Marlene van Niekerk - Triomf

If you ask him, Pop’s a sucker for wallpaper. Nowadays it’s on TV instead of wagons, but nothing has changed about the way Pop sees life. Or how he wants to see life. Ever since the day Pop gave the baked beans a talking to, he’s been getting more and more difficult. The other day he even went and bought Mol a rose bush. Just imagine it — a rose bush with two yellow roses. He drove specially to the nursery just to get it, to the larnies’ nursery in Jan Smuts Avenue. He saw they had cheap roses there on special. Keith Kirsten’s nursery. Going to a place like that was quite a business, he said, but he didn’t mind how far he had to drive as long as it made Mol happy.

He, Treppie, didn’t go. He was at the Chinese. Pop took Lambert with him, and Lambert told them afterwards that people were staring at them so much there among the plants, like they were from Mars or something, that he just went and sat in the car. Pop stayed away for a long time. He was looking for a Whisky Mac. He said he wouldn’t come back before he’d found one. When he did get back, he had a rose bush in his arms and he was smiling from ear to ear. Got that rose completely for nothing, he said. It wasn’t a Whisky Mac. Keithy Boy had never in his life heard of such a thing. But it didn’t matter. The colour was right.

The people at the nursery wanted him out of there, he said, so they said here, take it and leave. And then of course it was a whole palaver again, ’cause Mol started crying when she saw that rose bush. It was 17 January, her birthday. Pop had remembered it for the first time in ten years.

If you ask him, Mol will say any day in January is her birthday. Their IDs have been locked away in the sideboard for so long now that none of them remembers exactly when their birthday is. They know more or less. Everyone except Lambert, who knows exactly. Twenty-sixth April. And that’s something none of them must ever forget, otherwise there’s shit to play. But they know their own birthdays only by month. His birthday is sometime in November, and Pop’s is in May. It’s a long time since they did anything about it.

Then of course that rose bush needed planting, but Pop was so tired he couldn’t lift a finger. Lambert said when he dug holes it was for petrol, not flowers. So Mol got on to his case. He, Treppie, must plant the rose bush. Pop even had a list of instructions from Keith-Buy-Now-Flower-Later about how to make holes for rose bushes. This wide, this deep, then you mix this, that and the other into the ground, with so much water and with this spray for that insect and he didn’t know what else. He told Mol this rose bush would bring her nothing but misery. And then she really started crying.

It’s almost a month now, and that rose bush still hasn’t been planted. He sees Mol watering it every morning in its black plastic. It’s getting yellow underneath. Why she doesn’t just dig the bladdy thing into the ground somewhere he doesn’t know. She’s got two hands of her own, after all. When she gets into the mood, she walks around the yard with that rose bush all day long, asking everyone where must she plant it, in heaven’s name, where?

Pop says in front, next to the postbox. Lambert says no, at the back, next to the fig tree. That’s the only other plant in the yard. He, Treppie, says nowhere. Toby pees all over the place and she should wait until Toby’s also in heaven before she starts fiddling with roses.

Then Mol just wants to start crying all over again. The older she gets, the more she cries. It makes him feel like his guts are tied up in knots. Then he spins her a lot of crap about how roses never die in heaven, especially not from dog-piss, and how the heavenly roses have different colours and fragrances, all on the same bush. The more the divine dogs pee on them, the more colours and fragrances they get. He embroiders one never-ending story for her until she shuts up and gets that silly smile on her face again. Then she puts the rose down in the shadow of the kitchen door, still in its plastic.

And that’s where it’s still standing, today, among all the stuff Lambert carries in and out of the house all the time as he tries to get through his list. So much rubbish. Next to the rose bush on the one side lies the bathroom cabinet, the one Lambert ripped right off the wall the other day when the mirror didn’t fit. And next to that, a few odd planks Lambert wants to use for a bigger and better bathroom cabinet. Always wants to be bigger and better, that’s Lambert for you. On this side of the kitchen, three used-up Dogmor tins and a crate of empties. And on the other side, three old GTX tins and a box of empty Klipdrift bottles. Also very symbolic, if you ask him, of how they struggle by the sweat of their brows to dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s and get the little mirror mirroring on the wall. Then there’s Lambert’s old bed, with its imploded legs and its exploded stuffing, pushed up against the other wall. He wants to fix it, he says. And the bathroom’s burglar-bars, which didn’t want to fit so nicely after they’d used them to braai their T-bones at Christmas. Lambert says they got twisted in the heat, so now he wants to bend them straight again. Just proves his point, it’s never too late to build a tabernacle.

The latest is that he wants to paint the house. Now it looks like 127

Martha Street has to be painted snow white for the fucker’s birthday. And as the devil would have it, they found a letter in the postbox about painting houses the other day, with a golden stamp in the middle and a number under the stamp. At the bottom of the letter they found a list of numbers, including their own, which meant they could have three thousand rand worth of free paint — a little present from Wonder Wall for the New Year. That’s what Lambert read there. And then he started going on and on about the paint until Pop filled in their address and everything to say yes, please, they’d be happy to accept the free paint. Lambert posted it the same day, like the letter said he must. He, Treppie, didn’t even get to see it. He was at the Chinese. They only told him about it later, and then he asked them if they’d read the fine print. This was going to cause shit. But they didn’t even know what fine print meant. Fat lot they know! Then, just a few days later, the shit arrived in the form of a little man in a striped shirt and a tie full of flowers. He measured the house with a little wheel that he pushed around by a handle. The ceilings too. He asked for a ladder and he climbed on to the roof, measuring: ‘katarra! katarra!’ all over the corrugated sheets. Pop and Mol and Lambert were at Shoprite, and so there he sat, all alone. Him and the man and his little wheel with its little meter, measuring their house inside, outside and on top.

The man took out his Wonder Wall letter and showed him the signature on the dotted line. He asked if Treppie knew whose signature it was. That’s when he should’ve said, no, he didn’t. But the man looked him straight in the face and so he said, yes, it was his brother’s signature. The man said, no well, fine. If it was a close relation, then he, Treppie, could sign these other papers while his brother was out. The man pulled out a long paper with three carbon copies, all of them so full of fine print it would’ve taken three days to read. Please just sign, here, here and here, he said. It was a mere formality, just to say yes, they confirmed they wanted free paint to the value of three thousand rand. He told the man he should leave one of those carbon copies behind so his brother could go through it, but the man was already halfway out the door and he said the carbon would come when they delivered the paint. It would take a month or two, ’cause they had so many pledges they couldn’t keep up. Next thing, whoosh, he was gone in his Uno.