‘Then he started raising hell, all through the night. He didn’t sleep a wink. Me neither. Then I thought, let me just watch, ’cause here comes big shit again.’
‘It was you, Treppie,’ Mol says. ‘You went and stirred him up again! I know you. You torment him, just for the hell of it!’
‘He doesn’t need tormenting, Mol. He fucks out all on his own. Like a thread stripping on a jack. Strip! Slip! Kabam! If only he’d take his fucken pills.’ Treppie shakes a plastic bottle full of pills that he finds in the Tedelex’s door.
‘“Epanutin. L. Benade. One tablet three times a day. With meals”,’ he reads.
‘Meals,’ says Mol.
‘Yes, Mol, meals, like the food you cook in this house. Fit for a king, isn’t it? Bacon and eggs for breakfast. Pill. Rice, meat and potatoes for lunch. Pill. Wors and baked beans for supper. Pill.’ With each would-be meal Treppie throws his head back like he’s swallowing a pill. He smiles a silly smile at Mol, knocking his knuckles against his head, as if the pills are making him feel better.
‘Leave them alone!’ says Pop.
‘He says those pills make him feel dull,’ says Mol.
‘He can do with being a bit dull. The bright spark of the family,’ says Treppie, laughing through the side of his mouth.
‘Stop it,’ says Pop. ‘And then what?’
‘Then he started smashing up everything and dragging things outside. By seven o’clock this morning he was ready for fireworks. He threw petrol over everything. You were still sleeping. And from then on, we’ve been feeding the fire. Shoes, mats, Watchtowers, you name it! Blow high the flame! Hoist the flag! Trumpets away! Brothers and sisters, now there goes a man. His name is Lambertus Benade!’
Suddenly Treppie’s mouth is full of spit. He spits, ‘plop!’, and a mouthful of gob lands next to Lambert on the cement floor.
‘Sis!’ says Mol.
‘I’m going now,’ says Treppie. ‘Otherwise tomorrow we won’t eat again. Coke and bread and polony, polony and bread and Coke, bread and Coke and polony. For what we are about to receive, may we be thankful, Lord, praised be thy name, amen,’ Treppie sings.
‘Okay.’ Pop’s feeling sick. He looks at Lambert lying there without pants, and with arms that look like they’ve been turned inside out. With a flat box sticking out from between his teeth. He can feel Mol looking at him. He knows that she knows he’s feeling sick. He feels white. Treppie’s also looking at him. Treppie’s talking so much ’cause he knows Pop saw him crying when he was upside down.
‘Go fetch the cushions from the chairs in the lounge,’ Mol tells them.
‘Let’s first straighten his arms out,’ says Pop.
WATERMELON 
Mol stands in the lounge doorway. Pop’s sleeping in his chair. Mol’s just been to the back to look at Lambert again. For the third time tonight. At least he moved. He turned his head this way and then that way, shifting on to his side, with his fat, white bum facing her. Then she went and fetched the bottle of Coke in the kitchen and put it down next to his head. And she went to check the washing line to see if his shorts were dry yet. But they weren’t. What more can she do? She turns around and goes back to their room, where she fetches the faded old blanket, full of holes. Let her go put it over him, over his naked bum.
There’s so much rubbish and scrap iron on the den’s floor, she struggles to reach Lambert from the inside door. Enough for another three fires. She looks up, at MOLE II, there on the wall. Where would MOLE I be, then? She looks at Lambert’s list again. Number 12 reads: scrub linolium kitchen clean (Ma).
Mol walks back to the kitchen. She sticks her head round the door and looks inside. The kitchen looks funny, but she can’t figure out why it looks so odd. Then she sees the bits and pieces of Flossie that they carried through here this morning — half-melted, half-burnt plastic. And rubber. Like monsters’ body parts, or something. Scales and tails. Let her just close this door, for now. If they get hungry, she can always fix their bread in the lounge. Later.
She finds herself standing in the lounge doorway again. The TV’s on but there’s no sound. A little while ago, when Pop fell asleep, she switched it on. The news. Shooting and talking. So she turned off the sound and watched the never-ending talking and shooting, and the corpses under blankets in the dust, and people pointing this way and then that way. It’s always the same. Now she walks up to the TV and switches it right off. She’s walking slowly. Her legs feel like they don’t belong to her any more.
She walks round the back of Pop’s chair to go look out the window. She doesn’t see anything. Every now and again she hears people shooting off their Guy Fawkes crackers, far away. Usually the Benades have crackers too. Lambert’s the one who shoots them off on the little stoep in front. Pink ones that whistle, or green ones that make a small fountain, or silver ones that go ‘whoosh!’ up into the sky, shooting sparks like rain. So pretty.
But tonight they’ve got nothing. Tonight they stay inside. Tired. It’s been a long day.
Mol walks around Pop’s chair, on the front side. She bends over to see if he’s still breathing. She can’t see anything, so she listens. She hears nothing, but his chest moves slightly, up and down, up and down. His eyelids look like two shells. He doesn’t move. He must be having a white dream again.
She goes and sits down in her chair. Without cushions the chair’s very hard. How can Pop just fall asleep? she wonders. And he’s so thin, too. But he hasn’t moved an inch since he came to sit here this afternoon, after they got back.
Before they took Treppie to the bus stop, they all helped to make Lambert a bed with cushions from the chair. It was a helluva struggle to get him on to those cushions. He was like a dead-weight. In the end Treppie said for a job like this you need leverage. So he and Pop used iron pipes to work Lambert on to the cushions. Then Pop put his torn piece of shirt neatly over Lambert’s bottom half again, and she took his shorts to rinse them under the outside tap, ’cause what she saw in there was more than just pee.
Did they think he’d come to again?
Give him a chance, Pop said.
‘Maybe he’ll become a vegetable,’ Treppie said. ‘A king-sized watermelon. Suits me fine if he dangles from a stem for the rest of his life. Under a leaf, nice and quiet, then all you have to do is water him every now and again.’
Sis, Treppie, she said to him. Treppie can be so cruel. But he can’t help himself. That’s what she wanted to say. Instead, she just kept quiet.
They put on some clean clothes and then they got into the car to take Treppie to the Melville bus stop. They all felt better after washing themselves.
All except Pop. Pop was white in the face. That’s why, after they dropped off Treppie, she said to him they must first go to Shoprite and then take a little drive up Ontdekkers.
Pop wanted to know why.
Just to get out a little, she said. She took Pop by the arm, but then she let go again. She could see he was far away. Too far. She could feel it on his skin.
So it wasn’t long before they were back home again.
At Shoprite they bought a tin of dog food for Toby. But not Butch, his usual. She said if Toby felt the way she did today, then he must also feel like he needs a holiday. And, as Treppie would say, a change is as good as a holiday, so they bought him some Husky instead.
When they got on to Ontdekkers, Pop remembered he still had the paper in his pocket with the measurements for the bathroom mirror. So they went to the Mirror Shop at the corner, ’cause they knew Lambert was dead serious about fixing that mirror. It was one of the things on his list.