Marlene van Niekerk - Triomf

‘Fuck you, you motherfucking bastard!’ says Lambert to Treppie.

She’d better make herself scarce here.

‘There’s your mother, son, fuck her!’ Treppie points to her.

‘What do you say, brother?’ he asks Pop. ‘There’s a mother and there’s a son, even if the fathers were poorly shuffled.’

Treppie shakes Pop by the shoulder. Pop sits with his head hanging down.

So, has this been Treppie’s plan all along? Does he want to go and bugger up the whole perspective now? After all that practising? He’s still not ‘immune’. All for nothing!

Suddenly Treppie looks like he’s a video on fast-forward. He ducks to one side and quickly picks up something from the floor. It’s the little packet with the cowboy on top. He shakes it under Lambert’s nose.

They must just check, he says. Lambert took her with his bare hands. ‘Boom, boom,’ he shouts, pretending to shoot into the air.

‘As long as Lambertussie can shoot his load, hooray for the scent of a kill!’

Treppie quickly bends over again and picks up something on the other side. What’s that, now? Christ! A gun! It goes ‘pof!’ as Treppie throws it down on to the bed. It’s pitch black, with a curved handle. Where did that come from?

‘Oh, trusted steed, don’t fail me in my greatest need!’

Please, Pop, help! But Pop’s already seen it. Where’s the head that belongs to the hair? There’s a corpse here in the den! Lambert stuffed a corpse! No, God help us, was there really a murder here last night? While they were sitting so blissfully there on the koppie?

‘Grandpa rode a porker!’ shouts Treppie. ‘And then he went and pumped his floozy into her triumph and glory!’

Ja, Treppie, now all hell is loose, just like you wanted. She looks at him standing there and rubbing his hands, like he’s making a fire with sticks. The fire’s nice and wild now. Now things are going to start flying.

Just as she thought. Lambert grabs a long piece of iron from under his bed and swings it like a golf club, but he doesn’t hit a ball, he hits an empty GTX tin.

‘Hole in one!’ shouts Treppie as he catches the tin in mid-air. Softly, softly Treppie puts the tin back on the ground. He gives it a little tap on the lid, as if to tell it to sit there nicely now, ’cause there’s a lot of hustling going on and they must all sit dead still. That’s also the way she’s sitting, here in her corner. Dead still.

Doesn’t Lambert want a cigarette? Treppie asks.

Lambert doesn’t hear.

‘She brought her own fucken FL’s!’ he roars.

No, that’s fine, says Treppie, he was just teasing. You’re forty only once in your life, and it’s fine to have the night of your life with someone, just once in a lifetime.

Treppie’s breathing fast. It looks like his sentences are coming too quickly.

‘And then you took her for a proper spin, didn’t you, old boy? I see you parked Flossie in front, so she’s ready for us when we take back your girl’s wig and her shoe, later tonight.’

Lambert says nothing. He’s still holding on to his golf club. Treppie’s smoking hard.

‘And did Flossie at least behave herself, Lambert? She’s not really used to, er, joy-rides, you know!’

Lambert throws down the piece of iron. He turns around. All you see is his fat back. His lifts up his head and looks at his paintings, like he wants to start praying or something.

But here comes Treppie, the mosquito-man.

‘Er, tell us a little, old boy, was the joy-ride before or after?’

He doesn’t say what came inbetween, but she can imagine.

‘I mean, did you take her home, old boy? Did you put her back nicely in her show-case, like the little doll that she is, end of story? Hey, Lambert? Tell us, man, or where did you go driving around?’

Lambert’s in a corner now, she can see. They all know he’s not allowed to drive, ’cause of the fits, and he hasn’t got a licence. They’d catch him very quickly among the grand cars in that crock of his without its shell.

Treppie acts like he knows what Lambert’s busy thinking, and that those thoughts are very impressive. Very quick on the ball. He does it with all of them. He gives them ‘perspectives’ and things so-called to save their backsides, but then he cancels them again, laughing at the lot of them for even falling for any of it in the first place.

‘Aha, you naughty boy!’ says Treppie. ‘So then you took your girl for a ride around the block for a smoke break, ’cause that barrel of yours was hot, hey! Martha, Toby, Gerty, and then, when you’d finished the holy trinity, you came back for more, right?’

Wink, wink at Lambert, wink at her, wink at Pop.

Lambert tries to wink back, but his eyes are too wide open. All he does is shut them.

‘Yes, first we went and patrolled around Triomf a bit, but then she wanted to see my paintings again. She said she’s seen lots of paintings in her life, but not, um, as you say, frescoes like these.’

She must remember to go look inside that Frisco coffee tin in the kitchen. Doesn’t taste like paint to her, but then again her sense of taste isn’t so good any more. The other day she poured Vim scrubbing powder over the eggs and everyone except her tasted the difference. Treppie asked her if she was playing Daisy de Melker. He wouldn’t hold it against her, he said, but she’d have to increase the dosage. Then, luckily, she found the salt under the sink. No need to swing by the neck for nothing.

‘Where did you get that thing?’

It’s Pop who’s suddenly talking now, here next to her. He sounds like he’s trying to scold Lambert, with his last breath.

He points to the gun on the bed. Look how his hand’s shaking! Let her take his hand and put it back on his lap. It makes her feel eerie, hands shaking like that.

‘I bought it from a kaffir at the dumps for fifty rand. Pop. It’s for our protection, for when the shit hits the fan.’

Pop looks at Treppie as if to say, look where all your talking’s got us now! But Treppie pretends he doesn’t see Pop.

‘Yes and no,’ says Treppie. ‘It’s for the shit when the shit hits the fan, but it’s actually for shooting the fan when the fan doesn’t work.’ He sticks his index finger in his mouth and pretends he’s pulling a trigger. ‘Boom!’

‘Give it here!’ It’s Pop again, with that shaking hand of his.

‘Not a damn will I give it to you,’ says Lambert. ‘It’s my gun and only I can touch it!’

‘Give it to Pop, he just wants to look at it. It’s true, isn’t it, Pop, you just want to look, don’t you?’

She wishes Pop would say ‘just want to look’, but he says nothing. He keeps that trembling hand of his held out. It’s shaking all the way up to where the arm connects with the body.

‘I said, give it here!’

‘Not a fuck am I going to give you my gun, Pop!’ says Lambert. ‘The AWB has already recruited me to help shoot when the, um, when the …’

‘When the what?’ asks Treppie. He looks like he’s conducting exams again.

‘When the fan breaks. Fuck!’ Lambert looks like he wants to cry. Treppie claps his hands. Now, he says, Lambert has demonstrated an insight into a particular mentality. And Pop must leave him alone, too. One thing at a time. Treppie says, he first wants to test that insight a little.

Whoosh! Treppie grabs the gun out of Lambert’s hand.

He walks up and down with his hand under his chin. He pretends he’s thinking so hard that he’s kicking little stones, but he’s actually kicking tins and newspapers and the insides of radios. Then, suddenly, he gets a brainwave. He goes ‘snap!’ with his fingers in the air.

Jeez, he says, he hadn’t thought of it before, but maybe Lambert will land up on Robben Island. He mustn’t worry, though, they’ll send him polony so he won’t have to eat that watery porridge they give people there. And then, he says, Lambert can write a nice letter to Mandela, asking him if he can paint on the walls, but he’ll have to promise nothing but the New South Africa — just doves and AKs, doves and AKs, from the Cape right up to the North, on top.