Where’s he heard that before? He’s heard his mother say it: Viewmaster. But she’s like that, she says funny stuff at odd moments. Light blue, my beloved, she said to the postbox one day. Or was that Pop? Soft in the head, both of them. When she sees a moth she says TB butterfly. Must be thinking of the J&B butterfly on the whisky advert. She can’t tell TV apart from real life any more. He’s told her so, but Treppie says it’s a highly justified attitude, that, ’cause what else is the world if not one huge sitcom? Then Treppie tells one of his stories about corpses. Like when the Germans put dead babies into their BMWs so they could crash-test them to see if they were sufficiently roadworthy and people-friendly. Some things never change, Treppie says, but after the BMW story, ‘post-mortem’ is a completely new concept to him. Then he kills himself laughing and his mother says she really doesn’t see what’s so funny.
Lambert sees how the painters all around him are starting to climb down from their ladders. He’ll have to start hurrying up now. But then he sees them tying hankies over their mouths with little strings, like doctors before they do operations. Each one clamps a big spray-can on to his back. They climb back up their ladders and start spraying a fine, white mist on to the walls. That must be the matt of the matt-white. In the drawer he sees a pack of pictures held together with an elastic band. Old and faded black-and-white pictures. Underneath each one it says Viewmaster and something else that’s too small to read.
He puts a picture into the groove and moves the handle up and then down again until he can see what’s what through the magnifying glass of the goggles. Now what’s this got to do with the price of eggs, he wonders. Buckingham Palace, he reads. The Changing of the Guard. He tries another one. The Queen Mother, with Windsor Castle in the Background. He looks through them quickly, till he gets to Royal Picnic at Balmoral, where the queen sits on a blanket among her dogs, holding a boiled egg in her hand. No, fuck! This is definitely not the key to his existence! He puts the Viewmaster down on the sideboard, next to the mouth organ.
He scratches deeper in the drawer. Lots of old papers and other rubbish. Their IDs fall out from a plastic bag. He saw Treppie putting them back in here after the voting this morning. That must have been when he left the little key out, and the other ones too. He was in too much of a hurry to go catch his shit! That’s what comes from being in a hurry to shit. Quickly, he pages through their IDs. Lambertus Benade, Martha Benade, Martinus Benade. That’s Treppie. Once or twice, when they all go to fetch their pensions, and him his disability, he’s asked them how come Pop’s also a Benade. And each time Pop explains that he’s from the Cape Benades and Mol and Treppie are from the Transvaal Benades. Their forefather must’ve been the same old Dutchman or Frenchman, but if they were family, then it was very distant family. And in any case, Pop said, it made things easier, like getting the house in Triomf, ’cause in those days families used to get slightly bigger houses than other people. So they lied a bit, saying they were two brothers and a sister plus her illegitimate child from she doesn’t know where any more. But that was all just a lie for the sake of a roof over their heads. He, Lambert, was really Pop and Mol’s love-child, the one she was already expecting when they got married in Vrededorp in nineteen-whenever. And then Pop always tells the story about Treppie’s speech at the wedding, when he talked about the holiness of matrimony and sowing the seed of the watermelon.
Love-child! You wouldn’t say it if you saw how they treat him! If he gets iron, it’s scrap iron. If he gets a girl, it’s a darky. If he gets meat, it’s polony.
Lambert feels his tail-end starting to jerk. He wonders if it’s his conscience that sits there, ’cause it’s not just them, it’s him too. He knows he treats them roughly sometimes. But he supposes once a Benade always a Benade, as his mother says. They’re past praying for, as his father says. Same difference.
Lambert scratches around in the drawer among all the papers. His hands touch a wooden frame somewhere at the bottom. An old family picture. It shows the outside of a house, with a wire gate and bricks at an angle lining the garden path. A man and a woman and a youngish man are standing there, and then there’s a girl and a small boy. The woman’s wearing glasses and a hood. She looks tired. The man’s in a boiler suit. He looks fed up. The little boy’s holding a little toy whip. He looks like he’s pinching his mouth closed. The girl looks sly. She’s got black rings under her eyes and she’s wearing a bonnet, like her mother. The young man’s wearing a waistcoat and a hat with the brim turned up on the one side, with feathers in the band. And a white scarf tied into two silly points under his chin. Looks like he’s on his way to a fancy-dress party.
He taps the underside of the portrait. Then he screws up his eyes, peering through the white fog that fills up the whole lounge. What is it that looks so familiar about this picture? He looks closer. But this here is Pop! In his Voortrekker clothes, like that story he always tells when he rode with Johanna on the wagon. Johanna with her twenty-one stab wounds! When he smeared grease on his scarf, for luck!
He turns the portrait around. The paper at the back’s old and brown. There’s writing on the paper from a pen with real ink. The writing’s badly faded. He traces the letters with his fingers as he reads.
Sweat breaks out on his face. Suddenly he hears that song in his ears, right through the noise of the painting, the song that Treppie always sings when he wants people to open their eyes and pay attention:
It was written on an old sow’s ear
It was a little grey
But to everyone the news was clear
It was the monkey’s wedding day
Over and over he reads what it is he must understand now, but his head just doesn’t want to get it straight.
Vrededorp 1938, it says. And in brackets after that: (The year of the ox wagons). And then: Mum and Dad and Treppie — 10, Little Mol — 14, Lambertus Jnr, in front of our little house.
Further down, the writing gets smaller and more crammed, as if there wasn’t enough space left to fit in the whole story:
With love from Pop to you all, my flesh and blood, in memory of a big moment in the history of our volk. Given for safekeeping to Treppie (Martinus), the apple of my eye, so he’ll never forget from whence he comes.
Lambert feels dizzy. He fumbles behind him for somewhere to sit down. He’s trying to sit, but he’s already sitting. It feels like he’s sitting on a bag full of sharp things. God, no! It can’t be true. Then Pop, not Treppie, is the biggest liar of them all. Then it was Pop who used the truth to lie when he asked Community Development for a house. It was the truth, all along! He’s no fucken distant Benade. He’s fucken dirt-close! They’re all the fucken same, the whole lot of them! Treppie and Pop and his mother!
Lambert rubs his eyes. It feels like he can’t get enough air. He wants to get up, out of the chair. Christ, no. He feels like something that’s already dead, here among all these sheets. He gropes in the air in front of him as he tries to get up. His feet keep catching on Pop’s shoes under the chair, like he’s tripping over them. He feels like he’s fucking out from the inside. Things that have been said, pieces of stories, falling inwards inside his head.
Treppie! That’s him standing there with the pinched mouth! One Old Pop, two sons!