Lambert stood there with a cock-eyed look from all Pop’s talking. Treppie was laughing so much he was on the floor. After a while he rolled his ‘answer’ into a little ball and began chewing it like gum until it was small enough to swallow. He blew up his cheeks and used his finger to make a popping noise like a champagne cork. He went on like that for five minutes, popping champagne corks into Pop’s face, to show him his mouth was empty and everything that happened that day was fuck-all, completely fuck-all.
She could see the whole business was making Treppie upset. He didn’t have a good grip on himself. If you ask her, Treppie chewed and swallowed that silly answer of his ’cause he felt bad. He felt bad about poor old Lambert, with all his sores, studying so hard for his exam. Lambert was pale and sickly from trying so hard, from trying like that all his life long. And he felt bad about her and Pop, who praised Lambert so nicely and stood up for him when things got out of hand, ’cause most of the time they just tried to stay out of his way. She knows. Treppie’s not the kind of person who can show he’s sorry the way other people can. He’s scared of feeling sorry. She remembers, at Old Mol’s funeral, he didn’t shed a single tear. And he didn’t even try comforting her and Pop when they cried. But when the minister asked if anyone wanted to say a few words on behalf of the family, Treppie was quick to present himself. That was the first time he really put a few sentences together after Old Pop’s death.
But actually they weren’t just feeling bad and sorry for each other, that day of the exam. They were also scared. Scared about allowing Lambert to be the hero, and about the fridge book passing into his hands. That book that was now his, alone. It had been a family trophy and where the trophy used to be there was now just a big hole, a hole she knew none of them would ever be able to fill again. They were scared ’cause they knew this — and she could see Treppie and Pop knew it too — and ’cause they knew there were still lots of other things in that hole, and the whole caboodle was now making its way straight to Lambert. They wouldn’t have a leg to stand on any more, never mind a perspective to live from.
Treppie was looking a bit shot after he washed his face and came back into the lounge in his old clothes. No more red nose. He poured himself a stiff drink and threw it back just like that, clean, standing there next to the sideboard. She and Pop gave each other one look, as if to say: Treppie took a big knock today.
And he knew that they knew, ’cause when he turned around again with his second tot in both his hands, as if he was looking for something to hold on to, he gave them a wink, not a devil’s wink, but a half-mast wink, like he was half-sad. He cleared his throat and he put on a face and he said: ‘Well now, people, fasten your seatbelts, the playing fields have been levelled for a miracle, whether you believe it or not.’
Early the next morning, just after she and Pop woke up, Treppie came in and hurried them up. They must come now, he said, this thing began with witnesses and it had to end with witnesses. They couldn’t sleep at a time like this. When they got to the lounge, Lambert was already there, sitting and waiting in Pop’s chair. Excuse me, he said, but Treppie had told him to stay put. Pop pulled Lambert’s crate to the other side. Treppie sat in front of him.
Now, said Treppie, if Lambert thought the family Bible was something, then he had news for him, ’cause that was nothing. There were still the family jewels.
Treppie went into his room. He huffed and he puffed and then he brought out a great big trunk, dragging it right up to Lambert’s feet in the middle of the lounge.
He went and dug around some more in his room and he came out with a long army bag that rattled with long-necked things.
He even brought out his black sling-bag, the one he took with him to the Chinese every day.
Treppie laid his long fingers on the lid of the trunk. His hands trembled and his shoulder twitched.
Theory, he said, was one thing. It was book-learning. A vexation to the spirit, as Ecclesiastes said.
Ecclesiastes, hmph, this Treppie can really lay it on thick.
But practice, he continued, was something quite different, full of its own pitfalls, which you never saw until you were up to your neck. But not without rewards, which you also didn’t see until they hit you full in the face. Like a rainbow, one minute everything was grey, and the next there it was, filling up the whole sky.
‘Ahem!’ Pop cleared his throat. Treppie must please get to the point now.
But Treppie was already at the point. With Treppie, there’s never just one, clear point. You first have to set the scene, as he always says. The setting itself is half the point.
It was dead quiet there in the lounge. She could almost hear her own heart beating. They all watched Treppie as he opened the trunk’s lock.
Then, with a wide sweep, he lifted the lid and opened it out. It was a broad, deep lid. Took her breath clean away.
Neat little rows of tools were hanging there, each one sparkling in its own leather clasp. All the tools of refrigeration work. An expert’s toolbox.
‘Heaven,’ said Treppie. ‘This is heaven.’
Even Toby stuck his nose into the box to smell the strange new smells in there.
‘Well, I never,’ said Pop, lighting up a cigarette.
Lambert’s eyes glittered. He rubbed his big hands round and round in the hollows of each palm. She’d never seen him look at anything in that way before.
Treppie’s tools. His pride and joy. Ever since that terrible fire when the fridge business burnt down, he’d never used them in public again. Before the fire, when he did use them, he used to bring them out one at a time, and no one was allowed to touch them. Then at night he’d take them back into his room again. And she could see from the condition they were in that he’d been cleaning them all these years, shining them with a petrol rag every night, taking them out one by one and putting them back carefully in their places, in the trunk’s lid.
‘Now, take note: the first commandment of the practice,’ Treppie told Lambert, and she saw he was keeping a straight face, but he was starting to play Tickey again. ‘Order, hygiene, discipline. You can work with these tools, all of them, but if this trunk doesn’t look like this every night when you’re finished, then I’ll take the whole lot back and keep it behind lock and key. Then I’ll withdraw completely from you and your fridges and you can see how far you get on your own.’
When he’s in a setting, he always comes up with grand words.
But when he began to tell Lambert all the names of the tools, and what each one was used for, he was back on solid ground again. Lambert played his part nicely. Every now and again he chipped in and told Treppie what that tool’s name was, and what it did, ’cause he was ‘theoretically qualified’ now, as Treppie himself had said.
And each time they said a thing’s name, she said it after them, so everyone could see her head was still firing nicely. When it comes to the names of things, she knows she’d better pay attention, otherwise she’ll be gaga before her time.
They worked through all the spanners. From the nut spanner and the pipe spanner to the flarenut fittings and the other sockets and spanners, the six-point to the twelve-point box spanners. And then the punches, the centre punch and the starter punch, and the pliers, the cutting pliers and the squeezing pliers, the clipping pliers and the slipjoint pliers, and then of course the smallest and the finest, the needlenose pliers, which Lambert showed her with a little laugh. Pop squeezed her leg to tell her she must just smile now, ’cause this was a whole new beginning with pliers.