Suddenly light streams into the lounge. It’s dead quiet. The workers are taking the screens off the windows.
Lambert gets up. He stands in front of the sideboard. His eyes feel rigid. Jesus, now some sense must come into all this crap.
He supports himself with his knuckles on the sideboard. He feels like he wants to burst out of his seams as the truth plunges down into him. About his people, their house, their dog, in their street, here in Triomf.
He shakes his head. It feels like there’s loose stuff inside his head.
When he’s in a bad mood his mother sometimes looks at him in a funny way, and then she says, God help her, she wonders whose child he really is.
And he always thought it was just her way of talking. Like when she says he’s full of the devil or something. He always knew he was Pop’s child and that the story of his being illegitimate was a lie for Community Development. But if he is his mother’s child, and if his mother says her one brother’s a devil, and the other’s an angel, and he, Lambert, takes after the devil, then Treppie could be … Then his mother doesn’t know which one … then … then …
He turns around. His ears are zinging from the sudden silence. The sun shines sharply through the window. All the curtains are down. All he sees is white, white, white. Outside on the lawn they’re folding up the covers.
His birth certificate, that’s what he must find! He turns back to the sideboard. Now he’s going to scratch till he finds the thing.
If Pop’s his mother’s brother and he can sleep with her, and if Treppie’s also his mother’s brother, then … who the fuck’s his father, then? Whose fucken child is he?
He shuts his eyes. There’s too much white in the room. It makes him see black spots. He digs through the black spots in the drawer. Too many papers here and not enough time. He hears them taking down the sheets in the back room and shifting things back up against the walls.
He finds a piece of paper that’s brown around the edges and worn from being handled a lot. His eyes catch at the words:
… can’t carry on any longer … make an end … failed you and the children … Dear God … forgive …
Then his eyes stick on Treppie’s real name:
The business about Martinus not wanting to talk to me any more is breaking my heart. Make peace with him for my sake, I beg you, Mol. I did it because I love him more than I could ever say and because I want him to grow up decently.
Lambert quickly reads further: … dog’s life, he reads, kaffirwork … and about the Railways that will look after them. Widows’ fund and not much of an estate. He glosses over the next few lines until he comes to the last paragraph:
I know you’re sick in your lungs, Mol. Look after yourself. Don’t let the kaffirs take over your job. Be careful, the Jew Communists will undermine you. They’re heathens, the whole lot of them. A person has only one life and one soul but mine is finished.
He reads about the hope of a reunion with them all one day between the walls of jasper, in the streets of gold.
Underneath is written: Your loving husband, Johannes Lambertus Benade. (Pop.)
The postscript is underlined:
Give Treppie my mouth organ. Lambertus plays better but Treppie needs it more. Try to keep them off each other’s bodies, Mol, in God’s name send them away to different places if you can. So an end can come to you know what. Only a monster will be born from this sort of thing. I’ve heard from the others, more and more such cases are happening among us Railways people.
Slowly he folds up the letter again. He looks at his hands. Skew, full of knobs. He looks down at his legs and his feet. He wishes he’d kept on his white pants that he wore to the voting this morning, if only for this one moment. He wishes he hadn’t felt so hot and got back into his shorts so soon. Now he sees his large knees, his hollow shins, his knobbly, swollen, monster-ankles, his skew, monster-feet, and his monster-toes. Ten of them! All different shapes and sizes. Dog-toenails! He feels his face. A monster. A devil-monster. No wonder! No fucken wonder he’s such a fuck-up. No wonder he can’t even fuck a Hotnot bitch! No wonder only his mother’s good enough for him! It’s all in the family! The plague!
With one rip he pulls the drawer right out of its casing.
‘Family secrets!’ he roars.
His eyes feel like they’re spinning wildly in their sockets. He feels himself breaking the drawer with a cracking shot over the chair’s covered back-rest. He sees a man in white overalls looking at him with big eyes. Then he hears himself shouting at the man to fuck off. The man runs out the front door with a bundle of sheets in his arms. He hears the man shout at another worker trying to come inside: ‘Take cover, the nutcase has lost it!’
He storms down the passage.
‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’ he roars at a white overall here in front of him. ‘Take cover!’ He rams the man out of his way. With one kick, he knocks the bathroom door off its hinges. Then he grabs the door and throws it into the bath.
In front of him, Treppie sits with his pants around his ankles. He’s holding an open newspaper in his hands. Treppie’s smiling at him. The shit!
‘You!’ That’s all that comes out of him.
‘Tut-tut. Showing me the door, are you?’
As if it was all just a fucken little accident.
GUY FAWKES 
Mol stands on the little stoep in front. She’s listening to the crackers as they go off, one here, one there, close by and then far away again. Not so many before, in other years.
Shame, last year she and Pop still shot off some crackers together, right here, in their hands. It was quite jolly. And then they bathed together. Shame, Pop was so gentle with her that night.
She feels Toby rubbing against her leg.
‘Yes, old Toby, so it goes, hey?’
She bends over and scratches him between the ears.
Ever since Pop went, they’ve never really managed to be jolly again.
It was all ’cause the house was supposed to be painted white. Inside and outside. Everything covered with sheets. That’s where the trouble started. She said all along it was going to cost them dearly. Dearly, and how!
The account wasn’t even the worst of it. They found the account in the postbox when they got back from the hospital, that night after the painting. It was for twenty-five thousand rand less the discount of three thousand rand, so it came to twenty-two thousand rand. That ‘prize’ was never a prize, after all. It was a discount.
From then on they got a letter every month with a red sticker saying they must pay, otherwise lawyers would sue them. Treppie tore up the letters every time. Then one day the sheriff came to see which of their things he could take away to sell, but he left almost immediately when he saw none of their stuff was worth anything. He still said something about people like them thinking the New South Africa meant they didn’t have to pay their debts to the Old South Africa. Next, they got a letter from Wonder Wall saying they could pay the account off. Thirty rand a month plus a terrible amount of interest. Now Lambert and Treppie are paying it off, half and half, every month. Treppie says this is now what you call Triomf-debt — by the time they finish paying it off, their matt-white will have cost them ninety thousand rand.
But the account wasn’t even the worst of it. The worst was that no one kept an eye on Lambert that day. So he took his chance and scratched around in the sideboard drawer. Lambert doesn’t know what’s good for him. But it was bound to happen some time or another. Then he went and broke the drawer in half over poor old Pop’s head, right there where Pop was sitting under the sheet. Dead quiet, without bothering anyone. Where she said they must leave him so he could sleep where he always slept.