Marlene van Niekerk - Triomf

But what about the hole in the front door? he asked.

Treppie said that was easy, all they needed was to take a saw and widen that hole a bit. Then, abracadabra, he could say it was Toby’s dog-door, so that Toby could go in and out during the night and then she’d think they were ‘thoroughbred dog-lovers’, and that their dog, despite his inferior origins, still had very good manners. It was manners that counted with dogs, Treppie said, not pedigree.

He began to think Treppie was making fun of him again, but his face was completely serious.

And what about stuff to eat and drink? He couldn’t very well let his girl sit there dry-mouthed the whole night.

Treppie started to say that it shouldn’t be her dry mouth he worried about, but then Pop waved his finger at Treppie and luckily he shut up.

No, Pop said, if Lambert made a nice list, he and Mol would go to Shoprite. But he said they must go to the Spar in Melville instead. The Shoprite in Triomf didn’t stock those nice dips he wanted for his girl.

Treppie said he shouldn’t overdo things, that girl they were getting for him was a saucy little dip herself. She was the one who was coming to get dipped. Lambert should remember that he had to do the dipping, and if he wanted to get his chip properly dipped, then he shouldn’t be too stuffed with all kinds of snacks. But Treppie saw he was going too far again and he quickly tried to cover it up with all kinds of talk about dips and chips and chips and dips. He listed them, all the kinds of chips you get, from salt and vinegar to boerewors and barbecue, and all the dips he could think of, from garlic to angel-fish to avocado pear. All he was really trying to say, he said, was that Lambert should get on with it and make up his mind.

After that, they could all breathe more easily. Pop said Treppie might be an expert in dips and chips, but he’d better behave himself, or he’d give him another dose.

‘If we only had love,’ Treppie sang.

They carried on like this until very late last night. His mother mowed the lawn, with him supervising to make sure she kept in straight lines and cut evenly. Pop hammered the pelmet in the lounge straight and Treppie helped him put it up again. They even got the curtain hanging after a fashion. Treppie sawed the hole in the front door evenly, and then they swopped his mattress around with Pop and his mother’s inner-spring mattress. He managed to get that buggered old bed of his back on to its legs again but the bed springs were sticking out all over the place, so he just snipped them off with wire-cutters. He didn’t have time to mess around any more with that kind of thing. When they all went to bed last night, he wrote out his shopping list for Pop and his mother, and he made a list for himself, a short one from the long one, which was now longer than any list he’d ever made in his life before. It was so long it made him cross-eyed.

When he eventually got to bed, the sparrows were already singing.

It was the end of that long day. It was actually today already, the 25th, and he swears he slept only about four hours before he woke up again. And then it was still today.

And now, as he sits here, it’s the night of today, but it already feels like tomorrow.

Except that tomorrow only begins after twelve tonight, and it feels like all the watch-hands and the church clocks are depending on him. It’s like he has to extend himself to the utmost to make tomorrow come, his birthday. He has to make his own birthday happen. Then he’ll be forty. That’s if he can get it all together. But it’s actually a misnomer, as Treppie says, ’cause after twelve he’s already past his fortieth year. Then he’s into his forty-first year. That’s ’cause when you have a birthday, you don’t count what it is now, you count what’s already been, and then you’re actually on the way to the future again. But you don’t say it out loud, and you don’t add it on when it’s your birthday, which is actually a mistake, but you pretend for the sake of the party spirit. In the heat of things you just go ahead and say that, for the time being, you’re so many years old, but actually you’re always so many years old and a bit more. Forty point nought nought one into the next year. And if your watch is good enough, like an Olympic sprinter, you can even try keeping up with the facts of your lifetime, but it would be so fucken boring, keeping up like that. Tick-tick-tick-tick all day long, and between the ticks even more ticks, going even faster, and still more ticks and faster ones between those, until after a while time just zings by without even stopping for the ticks any more. Head first into your glory like a shooting star. Whoosh! Make way!

Lambert feels dizzy from thinking about time. He sits wide-eyed and stock-still, watching the things in his den. All the things stand there so quietly, you wouldn’t say time was zinging to hell and back in their insides, in their guts and in their seams.

‘Click’ goes the Tedelex as it switches itself on.

‘Clack’ goes the Fuchs as it switches itself off.

Suddenly a terrible fear grips his body. It pushes up from his tail-end like a wall of water. He wants to hold on to the bed but all he gets is a fistful of sheet in each hand. There’s a flashing behind his eyeballs. His head feels like a TV that’s busy fucking out. Lines and snow. Crash! Bang! Christ!

No, it’s not a fit, or anyway it’s not him that’s fitting. It’s a general seizure. He’s sitting wide awake right inside it and there’s no black-out to take him away, no blowing of fuses so he won’t know anything about anything. Everything is quiet and clear. The quiet convulsions of all the things in time. On and on it goes, forever. He feels like he’s shrinking down to the size of a pin-point and, at the same time, swelling beyond the walls of his den, shot through and blasted by time zinging through him.

‘And now? Why you sitting here like this with big eyes like you’ve just seen a ghost?’ someone suddenly says here next to him.

It’s Pop. He didn’t hear him come in.

How can he explain all this to Pop now? If he does, Pop will go tell the others and then they’ll all start saying something’s wrong with him again. He rubs his eyes.

‘Come see if you like what I did with the postbox.’

Lambert feels Pop’s hand on his shoulder. Pop’s voice is soft. He’s not so bad, old Pop. He sees Pop looking at his chair, his and Mol’s chairs that he dragged in here today. Pop didn’t say a word, but he can see the old man doesn’t really like it. He looks where Pop’s looking. Yes, he has to admit the chairs do look a bit funny here, as if they’ve been shrunk or something. The light falls on them in a different kind of way. You can see the hollows in the cushions made by Pop and Mol’s bodies. Those chairs have been sat to death, but they’re better than nothing. After all, he can’t very well let his girl sit on a crate. Where would she put her drink down? He looks at the chairs’ arm-rests. They’re full of coffee rings and black marks, from cigarettes. Tonight he’ll put his red light on and then she won’t notice a thing.

Pop sighs a deep sigh, here next to him.

‘Just for tonight, Pop, then I’ll take them back to the lounge.’

Pop shrugs. It’s okay.

He points to Treppie’s clock — radio next to the bed. Five past five, it says. Pop checks his watch to see if his time is right. Why’s Pop so worried about time all of a sudden? They worked everything out nicely, after all. When Treppie comes home, it’s just the finishing touches, then Pop and Treppie will go fetch the girl and drop her off here, and then, he told them, they must go out for a long drive with his mother. He doesn’t want to feel like he’s being spied on. He wants to be alone with his girl. That’s the least a person can expect of his own family.