Lambert feels for his cigarettes. He lights up and smokes in the dark, on his back. As he inhales he watches the little red coal glow. It’s good to think about how those fridges got fixed again. It’s so nice he just can’t stop thinking about it.
The first thing he tried using on the Fuchs was Sunlight, but the leaks were too big and there were too many of them. The soapy liquid was so runny that he couldn’t see very well what was going on.
Then he had a brainwave. He thought, let me send Pop to the big CNA in Melville to buy seven bottles of bubbles.
Late that night, after Treppie came and helped him pump more gas in for the test, he switched on his red light and asked the Good Lord and all the fridge fairies to please help him now, and he smeared every inch of that Fuchs with a thick layer of Fabulous Paradise Bubbles. Then he switched on the Fuchs at the wall.
The next thing there was a bubble bonanza like he’s never seen in his life before. The whole den was full of them. Big ones and small ones blowing from the holes. And all the sides of the bubbles shone with square pictures that bulged out as they caught the den’s reflections.
He must say, his jaw dropped when he saw that bubble bonus. He felt quite lame in the back as he stood there watching them. They just kept coming, one on top of the other, popping out of that Fuchs’ thick white body, some of them stuck together in five-bubble bunches, and then they separated and floated out the door and through the open windows, into the night, suddenly accelerating as the wind caught them.
The mouth of the ice-box, in front, was one huge bubble. When it came loose it was as big as his head. It floated there, in front of his face, wobble-wobble, like a big, hollow ball of jelly.
’Strue’s Bob, he walked right around that bubble. It just hung there. And with every step he saw a different angle of his room reflected on the bubble’s surface.
Everything looked completely different.
His bed, with all its rubbish-blankets and dirty pillows, looked like a lovenest full of secrets. And the painting above his bed, which was also in the bubble, looked like a masterpiece on a flowerpot, something he could never have painted himself. The Fuchs blowing bubbles was also in the bubble, like a magic machine in a science-fiction movie. And all the pieces of scrap iron, the tools, his steel cabinet, the crates full of empties, his painting of things with wings, looked like Treasure Island. He was also in the bubble. He looked like something from outer space, with ears that faded away to the back. His mouth and nose, popping out in front, like a goldfish in a glass bowl.
After a while he couldn’t take it any longer, but he also couldn’t snap out of it. So he took a deep breath and blew hard into that bubble as it floated there in front of him, like something in a nice dream. Then everything fell apart. The bed split into two floppy pieces against the ceiling, the Fuchs floated upside down into his eyes, his nose disconnected from his face. And then he followed his nose out the back door, weightless like an astronaut, up and away into the dark sky among the stars.
The bubble burst with a soft, cool, wet ‘plop’ on his face, like he’d walked with open eyes into a wet spider’s web.
Then he went and sat down on his bed, quite dizzy, and wiped his hand over his face. But there was nothing.
Lambert draws deep on his cigarette. That was really a special moment. From that moment on his den started feeling like a completely different place.
His mother said one minute she was standing in the front waiting for Toby to pee, and the next something suddenly began to bubble up from behind the house. She still thought, oh boy, here’s another big fuck-up, so she called Treppie to come and look. Treppie told her he reckoned that he, Lambert, had finally exploded, and what she saw there was his soul bubbling up to the heavens.
The next thing, Pop and his mother came running in from outside, smacking the bubbles left, right and centre. And then Toby came, almost running them right off their feet. His jaws went ‘clack-clack’ as he tried to bite the bubbles. Treppie waltzed in through the inside door, singing: ‘Tiny bubbles, in the air.’
Meanwhile, he was crawling around that Fuchs on all fours, with his pencil, quickly marking with circles the places where he saw bubbles popping out. There were so many of them that he couldn’t keep up. After a while everyone began smearing bubble juice on to the Fuchs. And the next thing Pop was smearing Mol and Treppie was smearing Pop and everyone was smearing everyone else full of Fabulous Paradise. And so they ended up having a whale of a bubble party there in his den.
Treppie said it just showed you what fun you could have with crocked stuff. Come to think of it, he said, where was the fun in a fridge that worked? Just ice and cold polony.
THE SECOND MIRACLE: SHOCK TREATMENT 
It took them three full days, testing with bubbles, pumping out the gas, cutting tubes, making new joints and filling up with gas again. Then they’d test with bubbles again and close up little pin-prick holes before filling up and testing the pressure yet again. Over and over until they had that Fuchs sort of sealed up.
But that was child’s play compared with the Tedelex. The Tedelex was a burnt-out case that had stood for years here in his den, stinking through its open valves.
He filed open that compressor all along its join to see what was going on inside. He took one look at the suction and liquid line pipes, the ones that go in and out of the shell, and he ripped them out with his bare hands, the oil line too. That was when he burnt his skin so bad with acidbreakdown oil.
‘Jeez!’ said Treppie when he saw the inside of that compressor.
Treppie made him put on gloves, and he put gloves on too, plastic ones that they hurriedly went and bought at the Spar, ’cause Treppie said he didn’t feel like being buried skinless one day. He didn’t see why he should have to be a take-away for the worms.
The pump inside was completely eaten away by acid. The insulation was perished right through, the windings were in their glory and the coils were burnt pitch black. When they opened it up some more, they saw that the gaskets on the cylinder head and the valve seats were totally non-existent.
Treppie said he wasn’t the god of fridges, so he couldn’t fix this kind of fuck-up, but then he saw Treppie’s eyes sparkle and he schemed that maybe he could push his luck a bit here.
He got Treppie to go as far as to order some of the most important parts for the Tedelex along with the orders he wrote out for the Chinese’s fridges. He even bummed some spares from the workshops around Triomf, West End Electrics and Century Appliances.
They spent weeks reassembling that compressor. The whole den was full of cut-up Dogmor tins filled up with parts and oil.
Every now and again Pop looked in, and he’d whistle between his teeth and say, goodness, it looked to him like Triomf Appliances was back in business.
But the day they welded up the compressor shell, reconnected the wires and tubes and tried to start the Tedelex, that compressor just sat there, jammed. Completely seized up.
‘Ag no, man,’ Treppie said after they’d cleaned it up for the umpteenth time and gone over everything again and checked the volts. ‘It’s like trying to get blood from a stone.’
‘What about a capacitor?’ he asked. ‘Then we can reverse the thing.’ That’s what the fridge book said you do with compressors when they get stuck. In Modern Refrigeration and Airconditioning, on page 355, middle of the page.