Lambert feels dizzy from thinking about time. He sits wide-eyed and stock-still, watching the things in his den. All the things stand there so quietly, you wouldn’t say time was zinging to hell and back in their insides, in their guts and in their seams.
‘Click’ goes the Tedelex as it switches itself on.
‘Clack’ goes the Fuchs as it switches itself off.
Suddenly a terrible fear grips his body. It pushes up from his tail-end like a wall of water. He wants to hold on to the bed but all he gets is a fistful of sheet in each hand. There’s a flashing behind his eyeballs. His head feels like a TV that’s busy fucking out. Lines and snow. Crash! Bang! Christ!
No, it’s not a fit, or anyway it’s not him that’s fitting. It’s a general seizure. He’s sitting wide awake right inside it and there’s no black-out to take him away, no blowing of fuses so he won’t know anything about anything. Everything is quiet and clear. The quiet convulsions of all the things in time. On and on it goes, forever. He feels like he’s shrinking down to the size of a pin-point and, at the same time, swelling beyond the walls of his den, shot through and blasted by time zinging through him.
‘And now? Why you sitting here like this with big eyes like you’ve just seen a ghost?’ someone suddenly says here next to him.
It’s Pop. He didn’t hear him come in.
How can he explain all this to Pop now? If he does, Pop will go tell the others and then they’ll all start saying something’s wrong with him again. He rubs his eyes.
‘Come see if you like what I did with the postbox.’
Lambert feels Pop’s hand on his shoulder. Pop’s voice is soft. He’s not so bad, old Pop. He sees Pop looking at his chair, his and Mol’s chairs that he dragged in here today. Pop didn’t say a word, but he can see the old man doesn’t really like it. He looks where Pop’s looking. Yes, he has to admit the chairs do look a bit funny here, as if they’ve been shrunk or something. The light falls on them in a different kind of way. You can see the hollows in the cushions made by Pop and Mol’s bodies. Those chairs have been sat to death, but they’re better than nothing. After all, he can’t very well let his girl sit on a crate. Where would she put her drink down? He looks at the chairs’ arm-rests. They’re full of coffee rings and black marks, from cigarettes. Tonight he’ll put his red light on and then she won’t notice a thing.
Pop sighs a deep sigh, here next to him.
‘Just for tonight, Pop, then I’ll take them back to the lounge.’
Pop shrugs. It’s okay.
He points to Treppie’s clock — radio next to the bed. Five past five, it says. Pop checks his watch to see if his time is right. Why’s Pop so worried about time all of a sudden? They worked everything out nicely, after all. When Treppie comes home, it’s just the finishing touches, then Pop and Treppie will go fetch the girl and drop her off here, and then, he told them, they must go out for a long drive with his mother. He doesn’t want to feel like he’s being spied on. He wants to be alone with his girl. That’s the least a person can expect of his own family.
Pop prods him gently. He must come outside now. Pop walks in front, straight down the passage and out the front door. He points to the postbox. It’s up, but Lambert must go look inside to see exactly how he did it. Lambert looks in through the little door. Fucken sharp!
Pop’s made the mother of all plans. He drilled a little hole through the bottom of the postbox and then he stuck some fridge tubing into the hole, twisting it on the inside so it wouldn’t slip out again. Then he stuck the other end of the tubing down the hollow gate-pole, till it almost reached the bottom.
‘Now it’s foolproof,’ says Pop, standing next to him.
‘Fucken sharp!’ he says again. But it’s not the engineering he’s praising, it’s the decoration. Light blue. Ja, just the thing. With its number painted pitch black in front: 127. ‘Not bad, hey?’
‘Ja, I saw there were some dirty old paint tins next door in the yard, from when they painted the roof. So I asked if I could have them. There was more than enough for a postbox.’
Now only does he notice Pop’s got blue paint-spots all over his face. He looks like a bird’s egg with a thin shell full of spots, standing there with a big smile on his face.
‘Thanks, Pop, man! You’re a champ.’
‘Postbox for peace!’ It’s his mother. She’s also come out on to the little stoep, standing there with her hands on her stomach, watching them. Here she comes now, walking over the lawn. When she gets to the gate, she looks up the street.
‘Treppie,’ she says.
Right at the top of their block, where Martha Street crosses Thornton, they see Treppie walking towards them. Apart from his black working bag, he’s also carrying a big black rubbish bag full of stuff.
Must be the lampshades. He makes a tick next to lampshades on the list in his head.
Today he’s flying through his list like the wind. He even saw to the moles. Last night he borrowed next door’s hosepipe and then, first thing this morning, he connected the pipe to Flossie’s exhaust and connected their own hosepipe to Molletjie, filling up those holes one by one with exhaust fumes. Now there’s no danger that he and his girl will be eating breakfast here in the yard tomorrow morning and she suddenly spills her coffee ’cause a mole’s pushing up a hill under her nose. Moles are ugly things with whiskers and two teeth in front. He’s sure you don’t get moles in Hillbrow. Cockroaches, yes, and termites. But he reckons those have also been seen to, with all the fumes on that side.
And talking about breakfast, the breakfast cake is also ready. It’s a small Swiss roll, just enough for two people, in a closed white box in the fridge, together with all the other snacks for tonight. His stomach churns.
His mother was fine about everything. When they arrived back here this morning with all those chips and dips and things, she helped him pack everything into the back of the fridge. Then she said he must wait, she had a surprise for him — she didn’t think he should display all those fancy eats in shop-packets and plastic bowls. So last night she asked Pop to get the key for the sideboard from Treppie, and she unpacked all the stuff that was inside there. Those things, she says, are all she’s still got left from her mother, Old Mol — two thick wine glasses with patterns, two round-bellied brandy glasses, and lots of plates and bowls in old cream china, all of them with a red stag in the middle, jumping among pine trees across mountains white with snow.
And now everything’s standing there neatly on his work bench, which he tidied up so nicely. His whole room’s been swept clean and dusted down, with planks covering his petrol pit. They washed and ironed two of Treppie’s window sheets and pulled them neatly over the bed. As Treppie said, a man couldn’t ask for more. And his mother found two cushions and covered them with bright pieces of cloth, ’cause he’d burnt all the slips in that fire to kill the earwigs.
No, he must say, his mother co-operated very nicely. She even washed the kitchen floor twice. After she finished cleaning it the first time, the silly old cow went and threw a whole bottle of drain acid down the kitchen sink, just like that. It bubbled and bubbled and then it exploded, ‘kaboof’, shooting up from the bottom of the sink right across the lino floor, all the way to the other side of the room. Sis! Dirty brown goo.
But his mother just went down on her hands and knees and cleaned the whole floor all over again.
He had to use plastic tape to close up the pipe under the sink, ’cause that acid burnt a couple of holes right through the pipe. That drain stuff is almost as bad as fridge burn-out oil.