Marlene van Niekerk - Triomf

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.

When he starts off like this, she always prays he’ll stuff himself up completely before he gets to her, otherwise she gets what’s left of him.

And God knows, the last bit of stuffing is always the bitterest.

What’s more, the shit flies ’cause his thing is so hard these days, ’cause he’s almost forty and he still hasn’t got a woman. Never had one either. But what’s she supposed to do about it? He is what he is. And he’s no good for marriage, ’cause of the fits and everything. There’s a reason for it, of course. That’s something they all know. Except him. God help them the day he finds out.

She and Pop just try to stay on his good side. They do what they can. She does even more than she can. She feels she owes it to him.

Treppie’s the one who looks for shit with Lambert all the time. Treppie’s a devil. He digs up shit and then, when he finds it, he sees how much more he can dig up. Treppie says he doesn’t want people here. She and Pop feel the same. Not the Jehovahs, not the NPs, not the police. Nobody. It’s better like that. They’re better off on their own. They are what they are. That’s what she said to the welfare, and now they’ve stopped coming too, thank God.

But there’s still Lambert. He wants company. He says how can he just stare into their faces all day long. He needs people to talk to. So he invites them in.

He actually stands out there on the pavement in the stinking heat and whistles to the Jehovahs to come inside.

She remembers when he started doing it. It was just before he left school. He was sixteen. That was when the Jehovahs came in for the first time. And once they’re in, they’re in for good. If one of them dies, they send new girls with pink dresses to come and sit here in their chairs on Sunday mornings, smelling of lavender.

The pile of Watchtower s in Lambert’s den is now almost as high as the ceiling. That’s in one corner. The NP’s new pamphlets are in the other corner, on top of the box of pamphlets from the last time they voted. That was when the NP came to fetch them in a grey van and they voted ‘Yes’. In their own backyard they do as they like, but to the outside world they always say ‘Yes’. United they stand. Treppie too. It’s best that way.

And then there’s the heap of Western Telegraph s. And Scope s. And See s. Lambert reads the lot. Short stuff that you can read quickly — he says it’s to keep his brain awake. Just not books. He says books put him to sleep. But that’s what he gets from Treppie. Lambert repeats everything Treppie says. Treppie used to read lots of books when he was still young. But then one day he stopped, just like that, and even today he’ll tell you the same story. He says he figures that if you’ve read ten Afrikaans books you’ve read them all, and in any case, the best stories are in the papers. He’d rather watch videos with Lambert, but then he sits and sleeps. Lambert too, sometimes.

She wishes Lambert would always sleep, like he’s doing now. He’s far too wide awake inside his head, and everywhere else, too. What he doesn’t paint on those walls of his. Dicks. And moles, with things stuck up you know where. Roads for Africa. Cars and the insides of fridges. The insides of people, all on top of each other. And he keeps painting more, on top of everything else. Most of the time she can’t make out what it is. Him neither, ’cause he writes names next to the drawings: star, cloud, bee, exhaust pipe, crack, fuck, cunt, pump, heart, rust, rose, evaporator.

He’s always been too wide awake. That’s what she said to Pop when he told her the child was backward. There was nothing backward about him, she said. He gets fits ’cause he’s too clever, ’cause his brain’s too busy.

And once he starts working himself up, it’s a struggle to calm him down again. God knows, it’s hard. There’s only one thing that helps. She found this out when he was still very small. Just three years old. One day in the old house in Vrededorp, when he was squealing like a pig, she rubbed his little thingy for him. Then he suddenly became all meek and mild, smiling at her with his big blue eyes.

In later years, when Lambert began to swear and get wild, breaking all their stuff so that Treppie would drag Pop out from behind the bathroom door where he was hiding and say to him, come, let’s pack our stuff so we can get out of this bladdy madhouse for once and for all, then she would say to Lambert he must come and lie down with her in the back room so he could find some peace for his soul.

She would rub his thing until he was finished and then everything would be fine again. But after a while that wasn’t good enough any more. He wanted to put it in. He wanted to do it himself. What could she do? She lay down for him. She went and lay herself down. Housecoat and all.

This was the way she’d kept them all together, Pop and Treppie and Lambert and herself.

’Cause they can’t do without each other. What would happen if something made them split up and they lost each other? They’d fall to pieces, the whole lot of them, like kaffirdogs on rubbish heaps.