as the Tuxedo Tyres girls. These ones have lots of dimples on the backs of their thighs. Pink Bikini stands with her arm around a man in blue jeans. The jeans are tight and there’s a bulge in front. Blue Bikini stands with her arm around Speedo. It’s a black Speedo with an even bigger bulge. His bulge stands at an angle, pointing to one side. Speedo’s got a big pair of thighs and a body-builder’s stomach. Hairy Paunch’s doing the meat. Lambert can see grey hair on his stomach. He’s wearing a towel that keeps slipping down. Then there’s another paunch, this one a little smaller, in khaki shorts. And there’s a thin little thing with knobbly shins in a cotton dress full of little flowers. She’s sitting on a plastic chair. Here
comes another one, with big flowers on her dress. She comes and stands next to the fire.

  ‘Johnny, don’t burn those steaks now, you hear me, don’t burn them like you did last time.’

  ‘No ways,’ says Hairy Paunch, ‘these coals are just right now, just right.’ He takes a long sip from his beer. All Lambert can see is his elbow lifting up, but it doesn’t come down again. Big Flowers walks away.

  ‘Mom, go see if Ansie’s remembered the potato salad,’ Hairy Paunch says to Little Flowers.

  ‘Ai, Johnny, and I was just settling down nicely here,’ Little Flowers says, but she gets up anyway. She grips the arm of the plastic chair to push herself up.

  Nice and pissed too, he sees. He knows it’s the old lady from Fort Knox. She’s the one who said they should take him, Lambert, and put him into a reformatory, that time he stabbed his mother in the cheek with a knife. In a reformatory or a madhouse, she said. Fucken old cunt.

  It’s Treppie who came up with the name Fort Knox. He says it looks like they’re living on a heap of gold, like it’s America or something, the way they put up burglar bars and gates in front, and Spanish burglar-proofing over all the windows, and spikes everywhere. There’s a safe full of gold under the ground at the real Fort Knox. Fucken joke, that. As far as he can see, all they’ve got here is three fast-food stands and eight T-bones. And wallpaper.

  ‘This meat’s ready now,’ Johnny Hairy Paunch shouts at the women in the kitchen. ‘Bring the dishes. Where’s the pap and stuff?’

  Here comes Big Flowers now. She’s got two bellies. One above the middle, then a deep fold, then another under the middle. Her dress creases into the fold. She’s carrying a big black pot full of pap. On top of the pap she balances a bowl of tomato and onion sauce.

  ‘Kiepie,’ she says to Khaki Shorts, ‘go fetch the dishes for Johnny. They’re on the table in the kitchen. The shallow one for the meat and the deep one for the wors.’