‘Come, my little doggie,’ she says to Gerty, ‘come take a sip here.’ She pulls Gerty’s head under her arm, and then with the same hand presses the corners of Gerty’s mouth to force it open. Gerty’s got no spirit left. She just opens her mouth. Mol lifts the bottle and slowly lets some brandy run down. ‘Swallow,’ she says, ‘swallow nicely now.’ She rubs Gerty’s throat. Gerty swallows. Then she coughs and coughs and coughs. Mol holds on to her tightly. Her eyes sting.
That’s also the way she held Old Mol at the end. Old Mol would never go and see a doctor. She was scared the doctor would see the black marks where Old Pop used to hit her. She also didn’t want to ask for more time off work. It was bad enough that she had to send one of them to say she was sick every other day when she wasn’t sick at all, just bruised from Old Pop’s fists. Old Pop always used to hit her in the face.
‘Hit me anywhere you want,’ she used to say. ‘I can put on long-sleeve overalls, but please, not my face.’
‘Shuddup! Shuddup! Shuddup!’ Old Pop shouted back. ‘Or I’ll give that jaw of yours some more panelbeating.’
To avoid bothering Old Pop in the middle of the night, Old Mol used to go cough in the bathroom. She coughed up blood, bending over the bath. Then she, Little Mol, went and held her tight. Sometimes Little Pop also did it, but not Treppie. Never. After Treppie got that hiding, he acted like he was deaf to the world. And after Old Pop died, Treppie got even worse.
‘That’s TB your mother’s got,’ Mrs Beyleveldt told Treppie. ‘You must do something about it.’
Mrs Beyleveldt also thought Treppie was the most intelligent of the children. He was at home a lot ’cause he was the youngest, which meant he took a lot of stick about the Benades from Mrs Beyleveldt and her cripple husband.
By then she, Little Mol, was going to the factory with her mother every day. She started when she was fifteen, working next to Old Mol and doing two people’s work. Old Mol was always behind with her shirts. She went too slowly through the thick parts, and then her needles would break. Then Old Mol would just pass it all over to her, and many were the days when she had to do Old Mol’s work as well as her own. But at least they brought some money home. Little Pop began to earn a bit too, although all he could do was piece-work. He was slow, and weak, and he looked blue around the mouth all the time.
After Old Pop died, they gave Pop a soft job on the Railways, out of pity. A waiter or something on the Karoo train, but Pop did only one trip. He kept dropping things. After that he preferred to stay at home. Much later, he became a lift operator in a high building in Jo’burg.
That was okay, but it gave him even more of a faraway look, like an elephant.
Mol sits on the edge of the stoep, in the cool night air. She can feel their smell coming out of the house. The warm smell of people, slightly sweet. Sweat and drink and tobacco and something sour that she can’t put her finger on. A sour smell that’s very close to her.
She doesn’t bath a lot, and the rest of them tell her she stinks. Not a damn. She washes herself. But now that moth’s sitting in the bath and she wonders how long it’s going to stay there. If she goes into the bathroom now it’ll stare at her, and then she’ll start thinking things again. Like the night Old Mol coughed herself to death. She hadn’t woken up when Old Mol started coughing. It was a night when she’d fallen into a dead sleep after doing double work all day long. Then, early in the morning, she went to the toilet in the dark. And there she found Old Mol, bent over the edge of the tub. Two identical spots of blood lay in the bath, the way it looks when a blot of ink seeps through a piece of folded paper.
‘It’s the TB butterfly,’ Mrs Beyleveldt said when she came to look. ‘One wing of blood from each lung. And then away she flies.’ Mol will never forget that. The crimson TB butterfly.
‘Shut your fucken mouth, old woman,’ Treppie shouted. ‘I thought you were supposed to be blind.’ Mrs Beyleveldt held her hands over her mouth. She never thought Treppie would shout at her like that.
After Old Mol died, Treppie got worse than ever. Only the big fire, when all the fridges were destroyed, calmed him down a bit, and that was many years later. Now, ever since Peace Day, he’s become quite tame. How long it will last she doesn’t know.
Pop says Treppie took a bad knock when the fridges burnt like that. She took a knock too. More than a knock. Something inside her head cracked that day, like when eggs break and the stuff runs out.
It all started when Lambert couldn’t find his spanner in the long grass. The day before Guy Fawkes. By then, Lambert had been out of school for two years. He was so impossible at school that they eventually kicked him out. Then he spent all day and night at home and they were the ones who had to put up with him, non-stop. He was supposed to be helping Pop and Treppie with the fridges, but he broke more than he fixed.
In those days, it was just fridges wherever you looked. The ones that wouldn’t fit into the den had to stand outside. Lambert’s den was the workshop. And the fridges standing outside, the ones that were switched off, had to have their doors open so they wouldn’t go rotten. Quite a few of them were running on extensions.
The grass grew long between the fridges, especially in the yard where they kept old ones for spare parts, like vegetable trays or racks or other parts from the insides.
One day, when Lambert was taking the insides out of an old fridge, she put one of his small spanners down in the long grass. Then, later, she couldn’t find it again. Those days Lambert was even more impatient than he is now. She used to spend most of her time at his beck and call. Taking orders. Pass this. Pass that. Take this. Pliers and hammers and screwdrivers with different heads. She even knew their names.
Treppie and Pop were out on a job somewhere. They’d asked Lambert to take spare parts out of an old fridge for one that had to be ready that night. It was late. Lambert had already started looking for trouble earlier that afternoon, long before the spanner got lost. First he said her housecoat was ugly and why didn’t she wear panties. Did she want the whole of Triomf to see her thing? Except he didn’t say thing, he said something much worse. And how did she think he was going to entertain customers at his Guy Fawkes party the next day if she wasn’t even wearing panties? How was she going to light the rockets if she had to bend over all the time with no panties?
He’s mad, Treppie said earlier, nobody would come. But no one tells Lambert he’s mad. For months already, he’d been putting invitations into every ice-box leaving the yard, with details about the party.
Don’t mis it. Fireworks in the backjaart./Moet nie dit mis nie. Vuur werke in die agter plaas. Kom maak a dop virniet op Gaai Foks. Come in for a free drink for Gaai Foks. Support your local electric appliance Repair Services. Ondersteun u plaaslike herstel diens vir elektriese toe stelle. RSVP.
One of those invitations is still pasted up behind the kitchen door. She sees it every time she hangs her housecoat up on the nail.
Lambert was ready for the party long before it was supposed to start. He spent all his savings on fireworks, boxes of the stuff that he got from the Chinese. They were called ‘Peking Ducks’. Treppie stood there, checking out those boxes. He said he couldn’t wait to see if it was true they went off ‘rack-a-tack-tack-tack’ in the sky with subtitles in Chinese.