Marlene van Niekerk - Triomf

Now the helicopter’s blue light shines right into their faces.

‘Ow!’ says his mother. She holds up her hand in front of her eyes. Pop looks the other way.

No, man, what are his people doing now, they must look straight into the light, with open eyes, so they can make themselves known to the protectors of the law. Let them shine their fucken light. If they want to interrogate him here in his own yard, then he’ll say to them, look, if it wasn’t for his regular patrols in the streets at night, which he does of his own free will, without expecting anything in return, then Triomf would be the same as all the other suburbs. Full of murder and robbery and killing. As things stand, Triomf is one of the safest areas in the whole of Jo’burg. You wouldn’t say it, with all the riff-raff and scum just a stone’s throw away, there on the other side of Ontdekkers. It’s all thanks to one white oke who can be seen regularly on the streets at night. They know they can’t just come and take chances here in Triomf.

That’s why, when he’s out at night and he walks past a munt, he shines his torch right into the munt’s eyes and then he says: Watch your step, my mate, I’m checking you out.

And nowadays he also tap-taps on his gun. Which he wears in his belt. Then their eyes go big, like saucers.

He sticks the gun in the belt that he took off his Man About Towns. He made a new hole right at the end of the belt, and now he can only just get it on again, under his belly. The stretched elastic in his shorts won’t hold the gun nice and tight. When he puts the gun into his belt, everyone can see it.

News travels. By this time, anyone who’s up to funny business will know about him. Especially now that he’s armed.

His family don’t know about the gun yet, but they stare at him like they do. ’Specially his mother. He figures that maybe they saw his list. And he thinks his mother saw more than just the list. He swears she saw THE MOLE IN THE FRIDGE. All his stuff was shifted away from the wall when he came to. But maybe he did it himself, when he was burning the rubbish. Or maybe they scratched around in his things when he was lights-out.

No respect for his privacy. But what can he do? He can’t remember so nicely any more. And when he woke up, he wasn’t wearing his shorts.

Lately, Treppie’s been holding his hands in front of his eyes like binoculars, and then he sings, in a deep voice:

‘I see a bad moon rising

I see trouble on the way.’

Or he pretends he’s pulling a gun out of a holster and then he does a crazy little dance with his mouth open and his tongue hanging out and his head pulled back into his shoulders. Then he pretends he’s shooting up into the sky, ‘crack! — crack! — crack!’.

And when he asks Treppie what now, then he says no, he’s just playing Lambert, the Sundance Kid.

Treppie’s arse. He doesn’t need to know about the gun. Nobody needs to know. He’s not going to start bothering about a licence now. In any case, nowadays it looks like every second kaffir’s got a gun, especially when they march up and down the streets and shoot off their weapons into the sky. No one can come and tell him they’ve all got licences. He’d thought it was against the law, but the policemen don’t do anything. They just lie on their tanks and watch. Treppie says that’s the official standpoint of the Ministry of Law and Order. Dis-cre-tio-nary po-li-cing. He says it’s just another word for shit-scared constables. But, he says, their shit comes in two different colours: one for when the Inkatha impis are on the march with their guns, and another when they think it’s APLA. When they reckon it’s APLA, they go on a raid across the border at night and shoot the APLAs full of holes in their beds. Never mind if they’re just apprentice-APLAs who’re still wet behind the ears. And with the ANC they don’t even bother any more. Treppie says that’s ’cause the ANC’s the biggest cannon of them all.

Well, all he knows is that if trouble comes their way, he’ll be on the right side. The police will still be grateful for people like him one day. People they can rely on. He stands for law and order here in Triomf. Like that little bloke in Urban Angel , who works for nothing and then gets a kick in the teeth for thanks. But in the end he’s still everyone’s hero.

So he doesn’t mind. He’s looking after Triomf, and he knows his day will come. Every dog has its day, no matter what Treppie says. Treppie says he mustn’t walk around so much on his own at night, ’cause he hasn’t got a groundswell behind him. He’s an individual, and the police are hard on lost individuals.

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.