Triomf

Well, he reckons the police are far too busy with discretionary policing to worry about people like him, never mind patrol Triomf. The only time they come here is when there’s trouble. And even then it’s a struggle to make them believe you’ve got a case. That’s if they ever get here. When they do come, it takes them hours to arrive.

Like when he phones about the people next door. If that bunch at Fort Knox isn’t making trouble, then it’s Fish-Eye and his lot on the other side. That Fish-Eye’s beginning to look just like his blarry fish, with his one flat eye and his scrappy little moustache-beard. He says he eats those fish of his. Sis! Carp. He keeps them in a Penguin Pool, with a pump that goes through seven phases. Carp have got to have bubbles, he says, otherwise they die. The pump starts off low, then it gets higher and higher. ‘Eeeeee!’ At phase five it starts shaking. ‘Drrr!’ It gets so bad that he, Lambert, can’t get to sleep in his own den from all the noise. Never mind the poor fucken carp. But he supposes carp don’t ever sleep.

He’s already told Fish-Eye, he knows all about machines. There’s nothing that these two hands of his can’t do. He’ll tune that pump for him in two ticks so it runs as smooth as a sewing machine, ‘zick-zick, zick-zick, zick-zick’, all day long, through all its phases. But then Fish-Eye told him he must fuck off. Just like that. Uneducated bastard.

And then the shit started again, just the other day. It was a Saturday night. That machine was making such a noise his mother began to think the whole of Jo’burg, all the way from Sandton to Bosmont, was falling into one big sinkhole. She started running up and down with her housecoat open and her stomach wobbling, screaming that she wasn’t ready, the Lord must forgive her and protect her from the jaws of the animal in the depths.

Then he thought, no, enough is enough, now he’s going to phone the emergency number. So he went across the road and asked the dykes very nicely. They were in a jolly mood, and they said okay, he must just stay there, they’d bring the phone to him. So they brought the phone to the lounge, with an extension.

‘Disturbing the peace,’ is how he began his story. Then he mentioned the carp and he explained about phase five.

But he was connected to the Flying Squad and they were using a radio telephone. Other people kept talking on the radio. The men from Murder and Robbery in Brixton were saying they’d run out of wet bags and wires, and where did you get wet bags after one in the morning in the New South Africa, and how did things look there at Johan Coetzee station, didn’t they maybe have some bags and wires to send over? And while they were at it, they could also send their little red Hotnots along so they could clean out their gills for them. They were sitting around in Brixton with nothing to do. Every time Lambert got a word in, he had to start the whole story all over again, and each time the constable couldn’t understand what carp and phase five had to do with disturbing the peace. Likely blarry story, if they knew what wet bags and little red Hotnots and boredom had to do with each other. But he supposes every oke has his own way of frying fish.

That’s also what he said to the dykes, and then the tall one told the short one she would put this story of his before Lawyers for Human Rights, and the short one started laughing so much she had to go sit down and hold her head in her hands. He couldn’t figure out what was so funny, but he kept quiet. It was then that he clicked why Treppie says they’re so dilly. Treppie says you get two kinds of dykes, diesel dykes and dilly dykes, and these two across the road are definitely the dilly kind, if you ask him.

Anyhow, then the police came. They stood there next to the wall and they listened, but they said they could hear sweet blow-all, and he, Lambert, mustn’t waste their time like this. They were the Flying Squad and all they really handled was serious crime.

By that time the pump, of course, was a long way past phase five. It was running softly on phase one and all you could hear was ‘plop-plop’ as the carp took bites out of their bubbles.

Meanwhile, Fish-Eye was standing there behind his aloes, smoking and listening to everything they said, acting like he knew nothing.

Lambert tried to explain what happened each time the pump got to phase five. And how many hours it took to go through the whole cycle. If the Flying Squad came back at about six in the morning, they’d see exactly what he meant.

Then the policemen said, with their hands on their hips, ‘Mr Benade, do you or don’t you want to lay a charge?’

So he said no, ’cause by then Pop and Treppie were outside, pointing angry fingers at him behind the policemen’s backs. He said no, he just wanted them to put some pressure on Fish-Eye about his pumps that were making such a noise.

Then those policemen told him they weren’t in the pressure business, they were in the shooting business. And if it’s pressure he wanted, he should go to the World Trade Centre, where they were also into phases and stuff like that. Those politicians knew all about pressure, they said, laughing themselves to death there on the Benades’ front lawn.

It wasn’t just the dykes who were dilly, he thought to himself.

And the next morning, when Pop took the key out of the postbox, he found a letter there, from Fish-Eye. Treppie grabbed the letter and made a whole performance out of it, so Lambert still doesn’t know if everything Treppie read was true or not. The long and the short of it was Fish-Eye saying his property was losing its value as a result of all their meddling, and he’d be much happier if a decent kaffir like Cyril Ramaphosa came to live next door to him one day. Ramaphosa might even plant something along the boundary wall, he said, ’cause he saw Ramaphosa was planting weeping boer-beans there at the World Trade Centre, in a suit too, which was more than he could say for the Benades, despite the fact that they were white. And then he made a long list of complaints about them disturbing the peace and using the Lord’s name in vain. And about Pop’s zips that always hung open, and his mother who walked around with no panties all day long. And that they must watch out before he mobilised the whole neighbourhood against them,’cause they were sticking out like a sore finger. And then, right at the end, the fucker actually wanted to know if they’d paid their dog taxes all these years, for their one departed and their one surviving dog. He was just asking, although he felt it was only fair to inform them that he himself was a police reservist, and that he had family who were high up in the municipality too. One word from him and the Benades would be in their glory, dogs and all. Thanking them in anticipation, J.J. Volschenk.

He swears Treppie sucked half that letter straight out of his thumb, but by then he had them all wound up anyway, which must have been what he wanted.

Treppie said the honourable Mister Jay Jay Volschenk doth protest too much. He schemed Jay Jay was himself so low down in the pecking order that he got a kick out of writing high-and-mighty letters to the untouchables.

Then Treppie had to explain to his mother what untouchables were.

Not that he, Lambert, knew so well what it meant himself.

Of course, Treppie went and said the worst thing he could think of, just to torment her. He said the untouchables wiped off their shit, er, er, pardon, he meant their excrement, with their hands, and then they used it to write messages on the walls, for aliens. ‘Mene Mene Tekel.’ Aliens were the only ones who were still interested in them. Hadn’t his mother noticed how people were taking a wide berth around them nowadays?

Then she asked him, but what about the Witnesses? They still came to visit, out of their own free will. But Treppie said the Witnesses were interested only in their souls, not their excrement; although, come to think of it, their souls were probably lodged in their excrement, otherwise he also couldn’t figure out what the Witnesses thought they were looking for here at the Benades. But, he said, one of these days the Witnesses would have to come visiting on stilts, ’cause they were already deeper than knee-deep, and they were sinking fast.