She found him still sitting there. She took the sheet off to tell him he must please come and do something, Lambert had kicked Treppie right out of the house and now Treppie had no pants on and the NPs had arrived to see if they’d voted right.
Yes, when she looked again, there was Treppie lying starkers on the lawn with Lambert stomping on his fingers. He broke them all, one by one. ‘Crack! Crack! Crack!’ she heard as those little bones in Treppie’s hands broke. Such bony little birdy-hands, too.
And those two from across the road stood there with their mouths open, staring at them. That was their day for moving out. Going to live somewhere else. The same day. No wonder.
It never rains but it pours, Treppie still said when they got back from the voting. They saw, across the road there, a few crock lorries and some lazy, slackarse-movers with red noses trying to move the dykes’ stuff. She must say, she looked at them and thought the lorries in front of their own house looked a damn sight better, just for a change. And their painters looked like angels from heaven compared with those wash-outs on the opposite side.
Anyhow, then Treppie said he hoped they knew what they were doing. Those movers looked like a bunch of cheapskate rehabs to him. Must have been all the dykes could find on voting day, as if they really had to go and move on a day like that.
All they seemed to be loading on to the trucks were plants.
One table, two chairs, one bed, and for the rest, just plants, plants and more plants. After a while it looked like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon on wheels.
That’s what Treppie said.
He said some people painted their walls white and others moved to greener pastures, but in the end everyone, without exception, just looked north and fucked forth, as if their lives depended on it. Delicious monsters.
Well, yes.
Sometimes there’s truth in Treppie’s jokes.
But that wasn’t even the beginning, that day of the 27th. Lambert was so wild after he’d finished with Treppie, he came for her next. She was walking around, shouting, ‘Pop’s dead! Pop’s dead!’, when he came and stabbed her in the side with Treppie’s pocket-knife. Just like that. In front of all those people. That’s when the painters dropped their sheets and ran for their lives.
Toby thought it was fun and games again. He tried to bite Lambert’s backside as Lambert ran amok there on the grass. With the knife still open, like he wanted to slaughter a pig or something.
Lambert turned around to give Toby a kick under the arse, but Toby wasn’t there any more and Lambert kicked the prefab wall instead. Broke his leg. A bad break, right at the ankle. And there he lay, roaring on the green, green grass of home, as Treppie said later. She stood around, holding on to her side where the blood was pouring out. And Treppie just lay there, crying from laughing so much. Broken fingers and all.
‘One dead, three injured!’ he shouted. ‘One down, three to go!
‘Aid us, aid us, afflictions abrade us!’ he shouted for all to hear.
Abrade.
On the very day Treppie appears before the heavenly gates he’ll still think of an impossible word to say. He’s always called himself an occasional speaker. Shame, and Pop used to say he shouldn’t waste his talents so, he was capable of doing so much more. And then Treppie would say he couldn’t help it, that’s what the people, meaning them, wanted from him. A story for every occasion, and who was he to say they must listen, he could also tell classic stories. In any case, that would be casting pearls before swine.
Classic.
Treppie says a piece that’s classic, whether it’s a piece of music or a piece of furniture or just a piece of house, is something that lasts forever, something everyone will like. The rest are just May-flies.
Well, if you ask her they’re not even May-flies, let alone classics. May-flies are complete in themselves and they fill the whole world, even if it’s just for one day. But the Benades were crocks from the moment they first saw the light of day. Pieced together and panelbeaten, not to mention screwed together, from scrap. Throw-away pieces, left-over rags, waste wool, old wives’ tales, hearsay, a passing likeness from the front and a glimpse from behind. That’s how they found themselves here on this earth. Things that get thrown away. Good for nothing. Write-offs.
She’s getting morbid now out here on the stoep. It’s not really so very bad, after all. She just thinks like this so she won’t have to think about Pop, but actually she does want to think about Pop. She wants to remember Pop. That’s what she wants to do. She wants to honour his memory on this Guy Fawkes night.
Shame, and there they stood at the JG Strydom hospital, at midnight of the same day. Treppie said come hell or high water, he wanted a post-mortem. A family like theirs couldn’t brave the future with a dubious cause of death in their midst. That’s now after she said Pop was blue and his nose was white and she thought it was from lack of breath that he died, sitting there and sleeping under the sheet and everything.
Never mind what she really thought. That’s what she said. She knew Pop would’ve done the same, to preserve the peace. And now Pop wasn’t there to do it himself any more.
And Lambert said, yes, he agreed, Pop couldn’t get enough air, ’cause apart from that sheet over his head, there were all those fumes and the spray from the Wonder Wall paint, too.
But when Treppie saw the drawer broken in half like that, he began to smell a rat.
Ja, and then Toby stood there and went ‘ee-ee’ next to Pop’s shoes, the ones he was still wearing. Most of the time Pop used to kick them off before he fell asleep in his chair, but now they were shoved so strangely under the chair, you’d swear they didn’t have feet in them any more. Toby’s face also looked like he had an idea or two about that pose of Pop’s there in his chair, with his knees pointed together in front like a Parktown Prawn’s.
Anyway, she and Treppie and the painting foreman managed to get Pop into the car, and then Treppie drove them to the hospital, broken fingers and all. Lambert changed the gears for him. By now, Lambert’s foot was swollen the size of a rugby ball. She’d taken off her housecoat to wrap around her middle and she was holding on to her side where it was still bleeding so much. What else was she supposed to do?
If she hadn’t been stabbed, she said to them as they stood around outside trying to make a plan, she would have driven the car herself. But they didn’t even hear her. Neither of them took her driving lesson seriously. Lambert didn’t even know about it. He had been sleeping that afternoon, after his shooting practice. And Treppie had such drunken blues that night, he stood there playing piano in the air. First in the air and then on the edge of the stoep, as if their whole yard was a concert audience, and he was on a stage with an entire orchestra behind him.
Eventually they were all bandaged and plastered up and at last they stood there, next to the doctor, who had to write out the death certificate for Pop on the trolley.
‘Heart attack,’ the doctor said. ‘And multiple thrombosis.’ She saw Lambert take a deep breath through his mouth as he stood there on his crutch.
‘Lambert,’ Treppie said, ‘shut your mouth, you look like you’ve just seen a ghost.’
‘Multiple skull fracture,’ the doctor said next, prodding Pop’s head with his hand so they could see the pieces of his skull moving back and forth.
Lambert shut his mouth. And the doctor looked at each of them, one by one. Right into their faces.