‘You’ll crack the plaster,’ Pop said.
‘Then let it crack,’ said Treppie, hanging up the calendar on its hard little plastic loop. His mother later cut off the part with the dates on. Now the bottom edges are curling up.
Lambert narrows his eyes to slits so he can see the little crosses Treppie made on the picture. A cross for Triomf, where they live now, and one for Vrededorp, where they used to live. No, it was him who made the crosses, with a red ball-point. Treppie showed him where, pointing with the sharp end of his pocket-knife. ‘Here!’ he said. ‘There!’
Vrededorp wasn’t there any more, not the part where they used to live. And he couldn’t, not for the life of him, make out from above, on such a small photo, where Vrededorp ended and Triomf began — it was somewhere in the area of Westdene and Pageview and Newlands and Bosmont. Everything just started swimming before his eyes.
Treppie shifts on his crate. He takes out his pocket-knife and slowly opens it up. Lambert can see Treppie’s checking out the Witness. He, Lambert, also can’t help looking at her, even when he tries not to. She’s wearing a smooth, shiny, pink petticoat that shows right through her cotton print dress. The dress is full of red and purple roses. They also show through. In front, where her knees come together, he can see the petticoat. He can also see it along the side where the roses got scrunched up as she sat down in Pop’s chair, the petticoat pulling tightly around her thighs.
He drops his eyes and looks past his knees, at the floor. Then he sees a lost ant. It runs first this way, then that. Lost. He looks for the others, but they’re on the far side of the room, in a line on the wall. When ants get lost like this, you know it’s going to rain. Lambert cups his hand in front of his crotch. Then he pulls his toes into an arch and slowly lifts up the balls of his feet. Loose wooden blocks from the parquet floor stick to the bottom of his feet. They go ‘click’ as he lifts them up. He could at least have washed his feet. Just look how dirty they are. But that doesn’t help either. Dirty feet or not. Lost ants or ants marching in a row. It cuts no ice, as Treppie always says, ’cause he’s already got a hard-on. When he looks up, he catches his mother looking at him.
The Witness reads: ‘“Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so, Amen.”’
Treppie says that the girl they’re going to get for him won’t be wearing a petticoat. Her kind don’t wear petticoats. Or rather, he says, petticoats are all they wear. He must remember to tell Treppie he doesn’t mind petticoats. Or dresses with petticoats. As long as it’s not overalls, or a ‘housecoat’, as his mother calls it. He hates the sight of housecoats.
He sticks a match into his mouth and frowns, like the cowboys on videos do as they pull their horses around when they get up the hills, so they can check where the Indians are, far below on the plains.
He looks at the lounge and everything in it.
Pop’s sitting on a crate with his back against the wall. Toby lies between Pop’s feet. His eyebrows and ears twitch as he listens to the Witness. Pop’s braces hang over his knees. His white hair stands up in little tufts on his head and his mouth hangs open. Any minute now he’ll fall asleep again. Pop’s almost eighty, and the closer he gets to his birthday, the more he sleeps. Treppie says Pop’s different to all the other old people he knows. They lie wide awake, he says, waiting for death.
His mother says Pop’s tired. They must just leave him alone. Next to Pop is the sideboard with its bandy legs: three bandy legs and one brick. He can’t remember which night it happened, but there was a mega fuck-around here again. Last night’s glasses are still on the half-piece of tray on top of the sideboard. It’s been like that for a long time now. Ever since he broke the thing over Pop’s chair that time.
It was Treppie who started the whole thing, over stuff in the sideboard’s top drawer that he, Lambert, isn’t supposed to see or know anything about. Then there’s his mother’s library books from the Newlands library. Next to them is the china cat without a head. When it broke, his mother went and fetched a plastic yellow rose from the bunch on her dressing table and stuck it into the cat’s hollow neck.
‘There, that’s a little better,’ she said. That was a year ago.
His father might be old, but his mother’s over the hill. Completely. She sits with her legs wide apart under her housecoat. In-out, in-out, she moves her false tooth. She’s sitting there with Gerty on her lap. Gerty’s mouth hangs open. Above their heads he can see the coloured-in photo of her and Pop and Treppie. She’s holding a bunch of roses. Yellow, touched-up roses. All you see are teeth, the way they’re smiling. When she was in her prime, she used to sell roses. That’s after she stopped working at the factory. She sold them at bioscopes and restaurants.
‘Better days,’ she says every time she straightens the portrait following another earth tremor.
These days she swallows all the time, and the skin around her throat is beginning to shrivel. Now she’s staring at the bits of curtain in front of the window.
Treppie suddenly jerks forward on his crate and starts cleaning his nails with his pocket-knife. The knife goes ‘grr-grr’ as it scrapes under his nails. His face is blue from not shaving and he looks live, like an open electric wire. His shoulder twitches. Lambert’s not sure whether it’s him or Treppie giving off the Klipdrift fumes that he can smell all over the room. From last night, when the curtains came down. When Treppie started taunting him about his birthday again. They mustn’t taunt him. He gives as good as he gets.
The other Witness is a man. He clears his throat, preparing to take over the reading. His cheeks look like they’ve been planed down, and his hair’s oiled. Smooth, like Elvis. He’s wearing a brown suit with a pale blue sheen. He smells of mothballs and peppermints and shaving cream.
The smell makes Lambert feel sick to his stomach. It’s a strange feeling, the heat and the hardness all at the same time. He tries to look out of the window, just past the little carport where the Volla’s standing. He wants to see if his postbox that he welded on to the gate yesterday is still there. But all he sees are molehills. The heads of the two Witnesses are in his way. The tips of the sun-filter curtains hang down behind their heads and shoulders. From the front, it looks like wings are growing out of them: sloppy, faded old wings full of holes. Growing and growing, like dusty old cloths that keep stringing out and rising up into the warm air, up, up from their innermost insides.
Pink Dress looks at Elvis. She’s reading the last sentence of her turn.
‘“I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.”’
Lambert grabs his knees in front and squeezes his buttocks together. He must just hold it now, hold it tight, just think of his postbox that he made all on his own. From pieces of plate his father fetched for him at Roodepoort Steel’s scrapyard. That was after the fridge business went bankrupt. After Guy Fawkes. Pop went to fetch the steel on the day before Guy Fawkes, ’cause his mother had said: ‘Pop, you’d better do something to keep Lambert busy. He’ll be the end of me yet.’ He’d been out of school for two years by then. Eighteen years old.
A house looks better with a postbox in front in any case. It says: People live here and they’ve got an address. This is where you’ll find them if you want them. It helps, ’cause the houses in Triomf all look much the same, anyway.
So he took the steel plates, cut them to size and welded them together. He made a little silver house with a V-roof and a slot for letters and a round hole in front. He made it nicely, with a double row of welding spots all round the edges, and with their number, 127, in front. Nice and black in lead so you could see it from the street. Then he put it up on a nail against the prefab wall, just inside the gate so the postman-kaffir could lean over and put in the letters, ’cause they always lock the gate in front. But since then, every time Treppie turns Molletjie into the gate at the end of the month, he knocks that postbox right off the wall again. Molletjie’s been panelbeaten and spray-painted to death from driving into that postbox. So in the end he just took the thing and chucked it into his den. It was always full of junk anyway. Adverts and pamphlets and the Western Telegraph. That kind of thing doesn’t need a postbox. You just pick it up off the lawn. There’s nothing to read in that paper in any case, except the flying squad’s emergency numbers and all the new stuff in the by-laws. About making a racket, ‘noise pollution’, as Treppie calls it.