He wipes his arse. Truly, when this happens, it feels like the seventh day, the day of rest. Emptied and unburdened. Everything well. Peace on earth.
18. TRIOMF TRIALS
FAMILY BIBLE 
Mol sits in her chair, sewing the middle button back on to her housecoat. The old button got lost, so she’s using one of Pop’s shirt-buttons that she found in the bathroom cabinet. It’s smaller, which means she’ll have to close up the buttonhole on the one side. But she doesn’t mind, it keeps her busy. When she’s not busy, she worries too much.
Lambert hasn’t set foot out of his den for three days now. Only a few minutes ago she went and took a peek at him. They told her she mustn’t bother him.
He’s sitting there with clean hands in front of his work bench, on a straight-backed chair that he fixed himself. He’s studying the refrigeration book. From first page to last. With a pencil in his hand and a Croxley exercise book. The two mugs of Frisco that Pop put down next to him look like they’re cold, and the ants are eating his polony sandwich.
‘He still hasn’t eaten or drunk a thing,’ says Pop, coming back from the den and sitting down in his chair next to her.
It’s Treppie’s book, which he lent Lambert after Pop begged him, on his hands and knees, in God’s name, to please help out a bit with Lambert.
If Lambert didn’t get those two fridges in his den up and running before his birthday, Pop said, then Treppie would still live to see the most terrible butchery with long knives ever seen in the long history of the Benades.
At first, Treppie was completely bloody minded.
Lambert would never use a sharp object, he said. Pop’s knowledge of human nature was failing him. Lambert was the kind of person who would definitely use a blunt instrument.
And sometimes, he said, as in the case of seals who bred too much, maybe that was the best thing for an environment’s balance.
How a thing like the environment could have trouble with its balance, like a tightrope walker, is beyond her. When she asked Treppie, he said balance wasn’t just a circus trick, it was the trick of life itself, except the Benades had never yet got the hang of it. But it was never too late to learn.
In fact, he said, Lambert should consider a general culling of the Triomf population while he was at it with his blunt instrument. The blunter the better, he said, like a pestle in a mortar, to stamp some national blood into the soil. A little blood would do the soil in Triomf no end of good, ’cause nothing exhausted a place like old bricks.
Pop begged and pleaded. It was so bad he even called up the memory of Old Pop after a while. Right here in the lounge. Pop went down on his knees, spreading out his arms with a bottle of Klipdrift in one hand. Right in front of the TV, like he wanted to embrace the Big One.
Was it Old Pop’s lost and homeless spirit tormenting them like this, year in and year out? he asked. Was it because Treppie had never forgiven Old Pop for that terrible hiding? Well, no one’s ever told her how you’re supposed to talk to a ghost, but Pop sounded like he knew how, ’cause he came out with some terribly high-flown language.
Oh troubled spirit, Pop said, his eyes rolling in his head, wilt thou not have mercy on us, thou who lurkest in the dark corners of empty coal trucks. And as thou holdest thy hand on thy neck, where death lashed thee, wilt thou not, we beseech thee, if a sacrifice is brought in the year of Our Lord, 1994, soften thy heart towards us? A sacrifice by the same child who since his eighth year hath refused to speak to thee and given thee no place in his heart whatsoever.
It was never too late, Pop said, for a living person to reconcile himself with a spirit who couldn’t come to rest because he was upset about that person.
Well, after that Treppie’s mouth dried up completely and he went and sat in his room behind a closed door for days on end.
Then it was suddenly so quiet in the lounge that she sat in her chair with nothing but fear in her heart. You could say she sat for days on end, ’cause the only time she ever got up was to give her rose some water, or to put her ear to Pop’s mouth to see if he was still breathing. She’d once heard about people who sink into a state of near-death, and that’s exactly what Pop looked like. It was from getting so worked up and tired and drinking three times more Klipdrift than he was used to. When she held that old piece of mirror to his mouth she could see only the merest wisp of breath. It was the last piece, the one she hid in her housecoat pocket when she saw Lambert was about to smash the new mirror to pieces.
Never before had there been such deathly quiet in the lounge. It felt eerie, sitting in silence like that.
It was also very quiet at the back, but that was a different kind of silence.
Every now and again terrible bangs or shots went off, with big chunks of quiet inbetween. Or things fell over so hard all the walls in the house started shaking.
It was almost like a big, wild thing was busy waking up in his cage after being shot with a dart, like those darts they shoot into the backsides of rhinoceroses when they’re put to sleep.
The problem was, she knew Lambert didn’t have a dart in his backside, and if something didn’t happen fast he was going to break out of his cage and come get them all, one by one, tearing them up piece by piece until there was nothing left.
So, under the circumstances, it was like mercy from above when Treppie came out of his room with his thick refrigeration book in both hands, looking terribly formal and serious.
Treppie’s treated that book like the holy scripture all his life. He bought it when they first moved to Triomf, when he still had plans to get rich from fridges.
No one was allowed to look in that book and no one except him could touch it. If Pop or Lambert or a customer wanted to know something about fridges, then Treppie would go into his room and, behind closed doors, look in his book. He’d come out a bit later and tell them exactly what the book said, on page this or page that, about this, that, or the other thing.
There Treppie stood, with that book in his hands. He said Pop must wake up now so he could go fetch Lambert. He wanted to say what he needed to say in front of witnesses.
It was for everyone’s sake, Treppie said, and for the sake of the spirits too.
Pop rose out of his deathly sleep and shuffled like a sleepwalker with eyes that stood stock-still in their sockets, while sickening bangs and crashes came from Lambert’s den.
She still thought, ja, there was Pop rising from one kind of death and walking with open eyes into the jaws of another.
Treppie held the book to his chest and stood there with his head cocked to one side so he could hear Pop walking down the passage.
Toby was also in a state. He went and sat in the lounge doorway with pricked ears, shifting his front paws excitedly. First he’d turn round to look at her, and then he’d look at Treppie again, his mouth opening and closing all the time. That Toby was so scared he almost began talking right here in the lounge that day.
Pop came back and sat down in his chair.
‘He’s coming. Get ready.’
She saw Treppie take the empty Klipdrift bottle by the neck. Pop felt under his chair for the small toolbox, pulling it out in front of his feet, and she took cover behind her chair, holding on to the back-rest. She told Toby he must come stand next to her. Toby came and sat down with his head turned up, as if to say, what now?
And then Lambert entered. He was black with oil and grease, and he had open wounds all over his body. It looked like something had burnt right through his T-shirt. His eyes were swollen and red. His one hand was trembling slightly and his feet looked like they’d been boiled. And he stank to high heaven. It was an odour like burnt hair and pee, along with that sharp, sour smell that floats over from the factories.