Treppie sang: ‘Up, up and away-y-y in my beautiful balloon!’
By this time, he was in high spirits. Mission completed, he said, now they could relax with a drink and a wide-angle view. So that’s where they were going — to the Brixton koppie.
Why did they have to go there again? she asked, but Treppie was running off at the mouth. He told her she should see it as a visit to the Mount of Olives. They would pour Klipdrift into their cans of Coke and drink them down to the very dregs! Yes, that’s what he said!
Pop was dead serious. He said this wasn’t the time and place for profanities. Didn’t Treppie realise how much depended on tonight? They should all hope and pray that everything went off well.
In for a penny, in for a prayer, Treppie said. They didn’t need to push him hard, ’cause when he had the city at his feet like this, he could pray a bird right out of a bush.
When they eventually settled down under the tower, she saw Pop would far rather drink than pray. ‘Ka-pssshhhtt!’ He ripped open the tab on his Coke tin, taking a big gulp — she saw his Adam’s apple jump and fall — to make space for a decent shot from Treppie’s bottle.
So there they sat, looking out at the view, the city’s lights shivering as far as the eye could see. More like candles than electricity. Far out to one side, they could see the Florida Lake water-organ and its lit-up fountain. Must be a lovely organ, that. She’s already told them she wants to go there and see it close-up, but they never get that far. Too many other things.
Then Treppie started up again.
‘All people that on earth do dwell
Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice’
he sang, just from seeing an organ in the distance. He’s got a head like a see-saw, that’s all she can say.
The next thing, Pop also started up, out of the blue: ‘What if you know you’re dying?’ he said.
She got such a fright she almost fainted. Pop wiped his mouth with an angry swipe and passed her his chocolate.
No, God, she said, there, eat your own chocolate, Pop. But he took the chocolate, ripped off the paper and flipped it right over his shoulder for Toby at the back. A whole half a Snickers. And Pop so loves his chocolate.
She thinks Treppie got a fright, ’cause he started talking about Toby being so spoilt and how he must think he’s part of a travelling church bazaar — if it wasn’t Snickers, it was Smarties. Treppie didn’t really want to change the subject. He made that speech of his about bazaars and things just to play for time. She could hear from his voice he was brimming with that topic of Pop’s. Meanwhile, Pop sat and looked straight ahead of him. She could see he was gritting his teeth. It was a long while before he started talking again.
No, what he meant was this: say you were dead certain you were busy dying, quite fast. So fast you could more or less count the days still granted to you. Pop’s voice was slow and dead even, like it always gets when he’s telling you what he’s saying isn’t small-talk.
She wanted to change the subject, so she said in the end everyone had to go, anyway — what was bothering him so much all of a sudden?
But by then Treppie was up and away already, running with that ball.
Ja, he said, pointing past her and Pop in the front seat, they must look at all those lights. ‘I say unto you, for every one of those lights, someone will either give up the ghost or give his first cry tonight.’ When Treppie starts with ‘I say unto you’, then you know he’s halfway up the pulpit already and you’re not going to get him down again so easy. ‘It’s one and the same thing. Breathe in, breathe out, eat, shit, eat, shit, poof, gone! No one asked for it.’
But Pop said, no, that wasn’t his point.
Well then, he’d better get to the point before the point got to him, Treppie said, and she said, yes, Pop should get to the point so he could get past it.
That’s what she thought, then. But it was a helluva long point, that.
No, Pop said, what he meant was, what did you do if you knew your time was running out. What should you do if you knew?
Now it was getting a bit too much for her. She switched on the radio ’cause she didn’t know what else to do, and the car suddenly filled up with a love song, something about ‘only a heartbeat away’. That turned out to be completely the wrong thing to do. Treppie stuck his arm past her and switched off the radio, shouting, ‘Shuddup! Shuddup with that fucken rubbish!’ right into her ear. Even Toby said ‘ee-ee’, he got such a fright. Then Treppie sat back heavily, his chest heaving. He tried to light a cigarette but he was striking the matches so hard they kept breaking. ‘Fuck!’ he said after each match broke.
It was Pop’s should that threw Treppie so badly. If there’s one word you must never say in front of Treppie, it’s ‘should’. It was like someone had poured turpentine on to his tail.
‘Should,’ he said. ‘The fuck with should! When you die, you die, period, over and out. You don’t owe anyone any shoulds ’cause you never ordered it. You never asked to be born, nor to live all the days of your life in this furnace pit.’
At first Pop said nothing. He just looked in front of him out of the window. Treppie blew smoke into Pop’s neck as he talked. It looked like Treppie was about to start shooting fire from his nostrils, like that dragon on the video he brought from the Chinese one year for Guy Fawkes.
Then Pop said, ‘Furnace pit’, so softly you almost couldn’t hear what he was saying.
So she asked, what was a furnace-pit.
‘Yes, ask!’ Treppie shouted. ‘Ask!’ It was a hole full of bricks, he said. A deep, burning hell-hole where you sat and baked bricks, all day, every day, and when you were not baking them they sat and looked at you, stacks and stacks of those rough, red things.
Pop turned his head a bit, like nothing at all was the matter, and he asked Treppie how it was that he came up with this kind of thing.
He came up with what he came up with, Treppie said, Pop didn’t have to worry about coming up with anything whatsoever; all he had to do was look in a dictionary. There it stood, in letters as large as life, for anyone to read: furnace pit. And he was sure Pop knew all the other names for that pit. Arse-end, deep-end, furnace-hole, hell-hole, long-drop, Treppie said, hauling out all the names for holes that he knew, and he said the Benades were sitting in the lot of them. That was the one thing. And the other thing was it wasn’t their fault.
Her chocolate was sticking to the top of her mouth by now. She’s never been able to chew when people fight. She felt quite paralysed. ’Cause if there’s one word that she can’t stand, then it’s fault. Old Pop always used to say everything was her fault, and then Old Mol would jump in front of her when she saw a punch coming her way. Or she, Mol, would jump behind Old Mol. Then she felt it was all her fault, twice over, ’cause Old Mol was always looking black and blue from taking the blows meant for her.
Treppie must have seen her say the word fault, even with her mouth full of Snickers.
Yes, fault, Mol, fault, he shouted, making his mouth droop and saying fault in the same way she does when she doesn’t have her tooth in her mouth and she says something. It was so bad she put her hands over her ears, and when she took her hands away again, Treppie was still saying it wasn’t their fault, because of something.
Because of what? she asked. Now she was curious, but she had to ask Treppie three times before he gave her an answer. By then he was drinking the Klipdrift straight from the bottle, ‘ghloob-ghloob-ghloob’, as though it was water on a hot day.