Triomf Read online

  ‘Just leave me alone!’ Lambert says. He swings his legs back on to the bed and gathers up his pamphlets. Treppie mustn’t start about his mother now. What does he know, in any case?

  ‘That stuff you’re reading there. Pure rubbish. You’re still going to see all that talk explode in your face.’

  ‘Yes, but we’ve still got a plan! We’re going to bugger off from here!’ Lambert says.

  Treppie turns around slowly, away from the cabinet. He walks towards Lambert. Then he stands in front of him, hands at his sides, staring.

  ‘Stupid fucken fit-catcher,’ he says. ‘You really do believe all that shit, don’t you?’

  Lambert looks up quickly. More because of the way Treppie says it than because of what he says.

  ‘Huh,’ he says. ‘Huh,’ and he feels his jaw dropping.

  ‘It’s a lot of shit, that,’ Treppie says. ‘It’s just a lot of shit that I told you. Do you really think a Volksie with a rusted chassis, with no shocks to speak of, a clutch as thin as tin-foil, gears that keep popping out when you ride from here to Ponta do Sol … do you really think she’ll take the four of us, let alone the tons of crap in your head about women, more than two blocks out of Triomf? You really think that? You’re fucken mad, man!’

  ‘But you said, you said so yourself …’ Lambert wants to kick himself. Treppie’s got him by the balls again.

  ‘Yes,’ says Treppie. His eyes are shooting sparks now. ‘I know I thought that plan up. You want to know why? You really want to know why? It was to get you out of the way. To get you out from under our feet, out of the house so we could get some peace and quiet in this place. That’s why. So you could bladdy shuddup and dig a hole, a nice hard hole full of pipes and bricks from the kaffirs. So you’d be so tired at night that you’d just fall on to your arse on your mattress and stay there, so you wouldn’t bother anyone. So you’d stop giving us a hard time. So you could spend your days on rubbish heaps and scratch around like a bladdy mad thing. So I can get some rest for my soul. Rest, I say. Mol and Pop too. If we ever vote for a party, it will be for one that locks up your sort in a madhouse, a party that chains you to a hard little bed with iron wheels and then plugs up your mouth.’

  Treppie flicks his cigarette butt on to the floor and steps on it with a hard twist of his shoe. His shoulder twitches wildly, once.

  ‘And when they unstrap your hands, once a month, you’ll be allowed to colour in those pictures of peace doves, the ones Mol and Pop bring, tiptoeing into your room ’cause they’re scared you’ll murder them if you wake up.’

  ‘Treppie, that’s my mother and father you’re talking about. You just keep your mouth shut about them.’

  ‘Oh yes, right, your mother and father, naturally it’s your mother and father. It’s ’cause of them that we’re in our glory here with you. You think they’re better than me, hey? Well, let me tell you something, my boy. They also lie to you, just like me. They lie to you to give you a better opinion of yourself. They talk the biggest lot of fucken shit, the poor fuckers.’

  ‘Like what, Treppie? What do they lie about?’

  ‘You’d love to know, wouldn’t you? Okay, here goes.’

  He looks at Treppie. There’s a whole floor full of broken Coke bottles between them. He sees Treppie looking at the bottles. Treppie’s got a disgusted look on his face. More than disgusted. He looks like he’s got a rotten smell up his nose. Now he smells it too. A smell like piss. And the smell of his come, which he always wipes off on an old T-shirt. Iron and oil, he smells iron and oil. He feels like he’s too much for himself. He swallows on something hot that’s starting to rise in his throat. Spots in front of his eyes. He can hear what Treppie’s saying, but it’s zinging inside his ears.

  ‘That story about when we became a republic, about the corsages and all that stuff your mother talks about when she’s pissed, it’s all a lot of lies, that. The part about making the corsages is true, we did that, but that was the night you went and threw your first fit. Just when things were starting to get going here. We were still having a big party and then your eyes did a somersault for real and you rolled right over into the trays of flowers and you shat and pissed and vomited all at the same time, right on top of the whole business. And then you lay there and took one fit after another till your back was as bent as a bucket-handle. Then me and Pop grabbed hold of you and strapped your arms and legs tight with our belts and took you to the hospital. They looked us up and down there and stuck up their noses and said you’d drunk too much brandy; epileptics shouldn’t drink alcohol, didn’t we know that? But if you fitted again, they said, with or without brandy, we must take an ice-cream stick and shove it into your mouth so you don’t bite off your tongue.’

