Mol comes back from the wall. They stand and look at the clouds of smoke.
The man from next door shouts at them. ‘We’re going to put the municipality on to you! Do you think you’re the only people in this street, hey? Just look at the mess here again. Everything full of soot and smoke! My carp can’t breathe in this air. They’re still going to come and take you away from here, the whole lot of you and all your fucken rubbish. You’re worse than kaffirs, you lot! Blarry filth. A plague. Sis! Sis! Don’t you have any shame?’
Pop pulls Treppie by the sleeve. He takes Mol by the shoulder. Come, let’s go inside, he wants to say, but now his voice is even further away than it was earlier.
He bends over and takes one of Lambert’s arms. Treppie takes the other. Mol takes the head. She holds it straight so the tongue won’t move. They drag Lambert back inside through the back door of his den. As she walks backwards, Mol kicks rubbish out of her way. They want to get Lambert on to his bed, but there’s no more bed. The mattress has disappeared. And the bed’s legs have folded inwards. Bits of spring stick out from under the frame.
‘He burnt it,’ says Mol.
‘Now he can fuckenwell sleep on the floor,’ says Treppie. ‘He’s the one who wants to go and burn his bed.’
‘He’ll catch a cold in his kidneys,’ says Mol.
‘So what,’ says Treppie. ‘I wish he’d catch something else in his kidneys. He’s busy wiping us out here.’
‘Wiping,’ Pop wants to say, but just ‘ing’ comes out. He wants to clean his hand on his shirt. Lambert’s arm was full of slime when Pop dragged him. But Pop’s shirt isn’t there any more. All he rubs are his ribs. It feels like he’s got too many ribs. Can it be that he’s gotten more ribs from all the misery?
Treppie mops his forehead with his arm. He looks spent. Utterly spent. ‘I must get to the Chinese,’ he says. ‘I’m late.’
‘Late,’ Pop hears himself saying. His voice is back. But it doesn’t sound like his own voice any more.
‘Go,’ says Mol. ‘We’ll manage.’
‘It’s okay, go,’ Pop tells him.
But Treppie keeps looking around him, at the den’s walls. He throws his arms up into the air. Like the Witnesses do at the end of their sessions, when they pray. But Treppie’s not praying. He’s looking. ‘Look. Just look how mad the fucker is.’
They look where Treppie’s looking. He’s looking up at the wall, just below the ceiling. Where Lambert’s calendars used to be.
‘Creepies,’ says Mol.
The animals in the depths. Pop doesn’t know why he thinks this, it’s not animals, it’s creepies and pests. And they’re not roaring in the depths, they’re painted on the walls. The strangest things he’s ever seen. All of them with too many wings and too many legs and heads. Snakes and mice and things, but they don’t look right. They look deformed. You can tell what they are only from what Lambert wrote underneath. Some are still just names. Others have a bit of outline, or a piece of wing. It looks like Lambert wanted to paint everything at the same time.
TERMITE, EARWIG, COCKROACH, SNAIL, ANT, SUPERBEE, MOUSE, MOTH, RAT, WORM, BAT, SPIDER, WASP, MOLE II.
‘Mole the Second,’ says Pop.
‘Second what?’ asks Mol.
Pop shows her where on the wall.
‘I only see one,’ says Mol. ‘Where’s the second?’
‘It’s like the kings and queens of England,’ says Treppie. ‘Henry the Eighth, Elizabeth the Second.’
‘I don’t see any queen,’ says Mol.
‘Just shows you how mad he is. He thinks a mole is a member of the royal family. He must figure he’s a prince or something himself. Prince Lambert the Executioner, known for his fires, his fucking with the neighbours and his painting on walls. The only son and heir of Queen Mother Mol. He’ll be remembered for that.’ Treppie’s grinning. After everything that happened here this morning, he’s getting his bearings back again.
Pop grins back. Just to feel if he still can. It’s not that he thinks Treppie’s funny. There’s nothing funny going on here. He feels shaky. He’s over-exerted himself. He needs to sit down. He finds a crate. ‘What happened?’ he asks.
‘You were sleeping,’ says Mol.
‘I dreamt everything was white, meanwhile it was smoke all the time.’
‘We left you to sleep,’ says Mol.
‘I must go now,’ says Treppie.
‘First tell us what happened,’ says Pop. ‘I’ll take you to the bus stop in Melville.’
‘He started last night. First he tried to get the Tedelex going, but it didn’t want to work. Then he began fucking around with Flossie, but not a single part of Flossie wanted to co-operate. He said everything had to get fixed for his, er, birthday. Then, later, the noise woke me up. It sounded like a fucken canning factory in the back here. So I went out to look. I told him he shouldn’t expect miracles, times were bad. He said to hell with bad times, he was only going to be forty once and he wanted to face the New South Africa like a decent man, with a good woman on his arm. Then he showed me his list.’
Treppie shows them the spot on the wall where the list is. They read it. Treppie picks up a pen from the floor and scratches out (time will tell). He also draws a line through the words everything must work, as well as change mattress.
‘How do you know?’ Pop asks, pointing at number 18, the fridges.
‘I know,’ says Treppie, ‘they’ve been standing here all seized up since before the fire, before the previous big fire.’
Treppie turns slowly from the wall. Then he smiles a disbelieving little smile. ‘Come to think of it …’ he says.
‘What,’ asks Mol.
‘What’s the date today?’ Treppie asks.
‘November,’ says Mol.
‘November the what?’
‘Fourth. No, it’s the fifth,’ says Pop.
Treppie claps his hands. ‘That’s it!’ he shouts.
‘That’s what?’ asks Mol.
‘Method in the madness! It was Guy Fawkes the last time too, remember. When he made that fire. Fifth of November. He wanted to have a party in the back here.’
‘To advertise,’ Mol says.
‘Then his spanner fell in the grass, and then there was that big fuckup.’
‘So we fuck along, so we fuck along,’ Treppie sings to the tune of ‘Sow the seed, oh sow the seed’.
‘Just look what’s been ticked off here,’ says Pop.
They read:
25. gun
26. binoculars
27. umbiera (Kaffir-harp)
‘Which he gets where?’ Mol asks.
‘He’s lying, man! Prince Lambert, the Prince of Lists, says he’s got a gun!’
Treppie writes 28. list underneath Lambert’s list. And under that he writes: 29. fit (the prince is dead, long live the prince. Guy Fawkes 1993).
‘He’s not dead,’ says Mol. ‘Leave his list alone.’
‘And then?’ asks Pop.
‘And then what?’
‘When Flossie didn’t want to work, what happened then?’