‘Front or back?’
Lambert laughs. ‘Well, Ma, let me tell you, those two stuff it with fruit salad wherever they can find a hole. Nose, mouth, ears, backside and frontside. And wherever they can find a split, they stick it in. In the bum, between the fingers, the toes. Behind the ears, you name it. After a while there’s so much juice on them they both look like tropical forests. Then they put the music louder.’
Lambert whistles the Trust Bank tune again, harder and quicker. Pop shakes his head.
Treppie pants with mock excitement. ‘The Amazons in Triumph, Part Two: The Revenge of the Fruit Salad!’ He rubs his palms together so hard they make sucking noises. No decency. Never in his life has he had any manners. ‘And then … and then … oh, what happens then?’ he asks.
‘Well, then they work each other up with their hands and they say Ooh! and Ahh! and they take all the fruit salad out again — banana, paw-paw, strawberries, the lot. They kiss each other with ice cream in their mouths. And then they lie down next to each other, with their eyes closed, and they sigh.’
‘Shit, Lambert,’ says Treppie, ‘now you’re lying. How could you have seen all that? Didn’t they maybe invite you inside, the Benade with the golden banana!’
‘What do they say to each other?’ she wants to know. If you ask her, fruit salad should come with stories.
No, he couldn’t hear so nicely. The music was playing too loud. And when the music stopped, they were already finished. Then they put new sheets on the bed ’cause the old ones were full of fruit salad, and he heard the one say to the other she thinks she’ll be able to fall asleep now.
‘“Are you sure?” the other one asked. And then the little round one moaned about the city grinding her points or something.’
‘Fuck, no, Lambert!’ says Treppie. ‘You must’ve been lying under the bed to hear all that. Which one did you want to do first, the little melon or the English rose? I must say, I admire your restraint, old boy.’
‘Treppie, I’ll smack you! I swear, man, the window was open. I was standing right in front of the window, in the bushes. I heard everything. You could almost say I heard it in stereo.’
‘What else did they say?’ She wants to know.
‘Well, then the one said something about being grateful, at least they still had a secret garden. And the other one said, yes, thanks a lot, the whole world’s a secret. Then the other one said or a bubble or something. We’ll never know.’
‘So much for the voice-overs,’ says Treppie. ‘What about the lighting? I thought you said they did it with candles.’
‘Oooh! Ouch!’ Don’t they burn themselves? she wonders.
‘Now that’s what I call burning desire!’ says Treppie.
‘No, man, Treppie,’ says Lambert. ‘They blow the candles out. It’s one of those affairs with seven candles on a holder.’
‘Seven?’ It sounds rather a lot to her.
‘Ag, come now, Mol,’ Treppie says. ‘There’s nothing that can still surprise you.’
‘Lambert means candlelight, Mol,’ Pop explains. ‘They do their thing by the light of seven candles. Then they blow them out. Then they go to sleep.’
‘Now how’s that for you, I say,’ says Lambert, lighting up.
‘Soft focus,’ says Treppie. ‘What do they know, anyway?’
Then everyone’s quiet for a long time. But she thinks what she thinks.
‘Well, it sounds nice and soft to me.’ The words come out before she can stop herself.
‘Oh my goodness,’ says Treppie. ‘Now Mol wants to become a lesbian as well. What do you say to that, old Gerty?’
‘Leave Mol alone,’ says Pop.
She wants to make her point here tonight. She doesn’t always get the chance.
‘No, I was just thinking,’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t mind if it was only strawberries that got stuck into me. With ice cream in my mouth. Then you must feel like an ice-cream float, with strawberry juice.’
‘But strawberry juice doesn’t have any fizz, Mol,’ says Treppie. ‘For a real float you need fizz.’ He laughs.
‘Red Hubbly Bubbly, then.’
But Treppie’s not listening to her. He just shakes his head. ‘A bubble,’
he says. ‘A fucken bubble.’
‘Well,’ says Pop, switching off the TV, ‘it’s bedtime now. Too late now for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Tomorrow’s another day.
‘Mol,’ he says as he walks down the passage, with his back to them, ‘you can bath tomorrow. Otherwise the overflow drips all night. Lambert, go get some rest now,’ he says as he enters into the bedroom.
She puts the lid from the dog food tin back into her housecoat pocket. She looks at her thumb where the lid cut her. Try as she might in this house, no one listens to her. She’s a woman alone here, that’s for sure. She’ll just have to accept it. Stuffing it with fruit salad. She smiles.
Treppie locks the Klipdrift in the sideboard. He takes the glasses into the kitchen.
‘Stuffing it with salad, oh stuffing it with salad,’ she hears him sing, to the tune of ‘Sow the seed, oh sow the seed’.
Lambert’s gone out the front door again. He’s got a big grin on his face. She watches him through the window. He stands in front, at the fence, looking across the road. She looks where he looks. It’s pitch dark over there. Just night and bushes, she sees, and lots of small, white flowers. The secret garden. Ja, well, secrets remain secrets, with or without sweetpeas.
12. DOG’S HEAVEN
Mol stirs in her bed, half awake. She can hear the big lorries taking to the roads outside. It’s pitch dark and something’s not right. She tries to prick her ears, but she’s still too groggy. And she can’t move her limbs, either. This is her usual waking up time — about two hours before dawn, when the big lorries set out for the day, with their large, flat snouts, their swivelling heads, and their thick, double wheels. Some mornings she tries to count them on both sides of Ontdekkers. The first stretch to Roodepoort is downhill. Then they change gears, roaring and snorting. She lies in bed and thinks about all the drivers who have to get up so early, each one in the dark in his big lorry, alone.
Inbetween, she hears the softer noises of the first cars. The cars get more and more. They zoom. After a while she can’t pick out the lorries any more. It’s just one big noise. The noise fills up the whole city as far as she can hear. It fills the air above and it runs into the hollows below.
When the noise is loudest, the sun comes up. Then it feels like her whole body starts droning softly, along with the city. That’s her sign to get up, otherwise she begins to feel sick in her stomach. She likes getting up first, so she can wake up alone and get herself ready. In this house you have to be ready for when the others wake up. Otherwise you see your arse. Especially her.
But it’s much too early to get up now, and something’s not right. It feels like something she won’t be able to do anything about, a wrong thing that wants to do something to her.
She listens as the hollows under the city begin to rumble. She feels it before she hears it, in the pit of her stomach. Like the earth tremors. She feels them in her stomach too, long before the windows start rattling.
Jo’burg’s like that. It’s hollow on the inside. Not just one big hollow like a shell, but lots of dead mines with empty passageways and old tunnels. Treppie says that’s why it’s become so expensive to get buried in Jo’burg. There just isn’t enough solid ground left for graves. And even if you do get a grave, he says, you still can’t be so sure, ’cause most of the corpses fall through after a while. Coffins and all. And the headstones sink at a funny angle into the ground. Or they fall right through, on to the coffins. Getting buried in Jo’burg is a waste of time and money, Treppie says. After you’ve lived in this place there’s not much left of you in any case.