Marlene van Niekerk - Triomf

Now, what first? In the middle frame? A bee, he thinks.

How does a bee look again? He must know, there were so many dead bees after the fuck-up when he threw water into the hive.

A bee’s got two pieces. A head-piece and a tail-piece.

He gets on to the Tedelex with the narrow brush and the tin of black paint. He gets his angle right. First he paints the outline of the head, and then, a little bigger, the outline of the body. The outline comes out nice and smooth and shiny. But the bee’s too small. It doesn’t fill the frame so nicely. What now? He adds another piece of tail to the bee. And now? Now the head’s too small. Wait, he knows. This bee is going to become Superbee. It’s going to get two more heads, one on either side of the middle one. That’s easy. Lambert gets down from the Tedelex and looks up at his Superbee. It’s becoming a bee to beat all bees! He smiles. The more heads, the more legs and the more wings, the better this bee’s going to work.

The bee’s got seven legs on either side. Lambert draws a narrow seam for the head. He makes connecting threads between the head and the body, and between the head and the other body. Each head gets two blobs where the eyes are. The middle head’s got the biggest eyes. Now for the wings. Four on either side. They’re the most difficult, with all those little veins. He finds a match. He chews the back end of the match until it’s soft, and then he pulls out a few threads until he’s got a point. He draws the veins on to each wing, showing how they get thinner and thinner. The veins hold the wing up. What’s a vein like that made of? Not bone, not wood. Maybe blood that’s gotten hard. Do bees have blood? Is it sweet? Does it run in veins? Do bees have hearts?

Lambert stands back a little from Superbee. His head feels like a joystick. He wants to fly.

It’s always like this when he paints. The smaller and flimsier it gets, and the more he has to screw up his eyes and hold his hand steady, the better it feels. It’s only when he tries to fix small things in fucked-up gadgets and stuff that he loses his cool so badly. In his paintings he can do what he likes with the flimsy little things.

Now, how’s he going to get the bee’s wings to shimmer with colour, but in such a way that you can still half see the world through them?

In that case, first the world. He takes his wax crayons and adds in daintily, between the bee’s legs and his wings, and between the veins in the wings, careful not to smudge the outlines — a blue mountain, a green aloe with three red aloe flowers, and a light yellow patch of grass.

But now the wings look completely see-through. He puts some spit on a clean match and works the colours of the world a little more densely between the veins — green and blue and light yellow and red.

Now for the final touches. That bee must gain some weight so it can stay put in the world. The three heads must shine pitch black and look solid. He leaves some white spots on the eyes so they can shine. Do bees’ eyes shine?

The two bodies get fat stripes: yellow-black, yellow-black, yellow-black. Golden yellow and pitch black.

He climbs down to look at the bee. It looks sharp. A black-yellow, black-yellow Superbee with veins on his wings that you can only just see through. But something’s missing. His bee’s got an earth, but there’s no heaven. Halfway up from the mountain, he makes a light yellow sun and slightly higher, a white cloud, with small pieces of light blue heaven inbetween.

He gets down to look again. How can it already be getting dark outside? He puts on the lights, the one next to his bed and the other on the ceiling, but the ceiling’s light doesn’t want to work. The bulb’s blown. Lambert smiles. He unlocks his steel cabinet and takes it out. Of course! The time has come for his red light.

His bee looks magic in the red light. What kind of honey will a bee with three heads and two bodies make? Mega-honey!

He holds his head at an angle. There’s only one problem with his bee: it looks a little stiff. Heaven and earth too, a little flat and a little stiff. Something jolly’s missing somewhere. The sting! Where does a bee’s sting sit? Well, this bee’s going to have more than one of them.

Coming out the left side of the middle head, he paints a thin, black sting, with a curl that goes around the aloe-flower. And out of the right side of the tail, a sting that splits three ways around the cloud, with arrows at the ends.

Now that bee looks wired! He looks like he fucken wants to spark right off the wall!

To frame the bee, Lambert paints fine black lines around the edges, where the calendar used to be. He paints ER underneath, in the middle, so he can paint SUP and BEE on either side, without going wider than the painting. Then he goes and lies down on his bed with a Paul Revere to look at his SUPERBEE. He leaves it to the darkness to quietly fill up the world outside. While the light in his room turns an ever brighter scarlet.

MEAT

It’s a Monday night. The Benades sit in the lounge in front of the TV. It’s tuned to TV1 but they’re not really watching. Everyone’s there except Lambert, who left just after five. Monday night is rubbish night, and Lambert’s gone to search in the rubbish bags for wine boxes. He promised he’d put Raiders of the Lost Ark into the video machine for them when he got back. Only Lambert’s allowed to touch the machine, so now they just have to sit and wait.

Mol’s knitting Gerty’s belly piece from scratch. When she let Gerty try it on this morning, it was miles too big. So then she had to pull the whole thing apart again. Gerty needs about twenty stitches fewer than she did last year. And now she’ll have to make Gerty try it on again when she gets to the middle piece. She hasn’t got a clue how much smaller to make it. Poor Gerty. She won’t eat on her own any more. She only eats when Mol feeds her little pieces of food from her hand, begging her to take a few morsels. And she coughs so bad she can hardly breathe.

‘Put her down. Put her down, so this misery can come to an end,’ says Treppie, but Treppie’s got no heart. Pop says he’s got a heart, but she thinks if he’s got one it must be a very strange kind of heart.

Treppie’s sitting here now on his crate, reading a Star . One that he took from across the road’s pile this morning before the lorry came to pick them up. First he read the classifieds and now he’s reading the main news right from the beginning. Every now and again his lips move as he reads something but she can’t make out what he’s saying. The TV’s too loud. She sees him lose his temper about something that he reads there. His shoulder twitches and he pages wildly without finishing anything he starts. Then he shakes out the folds violently like he wants to hit something right out of the paper, knocking the page in front of him with the back of his hand. Like he wants to smack the news back into shape. Treppie never gets like this with the classifieds. Then he reads all afternoon long, turning the pages nice and softly. And he chuckles all the time when he reads them. She wonders what’s so funny about the classifieds. Funny or almost funny, ’cause Treppie laughs a little half-laugh through that twisted mouth of his. Sometimes she asks: ‘What are you laughing at, Treppie?’, and then he reads her an advert about something, or someone. Like the last time, about someone called Alex, who had just died. It was something like ‘we all loved Alex as he was’, and that he also ‘loved everyone’. He loved all his neighbours and his friends and fish pies too. Her favourite part was when it said: ‘Let God be with him and bear with us through our never-ending troubles, happiness and sadness.’