Marlene van Niekerk - Triomf

He takes his ball-point and goes to the wall. He starts high up, so he’ll have enough space. He knows that lists can go on and on forever, like that time he made a list for the Guy Fawkes party, and the list of everything he needs to do on Flossie.

When he’s finished, his list looks like this:

1. Bags (20) check for leaks

2. Lawn-mower weld clean blades (time will tell)

3. Put postbox up

4. Gutters on

5. house white

6. Fill holes lounge (1 box Polyfilla, 2 litre high-gloss)

7. lampshades (4)

8. pelmet panelbeat

9. glue all blocks (31 new ones) or more — check

10. new cat (Shoprite) chuck old one away

11. patch hole front door (12 ” x 12 ” plywood single)

12. scrub linolium kitchen clean (Ma)

13. drain (Buster)

14. flush horsepis. always/immediately (gentle reminder!)

15. Toilet seat (Spur?)

16. Mirror bathroom (measure) bath plug

17. den (sweep burn wash)

18. everything must work fridges (Kneff too)

19. Change mattress? bedding? (Treppie window sheets!)

NB 20. Lambert: toenails push ups

underpants …???

20. burn Ma’s housecoats

21. zips for Pop’s pants (Ma)

22. Money. (6 Spur tickets?)

(R50 NP?) fuck them!

Take empties back

23. dip Toby.

He takes a step back and looks at his list. He rubs his eyes. Fuck. It’s a lot. But now at least he knows what he has to do. Now things are properly lined up. Now it’s first things first. One thing at a time. Every day a few.

He walks out the door to the tap in the backyard. He washes his feet. Then he tiptoes back over his dirty floor. He takes the T-shirt from behind his bed and dries his feet. He almost puts the T-shirt back in its old place, but then he stops and stares at it. Fucken piece of rubbish! Out with it! From now on, it’s out with everything that’s rubbish around him. He chucks the T-shirt into a crate next to the Watchtower s. He’s going to have to stop pulling his wire so much. Fuck that. He’ll wait. Save himself up. If it gets too much for him, he’ll just do some push-ups. Or paint. Or make a fire with all the rubbish. Just watch him. He wasn’t born yesterday.

He puts on his lace-ups. It’s his only pair. He bought them ’cause Pop said that’s what he needed for his weak ankles. But they look funny when he wears them with shorts. What he really needs is a decent pair of takkies. North Stars with soft soles. But if he’s going to walk to the rubbish dumps now to look for bags, then he must walk, whether he looks funny or not. He usually walks barefoot around the streets near their house, but the dumps are too far for bare feet. He looks at the list. It’s great. He salutes his list. Then he remembers something. Under 23. dip Toby he writes: 24. paint the gallery! Ant termite wasp, Mole II, bat, etc.

That’s to entertain his girl. If all else fails, he can say to her: look at my painting on the wall, the one in the middle. Look at those stings, curling round the cloud in three different directions. That’s the many-headed Superbee. And then he’ll say: you want to know why that Mole there is called Mole the Second? Well, come, let me show you Mole the First. Just don’t get a fright, hey!

’Cause what happens if she’s very nice and everything, but she doesn’t say a word? Like Pop. What’ll he do then?

He must just not make a fool of himself. Then all the trouble and everything will be for nothing.

He gets up. He doesn’t even want to think about that. That it could all be for nothing. He walks through the den’s inside door and into the house. He fetches a municipal rubbish bag in the kitchen, folding it carefully into a nice little square. He feels around on top of the dresser for the Spur tickets, where Pop said he must leave them. He’s not sure why he wants the tickets. He just feels he has to be ready for anything. Then he walks down the passage, ‘click-click-click’, over the loose blocks — the whole fucken floor’s full of loose or missing blocks. He counts twenty-three loose blocks by the time he gets to the end of the passage. He must check again. Maybe they need more than thirty-one.

Treppie’s out, at the Chinese. Pop’s sitting in his chair, looking through one of those Homemaker s they keep throwing over the fence. His mother sits and looks where Pop’s looking. Or she looks like she’s looking. Since Gerty died, Mol keeps looking where everyone else looks, but she sees nothing. She’s fucken blown away, that’s for sure. Pop says his mother lived for that dog. Well, she must wait, she’ll still see what to live for. With those fused-out eyes of hers. She’ll see how he fixes this place up. How he scores a proper woman. No one fuckenwell tells him he’s a miscarriage. No one tells him his brain is fucked. No one tells him he’s got a dick like a dinosaur, so why doesn’t he go fuck dinosaurs. There’s nothing these two hands of his can’t do. He just gets fits, and sometimes he misses out on chances — that’s all. It could happen to anyone. Who does his mother think she is? What makes her think she’s better than him? Her fucken arse, man!

‘Right, I’m going now,’ he tells them.

‘Where to?’ It’s his mother. She looks, but she doesn’t see him.

‘Where to? Where to?’ he mocks her. ‘Why don’t you fix Pop’s zips, Ma, then you’ll be doing something useful. And, Pop, measure the space for the mirror in the bathroom, so we can get one cut the next time we go to Newlands. At the mirror shop. I can’t see my face any more when I shave.’

‘Okay,’ says Pop. ‘I’ll do it.’

‘Where you going, hey, Lambert?’ It’s his mother again.

‘That’s my business, Ma.’ He squeezes between them and the sideboard so he can get the NPs’ fifty-rand note out of the headless cat, where Treppie stuffed it that night, right next to the plastic rose. Pop said they must put it there so they could give it back to the NP, just in case the NP wanted to take them to court or something. He pulls out the rose.

‘Keep your hands off!’ says his mother.

Pop doesn’t notice. He’s staring at a picture in the Homemaker. It’s a wooden house that looks like a king-sized dog kennel.

‘Off what?’ he says. She must shuddup. He shakes his finger at her, stuffing the money into his back pocket.

It’s hot outside. The sun’s sitting right on top of the sky. He stands under the little carport, next to Molletjie, with his hands at his sides. A cloud’s building up on the one side. Which way? He wanted to go to the dumps in Bosmont, but that’s too far in this heat. And the fucken Hotnots always stare at him, like he’s a fucken kaffir or something. Hotnots don’t like kaffirs, that’s something he knows for a fact. Still, he doesn’t know what their case is, and why they shout at him like that: What you looking for over here, hey, whitey? Not that they can talk. One Saturday he was in Bosmont’s Main Street, on his way home with his wine bags, when he suddenly saw these bouncy bunches of Hotnot-majorettes come marching past him, “boompity-boompity-boom”. They were jamming the whole street with their bands and everything, young Coloured girls, all of them in shiny dresses. Some of them were real white, a proper inside-bum white, but they’re still Coloured, you can see it. You can see it by their hair and those missing front teeth. He couldn’t get across the street, so then he had to stand there and watch the parade with all those Hotnots. They were jostling him from all sides, and then one of them said: ‘Ooh, watch out, this hillbilly’s getting a hard-on for our girls here!’