‘Inbetween the speeches. It was lots of fun. Very jolly!’ Mol nods her head up and down.
‘And if you want to see some more sports, then you must come again some other night. But you’ve seen enough for one day, not so?’ says Treppie. He unlocks the door.
‘Treppie, give them back their money.’ It’s Pop. Treppie pretends he didn’t hear.
He opens the door. He makes a deep bow. Then he waves them out as if they’re bits of fluff. Strangely enough, Van Zyl is standing out there on the little stoep, still in his helmet. There’re a few bees on the net over his face.
Dammit, there she’s gone and let this man give her a fright again. Where’s Gerty?
‘Not to worry,’ says the bee-catcher, ‘they’re nice and tame from the smoke, madam. We’ve got the queen. Now we’re taking the swarm away. You must just close up that hole, otherwise they’ll come back. There was lots of honey.’
He hands over the yellow bucket. ‘I washed it out nicely at the tap first,’ he says. ‘I’ll say goodbye then. All the best, folks,’ he says, waving a white glove behind him.
When he goes, they all look into the yellow bucket under the stoep-light. It’s half-full of wax-pieces. A few larvae stir in the honey.
‘I’m not eating any of that,’ says Lambert.
‘Let them take it,’ says Treppie, ‘then at least they’ll have something for all their trouble.’
‘And their fifty rand!’ says Lambert, laughing.
‘Thanks very much, but no thanks,’ says the girly.
‘Sights. They’re full of sights!’
The girly looks at her with big eyes. Good, good. She’s the one who wanted to come here and say nasty things about them in their own house. She pulls Blazer by his sleeve to the front gate. He still wants to turn around and say goodbye.
‘Come, missie, don’t be so high and mighty. There’s strength in the sweetness. You might still need it!’ Treppie shouts at their backs, but they’re already in their car. It’s pasted full of I love FW bumper stickers. Then they step on the gas, down Martha Street.
‘The last of the great pretenders,’ says Treppie. Pop says they must bring the bucket into the kitchen. He wants to work the honey. He tells her she must collect some bottles from under the sink. From those days when Lambert wouldn’t eat anything but pickled onions.
They work until late. Pop piles up the pieces of wax on a tin inside the bucket, so the honey can run out nicely. Meanwhile, she washes the bottles in boiling water to get rid of the onion taste.
She washes those bottles over and over. Pop smells every bottle carefully before filling them with honey. After a while they’ve got twelve bottles. Enough for a whole year, says Pop. He’s so tired of golden syrup.
At eleven they’re finished. She cuts two pieces of bread for everyone and spreads them nice and thick with Sunshine D and honey. Then she makes coffee.
It tastes good.
‘Mmm,’ says Lambert. ‘Tastes a bit wild.’
Ja, says Pop, it does. He just wonders what could be so wild, here in Triomf. Tastes almost like khaki-bush, or no, like flowers, the kind that grow on the island in the road, there next to Shoprite.
‘Afrikaners,’ says Treppie. ‘Stinkafrikaners.’
9. COUGHING
Gerty’s coughing so much Mol can’t sleep. The poor little thing stands next to her side of the bed, staring at her. Every now and again she makes a noise that sounds like something between a cough and a long, drawn-out clearing of the throat. It’s like the noise Treppie makes in the bathroom in the mornings, only worse. But Gerty doesn’t spit. If she could just gob out that thick slime, like Treppie does, it might help.
Instead, she stands there and lets her head sag, as if she’s lost heart. Her tongue hangs out. Thick, sticky tears drip from her eyes.
Mol lies on her side. She’s looking at Gerty. All she can see is Gerty’s face in the light of the streetlamp. She gets up on to her elbow and turns round to look at Pop. He’s lying with his back to her. She can see the sharp points of his shoulders inside his shirt. His breath whistles. She keeps telling him he mustn’t smoke so much, he must eat more, but he just shakes his head. He eats nothing and he says nothing. When he’s not holding his head in his hands, he’s lifting it up to light a cigarette. Poor Pop. Poor Gerty. She holds out her arm and Gerty takes two steps closer. The little dog lifts her snout. It feels warm and dry on Mol’s hand. Then she hears the sound of Gerty’s breath between the coughs. It’s worse than the coughing. It sounds like it’s more than just a dog’s breath. It feels like the room itself is breathing, like a big in-breath that sucks all the air from the corners and the cupboards and from behind the dressing table, holding it all in.
Mol lies back on the cushion with Gerty’s snout still in her hands. Suddenly she can hear everything, all the noises, inside and outside. The sound of the mattress as she and Pop breathe, the ‘tick-tick’ of a beetle on the ceiling, and above the ceiling the ‘krr-krr’ of the mice. Treppie says they’re rats, but Treppie smells rats everywhere. The tap goes ‘psheee’ as it leaks in the bathroom and the overflow makes a ‘tip-tip’ noise on the roof. Then there’s the sound of running water from next door. She’s told Lambert it sounds like next door’s running bathwater all night long, but he says she’s imagining things. He’s one to talk! And the fridge rattling in the kitchen. First softly and then louder and louder until it switches off, ‘cheeree-cheeree-cheeree-kaplock’. It gets the shakes so bad from switching off that the Coke bottles inside the door start rattling.
She hears Toby wake up in the lounge and scratch himself. ‘Click-click’ go the loose blocks of the parquet floor as he comes walking down the passage to the back of the house. He always knows when she’s awake. Gerty coughs some more and takes two steps back, as if she wants to step right out of the cough. Then she lets her head drop.
Toby comes to look at her with pricked ears. He moves his head closer, sniffing Gerty around the mouth and ears. Toby’s been sniffing Gerty like this ever since she started coughing. In the old days he used to sniff her backside. Now Mol uses her elbows to push herself up. Both dogs look at her. The streetlight from outside shines right though their eyes, which suddenly look just like marbles. The sight almost takes her breath away. A big lorry changes gears in Ontdekkers, blowing ‘phff-phff!’ out of a hole in its guts.
Mol sits up straight. Dear Lord, what’s got into her now? She folds the flaps of her housecoat over one another and feels for her slippers, here next to the mattress. Now she’s in a hurry.
‘Come,’ she whispers. ‘Come, let’s go for a little walk.’ She picks up Gerty and walks through the dark, to the bathroom. She can feel Toby’s cold nose against her heels. Why can’t Gerty’s nose feel like that?
She puts on the light and tears off a piece of toilet paper so she can wipe Gerty’s eyes. But before she does it, she sees a great brown moth on the floor of the bath. As big as her hand. Dead still the moth sits there, as if it has every reason to do so, looking at her from two deep-purple eyes on its back. Like a hand that can fly, with eyes. What does it see? Mol wonders. How much can a moth see? And why’s it looking at her like that? What is she, to a moth? Under the light of the bare bulb she looks for her face in the last little piece of mirror. More pieces keep chipping out. She’s told them, one day someone’s going to look for his face in the mirror and then there’ll be nothing. Just a piece of hardboard. But they won’t listen to her.
All she sees is the area around her mouth. It looks like someone else’s mouth. Skew. It moves in a funny way, like it’s chewing something. She wipes her mouth with her hand. She’s trying to wipe it away. She bends over to look for her eyes, but she can’t find them. She must tell Pop he must get Lambert to fix the mirror. She wipes Gerty’s face and turns off the light. Then she turns it back on again. That moth mustn’t sit there and stare at her in the dark.