He was right, too, ’cause here was that nose again, finding its day and its place. The place of Treppie’s lost talents. And the moment of truth for poor old Lambert, if you ask her.
‘Circus, circus!’ she and Pop called when Treppie came out, walking like a clown and sticking out his neck like a rooster.
‘No, no, no, there won’t be any circus tricks around here,’ he said, snorting through his nose.
‘Examination. Fridge exam. Fridge trial. So that the knowledge of the fathers may be passed on to the children. Triomf trials. And such occasions, as my brother, er, excuse me, er, my brother-in-law rightly said, such occasions deserve a special kind of approach.’ She looked at Pop, but Pop didn’t look worried. Pop always knows when things are okay.
At the word ‘approach’, Treppie smacked Lambert a hard shot on the back as he sat there on his crate. Lambert flashed him an angry look, as if to ask if that was really blarrywell necessary. But Treppie hiccuped like it was him who’d gotten the blow and he fell over. And then he just lay there on his back in the passage.
That was when she saw Lambert click that his exam wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Lambert was right. Everyone relaxed and they all felt relieved. She even took her hand out of her housecoat where she’d been feeling for a peg, ’cause in her mind’s eye she’d seen Lambert having another one of his terrible fits. From doing exams at his age.
But he didn’t look so old that night. You can’t be old in a circus. All you can do is jolly it up and play along. Fall down and stand up, take smacks and dish them out again, roll your eyes and stick out your tongue. Get kicks in your backside and have your arm twisted. Let out farts and eat your hat. Until you’re completely buggered.
That’s exactly what Treppie did with Lambert. When he saw Lambert was losing heart or getting tired, he let him have the red nose for a while so he could also play the fool.
And that’s how they got through the whole business. It was jolly and full of fun, and even she learnt something. She’d thought parables were only in the Bible, like the sower and the seed and the wasted talents, but then Treppie asked Lambert to tell everyone the parable of how fridges worked. It was a good story, too, about the canoe that leaked. And Lambert told it so nicely.
About how the heat inside a fridge was like water that kept leaking into a canoe, and how the heat was soaked up by the fridge’s gas — just like you sucked up water from a leaking canoe into a sponge, and then squeezed it out over the side, back into the ocean. That’s why a fridge was always warm at the back. It was where the heat came out, from the inside, allowing the fridge to stay cool. And that’s why the sea was always full of water, Lambert suddenly said. It was from the leaking canoes that people were sponging dry all the time. Treppie said, no, that was enough now, he was taking the parable too far. He should remember a parable was a truth with a short shelf-life. There was nothing in the world that was exactly the same as anything else. Then Treppie said a funny thing. He said that’s why he wouldn’t mind if he didn’t go to heaven one day, ’cause heaven was a place where everything was exactly the same as everything else, so they didn’t need parables over there. It was just pure, undiluted, eternal truth, without words. That, he said, sounded terribly boring to him, in fact it sounded like hell itself.
Pop said Treppie mustn’t start losing his thread, but Treppie said he’d already lost it, there was nothing to be done about it, and if heaven was like hell, then hell had to be like heaven, and he reckoned that was a place where everyone sat around and told weird parables all the time and no one ever ran out of things to say. It was a place where the truth kept flashing behind your eyeballs all the time, like multi-coloured fireworks on Guy Fawkes.
Horries, that’s what she said, just horries.
Circus, Treppie said, just circus. And he took Lambert further through his exam. What did it mean if there was too much ice in the ice-box and the pump had stopped and the on-off-on-off cycle got mixed up? It all meant the fridge was too warm, Lambert said. Full marks! And why did a fridge get too warm? He must please list the reasons. Then Lambert listed them on the tips of his fingers: blocked condenser pipe, broken seals, too little gas, old oil, broken thermostat. Full marks again! She and Pop clapped.
Treppie asked him about materials, tools and troubles, a whole list of things a person must know when you service a fridge, and Lambert got through that list with flying colours. He even knew you had to insert a spring into soft copper tubing before bending it, otherwise the tubing would break or pinch closed. Treppie asked him how you work the valves on the manifold gauge to purge or to vacuum. Lambert knew it all, how you use a piercing valve to connect a service line to the system. If he was allowed to make a comment, Pop said, he just wished Lambert would learn the Afrikaans words for all these English terms, ’cause the English may have invented the fridge, but they didn’t have copyright on fridge language. Then Treppie said Pop shouldn’t get all puritan now, as long as a fridge worked he couldn’t be bothered with language. Lambert said he agreed. All that mattered was that a thing worked.
Then Pop asked Treppie in what language he thought those sinners were telling their parables, the stories that exploded like fireworks behind their eyeballs in Treppie’s heavenly hell. Treppie laughed so much that his nose fell right off, and then he bent down with his back to Pop and pushed his hand through his legs, shaking Pop’s hand from upside down. Now that was a bladdy good point, he said. ’Cause as far as he knew, all you heard in hell was your mother tongue, and then he farted out aloud.
Boy, they laughed themselves sick that night.
And through it all, Lambert stuck to his guns. Most of the time he sounded like a real expert. Here and there he hit a blind spot, like what if a valve seat came loose in a pump and you didn’t have a new one with you? Or what was a scotch yoke piston arrangement? Pop told Treppie he mustn’t get too technical, those were the kind of things you learnt only in a workshop situation. She also said, yes, Treppie mustn’t get too technical, and then Treppie answered the questions himself, giving Lambert a whole lesson. Lambert took notes until he said he now understood, and then he closed his notes and repeated the answer from memory, until Treppie was satisfied.
MULTIPLE CHOICE 
The fun really began when Treppie gave Lambert a series of multiplechoice questions, from the chapter on safety measures and accidents.
Lambert had to choose the right answer. Like what should you do if you burn yourself with acid oil after a burn-out? Treppie gave a long list of multiple choices: smack the fridge, or your mother; swing the compressor by its oil line like a slingweight and let it fly when it’s going really fast; eat polony; put ice on your wounds. And then he got rude as welclass="underline" pull your wire; or take a bath in Coke. Really! And the last one was, phone the Flying Squad.
Lambert guessed the right answer straight away. Put ice on your wounds.
But the next question, also a multiple choice, was a different matter altogether.
For this one, Treppie pressed his nose more firmly on to his face, and then he went and stood in the lounge doorway like a clown who wanted to run a race. Just in case. Toby started barking ’cause he thought the game was for him, but she and Pop told Toby to shuddup. He went back to his spot under the TV and lay down with flat ears.
The question was this: what was the single worst thing that could happen to Lambert Benade as a top fridge specialist? Treppie began talking high falutin’ language, like he was reading from a book, and he pulled his mouth this way and that.