The postbox stayed in his den until yesterday, when he suddenly clicked: nowadays a person needs a decent postbox here in Triomf. Easily visible, and within reach of the pavement, so you can get the pamphlets, so you can keep up with what’s going on, so you can keep ahead, so you don’t wake up one morning to find that the kaffirs have already taken over, right under your nose. So they can be ready — Molletjie’s points grinded just right, and her front boot and roof-rack loaded with bags of petrol, for the great road to the North.
‘No, shit, I’m going to weld that postbox on to the gate now. It’s now or never,’ he said. That was yesterday.
‘But the rain’s coming, Lambert,’ his mother said.
‘If I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it,’ he said, making them run around under the blue lightning to bring his tools: the welding box, his helmet, his hammers, his pliers and his level. Rain or no rain, when a thing’s got to be done, it’s got to be done. Otherwise there’s always a fuck-around. When he, Lambert, wants a thing to work, then it must work. Come hell or high water.
But his mother was slow on the uptake, as usual. She gets like that sometimes, her head all haywire. He had to send her back to his den three times to get the level. First she came out with a monkey wrench, then the crowbar, till he finally told her it was the fucken plank with the fucken bubble in it!
He swears, she’s driving him nuts.
And then those fuckers from next door peeped at them over the prefab wall, as they stood there, struggling with that damn postbox ’cause it kept fucking off the pole. Till at last he figured he must actually just weld a flat plate on to the pole, and then fix the postbox on to the top of the plate. Then it worked. He, Lambert, can tell you all about never giving up. In the end, he gets everything fixed. Postboxes, lawn-mowers, taps, overflow pipes, geysers, you name it. Fridges and washing machines too. And Molletjie. He services her all the time. Drains her oil, greases her, grinds her points, the works.
It’s just his mother that he can’t get fixed up. You can still fool Pop. And Treppie needs the occasional smack on the head, then he’s okay again. But his mother is his fucken end.
Treppie’s his mother’s brother, but even he’s given up on her. No matter how much he carries on with her, she just takes it lying down, like a scared little dog. Never backchats. And the day she does open her mouth, then it’s to say the same thing he’s just said to her. Like a blarry echo machine.
Treppie says she’s their ‘valley of echoes’. And when he really lets her have it, your ears start burning, ’cause Treppie can say mean, bad things.
Like the day they went to buy the car. They first wanted to trade Flossie in, but the man there said no, she’s too far gone, they must rather keep her for spares. Then Treppie winked, with those slit-eyes of his. That devil’s wink of his, when you know he’s up to something.
Treppie said to Pop, right in his face, right there next to that garage man, they should name the new Volla after his brother-in-law’s ‘dear little wife’.
Mol, he said, should be the little car’s name, and then he started pushing Pop around. What for, Lambert still doesn’t know.
‘Old, but game!’ Treppie said, and Pop pointed his finger at him. He must go slowly now, but Treppie just fucked along.
‘For a man to come with, to the place where he needs to come!’
Still it wasn’t enough; Treppie went and fetched his mother from where she was standing among the scrapheaps and the write-offs, and he put his arm around her in an off kind of way, half-soft, half-hard, and then he said, still in front of the garage man, she wouldn’t mind, of course, ’cause all three of them rode her in any case.
Well, he can’t see how Treppie knows about him and his mother’s business, ’cause he spends just about the whole day at the Chinese, week in and week out. He says he does odd jobs. But he can swear Treppie’s got a thing going there. He always flattens his hair with Brylcreem before he goes to work, the whole car stinks of Brylcreem when they take him to the bus stop. And Pop sleeps day in and day out, so he knows nothing … and in any case, that just makes two, that is, if Pop still can, which he doubts … for the rest, Treppie and his mother are brother and sister, so they can’t.
But: ‘Three in one!’ Treppie said, talking at the top of his voice. ‘Services them all! Father, Son and Holy Ghost, into their glory!’
‘Three in one,’ his mother said.
Well, that garage man’s laugh dried up right there, and when he looks back at it now, that must have been what Treppie wanted with all his dirty talk. ’Cause in the middle of all his sales talk, that dealer had a fat we-love-Jesus grin on his mug, and he’d stuck fishes on to the bumpers of all the cars in his yard. Fishes, fishes, fishes wherever you looked, big fishes and small fishes, it looked like the blarry Sea of Galilee there under those awnings. That’s what Treppie said and what his mother also said, afterwards. And before he and Pop went to pay the deposit, Treppie told that salesman, who was now looking down in the mouth, that if there’s one thing that gave him a major pain in the arse, it was a second-hand car dealer who tried to tell him religion ran on ninety-three and fishes stepped out in Firestones.
‘Firestones,’ his mother said.
But all the time that Treppie and his ‘echo machine’ were busy working off that goody two-shoes’ smile, Pop just stood there and stared out into the distance. Only Treppie was laughing, and then Lambert saw how Pop took his mother’s hand and gave it a little squeeze, as if to say, don’t worry, and he knew she was just playing along for the sake of peace.
Then Treppie came with a new angle. He started singing a classical kind of tune in another language, something ‘-line’, something ‘-line’ and something else ‘-line’; he still doesn’t know what all those lines meant. And then the garage man asked Treppie what he was singing now, and Treppie said he thought he was singing a famous German SS hallelujah song, from something called ‘Der Rosenkavalier’, and it meant blood was thicker than water. All the way down the line.
‘Rosenkavalier,’ his mother said, squeezing Pop’s hand.
In any case, from then on the car’s name was Molletjie. Sometimes, when the car won’t start so nicely, then Treppie says, come now, little sister, or he sings her the hallelujah of the SS. He says he’s just glad it’s another Volla, the same model as Flossie, ’cause, unlike the saying, it’s actually the familiar that makes the heart grow fonder.
Now Elvis takes over the reading. His hands look all white and smooth as he sits there, holding his Bible. The woman leans back into Pop’s chair, and her petticoat pulls even tighter over her thighs. She follows Elvis’s reading in her own Bible. His voice is smooth, like his face.