Triomf Read online

  Treppie doesn’t like visitors.

  His mother even takes off her overall for them. Her housecoat. She’s got a blue one and a pink one, and it doesn’t matter which one it is, when the NPs come, she takes it off and hangs it up on the nail behind the kitchen door. And then she fidgets with her bun and all to make sure she still looks decent. He wishes the NPs would move in here with them, so his mother would never have to wear the overall again. She says she keeps it on so she won’t mess up her clothes. That’s what she said when he was little and she still says it now. ‘Mess up,’ she says, pulling a face. But he saw, long ago, when Pop still wanted to, how she used to take the housecoat off for him.

  The only other time she takes it off is when she and Treppie go sit in the back room to talk about family matters. What family matters? he always wants to know, but Treppie just winks that devil’s wink of his. ‘Family secrets,’ he says. And then he smacks her on the bum as they go in through the door.

  Not that there’s ever much discussion behind that door. But then family secrets aren’t things you go around announcing from the rooftops. Like the fact that his mother doesn’t wear panties. It’s that kind of secret. Treppie told him that. He says it comes from when they were children and there wasn’t enough money for women’s panties. They’ve got dresses after all, and no one needs to know.

  Lambert doesn’t mind that either. It’s that housecoat of hers that gets him down. It smells sour, like the dishrags in the kitchen.

  Lambert gets up. He pulls his shorts up over his bum and then switches on the fan standing on top of the sideboard. It makes a soft zooming sound, but it doesn’t budge. He looks back into the room first, and then he smacks the fan behind its head. The blade and the head immediately start turning, back and forth. Pop half wakes up, almost falling off his crate.

  ‘Lambert,’ he mumbles. Lambert shifts the fan so the Witness with the pink dress gets the most wind. Her hair begins to fly about and her dress blows against her body. She takes over the reading. Her voice is a little higher now and her shoulders lift as she breathes between sentences. She’s drawing on her spirit.

  Lambert touches the front of his pants. Christ, if this dick of his would only stop playing up like this. He bends over double and walks back past the Witness. Then he sits down and tries to concentrate on what she’s reading, about the Son of Man in the midst of the seven candlesticks, clothed in a garment down to the foot, with a golden girdle around the chest. Funny place to wear a belt. Must be something like the president’s oranje-blanje-blou sash that he wears across his chest. He wonders how they’re going to get all the new flag’s colours on to the president’s sash. They’ll just have to make it broader, or the stripes thinner. Treppie will say it’s all in the mind. That’s just about the only thing he says nowadays, no matter what you talk about.

  The fan’s another thing Treppie got from the Chinese. Its head was jammed with rust and the wires were burnt into each other. But he fixed it. Now all it needs is a little smack and then it works. He, Lambert, knows what he’s talking about when it comes to machines and gadgets and stuff. He knows how to make them work. A thing that won’t work gets his goat. A thing that won’t work is almost as bad as a thing that gets lost, something you can’t find no matter how hard you look.

  It does him the hell in. He fixes things. Or he searches till he finds them, even if he has to turn the whole house upside down or break things. Pop says it’s the cross he has to bear in life, the fact that broken things get on his tits: fans, tape recorders, video machines, the lot. That’s why he makes sure the lawn-mower is always tuned, and the grass is kept short, and that Molletjie’s timing is set and her oil gets changed. That other Volla standing on blocks here in the back is his fucken end, but one day he’s still going to kick it until it’s fixed, kick it right into its glory. And he struggles like hell with the Fuchs and the Tedelex. The Kneff is completely seized up, but he’ll still get the whole lot of them fixed and working again. Before his birthday. Before the election. And even if the election gets postponed for ten years, like some people say, he won’t let it stop him. ’Cause his birthday can’t be postponed.

  The same goes for his birthday present.

  Pop and Treppie will park around the corner and then bring her in quietly around the back so his mother won’t see. His mother’s the one who says he wasn’t born to mess with women, he must ‘make peace with his lot in life’. Who the hell does she think she is? Raquel Welch or something? He’ll show her. He’ll fucken ‘make peace’ with nothing. And he’ll mess around as much as he likes.

