Marlene van Niekerk - Triomf

She wanted to change the subject, so she said in the end everyone had to go, anyway — what was bothering him so much all of a sudden?

But by then Treppie was up and away already, running with that ball.

Ja, he said, pointing past her and Pop in the front seat, they must look at all those lights. ‘I say unto you, for every one of those lights, someone will either give up the ghost or give his first cry tonight.’ When Treppie starts with ‘I say unto you’, then you know he’s halfway up the pulpit already and you’re not going to get him down again so easy. ‘It’s one and the same thing. Breathe in, breathe out, eat, shit, eat, shit, poof, gone! No one asked for it.’

But Pop said, no, that wasn’t his point.

Well then, he’d better get to the point before the point got to him, Treppie said, and she said, yes, Pop should get to the point so he could get past it.

That’s what she thought, then. But it was a helluva long point, that.

No, Pop said, what he meant was, what did you do if you knew your time was running out. What should you do if you knew?

Now it was getting a bit too much for her. She switched on the radio ’cause she didn’t know what else to do, and the car suddenly filled up with a love song, something about ‘only a heartbeat away’. That turned out to be completely the wrong thing to do. Treppie stuck his arm past her and switched off the radio, shouting, ‘Shuddup! Shuddup with that fucken rubbish!’ right into her ear. Even Toby said ‘ee-ee’, he got such a fright. Then Treppie sat back heavily, his chest heaving. He tried to light a cigarette but he was striking the matches so hard they kept breaking. ‘Fuck!’ he said after each match broke.

It was Pop’s should that threw Treppie so badly. If there’s one word you must never say in front of Treppie, it’s ‘should’. It was like someone had poured turpentine on to his tail.

‘Should,’ he said. ‘The fuck with should! When you die, you die, period, over and out. You don’t owe anyone any shoulds ’cause you never ordered it. You never asked to be born, nor to live all the days of your life in this furnace pit.’

At first Pop said nothing. He just looked in front of him out of the window. Treppie blew smoke into Pop’s neck as he talked. It looked like Treppie was about to start shooting fire from his nostrils, like that dragon on the video he brought from the Chinese one year for Guy Fawkes.

Then Pop said, ‘Furnace pit’, so softly you almost couldn’t hear what he was saying.

So she asked, what was a furnace-pit.

‘Yes, ask!’ Treppie shouted. ‘Ask!’ It was a hole full of bricks, he said. A deep, burning hell-hole where you sat and baked bricks, all day, every day, and when you were not baking them they sat and looked at you, stacks and stacks of those rough, red things.

Pop turned his head a bit, like nothing at all was the matter, and he asked Treppie how it was that he came up with this kind of thing.

He came up with what he came up with, Treppie said, Pop didn’t have to worry about coming up with anything whatsoever; all he had to do was look in a dictionary. There it stood, in letters as large as life, for anyone to read: furnace pit. And he was sure Pop knew all the other names for that pit. Arse-end, deep-end, furnace-hole, hell-hole, long-drop, Treppie said, hauling out all the names for holes that he knew, and he said the Benades were sitting in the lot of them. That was the one thing. And the other thing was it wasn’t their fault.

Her chocolate was sticking to the top of her mouth by now. She’s never been able to chew when people fight. She felt quite paralysed. ’Cause if there’s one word that she can’t stand, then it’s fault. Old Pop always used to say everything was her fault, and then Old Mol would jump in front of her when she saw a punch coming her way. Or she, Mol, would jump behind Old Mol. Then she felt it was all her fault, twice over, ’cause Old Mol was always looking black and blue from taking the blows meant for her.

Treppie must have seen her say the word fault, even with her mouth full of Snickers.

Yes, fault, Mol, fault, he shouted, making his mouth droop and saying fault in the same way she does when she doesn’t have her tooth in her mouth and she says something. It was so bad she put her hands over her ears, and when she took her hands away again, Treppie was still saying it wasn’t their fault, because of something.

Because of what? she asked. Now she was curious, but she had to ask Treppie three times before he gave her an answer. By then he was drinking the Klipdrift straight from the bottle, ‘ghloob-ghloob-ghloob’, as though it was water on a hot day.

No wonder he’s now fast asleep at the back here with his mouth wide open. ‘Gaaarrrgh-gaaarrrgh’, he goes. She can smell it from where she’s sitting. Lambert says Treppie’s breath is enough to fire off a rocket. Lambert. How will he know what to do with that woman he doesn’t know from a bar of soap? Maybe she should wake them up now so they can go and look. But then again, maybe not. Pop needs his rest. Let him sleep. And maybe Lambert’s still awake. Maybe he’s waiting up for them. In that case, she’d rather sit here until sunrise.

Pop also asked Treppie, because of what? It wasn’t their fault they were in the furnace pit, because of what? Not that he knew, Pop said, what that had to do with knowing you were dying and what you should do in the circumstances. Can you believe it, there Pop went and said should again. She thought something must have come over Pop. Once was enough, and she could see Treppie wasn’t even finished with the first should, not by a long shot. And here Pop came with another one. And it wasn’t as if you could duck out of Treppie’s way.

‘Everything!’ he shouted into their faces. It had everything to do with it, ’cause if their mother and father hadn’t been so backward, and if they had been raised better, and Old Pop hadn’t shouted at him, Treppie, so terribly before he even knew what went for what, and if Old Pop hadn’t beaten him to a pulp when he did know what went for what, then everything would’ve been different.

Then what would have been different? Pop asked, and she thought to herself, now Pop was really asking for trouble, he should know he can’t square up with Treppie. But she was wrong, ’cause Pop just pushed on. Then what would have been different? he asked again.

What would’ve been different, Treppie said, was that he might’ve had a choice. He might’ve been able to choose how to die and what to do if he knew he was dying. And with that he sat back, boomps, against his seat and said it may be that Pop had begun to die only recently but he, Treppie, had been dying ever since his eighth year, and it was the kind of dying you do twice over — in body and in soul. The ruination of his soul, and the blood of his limbs, he said, was on Old Pop’s hands. May Old Pop hear him wherever he was and may Old Pop gnash his teeth in the outermost darkness for ever and ever.

At that point she wished she was a Catholic so she could’ve crossed herself against Treppie’s terrible Satan words, ’cause Treppie began swearing hellishly terrible words inbetween every other word he said, above and below and on each side, so much so that she and Pop were wiping his spit from their necks after a while.

All Pop said then was, honour thy father and thy mother, and she recited the rest, ’cause that was all that came into her head: ‘“That thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.”’

That was the last straw.

‘ Honour , for what should I honour him — all that’s left of me is a drop of blood, a wet spot with some skin around it struggling for breath. A lump of scar-tissue with a heart in the middle.’