Marlene van Niekerk - Triomf

Pop prods him gently. He must come outside now. Pop walks in front, straight down the passage and out the front door. He points to the postbox. It’s up, but Lambert must go look inside to see exactly how he did it. Lambert looks in through the little door. Fucken sharp!

Pop’s made the mother of all plans. He drilled a little hole through the bottom of the postbox and then he stuck some fridge tubing into the hole, twisting it on the inside so it wouldn’t slip out again. Then he stuck the other end of the tubing down the hollow gate-pole, till it almost reached the bottom.

‘Now it’s foolproof,’ says Pop, standing next to him.

‘Fucken sharp!’ he says again. But it’s not the engineering he’s praising, it’s the decoration. Light blue. Ja, just the thing. With its number painted pitch black in front: 127. ‘Not bad, hey?’

‘Ja, I saw there were some dirty old paint tins next door in the yard, from when they painted the roof. So I asked if I could have them. There was more than enough for a postbox.’

Now only does he notice Pop’s got blue paint-spots all over his face. He looks like a bird’s egg with a thin shell full of spots, standing there with a big smile on his face.

‘Thanks, Pop, man! You’re a champ.’

‘Postbox for peace!’ It’s his mother. She’s also come out on to the little stoep, standing there with her hands on her stomach, watching them. Here she comes now, walking over the lawn. When she gets to the gate, she looks up the street.

‘Treppie,’ she says.

Right at the top of their block, where Martha Street crosses Thornton, they see Treppie walking towards them. Apart from his black working bag, he’s also carrying a big black rubbish bag full of stuff.

Must be the lampshades. He makes a tick next to lampshades on the list in his head.

Today he’s flying through his list like the wind. He even saw to the moles. Last night he borrowed next door’s hosepipe and then, first thing this morning, he connected the pipe to Flossie’s exhaust and connected their own hosepipe to Molletjie, filling up those holes one by one with exhaust fumes. Now there’s no danger that he and his girl will be eating breakfast here in the yard tomorrow morning and she suddenly spills her coffee ’cause a mole’s pushing up a hill under her nose. Moles are ugly things with whiskers and two teeth in front. He’s sure you don’t get moles in Hillbrow. Cockroaches, yes, and termites. But he reckons those have also been seen to, with all the fumes on that side.

And talking about breakfast, the breakfast cake is also ready. It’s a small Swiss roll, just enough for two people, in a closed white box in the fridge, together with all the other snacks for tonight. His stomach churns.

His mother was fine about everything. When they arrived back here this morning with all those chips and dips and things, she helped him pack everything into the back of the fridge. Then she said he must wait, she had a surprise for him — she didn’t think he should display all those fancy eats in shop-packets and plastic bowls. So last night she asked Pop to get the key for the sideboard from Treppie, and she unpacked all the stuff that was inside there. Those things, she says, are all she’s still got left from her mother, Old Mol — two thick wine glasses with patterns, two round-bellied brandy glasses, and lots of plates and bowls in old cream china, all of them with a red stag in the middle, jumping among pine trees across mountains white with snow.

And now everything’s standing there neatly on his work bench, which he tidied up so nicely. His whole room’s been swept clean and dusted down, with planks covering his petrol pit. They washed and ironed two of Treppie’s window sheets and pulled them neatly over the bed. As Treppie said, a man couldn’t ask for more. And his mother found two cushions and covered them with bright pieces of cloth, ’cause he’d burnt all the slips in that fire to kill the earwigs.

No, he must say, his mother co-operated very nicely. She even washed the kitchen floor twice. After she finished cleaning it the first time, the silly old cow went and threw a whole bottle of drain acid down the kitchen sink, just like that. It bubbled and bubbled and then it exploded, ‘kaboof’, shooting up from the bottom of the sink right across the lino floor, all the way to the other side of the room. Sis! Dirty brown goo.

But his mother just went down on her hands and knees and cleaned the whole floor all over again.

He had to use plastic tape to close up the pipe under the sink, ’cause that acid burnt a couple of holes right through the pipe. That drain stuff is almost as bad as fridge burn-out oil.

That was all this morning. He’s just glad the smell has gone. It was a whopper of a pong. And he’s also glad Treppie wasn’t there when it happened, ’cause then of course he would’ve had lots to say.

Here he is now, at the front gate. He looks pissed.

‘The burghers of Triomf!’ he says. ‘Why you all standing here like you’re going to church? It looks like you want to get baptised or something.’

His mother points. The postbox.

‘Light blue.’

‘Yes, I see, it’s breaking out like pork measles, the national peace epidemic, vote blue, vote pig, the Benades are going aboard the peace brig! Coor-doo, coor-doo!’ sings Treppie, flapping his arms like a dove.

‘Now the postbox is fixed for ever and ever.’ Pop winks. He can see Pop’s telling him he must just stay cool. He’ll handle Treppie.

‘Sure thing,’ says Treppie, ‘hope springs eternal. Go fetch the ladder so we can start. I’ve got lampshades for Africa here, and you can choose between a yellow or a blue toilet seat.’

‘Blue,’ says his mother. He agrees. Blue’s better. Blue or pink, but not yellow. Yellow’s too close to shit.

Treppie says he’ll hang the yellow one behind the bathroom door as a spare. That’s cool, he wants to say. If he, Lambert, spent as much time on the toilet seat as Treppie, then he’d also want a spare. But he doesn’t say it. He holds back. He doesn’t want to rub Treppie up the wrong way. Treppie’s on his ear already.

And he’s full of tricks, too. No, they can’t touch his bag. He wants to unpack the stuff himself, inside, not here. They must come into the lounge. His mother closes the door behind them.

Lambert feels Pop pulling him by the sleeve. He must sit down on his crate so Treppie can start. Treppie’s wired. He acts like that rubbish bag’s a king-size lucky packet. He must just be cool tonight. The closer they get to the election, the more crazy Treppie gets. Like the other day, when they heard someone say the voting would now be over three days — the first day for special votes, and the next two for ordinary votes — Treppie started spouting rubbish again. Seeing that he, Lambert, was in the special class at school, Treppie said, he should by rights bring out a special vote on the 26th, which was also a special day for him — his birthday. But he needn’t be afraid, Treppie said, he’d go with him, they didn’t allow special cases to make their crosses without the guidance of an adult. He was just about to give Treppie another smack when Pop explained a special vote was something people made in ‘exceptional circumstances’, like drought or a plague, but then Treppie said, in that case the whole of South Africa should go vote with Lambert, so he wouldn’t feel lonely. Then they could all make one helluva big cross with white stones on RAU’s rugby field, right inside those new walls. Then maybe a few UFOs would come land there. Treppie says UFO stands for United Foreign Observers. Typical Treppie rubbish.

Here he comes now with the first shade. Just a yellow square, really. What kind of a shade is that? But now Treppie’s unfolding it like a fan. It’s a great big sun with a wide, red mouth that smiles.