  Treppie lights another cigarette. He pulls hard and blows out clouds of smoke.

  ‘And from that day on you’ve spoilt every fucken party we’ve ever had here. You break every fucken thing in the house and you make shit as far as you go.

  ‘Ja,’ says Treppie. He kills the flame that’s been burning in his hand all this time. Blue sulphur-smoke hangs in the air. ‘And as far as Republic Day’s concerned – no one went to Pretoria that day, and no one made six hundred rand, and you didn’t charm anyone out of their paper money there by acting crazy with your donation list. ’Cause you weren’t even there. That’s what. Pop took those trays full of corsages, full of your vomit and your shit, and he buried them just like that, right here in the backyard. Ribbons and all. All the trouble, all the money – our money from the fridge business – into its glory, ’cause Baby Benade, the lamb of our loins, ’cause Lambertus the third – surprise, surprise! – turned out to be a genetic cul-de-sac. But that’s too difficult for you, so just think of a bulldozer in a sinkhole instead.’

  Treppie dusts off his hands, as if he’s got dirt or fluff on them. ‘Food for thought, hey?’ he says, and he winks at Lambert as he starts walking back into the house.

  ‘Hey,’ says Lambert. He has to clear his throat. His voice won’t come out so nicely. ‘Hey,’ he begins again, ‘what about my girl, for my birthday …’

  ‘We’ll have to see, old buddy, we’ll just have to wait and see,’ Treppie says, and then he winks one last time.

  In that moment, just as Treppie tries to walk here, right past his face, back into the house, Lambert takes one step forward, on to a piece of glass. But he doesn’t feel anything.

  He takes Treppie from behind, by the neck. Such a thin little neck. He gets a nice grip, on Treppie’s throat. Then he drags him inside, kicking and squirming through the kitchen, where Treppie kicks over the Primus, spilling its cold Jungle Oats all over the lino. He drags him all the way down the passage. As they go, the loose blocks on the floor jump up. He drags him past the bathroom, past Pop and his mother’s room, right into the lounge, where his mother’s standing on a beer crate, trying to get the curtain rings back on to the railing and the railing back in under the pelmet. Gerty’s with her. He hears Gerty bark a scared little bark. He sees his mother turn around. Her mouth is open. She swings the railing with her as she turns, she gets such a fright.

  ‘Hey! You two!’ she shouts. Treppie gets the railing full in the face. Mol swings again. She mustn’t go swinging railings now. He feels the railing slide off his shoulder. He throws Treppie against the wall.

  ‘Hic’ goes Treppie as he hits the wall, sliding down on to his backside.

  ‘You just stay there for a while,’ he says to Treppie. He takes one big step towards his mother and rips the railing out of her hands. Gerty jumps up against him. He kicks her, and she lets out a yelp as she flies through the air. Toby comes to look as well. He thinks it’s a game. He starts barking and gets two kicks. ‘Ow-whoo, ow-whoo!’ he cries.

  ‘You people think you can lie to me, hey?’ he says, bending the railing over his knee, curtain and all. It feels like a piece of tin. ‘People mustn’t lie to me!’ he says. He takes a jump and grabs hold of the pelmet. One end comes clean out of the wall. That’ll sho
w them.

  ‘Go get yourself ready, Ma, I want to see you in the back room as soon as I’m finished here.’

  He grabs Gerty’s green ribbing and the half-done yellow back part in one swipe, breaking the pins and pulling out the stitches on both sides. Fucken rubbish! Then he walks out the front door to the postbox on the lawn and kicks it with his bare foot so hard it smashes into the prefab wall.

  He feels no pain. He feels fucken nothing. He picks up the postbox and throws it on to the neighbours’ roof. As it hits the corrugated iron it goes ‘boom!’, and then ‘doof-doof-doof’ as it rolls down. It hits the gutter, tips over and falls on to the ground with a thud. He hears someone swearing next door. Let them fucken swear!

