‘Now you listen to me, Martinus Lambertus Benade,’ his mother always said. ‘I didn’t come to Johannesburg to be a charity worker. In Klipfontein I could at least spend some time in my own house, with my own family. I could slaughter a decent chicken for the pot and keep us alive by selling down and soap.’
Then Old Pop used to slam down his lunch-tin and tell her she must stop complaining. She still had both her eyes. He still had both his legs. They should count their blessings. They had each other. They had a roof over their heads. Ja, the story of their lives. Then his mother would ask his father to name all the things they were supposed to have. All she could name were the things they no longer had. Many times she complained how she’d baked two loaves of bread and cooked a big pot of soup, just yesterday. Enough for the whole family as well as the Beyleveldts. Soup that she made from the cheapest soup bones and barley, and from vegetables she found in the dustbins. It took her hours to sort the vegetables and cut out the good pieces. She’d worked until late at night with her own two hands, which were full of holes from the Singer’s needles. And then, when she went to the kitchen the next morning, the pot was empty and both loaves of bread were gone.
Those days Old Mol used to knead the bread. For the first rise, she covered it with an old greycoat that someone on the Railways had given Old Pop.
But no one could live on bread alone, she used to say. When she started like this, nothing could stop her. She used to name all the things they would soon be needing but didn’t have. New shoes. Warm clothes for winter. A pair of glasses for her ’cause her eyes couldn’t take the poor light at the factory, and the light in their room, which was even worse. Doctors’ fees and medicine for Little Mol and Little Pop. Their chests were closing up again. How was she supposed to know what was wrong with them?
Then his father would tell her to shut her mouth this very second, he couldn’t bear it any longer. Wasn’t he, a white man, doing work that no white man should ever have to do? But his mother wouldn’t shut up. She said she wished they were kaffirs. Then at least she’d be able to give them porridge every day, with no salt or milk or sugar. Then they could dress in rags and no one would even know the difference.
At this point, Old Pop would thump her on the chest and tell her in that case she should go find herself a kaffir husband. So she could bring forth bastards, if that’s how little she felt for her volk.
His mother always said: ‘Not in front of the children, Lambertus.’
Later, Old Mol took to making their food on a Primus in the room. She locked the bread in a shoe cupboard. And she put up a sheet between the children and the grown-ups. But they still saw and heard everything. They watched the shadows on the sheet when Old Pop climbed on top of Old Mol and began riding her wildly, until she started crying and calling out the Lord’s name.
When their mother and father were out working, the children stayed behind on their own until he, Treppie, was old enough to go to school. In the beginning, they all used to get up together, dress for school, and then eat the bread and jam their mother had made for them. Then his father used to say to his brother: ‘Look after your sister nicely, Little Pop.’ And his mother used to say to his sister: ‘Look after Treppie nicely, Molletjie, remember he’s the smallest.’
‘All we have in the world is each other. Us Benades must stand together,’ his father sometimes said with a crack in his voice. When his father said that, his mother’s head jerked slightly, just like it jerked when old One-Leg Beyleveldt used to say to them: You must do this, or, You must do that. Then Old Pop asked Mr Beyleveldt how many Us there were in his alphabet. They were trying to look after their own. He must please just leave them in peace.
Old Mol was also getting nice and mixed up. She knew ‘each other’ was too little to live by, but what else could they do? Everything was starting to fuck out, even then.
And so that’s how they learnt to look after ‘each other’. How he and Little Mol and Little Pop learnt to take care of ‘each other’.
‘Look after’ was supposed to mean they were valuable. More valuable than other people. Most other people couldn’t look after themselves properly. That was Old Mol’s opinion in those days. She clung to that belief, even though she knew there was something wrong with it. What’s more, it also meant that if they wanted to fight or look for trouble, they had to do it with each other and not with other people. A ‘well-looked-after’ person was someone who stayed the way he was, a person who kept to himself, to his own kind.
His father always used to say: ‘That which belongs together, must remain together.’ That’s why he voted for Malan’s National Party in the 1948 election. Out of family instinct more than anything else. There was no other choice.
And that’s why Mol still nods her head up and down so hard when those two snotnoses from the NP come and tell them how ‘valuable’ they are to the Party, how they belong heart and soul to the big National Family, whose members are now looking after each other ‘across the boundaries of race, language and culture’. Mol doesn’t hear the last part. All she hears are Old Mol and Old Pop’s words.
To him, those two sound more like far-fetched versions of Hertzog or Smuts, like margarine that has everything to make it spread but still isn’t butter. It’s a long time since he’s seen any butter. And he doesn’t feel at all looked after by the NP and their so-called canvassers. He feels they want to use him like they’ve always used people. He knows they talk behind his back. Fuck knows what gets pumped into their heads at headquarters. He just wishes Lambert would corner that girl with the airs and give her some of his treatment, so she can also learn what ‘belongs to’ and ‘look after’ mean.
In later years, the three of them often stayed in bed together after the grown-ups had left the house. School was shit — they were made to swallow spoonfuls of cod-liver oil, so they stayed in bed instead. Little Pop’s dick could already stand up nicely by then. He showed Treppie and Mol how to rub it. They killed time on those mornings by rubbing Little Pop’s dick. It took away the hunger. They were allowed to have their morning bread only once Pop had come three times; otherwise they’d get hungry for their afternoon bread too soon. And if that got eaten, they stayed hungry all day, until their mother came home from the factory at night.
Hungry time, time that you feel in your stomach, is a terrible thing. But what’s worse is how time feels when you see the same things happening over and over again. Like things that get broken and then get fixed again. Over and over again, fucken broken and fixed again. And nothing ever gets fixed properly.
Treppie suddenly sees Mol coming round the corner. She’s dragging the ladder behind her.
‘Pick the damn thing up, woman,’ he shouts. His voice sounds too high. He mustn’t think about these things. It makes him shaky. It causes accidents.
‘It’s heavy, Treppie,’ says Mol.
‘Yes, Mol, that’s what you call the effect of gravity.’
‘Gravity,’ says Mol.
‘Yes,’ says Treppie, ‘that’s the force that holds us down here in Triomf, in Martha Street, on our feet, in our skins, together, with a roof over our heads. Otherwise we’d all have floated away by now, one by one, and fallen to fucken pieces.’
Then, for the first time, he sees Lambert. He’s standing on the stoep with no shirt. He’s got that mad look in his eyes that he gets when he’s been lying on his bed for too long.