5. SWEET IS THE DAY
When Pop woke up and couldn’t pick up the smell of battery acid from Industria, he knew it was going to be a good day. And when he hooked his braces over his shoulders, in front of Mol’s three-piece dressing table — he was standing before the middle panel, the only one still there — he did it carefully, out of respect for the feeling he’d just had. Carefully, ’cause these days he feels to himself like a place he doesn’t know, a place full of strange noises coming at him through a thick mist. Carefully, he blew the dust from the yellow plastic roses. Dust motes flew around his head, but he didn’t move. He waited, bent over, for the dust to settle. You have to be careful on days like this.
And when he got to the kitchen, Lambert was already there. ‘Pop, do you want a polony sandwich too?’ he asked.
He said okay and then Lambert said he must come join them, they were sitting out in the yard.
And when he came round the corner, there they all were, sitting with their bodies in the shade and their feet in the sun. On Coke crates, with their backs against the den. Treppie pulled something out of the den for him to sit on, and Lambert brought him some coffee and a polony sandwich. ’Strue’s God. Who would have believed it?
Now they’re sitting peacefully there in the shade. Treppie’s trimming his nails and Mol’s feeding Gerty little bits of her sandwich. Flossie’s hubcaps are lined up in a row in front of Lambert. The other day he knocked the dents out, and now he’s using a fine little brush to paint the really bad spots with silver paint.
‘How’d you sleep, Pop?’ Lambert asks.
This can’t be true.
‘Huh?’
‘I said, did Pop sleep all right?’
Can you believe it? Someone’s asking him if he slept all right.
‘Yes, thanks,’ he says, ‘I slept nicely.’
As Mol feeds Gerty, Pop sees her head jerk forwards, and then backwards again. No, jerk’s the wrong word. It wasn’t a jerk and it wasn’t a shake; not a nod, either. It was like a little tremor. But she doesn’t look up.
‘Nicely,’ Pop says, and his voice sounds like it’s blowing from far away, through thin clouds. ‘Nicely, thanks, my boy,’ he says again.
Treppie gives a little cough. Then everyone’s quiet for a while.
All you hear is Lambert’s brush. ‘Swish-swish’ it goes over the hubcaps; Treppie’s pocket-knife nail clipper goes ‘clip-clip’; and Gerty’s breath comes and goes heavily inbetween the bites of sandwich Mol’s feeding her.
Around them, far and near, they hear the rush of cars, from Ontdekkers on one side to Victoria on the other, from Thornton’s uphill stretch, where the cars go into lower gear, to the last bit of Empire, where they always dice to the robots.
‘Look,’ says Mol, and everyone looks where she’s pointing. Someone’s let his homers out for the morning. A whole flock of them, flying first bright side up, then dark side up as they turn around. ‘Sweereereep’, they come flying overhead, and when they come past again, they’re even lower, ‘wheedy-wheedy-wheedy’.
‘When they’re full of sights like this, it means the rains are coming,’ says Treppie, clicking his knife closed.
‘Right,’ he says. ‘Duty calls.’
‘I’ll give you a lift,’ says Pop, pushing himself up on Lambert’s shoulder.
‘I’m staying so I can finish this,’ says Lambert.
‘No, fine,’ Pop says. ‘Then I’ll see you all later.’
He taps Mol on the shoulder as he passes. She clears her throat. ‘Bread and milk,’ she says.
Pop pulls the car out from under the carport. He takes Treppie to the Chinese in Commissioner Street, just as he often does, but today he feels different.
As he drives home across the bridge, back over the railway tracks, he gets a sudden feeling that something’s about to happen.
Once across the bridge, he switches lanes and drives towards Braamfontein. The taxis hoot, but he keeps to his course. He parks next to a meter in Jorissen Street.
He doesn’t know what he’s looking for. He’s not looking for anything. He just wants to feel the rush of people around his shoulders; he wants to look at their faces.
He puts twenty cents in the meter. Then he takes one, two, three steps along the pavement. And then he stops, just looking.
People open up in front of him and then close up again behind him as he stands there on the pavement. He feels them brushing against him as they pass. So many strange, busy people.
Someone rattles a tin in his face. Pop throws twenty cents into the tin. He gets a sticker from the Association for the Blind on the front of his shirt.
People are selling vegetables and things on the pavement. Pop sees mangos, and he suddenly craves one. His mouth starts watering. Quickly he walks away. Then he turns around and walks back. He pays fifty cents for a mango and lifts it to his nose. The smell comes back to him from very far away. Fresh sheets, that’s what the smell of a mango’s peel always made him remember. Fresh sheets hanging up in the sun on the farm, before ironing.
He moves towards the edge of the pavement. Then he leans slightly forward, over the kerb, biting into the mango. He uses his teeth to pull back the skin, so he can get to the flesh.
Why don’t they ever buy mangos at the end of the month?
He works out the lie of the mango’s flesh, strangely crosswise on the flat side of the core. The fibres catch in his teeth and people bump into him as he stands there, eating. Piece by piece he spits the peel out on to the street in front of him, until he can put one end of the core right into his mouth and suck the soft mango sap out of the fibres.
Now all he’s got left in his hand is the core. He looks for a place to chuck it. He sees a blue wire-bin on a pole. He smiles. That was really delicious. He throws away the core.
He wipes his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt and rubs his hands over the back of his pants. Then he hooks his thumbs into his braces, pulling them nicely over his shoulders again. He’s got that feeling again, the one he had this morning in front of the mirror. It’s sitting nice and deep now. He stands for a while with his thumbs hooked into his braces. He knows the feeling. It’s as if two warm, open hands are holding him in front, against his chest, and from behind, between his shoulders. Under his skin and inside his flesh. Right up against his bones. He stands like that for a long time, feeling how it feels and smiling to himself. Until someone says to him, here at his feet: ‘Please, boss. Asseblief, baas!’
Pop sees a black man with only one leg. The useless trouser leg is folded above the knee and turned back almost all the way to his bum.
Pop takes out twenty cents and throws it into the man’s cap.
‘God bless you, sir,’ says the beggar.
‘You too,’ says Pop.
When he looks up again, he sees the Ithuba stall. Lambert’s always reading from the papers how much money people win — widows, Post Office clerks, even tramps.
He feels in his pocket for the five-rand note. Mol said bread and milk. It’s already become an expensive morning. What the hell, he thinks. He buys a ticket and puts it down on the counter so he can scratch. The black woman first has to explain to him where to scratch. She smiles a big smile at him. Never in Triomf has he seen a black woman smile at him like this. She smiles a lovely smile and then she says: ‘It’s all right, dearie, just go right ahead.’ And: ‘Maybe it’s your lucky day today.’ And: ‘Don’t worry, the others must wait their turn.’
All those behind him in the queue are black men in suits. And would you believe it, he gets three fives! He buys another ticket. Three twenties! ‘Watch this old bugger, he’s on a roll,’ someone behind him says. As the woman counts out his money, he hooks his thumbs under his braces. ‘Come on, be a devil,’ she says to him. He wishes Treppie were here. Or Lambert. ‘Come on, one more time, you can’t lose now,’ she says. He buys one more ticket. My word, three fifties! ‘Now you must buy twenty-five tickets and carry on,’ someone in the queue says. But he’s finished. That was good enough. Three times lucky. He waits while the woman counts out his money, and then he adds it to the rest in his pocket. He’s not sure how much he’s got by now. ‘Have a nice day, sir,’ the woman says. And as he turns, a big black man takes him solidly by the shoulder and says: ‘Hey, well done, old man, now wish me luck.’