He rubs his jerking shoulder. He sees Toby looking at the candles on the tins, inspecting them one by one as Pop puts them up. Must think it’s Christmas all over again, the poor dog, like he’s in a time-warp or something. He’s been completely mad recently, barking at fuck-all half the time. Must be the bombs going off all over the place, and the shooting in the middle of the night. More and more bombs going off by the day. And now it’s guns with hand-pump action, he reads in the papers. When Toby hears those things going off at night he runs round the house like he’s got a Guy Fawkes movie in his head. Not to mention all the cars that race and crash and the sirens and things on Ontdekkers, a wailing and a gnashing of teeth. The dogs feel it the worst. This afternoon again, when that thing came wheeling down the street, the dogs thought it was coming for them. A monster of a yellow crane with a small head and a long arm. You just saw dogs barking and teeth snapping at those tyres. The wheels were half a house high. So he decided to let Toby out so he could also blow off some steam.
And guess who was sitting up in the cab, along with the kaffir who was driving? None other than those two little lapdogs from RAU. Waving their little white hands from a dizzy height behind a tinted windscreen, as if they were fucken royalty or something. Colour-combined too, like Christmas trees — margarine suns on her ears, and him with a fig-leaf tie in NP colours. Underneath the tie, his stomach was sticking out like a plump white pumpkin.
They all went down to the oak tree at the bottom of the street. The crane stuck out its arm a little further, ‘bzzzt!’, with Jannie White-Pumpkin strapped into a little chair at its tip. He stretched a big banner right around that tree’s crown. It looked like a bad joke, like an ancient creature with a sore head. The banner said, in big, fat letters: THE TIME HAS COME TO CHOOSE BETWEEN THE BUILDERS AND THE BREAKERS! Underneath, someone had written in, just for the occasion, in slanted writing: F.W. LOVES TRIOMF. FORWARD WITH OUR MINORITY! KEEP OUR NEIGHBOURHOOD CLEAN! Pop asked him what he thought it all meant, but all he said was, no comment. He was listening out for his stomach.
So, that was diversion number one. And, he must say, they needed a little break after the shock this morning when they got home and found the house looking like a ghostbuster had ripped through it. Not that he was surprised after all that build up. He’d promised Lambert he’d bring the girl, and there was no way he could go back on his word. He was too deeply dug into the whole story. That’s how it goes in this place. You plug one hole with a story and then the story blows up in your face. Then you’re left with an even bigger hole. Now even the lounge window’s got a fucken hole in it. Well, it keeps him busy, that’s all he can say. Deeper than a hole you can’t go.
Then it was time for diversion number two. Mol again. They must come see, she says, here comes Miss South Africa. But it wasn’t her, it was soft-serve with a difference, ’cause that ice-cream kaffir was covering his backside — the Ding-Dong was decorated with every flag under the sun. From the NP’s flag right through to the DP, the ANC, the PAC and the AWB. And, just for luck, he chucked in a zebra flag from Trek Petroleum, as well as a Vierkleur, a Red Cross, a flag with the Malawian rooster on it, and a Toyota horse. The works. On the aerial, of course, he had a blue peace-flag with little doves on it. Yes, he said, that was the only way. A kaffir couldn’t take chances with ice cream on a day like this, especially in Triomf. That man had a very good nose for business, not to mention a grand sense of occasion.
The only flag he hadn’t seen on that Ding-Dong, he told them, was the flag of the New South Africa, thank God. Then of course Pop wanted to know why, ’cause Pop’s a sucker for adverts. As long as it’s new. So he told Pop he hoped to heaven that he, Treppie, would be six feet under when the New South Africa started to see its arse, ’cause he’d been forced to watch the old South Africa go down the drain and he couldn’t bear to see the new one dying on a life-support system while it handed out golden handshakes left, right and centre. With the bugles of the last tattoo in its ears and a Y-front flag blowing at half-mast in the wind of its last breath. Thank you very much. Two nationalistic fuck-ups, he told Pop, would be too much for a finely tuned and constipated mortal like himself to handle.
All this time Pop just stood there, looking at him like he wanted to start crying. He mustn’t go and start blubbering now, he told Pop, ’cause he could see what was going on in his head. Pop must just understand, he said, a life-support machine was a lie against the truth of death. It didn’t save you from your unavoidable end. He was fed up with this whole show just for Lambert’s sake, he said, and that’s why he’d let the cat out of the bag this morning. Lambert must take the whole fucken lot now and get finished. If he was good enough to inherit all that they still had of any value, namely his fridge book and his fridge tools, then now was also the time for him to inherit the secrets of the fathers, so he could seek his own salvation with open eyes, like a man.
Then Mol echoed him, of course.
‘Yes, fathers,’ Mol said. ‘That’s right. Lambert actually had two fathers, the good father who tried to keep him on the straight and narrow all his life, and the bad father who fucked up every inch of that road, as far as he went.’
Well, what can a person say? Who does she think she is, anyway? So he asked her, in that case, what did she think of a house with no mother? But of course you have to say everything twice before Mol understands, and this time she was really looking for it. So he told her, maybe he was in fact the vital ingredient in their story, and Pop the saving grace, but she should just realise that she was the joy of their desire, in other words the queen bee, and if it hadn’t been for her, then Lambert, club-footed cretin that he was, would never have seen the light of day.
That shut them up. The sun was almost down and Pop said, well, maybe they should have the driving lesson now. In Flossie, he said, just in case. Why not in Molletjie? he asked. Then it would be Mol-on-Mol violence. But no one else thought his joke was funny.
To tell the truth, it wasn’t funny, but these days he can’t help himself any more. It’s his stomach that’s jammed so badly. No one believes him when he tells them it’s enough to make a person write a whole book full of cheap one-liners. And it’s been like this ever since he can remember. What goes in, must come out. And what won’t come out of the one end has to come out the other end. Top-dressing, that’s what he calls it.
Anyhow, then it was a whole palaver again to get Mol into Flossie, ’cause she’d seen in the past how the petrol pedal got stuck when Lambert played go-cart around the house, and how he bumped into things — so hard he sometimes fell right out. There weren’t any seat belts in that thing, either.