Pop asked Treppie if he didn’t have a drop of self-respect left in him. But Treppie just acted like he hadn’t heard. He pinched his nostrils and sang like the main coolie-singer on top of the mosque, the one they always hear from Bosmont when the wind blows in the right direction:
‘Lemon tree very pretty
And the lemon flower is sweet
But the fruit of the poor lemon
Is impossible to eat.’
So, that’s why Pop’s wearing blue shirt-buttons to close up his khaki-pants nowadays. His mother spent the whole day sewing them on, with pink cotton. It doesn’t look right, she says, but at least Pop looks decent again. She also tried to fix Pop’s zip-up pants, but he uses a safety pin to keep the fly closed. And Lambert thinks they must’ve bought his mother some panties too, ’cause every now and again he sees them hanging on the line.
He’s got his own plans for Fish-Eye. When he goes out on his rounds, late at night, he takes a crate to stand on and then he pisses into Fish-Eye’s postbox.
Fish-Eye thinks it’s the kaffirs. Lambert’s seen how he waits for them behind his wall on weekends, early in the evening. But Fish-Eye has to wait a long time. It’s mostly just kaffirgirls who walk up and down Martha Street, and they wouldn’t be able to piss into that postbox of his, even if they wanted to. Every now and again a few kaffirs come walking past and then Fish-Eye shits them out. He calls them hosepipe-dicks. And he asks them if they’d like to know what it feels like to get their king-sized dicks caught in a mouse trap. He’ll give them something to write home about, he says. They mustn’t think they’re the only ones with cultural weapons around here.
Then, one day, a long stick of a kaffir came walking past with his hair all tied up in strings. He was wearing sunglasses, with a red, green and yellow cap. Lambert’s mother thought he was a Zulu, so she hid behind the bathroom door. But Treppie said, no, Zulus had knobkieries. This was a Rasta-man, and they must check now how this Rasta-man was going to jive old Fish-Eye, who was shitting him out something terrible there in the street. That Rasta-man just stood there, cool as a cucumber, rolling a zol and checking Fish-Eye out as he screamed at him from behind his wall.
And then the Rasta-man actually had the guts to give Fish-Eye a talking to. ‘Cool it, my man. Smile, God loves you,’ he said. He even threw Fish-Eye a peace sign. Fish-Eye went completely purple in the face. He ran around like a madman. It was so bad they thought he was going to jump into the Penguin Pool to be with his carp. But he didn’t. He went and set the little mousetrap in his postbox, and then it snapped on to his finger.
Lambert’s clever. He first takes out the mousetrap. Then he pisses into the postbox. When he’s finished pissing, he puts the trap back again. He doesn’t let people fuck with him. Now Mister Reservist can read piss-letters until the day he dies. And he gets a lot of letters, too. From Absa and Sanlam and the Bible Society and the AA and Readers Digest. Serves him right. And the police must also watch out, discretion and all. Treppie read him a story the other day about two policemen from Triomf who raped a woman at Johan Coetzee police station. De Bruin and Visagie. Lambert still wants to find out where in Triomf De Bruin and Visagie live. And that clever-arse traffic cop at number 101, who races up and down Martha Street on his motorbike must watch out too. A person’s life is in danger around here. The place is full of dogs and things. He can just see an accident happening.
When the police themselves become a danger to society, then you know something’s wrong.
So he patrols. Somebody has to do it.
When he walks up and down the streets of Triomf at night, with his stick and his gun safely in his belt, he feels like he was born to patrol. He feels sharp. The kind of person other people can rely on. And he checks out everything, even the stuff that looks okay. It’s when things don’t look different that you drop your guard. So he checks, not only inside all the windows, to make sure that every mother and father, grandma and grandpa, child and grandchild, brother-in-law and step-sister, what have you, is sitting nicely at the TV and watching the news; and not only that all the front gates and the driveways and the car windows are closed, and that the number plates are still on. He also checks the things no one else ever looks at, the things that tell you straight away when something’s wrong. Like the stop signs. He checks to see if they’re the right colour and the right height, and if they’re standing on the right side of the road; and he checks the streets’ name-plates, to make sure they’re the same as the names on the kerb, and that they point in the right direction; and the streetlights, to make sure they’re all switched on; the telephone wires, to see that they’re still nicely connected; and the manholes, whether their lids fit the holes nicely. Nowadays the kaffirs even steal manhole covers and sell them for scrap iron. Ten rand apiece. Treppie says it’s to keep the balance in the New South Africa, ’cause for a long time now the antiquarians have been stealing pressed metal ceilings from old houses, to sell on the black market.
So he also tries to check if all the houses still have their ceilings, although Triomf’s houses have only pressed cardboard. And he looks inside the rubbish bins, to make sure they’ve got the kind of rubbish they’re supposed to have: old bread and newspapers and rotten vegetables and stuff, not heads or cats or babies. People throw away the funniest things nowadays.
He checks the green fuse boxes on the pavements to see if their little doors are closed, and to make sure no loose wires stick out or lie around. Treppie says people siphon off electricity illegally, but no one ever gets caught. Triomf’s a closed shop, a law unto itself, he says. Not if he, Lambert, can help it. He’s going to check out this closed shop very carefully to see what openings he can find.
And with his sharp eye he sometimes sees things he’s sure no one else ever sees. Things on the ground and things in the air. On the ground, it’s mostly bugs and funny little creatures that come out of their little holes. He once spent the whole night on the veld across the road from Shoprite, at that bus stop in front of the police flats, watching with his torch how termites come pouring out of their holes after the rain. They just kept coming, in a never-ending line, like someone was pulling them out from above on a string. Then they broke loose and swarmed up into the sky. Some of them fell down and died. Moles also do their pushing at night. Rats too. The rats are breeding like mad in the drains. That’s where they live. They go ‘trrrips!’ one after another through the gaps in the pavement, down into their holes. Like someone’s reeling them in by their noses, downwards.
He once saw a baboon-spider walking across the street. It was as big as his fist, with legs that moved on their own, as if they were tied to separate threads. That was at the end of Martha Street, on the koppie-side. You see some interesting things on that side. Rabbits with eyes like reflectors, who feed in the beds at the Centenary Old Age Resort. Once he even saw a little buck, and often he sees owls. That’s when he realised there was more to Jo’burg than met the eye. And he’s glad that he sees all these things. It feels like he’s got secrets that are his only. But when he sometimes tells his folks a little something, they just laugh at him. Then they say he’s having them on.