  Then they’ll knock softly on the back door of his den and say: ‘Lambert, she’s here.’ And when he opens the door, she’ll be standing right there. With blonde curls all the way down to her shoulders and a pink petticoat and make-up and high-heels and the works. It will be the end of April, so maybe she’ll be wearing a coat over her shoulders. Then he’ll stand aside. And as she walks past, he’ll say, ‘Allow me.’ He’ll take off her coat and hang it up behind the door. His red light will be on. And he’ll say: ‘Take a seat. Would you like something to drink?’

  Just like that. He’ll take the ice out of the Tedelex’s ice-box, and the nice cold Coke out of the inside door of the Fuchs, and he’ll open and close the doors slowly so she can see. Yes, see. ’Cause even their inside lights will be working. She’ll see how those fridges are stacked full of Castles and polonies. And the Spar’s fancy dips, fish dip and cheese dip, and maybe even a box of wine. Enough for a week. He’ll have his Simba boerewors chips and his Willards cheese-and-onion crinkle cut ready. And lemons for the Coke. Right there on his work bench. And peanuts, too!

  Later, when things are going dandy, he’ll switch on the Kneff for her, with nothing in it but water and washing powder, just for the hell of it. And then he’ll tell her about Hitler’s dirty Jews, and they’ll stand on a beer crate and look down at the foam it makes, that Industrial Kneff from the war. And they’ll put their hands on the Kneff and feel how nicely she runs, ‘wish-wash-wish-wash’, non-stop, without a hitch.

  Lambert stares at the Witness in the pink dress. She’s also got curly hair. But her curls are brown, not blonde. Now if her hair was blonde, she’d be dead right. All she needs is a little more make-up. He feels himself getting hot and cold, but he holds on. He tries to look at something else. He looks down. A mouse runs across the floor.

  Mouse, his mother points. Her mouth opens wide, but she doesn’t make a sound.

  Just the Witness’s mouth makes sounds. ‘White like wool’, ‘as a flame of fire’, ‘unto fine brass’, ‘as the sound of many waters’, ‘the Son of Man’.

  Elvis’s lips move as Pink Dress reads, but you can’t hear him. His eyes are on the mouth of the Witness who’s reading. He rubs his hands softly over his legs.

  Suddenly Lambert clicks. These two Witnesses are fucking each other. That’s it. When they finish reading here, they go fuck their heads off. That’s what they do. Fuck. She doesn’t even take off her clothes. She just pulls up that pink dress of hers, with the petticoat and everything still on. Him too, he doesn’t take anything off, he just unzips and pulls out his dong. Sticks it in. Nice and deep until she screams like a pig. That’s the way they scream. On the videos as well. His mother too, but she screams too hard, and then he has to close her mouth with his hand.

  Just look how Toby’s hair is standing up. Toby’s lips pull away from his teeth. When people get horny, Toby’s hair stands on end. Come to think of it, Toby’s hair stands up even more when those two from the NP are here. The chappy with the blazer and the girl with her straps. From the Rand Afrikaans University, just up the road. She says she’s studying ‘law’, and he’s just finished studying ‘law’. What ‘law’, what ‘studying’? They just fuck all the time, that’s what. A person doesn’t have to study ‘law’ to know what’s what about fucking.

  Gerty’s coughing, too. She’s coughing ’cause the Jehovahs are getting hot for sex. It makes Gerty feel lik
e she’s suffocating. Him too. It fucken makes him feel like he wants to pop. He’s not stupid, and the dogs are also not stupid. They know when people are horny and they know when they’re kaffirs. Gerty and Toby get just as worked up when they’re around kaffirs, like that old woman with her cart: ‘Potatoes, potatoes, missus, potatoes and pumpkin’, up and down in the street here in front. Treppie says that old woman used to live here a long time ago, and now she’s just checking to see if they’re still looking after her place nicely.

  Treppie can talk so much shit. But he always stops Toby and Gerty when they try to bite the kaffirs. No matter how full of shit they get.

  Like that Nelson-kaffir with his brooms and dusters. Green brooms and pink dusters. He pumps them up and down in the air like he’s cleaning walls that only he can see are dirty. ‘Brooms, madam, brooms! Sweep your yard and dust your walls and prick up your ears when Nelson calls.’