  Then he goes back into the house. Past Treppie, who’s still sitting against the wall in the passage. He leaves a trail of blood as far as he goes. He heads for the back room.

  He sees Pop giving way in front of him. Good for him. Pop always goes and hides in the bathroom behind the door. Let him. He wants to go and tell lies. His mother’s already in the back room. She knows her place. Now he’ll first have to throw out that stinking dog of hers, ’cause she always sits there and looks. He doesn’t like dogs looking at him when he’s busy. And his mother had better keep her mouth shut. Nowadays she screams like someone’s slitting her throat or something. Well, she’d better watch out or he’ll squash her fucken voicebox to a pulp. They mustn’t come here and treat him like he’s a fucken idiot.

  For a long time, Pop sat there with his fingers in his ears and his head against the cold middle hinge of the bathroom door. When he took his fingers out, Mol was quiet again. All he heard from the back room was sniffing. But now there were other noises too. People talking. Lambert talking to other people. Pop sat there for a long time, looking at himself in the piece of mirror in the bathroom cabinet. He looked blue and white, like stones. Then he went to the front to see who was talking, but by then they’d left already. It was the NPs. They’d dropped off their pamphlets and then got the hell out. And no wonder – the lounge looked like a hurricane had hit it. Lambert had a rag around his foot, with blood seeping through in a bright red stain. Treppie was holding a hand to a deep cut over his eye. And then Mol came out from the back, Gerty in her arms. Slowly and carefully she went and sat in her chair, Gerty still in her arms. Very slowly and carefully, like she was sore.

  Later, when Pop saw Treppie locking the front gate with the chain for the night, he went out to have a word with him.

  ‘Treppie, man, listen to me, you can’t carry on like this with old Lambert. We’d better make a plan and find him a girl. Really. Otherwise he’s going to kill the lot of us here in this house before long.’

  Then Pop picked up the dented postbox from where next door had thrown it back on to the grass, and he carried it through to the back, even though it was getting heavier and heavier in his hands. He put it down at the foot of Lambert’s bed.

  ‘Here’s your postbox, my boy. Tomorrow we fix it. First thing in the morning. I’ll help you, me and Treppie.’

  Pop didn’t say anything to Mol. She was already sleeping, lying on her side in her housecoat, on the far side of their worn-out double mattress. She lay there with Gerty in her arms, the light from the naked bulb burning brightly above her head.

  5

  SWEET IS THE DAY

  When Pop woke up and couldn’t pick up the smell of battery acid from Industria, he knew it was going to be a good day. And when he hooked his braces over his shoulders, in front of Mol’s three-piece dressing table – he was standing before the middle panel, the only one still there – he did it carefully, out of respect for the feeling he’d just had. Carefully, ’cause these days he feels to himself like a place he doesn’t know, a place full of strange noises coming at him through a thick mist. Carefully, he blew the dust from the yellow plastic roses. Dust motes flew around his head, but he didn’t move. He waited, bent over, for the dust to settle. You have to be careful on days like this.

  And when he got to the kitchen, Lambert was already there. ‘Pop, do you want a polony sandwich too?’ he asked.

  He said okay and then Lambert said he must come join them, they were sitting out in the yard.

  And when he came round the corner, there they all were, sitting with their bodies in the shade and their feet in the sun. On Coke crates, with their backs against the den. Treppie pulled something out of the den for him to sit on, and Lambert brought him some coffee and a polony sandwich. ’Strue’s God. Who would have believed it?

  Now they’re sitting peacefully there in the shade. Treppie’s trimming his nails and Mol’s feeding Gerty little bits of her sandwich. Flossie’s hubcaps are lined up in a row in front of Lambert. The other day he knocked the dents out, and now he’s using a fine little brush to paint the really bad spots with silver paint.

  ‘How’d you sleep, Pop?’ Lambert asks.

  This can’t be true.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I said, did Pop sleep all right?’

  Can you believe it? Someone’s asking him if he slept all right.

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ he says, ‘I slept nicely.’

  As Mol feeds Gerty, Pop sees her head jerk forwards, and then backwards again. No, jerk’s the wrong word. It wasn’t a jerk and it wasn’t a shake; not a nod, either. It was like a little tremor. But she doesn’t look up.

