Treppie says if there were just one wild buck left in Jo’burg, it would be worth saving from fire and brimstone, but there obviously isn’t. He says all he can hear in Jo’burg are sirens and gunshots. All he can see are things that burn. And all he can smell is blood and iron. He says Jo’burg’s like a massive big iron dinosaur devouring itself, tail first, screws and brackets flying through the air.
Then his mother asks Treppie where he sees this ugly monster, and Treppie says if she’d just use her eyes like the good Lord Jesus intended her to, she wouldn’t be able to miss it. And then his mother spends the whole day waiting for the dinosaur to pop out somewhere. Behind the Hillbrow tower; on the open ground behind the Spar; or behind Northcliff hill. She says she can’t see any dinosaurs. All she sees are roads and cars and buildings and shops and people and things.
She’s looking in the wrong places. Treppie too. It’s just him, Lambert, who knows where to look. Only he sees everything there is to be seen.
’Cause he’s a patrolman. It’s in his blood. If you’re a born patrolman, you see everything, near and far, big and small, and you look at things carefully. You check to see how they work and what their movements are, inside and out.
And you pick up vibes.
He feels bright and breezy when he’s finished his patrolling for the day. He keeps on looking till he starts picking up vibes. Some nights there’s nothing. He knows there’re vibes, but he doesn’t always get hold of them so nicely. Then it’s just an ordinary night. Nothing special.
But other nights are different. Then he picks up the vibes on the ground and he follows them through the air. The vibes of things that fly, things that travel far. Stars with tails. He sees lots of stars falling. Stars dying. And he sees sputniks too. Bright side, dark side, bright side, dark side, as they dip through the night. That’s when you know the little monkey can’t settle down. Or the little dog.
Treppie says sputniks are full of over-excited monkeys and dogs. Sometimes the sputniks are empty, just cameras and things taking pictures of the earth and the moon and the stars. But others have astronauts inside. Space travellers. They patrol the heavens. Treppie says those astronauts are even more fidgety than the dogs and the apes. They’ve got ants in their pants. That’s why sputniks sometimes explode before they even take off, like the Challenger. Treppie says everyone’s a challenger, but sometimes people take things too far, or they do nothing. If they do nothing, they open their eyes one day and they’re knee-deep in something that someone else took too far. Then there’s shit to play.
Treppie’s a fine one to talk. He’s always challenging him, Lambert, and he always takes things too far. A pity, ’cause Treppie’s the only one among his family with anything between his ears.
Sometimes they have interesting conversations.
But as soon as it gets interesting, Treppie starts fucking around.
Lambert looks at Treppie next to him, here on the lawn. ‘Wakey-wakey!’ Treppie says. ‘All is quiet on the white side of Ontdekkers.’
The helicopter turns to the Bosmont side.
Martha Street’s residents go back into their houses. The moon’s sitting high.
‘They’re looking for a Hotnot,’ says Pop.
They stand and watch for a while as the helicopter searches, up and down, up and down, its red tail-light flashing. The searchlight cuts Bosmont’s dark streets like a thin, blue probe of glass. Sirens wail all over Jo’burg. Shots go off on Ontdekkers.
‘Who’s shooting?’ his mother asks.
‘Those are just the taxis that are missing, Ma.’
‘It’s Jo’burg that’s missing,’ Treppie says.
‘Her points are dirty. Her timing’s out. Who’ll give Jo’burg a service?’ he sings. Treppie started hitting the Klipdrift early tonight.
Lambert goes back to his den. There was nothing special on the go tonight. He went up and down Martha Street and then into Gerty and down Toby, to the bottom, where he always checks out the cars on the big advertising boards.
Those boards have long strips running downwards. First they turn one way, then the other, making a ‘ting!’ sound after each turn. And there’s a different picture each time.
Tonight it was a car driving through a veld fire.
Metallic blue. ‘Ting!’ It curves!
‘Ting!’ Opel Kadett 140.
And then it starts all over again. The blue car with its wheels in the fire. No one inside.
‘Ting! Ting! Ting!’
Over and over again.
Then the moon rose like a big, yellow ball above the advertising board.
And then he thought, no, now he’d better go home.
He goes round the back way to his den. Once inside, he feels for the key at the back of the Tedelex’s ice-box. He unlocks the steel cabinet and takes out his binoculars. Should he strip them? He once opened a kaleidoscope that Treppie brought home from the Chinese, just to see how it worked, how it made the little patterns that were all the same but also all different. But the pieces of glass fell out and he couldn’t get them to fit together again. Common piece of Chinese rubbish. Anyway, a Chinese is a sort of a Hotnot. The Japanese are the ones with real class, Treppie says. They’re honorary whites. They can make motorbikes. Suzuki, Kawasaki. Sounds more like Zulu to him.
He lies back on his mattress. The mattress he inherited from Pop and his mother. They actually went and took the new one for themselves. They say if he wants to burn his own bed he mustn’t complain about what they give him. Mind you, theirs is also not brand new, it’s a second-hand mattress from the pawnshop in Brixton, with an inner-spring. Not bad. And they bought a base, too, a shaky one, but what the hell. Now at least there’s one decent bed in the house. When his girl comes he’ll swop the mattresses around. They mustn’t try to stop him. You can’t let a guest sleep on a fucked-up piece of old sponge on the floor.
He focuses his binoculars on SUPERBEE. He sees it from so close that all he can make out are some of its parts. It takes him a while before he realises he’s looking at SUPERBEE’S body. Then he clicks it’s the middle sting, the one curling round the cloud. He can see on the black line how his hand was shaking when he got to the narrow part at the end. He looks down, at the wings, where the world shines through, softly blurred with spit between the veins. Yellow grass and red aloes. This bee’s more than a Superbee. This bee’s heavenly! It should actually be called ANGELBEE. Maybe he can still change it. Same number of letters. He’ll first have to paint white over SUPER and then write on top of it again.
He looks at his painting. There’s still a helluva lot to do. Lots that he has to fill in. Here and there he’s drawn a piece of outline. Most of the squares only have names. He looks at the names. Actually, everything should get wings like Angelbee. Angelbee’s got a vibe. None of them must lie thick or heavy or flat on the earth. They must fly. Things that can fly up into the air have vibes from other worlds.
Termite angel. Angel wasp. Heavenly rats and moths. Angels for Africa. Then the whole ceiling can get stars, so it looks like heaven.
He sees yellow spots on the ceiling. Must be the geyser leaking, or the overflow. And black specks, from the damp. Or maybe it’s fly-shit.
In the one corner he suddenly sees an off-white clot of threads. Things that look like sticks.
What is it?
He sets the binoculars to see better, but it blurs on both sides. He turns and turns until he gets it into focus.
The ball-thing’s moving. No, what the hell. What’s this now?
Slowly the little ball begins to tear open on the one side. Something’s moving around. Then three little folded-up things pop out. For a while they just hang there. Then they slowly open up.