They stare at his clothes. He feels naked.
‘Phew!’ Treppie whistles. He picks up the Speedo, stretching it open with his hands.
‘Hey, Lambert, how you going to get your whole pedigree into this, old boy? Pit bull terriers! Njarrr! Looks a bit small for champion stock, don’t you think?’
‘Hands off!’ says Pop, taking the Speedo away from Treppie. Pop puts it back on to the bed. He motions with his hand. He’s trying to tell him he must just hang in there, it’s almost over. They’ll be out of here any second now. They fuckenwell better.
But now Treppie’s trying a new angle, sticking his fingers into his shirt-pocket with only his pinky sticking out. Like a poofter. Sometimes he thinks Treppie should’ve been a poofter. It’s only poofters on TV who throw scenes like he does. He’s got a lot of fucken airs, this Treppie.
‘I almost forgot!’ Treppie looks round to see if everyone’s eyes are fixed on that shirt-pocket of his. ‘Rough Riders. Look, Lambert, a cowboy on a horse! We don’t want you to go and get the load, hey.’
His mother grins.
He wants to tell Treppie he’s a fucken poofter, but his voice gets stuck. He looks at Pop. Please, Pop, please. Pop takes Treppie and his mother by the arm.
‘Right, Lambertus, get yourself ready. We’re leaving any minute now.’ Pop nods at him as if to say everything’s okay, he needn’t worry.
He watches them as they cram through the door. Fucken bunch of sheep. He looks at the alarm and then at his watch. Only quarter past seven. God, help!
He calls after his mother. She must come here, he wants her to tell him something. He hears her shuffling back.
‘Yes?’
He points. ‘Does everything look all right here?’ He can hear his own voice. It sounds panicky. He doesn’t want to sound panicky. What for?
He says it again: ‘Everything’s ready, right?’
‘All ready,’ his mother says, nodding her head up and down. ‘Just perfect!’
She’s also on her ear. He saw her pouring herself shots all afternoon long. She doesn’t usually drink alone. Seems like she’s also got the jitters. What for?
‘What else do I need?’ He points to the room.
‘Beauty sleep. Hic!’
Hiccup or no hiccup, he wants to try this just one more time.
‘Pleased to meet you.’ He shakes his mother’s hand.
‘The pleasure, hic, is mine,’ she says, just like he taught her.
But he can’t sleep. He baths and shaves and puts on his new clothes. Then he puts out his dips and chips and lemons on the service counter. All in a row. Pop and Treppie have been away for more than an hour now. Wait, let him quickly go and see if everything’s still okay in the house. His mother’s fast asleep. Huddled on the bare mattress in her and Pop’s room. Toby’s lying behind her back. Now Toby lifts up his head and pricks his ears. ‘Swish-swish’ goes his tail on the mattress. The blue lampshade with its silver stars throws strange spots and shadows over his mother. And across the mattress and Toby and the floors and the walls. Weird.
Let him just leave her to sleep, even though he really wanted her to tell him a story, to get him right and ready. ’Cause he doesn’t feel ready.
Maybe it’s just as well. Now he can go pick the yellow bud on her rose bush without her seeing. It’s the first bud. He’s been eyeing it all week. That rose bush is still sitting there in its plastic bag.
It’s for the little bottle next to his bed. ’Cause if you ask him, a real flower’s the only thing he’s short of.
SERMONS ON THE MOUNT 
Mol wakes up. She’s not altogether sure where she is. ‘Tip-tip-tip’, she hears. It’s raining. Where’s it raining now? She sits up. Here’s Pop, next to her. There’s Treppie, on the back seat. Pop and Treppie are both sleeping. Toby’s awake. He looks at her with big shiny eyes from where he’s sitting in the dicky at the back. All she can see through her window are drops of water. She winds down the window. It’s the Zoo Lake parking lot. That’s where they are.
First they were on the koppie. That’s right, now she remembers. With sermons. And Klipdrift. She touches her head. It hurts. Too much Klipdrift today. The stuff just makes her feel sleepy, but what could she do, with all the nerves in the house about the girl who was supposed to be coming, and everything. So when they finished looking at Lambert’s den, she helped herself to another shot. And then she went and lay down, ’cause Pop and Treppie just couldn’t get themselves going. Before she knew it she was fast asleep. The next thing, Pop was shaking her. All she could see were little stars.
‘Get up! Quick!’ Pop said. He was standing in the door, looking down the passage towards the den and then back into the room. In and out, in and out he kept looking, completely white with nerves.
‘She’s here!’ Pop said. ‘Quick! We must go!’
So she dragged herself to the front, even though she wasn’t properly awake yet. She only really came to when they got to the koppie. And not by herself. The sermons did it.
Pop stirs in his seat next to her. He looks all broken-jointed. His head lolls over the back-rest and his knees are jammed at an angle against the gear lever. Shame, he must also be tired after all the fuss. He was wiped out even before they left the house.
They had to stand on the pavement next to the car, waiting for Treppie. He’d taken the girl through to the back. Pop was pacing up and down, blowing out clouds of smoke. They told her later they’d looked high and low to find a girl, and in the end they decided to pick one up off the street. With a touch of the tar-brush, Pop said. Shame, a little touched. And Lambert himself is also a bit touched in the head. She wonders when they’ll be able to go home again. What’s the time? Probably early morning already. Lambert should surely be finished by now? Finished! God help her!
Pop said the girl cost a packet. He said Treppie tried to bargain with her, asking if they couldn’t first pay her a deposit. Then that girl told Treppie she may be a rent-piece, but she wasn’t yet a lay-by. Not slow on the uptake, Pop said. A real livewire. Well, so far, so good: that’s what Lambert said he wanted. Now he’ll see how things really work. Not everyone’s just going to do what he says. She hopes the whole thing doesn’t turn into a big fuck-up again. Pop said Treppie told the girl a lot of stuff and nonsense that she had to spin Lambert. That she was a high-class whore, a Cleopatra or something. And that she should keep a close watch, ’cause Lambert sometimes got wild. And if Lambert did get a bit wild she should pull his pants down over his feet and get the hell out of there. Pop said Treppie almost ruined the whole business with his horror stories. In the end they had to pay all the money in a lump sum, more than a hundred rand, just for an hour. Mol has her doubts. This woman is a stranger to Lambert. She’ll have to know her stuff, ’cause sometimes Lambert takes a while to get going. It’s a good thing they got out of the house. She told Pop, she really didn’t want to be there if the whole thing blew up, ’cause then she’d be the one to fix what that whore went and stuffed up. She could just see it coming.
She’s never before seen Pop in such a hurry. Treppie had hardly gotten into the car when Pop took off so fast that her head nearly jerked off her neck. They were thrown sideways, this way and that, as Pop wheeled around the corners. And when he skidded to a stop outside Ponta do Sol, she almost bumped her head in front. Pop was in a state all right. They bought Cokes and things and rushed back to the car. Then she asked him where was he taking them, but he just leant forward and stepped on the accelerator.