‘So, are you going to help me this morning, Mol?’
‘Who, me?’
‘Yes, Mol, me and you. We’re going to play Helpmekaar and Reddingsdaadbond.’
‘Huh?’
‘Never mind, Mol, just help a little here, ’cause you’re the only who’s up and about this morning. Or would you like me to go wake King Kong and Rip van Winkle?’
‘Who? No, leave them,’ Mol says quickly. ‘I’ll help you. Leave them so they can get some rest.’
‘Fine,’ he says. ‘It’s nice that you want to help; just a pity it’s a bit late.’
‘Late?’
‘Yes, Mol, late, like a dead star. You should’ve helped when it could still have made a difference.’
‘Difference?’
‘Yes, it would have made a big difference if you’d brought him down.’
‘Who?’
‘Lambert, when he was still inside you. He’s caused us nothing but misery, right from the start. Look at the roof. Look at you. We’re all in our glory just ’cause you and Pop wanted to play housy-housy. Man and wife. Big happy family, I say. Next time Fort Knox will rip the whole roof down. And after that the walls. It’s just a matter of time.’
Mol looks at the heap on the grass. Gutters, the overflow, the TV aerial.
‘The poor bastard belongs in a madhouse,’ he says, shoving the gutters around with his foot. Most of the pieces are rusted through. ‘He should be strapped into a fucken jacket and put on to a steel trolley. Then the nurses can hose porridge down his throat with an enema pump.’
‘Sis, man, Treppie!’ says Mol. ‘Sis!’
‘Don’t come and sis me,’ he says. He can feel he’s got her going now.
‘You’re a devil, Treppie,’ says Mol, drawing in more breath for the next sentence. ‘And he takes after you, Treppie, that’s what! It’s the truth. Look at Pop. He’s soft. Look at me, I’m also soft. You’re the one with the attitude. Stubborn! Devil’s blood!’
‘He’s not my fucken child,’ Treppie shouts. ‘I always pulled out. Aimed high, to the side, ’cause I know what comes from that kind of thing! So don’t come and talk shit here on a Monday morning!’
‘Evil seed can fly,’ says Mol.
‘What? What you say there?’
‘I said the devil’s seed can fly through the air. Devils can’t be put off. Once they’ve got their sights on you, it’s tickets!’
‘What rubbish you talking now?’
‘Lambert says it’s in the Britannica!’
‘Let me tell you something, Mol. It’s not in the Britannica, it’s in Lambert’s sick head. Together with all the other shit-stories he sells you.’
‘Well, if it’s shit, then he gets half of it from you, Treppie!’
He can see she thinks she’s got him in a corner now.
‘Ag really, Mol, like what?’
‘Like that you and Pop are going to get him a whore for his birthday.’
‘I see, and who told you that?’
‘Pop said—’
‘Trust him.’
‘I said to Pop he must tell you, you mustn’t do this kind of thing to Lambert. If you promised him, you’d better do it, otherwise …’
‘Otherwise what, Mol?’
‘You know bladdy well what, Treppie. In the end I’ll go lie down and die in a heap somewhere. I’m completely buggered down under. I can’t any more.’
‘Don’t come and moan at me, sister. I told you and that stupid fool of a Pop, long time ago, you must be careful. But the two of you thought you were playing leading roles in Genesis. Just like that first fucken batch — Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel — all in the same family, and Lot with his randy daughters, and Noah, whose own sons buggered him. No wonder the whole lot of them drowned in the end. They say inbreeding makes people’s bones so heavy they can’t even tread water.’
‘Really, Treppie? Where did you hear that?’
‘In the Britannica, Molletjie, in the Britannica,’ Treppie says, cackling.
Mol picks up one of the postbox’s broken struts and throws it at him.
‘Devil!’ she screams. ‘Satan’s child!’ The strut flies through the air in an arc. Treppie has plenty of time to duck.
He laughs at her. ‘You must aim for the middle wicket, old girl, the middle wicket.’
‘No manners,’ says Mol.
‘You’d better get your aim right if you want to help this morning, old girl! Go fetch the ladder behind the den’s wall so I can get up on the roof. Then drag the toolbox on to the stoep so you can pass me things I need. And when you’ve done that, go look on the scrapheap for a piece of pipe, about two fingers thick. Ask Lambert where he keeps his glue. And while you’re there, you may as well bring out the welding box and the helmet as well.’
‘Huh?’
‘Ja, Mol. Running repairs.’
Treppie looks at her, standing there with dazed eyes. He first saw that look on her face when he found her sitting in the fridge after she lost Lambert’s spanner in the long grass. The day everything burnt down. Ever since then, she shuts up like a clam the moment anyone asks her about tools.
‘Huh?’ Treppie mimics her. ‘Huh? Huh? Huh?
‘Come,’ he says. ‘Shake your head a little first, Mol, like this,’ and he shakes his head.
Mol shakes her head. Then she stops. ‘Why?’
‘Just shake a little more,’ he says, and he bends his head closer to her, as if he wants to listen.
‘What?’ asks Mol.
‘Don’t you hear anything?’
‘What am I supposed to hear?’
‘The loose screws in your head, sister, a whole assortment of nuts and bolts, all of them odd pairs — pop rivets, fissure plugs, wing-nuts, you name it!’
‘Wing-nut,’ says Mol.
‘Nice and scrambled, hey,’ Treppie says. ‘It’s hereditary.’
‘Scrambled what?’
‘Scrambled eggs, Mol, scrambled stories, scrambled genes, scrambled rails, we’re one big pot of scrambled Benades.’
‘One big pot,’ says Mol.
‘Yes, Mol, and they can put us inside a centrifuge and spin us till we burst, but we won’t unscramble.’
‘Centrifuge,’ says Mol.
‘Ja, old sister, we’re twisted into each other like the innards of a fridge; remember, like those fucked-up fridges we sometimes used to get for repairs, when their motors seized up from the wrong voltage.’
‘Voltage,’ says Mol.
‘Ja, from too little voltage. The motor gets too hot, and then it seizes. It’s from too few volts that they do that.’
‘Volts,’ says Mol. ‘We’ve got too few volts.’
‘Now you’re talking, sister. Now you’re talking.’
Mol goes and sits on the edge of the stoep. She takes the cigarettes out of her housecoat pocket and lights up. ‘First sit a little,’ she says, blowing out smoke.
Treppie looks at Mol, who first wants to sit. The sky above Triomf is blowtorch blue. He looks at the half-cut grass. Then he kicks at a fresh molehill, and remembers how, all those years ago, they came to the city as children with Old Pop and Old Mol. All the way from Bloemhof, on a Railways bus. He was very small then, five or six. All their possessions were squeezed into trunks behind them, on the lorry’s trailer.
He was still on Old Mol’s hip the day she let the screen door slam closed for the last time. She closed the outside latch and said: ‘Farewell, Klipfontein.’
Klipfontein was his grandma and grandpa’s farm in the Western Transvaal. The depression stripped them bare. There was no water, anyway. Just stones. That’s how his father explained things to him.
Then his father decided to write a letter to the Railways. He’d never been a Hertzog man, but he always said Hertzog’s Railways plan for poor whites was the best thing an Afrikaner had ever thought up.