  Then Treppie says to his mother she’d better buy a broom, ’cause this is the New South Africa. But they never buy. They just go out and look when that kaffir starts shouting and whistling in the street. Then everyone comes out to look and all the dogs start barking and there’s just brooms all over the place.

  Pains shoot through his tail-end. He shifts on his crate. The grid cuts into his backside. He clears his throat. The air’s thick. The fan blows the thick air around the room. Suddenly a bee flies in through the window. Must have lost its way from that nest under the house. The fan’s air confuses the bee. When it gets caught inside the stream, it suddenly starts flying all over the show. But the Witnesses don’t even notice. They’re getting more and more worked up. The pink petticoat shows dark spots under the Witness’s arms. She wipes her upper lip with her hand. Elvis passes her his hanky. He holds her hand for a while. She’s getting hot. Too hot for any fucken fan or hanky. She holds her right hand up in the air with the hanky in it.

  ‘“And he had in his right hand seven stars”,’ she reads.

  Her eyelids flicker. She looks like someone who should be bathed in red light. For seeing things, for wanting to fuck, for feeling pressed, for wanting to make or break, wanting out, anywhere.

  When Lambert starts painting, he puts his red bulb in. Not straight away, but after he’s made a start, when he gets into it with his spray-cans. Into the never-ending painting. Then the red bulb has to go in. And when he digs his pit under the den to store petrol, he keeps the red light on, day and night, all the time, as that heap of kaffir rubbish gets higher and higher: bricks, bottles, window frames, drainpipes. The stuff even shines in the red light.

  He feels the pain behind his eyeballs. It’s coming. He knows it’s coming. He tries to stop it. He focuses on the floor behind Treppie. On the line of ants. Some of them march this way, others that way. But they stay in one line, except the ones who smell rain.

  The Witness is reading about a sharp two-edged sword that comes out of His mouth. About His countenance that was as the sun shineth in His strength.

  Poor Son of Man.

  Sounds more like a fuck-up to him.

  Toby begins to growl softly. He stands up between Pop’s feet. His eyebrows twitch as he checks what’s happening. Lambert feels the sweat in the palms of his hands. His mother just keeps looking at him. The scar where he stabbed her with a knife when she threw his spanner in the grass has gone white. She’s got that funny look on her face, like she thinks he’s a fucken devil from hell. He’s not holding it together any more. He begins to shudder, down there in his tail-end where it always starts.

  ‘Fuck!’ says Treppie. He stands up quickly and walks straight out the front door. Treppie also knows when it’s coming. First Toby and then Treppie. Treppie walks to the carport and rips open Molletjie’s door. Then he starts her up and revs her until she screams like a pig. Lambert sees all this as the foam in his mouth goes hot and cold. He tries to hold it back. He feels his back arching into a hollow, and then he slides slowly off his seat. There’s a burn-out in his head.

  It’s the beginning of October on the calendar. In less than six months he’ll be forty, at the end of April. On the calendar. And then it’s the election, the very next day. On the calendar. ‘A test for Triomf,’ as the girly from RAU says. When the sun’s going to shine on everyone, like time, like a flame of fire, like the sound of many waters. As he sinks to the floor, he sees Treppie reversing Molletjie into the gate. The postbox falls down. He hears it roll over once, twice, into the street. But he can’t see too well, the fan’s blowing the ends of the curtain up and down in front of his eyes. It looks like the curtains are growing out of the Witnesses’ backs, and the pelmet out of the curtains, the ceiling out of the pelmet, and the spot on the ceiling where the overflow leaks. The whole lounge looks like things running into each other, like each other’s insides, the insides of the Witnesses, the china cat with a rose for a head, the Chinese’s fan, the wall with Toby and Gerty’s rub-marks at knee-height, the sideboard, the floor-blocks that keep lifting up, the front door with the hole that he kicked in last week, the lawn cut to the quick, the little carport roof, the gate, the gate-pole with the postbox lying on its side in the road. Pop and his mother slowly rising from their seats. Treppie standing outside and looking at Molletjie’s dented backside. Everything a slow mashing of insides. The insides of the Witnesses running out of their spines and rising up like the ashes of paper above a fire. The insides of Triomf. Pink insides. His eyeballs are burning inside.

