So, today’s the day he’s going to unlock this drawer. All around him the painters are busy on their second coat. Wonder Wall’s paint is ‘quickdrying’, the papers said, ‘matt-white’ and ‘quick-drying’. Like pistons in white sleeves the arms of the painters go up and down as they paint. He looks at the things under the sheets in the middle of the room. He knows them by their shapes: Treppie’s crate, his crate, Pop’s chair, his mother’s chair, the TV, the toolbox. And then there’s the sideboard, with its riffled edge in front.
Lambert works his way in amongst all the stuff. The little key sweats in his hand. It’s the flat one with a round head and a little hole in the middle. He opens his hand and sniffs it. The iron smell is still there, right through the paint fumes. The other two keys he’s put in his shorts pocket. Treppie must just keep shitting for all he’s worth now. But if he does come out, then he’ll see him right, just like that. He’s not scared of Treppie any more. After forty there’s nothing Treppie can say to make him feel small any more. Treppie’s tools and Treppie’s book and Treppie’s keys are all his now. Treppie’s a dead duck.
It’s only Pop. He can feel Pop’s eyes on him somehow, but Pop’s not here. He must be outside, sitting with Mol in the car. Pop’s become very touchy lately. Must’ve found the noise in here too much. At the voting this morning, when the man took Pop’s right hand and pulled it across the table so he could spray his invisible ink, Pop’s arm came out of his sleeve in such a strange way — like the hand was coming right off his arm. Nothing but skin and bone. The point of his nose was white and he was shaking, too. His mother said Pop took so long to vote she started thinking he’d given up the ghost right there in his little booth. Treppie said she was worried for nothing. The whole Transitional Executive Council had Pop by the short and curlies. He knew he had to vote for volk and vaderland.
He lifts the sheet covering the sideboard. Chairs and things stick into his back, but he doesn’t want to shift too much furniture around now. He just gives Pop’s old boots a bit of a shove. They’re sticking out from under the sheet. Jesus, but they’re heavy.
He unlocks the drawer. The little fitting around the keyhole came off a long time ago and where it used to be the wood’s discoloured. He notices he’s short of breath. He rubs behind his neck. What ghost is breathing down his neck now? No, he mustn’t think about that kind of thing.
The mouth organ is lying right in the front of the drawer. He knows it well. It was his grandfather’s mouth organ. Old Pop, they call him.
He remembers, once, how Pop sat and played ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’, but then Treppie came and messed around with him again. He said Pop mustn’t sit there like that and tell lies with a straight face. And he mustn’t start imagining all kinds of things about his family tree, either. Pop’s family tree, he said, was a tree full of hillbillies without any music in their bones. He said Pop might be the musical one in the family, but that was only ’cause Pop’s father hadn’t hit him the way Treppie’s father had hit him. And if Pop didn’t believe it, he should ask Mol — she still remembered how their father had disciplined him, out of the love of his heart, so he’d at least achieve more in life than to sit and play ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ over and over again.
Well, now he’s going to find out what goes for what in this house, and whose father is whose father and what’s a hillbilly in a tree with music in his bones.
’Cause if there’s one thing that has to come to an end now, then it’s Treppie’s fucken bullshit-stories. He says he lies for the sake of truth, the shit. He says it’s a paradox. He once heard Pop say to Treppie that whatever it was, para-this or para-that, if you couldn’t convey the truth with a pure heart, then it didn’t count for the truth, anyway. Then of course all hell broke loose. Treppie said Pop was mixing up truth with goodness, and if there were two things under the sun that were further apart than chalk and cheese, it was those two, and did he, Pop, want Treppie to start telling lies now, just to spare people their pain and sorrow? Pop said if he wanted to put it that way, then his answer was yes, and he, Treppie, would be terribly dirtied and infected by sin if his own answer was no.
‘Infected! Infected!’ Treppie shouted. Was Pop trying to tell him God was a bath full of Dettol-water for washing off the germ of being human?
When those two start on God and stuff, it doesn’t take long before Treppie goes completely berserk. He starts swearing and performing up and down the passage. But it’s not just for show, like when you can’t get the lawn-mower started or the postbox won’t stay on its pole any more.
Then it’s for real.
He’s already seen how Toby, and Gerty too, when she was still alive, used to hide behind the bathroom door with their ears flat against their heads. And his mother would sink on to her knees, right there where she was standing on the loose blocks in the lounge, or on the lino in the kitchen.
Pray, Treppie would shout at her, conceited fucken old cunt, who did she think she was? Did she think she could talk to someone and he’d listen? That almighty tinpot of a God sitting up there welding time together all by himself? Hearing deaf, that’s what he was! ‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’ There he sat, slamming the moon and the sun like pot lids over our heads. Did she think he had a beard and saucer ears like Father Christmas or someone? Forget it, Mother Superior, forget it! She should listen to the way her heart beats in her chest. ‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’ Buggered by Lucky Strikes! That’s what He sounded like! Just look what God’s Providence had wrought over time, creasing the wattles on her throat, weighing down her old gut and cracking the soles of her old feet — being one of the chosen had worn her out good and proper! The whole lot of them in this house, first they were young with God and now they were old with God. God-infested to the back of their teeth! Meanwhile, up there He just kept running down like a king-size bobbin, back and forth like a shunting train. Like the ants, up and down, up and down. If you stepped on him he’d stink like a Parktown Prawn. All he could do was kick up heaps with his back paws. Molehills! Molehills! Molehills!
One day, when things were going like this and Treppie was shouting and screaming, Pop took a swing and connected him a shot just under the chin. Treppie went down like a bag of cement. Out like a candle on the flat of his back, in the passage.
That was the only time he’s ever seen Pop cry. Pop’s tears come very easily, and he’s always got that drop hanging from his nose. The essence of life, Treppie calls it. But that day, when Pop took hold of Treppie under the arms and dragged him away to his room, Pop was folded over double from crying. His tears were dripping on to Treppie’s face, so it looked like Treppie was also crying as he lay there, lights-out.
Pop had tears for Africa, his mother said. Then she looked at him and said he, Lambert, was born in tears and received in tears, never mind sin, and maybe one day she’d tell him what was what, otherwise he’d never understand why they were the way they were in this house.
Well, she waited too long. Now it’s tickets with ‘one day’. One day is today. Today he’ll know what’s what.
The paint machines suddenly sound louder outside. Something falls ‘bam!’ on the roof.
He puts the mouth organ down on top of the sideboard, on the folds of the white sheet. His legs have gone to sleep from sitting in front of the drawer. He gets up. It’s hot. Must be all the closed windows. He pulls the drawer further out. Something sticks. He gives it a hard pull. The thing comes out, with a dent on the one side. It looks like a pair of goggles made from a thin piece of tin with a little arm in front. Here’s a little handle sliding on a groove in the arm. He can shift the handle. He shifts it up and down. What the fuck? He reads the letters on the goggles. Viewmaster.