Marlene van Niekerk - Triomf

In front of him, Treppie sits with his pants around his ankles. He’s holding an open newspaper in his hands. Treppie’s smiling at him. The shit!

‘You!’ That’s all that comes out of him.

‘Tut-tut. Showing me the door, are you?’

As if it was all just a fucken little accident.

GUY FAWKES

Mol stands on the little stoep in front. She’s listening to the crackers as they go off, one here, one there, close by and then far away again. Not so many before, in other years.

Shame, last year she and Pop still shot off some crackers together, right here, in their hands. It was quite jolly. And then they bathed together. Shame, Pop was so gentle with her that night.

She feels Toby rubbing against her leg.

‘Yes, old Toby, so it goes, hey?’

She bends over and scratches him between the ears.

Ever since Pop went, they’ve never really managed to be jolly again.

It was all ’cause the house was supposed to be painted white. Inside and outside. Everything covered with sheets. That’s where the trouble started. She said all along it was going to cost them dearly. Dearly , and how!

The account wasn’t even the worst of it. They found the account in the postbox when they got back from the hospital, that night after the painting. It was for twenty-five thousand rand less the discount of three thousand rand, so it came to twenty-two thousand rand. That ‘prize’ was never a prize, after all. It was a discount.

From then on they got a letter every month with a red sticker saying they must pay, otherwise lawyers would sue them. Treppie tore up the letters every time. Then one day the sheriff came to see which of their things he could take away to sell, but he left almost immediately when he saw none of their stuff was worth anything. He still said something about people like them thinking the New South Africa meant they didn’t have to pay their debts to the Old South Africa. Next, they got a letter from Wonder Wall saying they could pay the account off. Thirty rand a month plus a terrible amount of interest. Now Lambert and Treppie are paying it off, half and half, every month. Treppie says this is now what you call Triomf-debt — by the time they finish paying it off, their matt-white will have cost them ninety thousand rand.

But the account wasn’t even the worst of it. The worst was that no one kept an eye on Lambert that day. So he took his chance and scratched around in the sideboard drawer. Lambert doesn’t know what’s good for him. But it was bound to happen some time or another. Then he went and broke the drawer in half over poor old Pop’s head, right there where Pop was sitting under the sheet. Dead quiet, without bothering anyone. Where she said they must leave him so he could sleep where he always slept.

She found him still sitting there. She took the sheet off to tell him he must please come and do something, Lambert had kicked Treppie right out of the house and now Treppie had no pants on and the NPs had arrived to see if they’d voted right.

Yes, when she looked again, there was Treppie lying starkers on the lawn with Lambert stomping on his fingers. He broke them all, one by one. ‘Crack! Crack! Crack!’ she heard as those little bones in Treppie’s hands broke. Such bony little birdy-hands, too.

And those two from across the road stood there with their mouths open, staring at them. That was their day for moving out. Going to live somewhere else. The same day. No wonder.

It never rains but it pours, Treppie still said when they got back from the voting. They saw, across the road there, a few crock lorries and some lazy, slackarse-movers with red noses trying to move the dykes’ stuff. She must say, she looked at them and thought the lorries in front of their own house looked a damn sight better, just for a change. And their painters looked like angels from heaven compared with those wash-outs on the opposite side.

Anyhow, then Treppie said he hoped they knew what they were doing. Those movers looked like a bunch of cheapskate rehabs to him. Must have been all the dykes could find on voting day, as if they really had to go and move on a day like that.

All they seemed to be loading on to the trucks were plants.

One table, two chairs, one bed, and for the rest, just plants, plants and more plants. After a while it looked like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon on wheels.

That’s what Treppie said.

He said some people painted their walls white and others moved to greener pastures, but in the end everyone, without exception, just looked north and fucked forth, as if their lives depended on it. Delicious monsters.

Well, yes.

Sometimes there’s truth in Treppie’s jokes.

But that wasn’t even the beginning, that day of the 27 th. Lambert was so wild after he’d finished with Treppie, he came for her next. She was walking around, shouting, ‘Pop’s dead! Pop’s dead!’, when he came and stabbed her in the side with Treppie’s pocket-knife. Just like that. In front of all those people. That’s when the painters dropped their sheets and ran for their lives.

Toby thought it was fun and games again. He tried to bite Lambert’s backside as Lambert ran amok there on the grass. With the knife still open, like he wanted to slaughter a pig or something.

Lambert turned around to give Toby a kick under the arse, but Toby wasn’t there any more and Lambert kicked the prefab wall instead. Broke his leg. A bad break, right at the ankle. And there he lay, roaring on the green, green grass of home, as Treppie said later. She stood around, holding on to her side where the blood was pouring out. And Treppie just lay there, crying from laughing so much. Broken fingers and all.

‘One dead, three injured!’ he shouted. ‘One down, three to go!

‘Aid us, aid us, afflictions abrade us!’ he shouted for all to hear.

Abrade.

On the very day Treppie appears before the heavenly gates he’ll still think of an impossible word to say. He’s always called himself an occasional speaker. Shame, and Pop used to say he shouldn’t waste his talents so, he was capable of doing so much more. And then Treppie would say he couldn’t help it, that’s what the people, meaning them, wanted from him. A story for every occasion, and who was he to say they must listen, he could also tell classic stories. In any case, that would be casting pearls before swine.

Classic.

Treppie says a piece that’s classic, whether it’s a piece of music or a piece of furniture or just a piece of house, is something that lasts forever, something everyone will like. The rest are just May-flies.

Well, if you ask her they’re not even May-flies, let alone classics. May-flies are complete in themselves and they fill the whole world, even if it’s just for one day. But the Benades were crocks from the moment they first saw the light of day. Pieced together and panelbeaten, not to mention screwed together, from scrap. Throw-away pieces, left-over rags, waste wool, old wives’ tales, hearsay, a passing likeness from the front and a glimpse from behind. That’s how they found themselves here on this earth. Things that get thrown away. Good for nothing. Write-offs.

She’s getting morbid now out here on the stoep. It’s not really so very bad, after all. She just thinks like this so she won’t have to think about Pop, but actually she does want to think about Pop. She wants to remember Pop. That’s what she wants to do. She wants to honour his memory on this Guy Fawkes night.

Shame, and there they stood at the JG Strydom hospital, at midnight of the same day. Treppie said come hell or high water, he wanted a post-mortem. A family like theirs couldn’t brave the future with a dubious cause of death in their midst. That’s now after she said Pop was blue and his nose was white and she thought it was from lack of breath that he died, sitting there and sleeping under the sheet and everything.