  ‘Happy birthday, honey,’ he hears her voice, on a megaphone, and it echoes away. ‘Happy birthday, honey, honey, honey.’

  The floor’s hard under his head. He sees the Witness from underneath. Her shoulders are high. Her mouth’s the wrong way around. Her lips open and shut as she reads: ‘“the first and the last he that liveth”.’ Like a horse drinking water. She stretches her one hand out over him, as though she wants to pull something up from out of him: his insides, his brain. She hangs from wings in the warm air. She flies without moving, like a vampire. But he’s gone, disconnected. She speeds away into space, floundering among stars, a little Satan-bitch in Star Wars. The darkness rips open, white noise rushes into his ears, seven stars in his hand.

  3

  KNITTING

  Mol sits on her chair in the lounge. The house is quiet – Pop and Treppie have gone to town and Lambert’s sleeping. He sleeps like this when he’s had a fit, for days on end. She’s doing the stitches for the back of Gerty’s new jersey. That’s the easiest part. She always has to reduce the stitches on the tummy, so it’ll fit tight, even when it stretches. Otherwise it drags on the floor. Gerty gets a new jersey every winter. She’s hard on jerseys, but that’s not her fault. It’s Toby. He gets jealous and then he chews up her jersey. By the end of winter it’s chewed to pieces. Then it hangs in tatters.

  The truth is she knits so she can think. This is the earliest she’s ever begun knitting Gerty’s jersey, but it doesn’t matter. She needs to think.

  The most difficult thing about thinking is where to start.

  When she knits she can start over and over again – too many times to count. Not while she’s doing stitches, though; then she has to concentrate. But once the stitches are done and she gets going, she starts thinking so much that she can’t keep up with herself any more. Then she knits like someone possessed, trying to catch up with her thoughts all the time. She goes so fast the stitches fall in bunches, and before she realises it she sees she’s gone and made a couple of bad ladders.

  Then she stops for a while to fix up the mess. But that’s also okay, ’cause a person can’t think so fast all the time without stopping.

  Now she must do the ribbing. It’s green. From last year’s left-over wool. Then the jersey was green and the ribbing pink – from the year before’s jersey, when the jersey was pink and the ribbing blue. She always uses the same cheap balls of wool, which she buys at the wool shop in Main Road, Fordsburg. The coolie-women at the shop know her quite well by now. They keep all their left-overs for her, which is
quite nice of them, seeing that they don’t have to. But they like Gerty. She always takes Gerty along when she goes to buy wool there. Pop says she must watch it, just now Gerty pees on the wool, but Gerty never pees in public. It’s only Toby who does that. He’s a male dog, and males are the ones who do that kind of thing.

  This winter, Gerty’s going to get a yellow jersey with green ribbing. Just now, when she took out the wool, just before Pop and them left, Treppie said she must watch out, if she dressed Gerty in ANC colours the Zulus would beat that dog of hers silly the moment they got their hands on her. Then they’d want to know who knitted the jersey, and they’d stuff her up half-dead too, ’cause she was the only one in the house who knew how to knit. As if they don’t already stuff each other enough. Knitting or no knitting, they’re stuffing the shit out of each other around here nowadays.

  It starts when the Jehovahs come to visit, but at least then she can prepare herself. On Saturday nights she puts a washing peg into her housecoat pocket so she won’t forget. ’Cause Lambert always starts his nonsense before they even finish the reading. You’d think he’d learn, but no. It’s that one with the pink dress. She’s always asking for trouble. And Lambert doesn’t let people get away with that.

  The trouble also comes every few weeks or so when the NPs land up here with their pamphlets and all their high-falutin’ new words. It starts even before they come, on Tuesday night. Wednesdays – that’s their day.

  On Fridays and Saturdays, most of the trouble is with next door. Next door on the left, or next door on the right. Or with the people behind. Lambert keeps bugging the people next door, on and on in bladdy circles, until the shit starts flying and then they all want to start knocking him around again. Then he goes and phones the police from across the road but across the road wants to do him in too ’cause he phones there so much. And then the police come and stop all the fighting, and if Lambert still has any stuffing left in him after that, he comes and stuffs her.