  ‘Nicely,’ Pop says, and his voice sounds like it’s blowing from far away, through thin clouds. ‘Nicely, thanks, my boy,’ he says again.

  Treppie gives a little cough. Then everyone’s quiet for a while.

  All you hear is Lambert’s brush. ‘Swish-swish’ it goes over the hubcaps; Treppie’s pocket-knife nail clipper goes ‘clip-clip’; and Gerty’s breath comes and goes heavily inbetween the bites of sandwich Mol’s feeding her.

  Around them, far and near, they hear the rush of cars, from Ontdekkers on one side to Victoria on the other, from Thornton’s uphill stretch, where the cars go into lower gear, to the last bit of Empire, where they always dice to the robots.

  ‘Look,’ says Mol, and everyone looks where she’s pointing. Someone’s let his homers out for the morning. A whole flock of them, flying first bright side up, then dark side up as they turn around. ‘Sweereereep’, they come flying overhead, and when they come past again, they’re even lower, ‘wheedy-wheedy-wheedy’.

  ‘When they’re full of sights like this, it means the rains are coming,’ says Treppie, clicking his knife closed.

  ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Duty calls.’

  ‘I’ll give you a lift,’ says Pop, pushing himself up on Lambert’s shoulder.

  ‘I’m staying so I can finish this,’ says Lambert.

  ‘No, fine,’ Pop says. ‘Then I’ll see you all later.’

  He taps Mol on the shoulder as he passes. She clears her throat. ‘Bread and milk,’ she says.

  Pop pulls the car out from under the carport. He takes Treppie to the Chinese in Commissioner Street, just as he often does, but today he feels different.

  As he drives home across the bridge, back over the railway tracks, he gets a sudden feeling that something’s about to happen.

  Once across the bridge, he switches lanes and drives towards Braamfontein. The taxis hoot, but he keeps to his course. He parks next to a meter in Jorissen Street.

  He doesn’t know what he’s looking for. He’s not looking for anything. He just wants to feel the rush of people around his shoulders; he wants to look at their faces.

  He puts twenty cents in the meter. Then he takes one, two, three steps along the pavement. And then he stops, just looking.

  People open up in front of him and then close up again behind him as he stands there on the pavement. He feels them brushing against him as they pass. So many strange, busy people.

  Someone rattles a tin in his face. Pop throws twenty cents into the tin. He gets a sticker from the Association for the Blind on the front of his shirt.

  People are selling vegetables and things o
n the pavement. Pop sees mangos, and he suddenly craves one. His mouth starts watering. Quickly he walks away. Then he turns around and walks back. He pays fifty cents for a mango and lifts it to his nose. The smell comes back to him from very far away. Fresh sheets, that’s what the smell of a mango’s peel always made him remember. Fresh sheets hanging up in the sun on the farm, before ironing.

  He moves towards the edge of the pavement. Then he leans slightly forward, over the kerb, biting into the mango. He uses his teeth to pull back the skin, so he can get to the flesh.

  Why don’t they ever buy mangos at the end of the month?

  He works out the lie of the mango’s flesh, strangely crosswise on the flat side of the core. The fibres catch in his teeth and people bump into him as he stands there, eating. Piece by piece he spits the peel out on to the street in front of him, until he can put one end of the core right into his mouth and suck the soft mango sap out of the fibres.

  Now all he’s got left in his hand is the core. He looks for a place to chuck it. He sees a blue wire-bin on a pole. He smiles. That was really delicious. He throws away the core.

  He wipes his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt and rubs his hands over the back of his pants. Then he hooks his thumbs into his braces, pulling them nicely over his shoulders again. He’s got that feeling again, the one he had this morning in front of the mirror. It’s sitting nice and deep now. He stands for a while with his thumbs hooked into his braces. He knows the feeling. It’s as if two warm, open hands are holding him in front, against his chest, and from behind, between his shoulders. Under his skin and inside his flesh. Right up against his bones. He stands like that for a long time, feeling how it feels and smiling to himself. Until someone says to him, here at his feet: ‘Please, boss. Asseblief, baas!’

  Pop sees a black man with only one leg. The useless trouser leg is folded above the knee and turned back almost all the way to his bum.