She couldn’t help it, she said, standing up against the door with her legs wide open, right there where Pop had stood her up, with a cigarette in one hand and that doctored brandy in the other. She couldn’t help it, it was so funny, and then she started laughing all over again. She showed Pop in slow motion how he, Lambert, had thrown himself into that big punch. And then she ducked like Treppie, but in slow motion, putting her fist slowly through the hole in the dresser. ‘Boom! Crash! Ting-a-ling!’ she slurred, and God knows it looked so funny that he and Pop started laughing too, and then she laughed even more.
So he said sorry very nicely to her and told her he hadn’t meant it. Then he began to feel sleepy again and Pop led him off to the den. When he woke up it was evening already, and it hit him like a bomb: if his girl was coming just after midnight tomorrow — that’s now today, which at midnight becomes his birthday, the 26th — then he still had a helluva lot to do. And ever since then his hands have been shaking.
Come now, Lambert, Pop said, there was nothing to tremble about. They must just calmly see what they could still do with reasonable certainty and capable speed. It wouldn’t help to try and move mountains in the space of twenty-four hours.
His mother made them all eggs on bread with tomato sauce, and then they sat down in the lounge with pen and paper and worked out what each of them could do to get things ready, even if it was just on the surface, ’cause it was appearances that counted.
His mother said if he got the lawn-mower running nicely for her, she’d cut the grass, right away. That’s ’cause there was a full moon and next door wasn’t allowed to start complaining before ten o’clock. Tomorrow, she promised, she’d tackle the kitchen.
Treppie said unfortunately he had to go work the next day, but he’d get some nice colourful Chinese lampshades, and then it would look like a jolly party. Pardon, he should say they would create a festive atmosphere, and he was sure he’d be able to get his hands on a plastic Chinese toilet seat as well.
Pop said he’d make a plan to find a mirror for the bathroom. There was still a whole panel of looking-glass left in the dressing table in their bedroom. He’d take it out of its frame and stand it up on top of the toilet. And then he’d put up the postbox, too, but this time, he said, it would be for good. For ever and ever, his mother said, and Treppie began singing: ‘Sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset.’
And what about the gaps in the wall where the cement was gone and the red bricks showed through? Lambert asked. But Pop said if his girl said anything he could just show her the Wonder Wall papers. Painters always fix that kind of thing before they start painting. Then she’d know everything was okay.
Well, this morning he asked Pop for those papers and then he phoned the Wonder Wall people from across the road to ask when they were coming. The lady on the switchboard said, no, most certainly today, and if not today, then by the latest tomorrow, and thank you for your patience.
More than that he couldn’t do. If they come tomorrow, on the day of his birthday, then maybe his girl will still be here and then at least there’ll be something interesting on the go. Then she’ll be able to see with her own two eyes that the Benades aren’t just any old Tom, Dick and Harry from Triomf.
But what about the hole in the front door? he asked.
Treppie said that was easy, all they needed was to take a saw and widen that hole a bit. Then, abracadabra, he could say it was Toby’s dog-door, so that Toby could go in and out during the night and then she’d think they were ‘thoroughbred dog-lovers’, and that their dog, despite his inferior origins, still had very good manners. It was manners that counted with dogs, Treppie said, not pedigree.
He began to think Treppie was making fun of him again, but his face was completely serious.
And what about stuff to eat and drink? He couldn’t very well let his girl sit there dry-mouthed the whole night.
Treppie started to say that it shouldn’t be her dry mouth he worried about, but then Pop waved his finger at Treppie and luckily he shut up.
No, Pop said, if Lambert made a nice list, he and Mol would go to Shoprite. But he said they must go to the Spar in Melville instead. The Shoprite in Triomf didn’t stock those nice dips he wanted for his girl.
Treppie said he shouldn’t overdo things, that girl they were getting for him was a saucy little dip herself. She was the one who was coming to get dipped. Lambert should remember that he had to do the dipping, and if he wanted to get his chip properly dipped, then he shouldn’t be too stuffed with all kinds of snacks. But Treppie saw he was going too far again and he quickly tried to cover it up with all kinds of talk about dips and chips and chips and dips. He listed them, all the kinds of chips you get, from salt and vinegar to boerewors and barbecue, and all the dips he could think of, from garlic to angel-fish to avocado pear. All he was really trying to say, he said, was that Lambert should get on with it and make up his mind.
After that, they could all breathe more easily. Pop said Treppie might be an expert in dips and chips, but he’d better behave himself, or he’d give him another dose.
‘If we only had love,’ Treppie sang.
They carried on like this until very late last night. His mother mowed the lawn, with him supervising to make sure she kept in straight lines and cut evenly. Pop hammered the pelmet in the lounge straight and Treppie helped him put it up again. They even got the curtain hanging after a fashion. Treppie sawed the hole in the front door evenly, and then they swopped his mattress around with Pop and his mother’s inner-spring mattress. He managed to get that buggered old bed of his back on to its legs again but the bed springs were sticking out all over the place, so he just snipped them off with wire-cutters. He didn’t have time to mess around any more with that kind of thing. When they all went to bed last night, he wrote out his shopping list for Pop and his mother, and he made a list for himself, a short one from the long one, which was now longer than any list he’d ever made in his life before. It was so long it made him cross-eyed.
When he eventually got to bed, the sparrows were already singing.
It was the end of that long day. It was actually today already, the 25th, and he swears he slept only about four hours before he woke up again. And then it was still today.
And now, as he sits here, it’s the night of today, but it already feels like tomorrow.
Except that tomorrow only begins after twelve tonight, and it feels like all the watch-hands and the church clocks are depending on him. It’s like he has to extend himself to the utmost to make tomorrow come, his birthday. He has to make his own birthday happen. Then he’ll be forty. That’s if he can get it all together. But it’s actually a misnomer, as Treppie says, ’cause after twelve he’s already past his fortieth year. Then he’s into his forty-first year. That’s ’cause when you have a birthday, you don’t count what it is now, you count what’s already been, and then you’re actually on the way to the future again. But you don’t say it out loud, and you don’t add it on when it’s your birthday, which is actually a mistake, but you pretend for the sake of the party spirit. In the heat of things you just go ahead and say that, for the time being, you’re so many years old, but actually you’re always so many years old and a bit more. Forty point nought nought one into the next year. And if your watch is good enough, like an Olympic sprinter, you can even try keeping up with the facts of your lifetime, but it would be so fucken boring, keeping up like that. Tick-tick-tick-tick all day long, and between the ticks even more ticks, going even faster, and still more ticks and faster ones between those, until after a while time just zings by without even stopping for the ticks any more. Head first into your glory like a shooting star. Whoosh! Make way!