Love Thy Neighbour. Long Time.

"I am saving your latest blog post for a moment of work boredom tomorrow, but I need to make it clear that I expect a post about MG and the gang, STAT."

I arrived at work on Friday to find the above comment glaring at me from my Facebook wall. Now, when you only have five readers in the whole wide wonky world, you’re not really in a position to refuse orders. Hack one of them off and there goes 25% of your readership.* What’s more, Bec is really the Fury Godmother to my blog; that is, she suggested I start it, got swine flu to prove it, and has since then even actually read it.

In short, when Bec wants a post, Bec gets a post.

Her own latest blog is about neighbours: a sewer-splashed Etiket Met Emsie guiding you through everything from offering them canapés to vandalising their mail. Which, apart from being chock-full of invaluable tips, also led me prancing down memory lane – in my case, more of a dingy alley – where I have my own share of colourful neighbours.

It is this alley that Bec wanted the tour of.

I should begin by explaining that I am descended from a long line of Calvinists, bred through generations to embrace the simple life. My grandfather’s generation was the first in our family to leave farming behind in favour of academia; the rest never bothered beyond Std 2 education (a sensible move in my opinion). Today, wholesome farm living has been replaced by a certain urban dinginess, but the surviving members of our clan still nurse the belief that there is something vile and muddy about being too posh; that even if you should (God forbid) earn enough to move out of your humble cottage below the railway, you should rather just stay put and find something worthy to spend the money on, like a pilgrimage, or sending someone with less cash than you to university.

Though I have not yet put anyone through university, I have saved up for my share of pilgrimages, and to this day feel a peculiar shame when confronted with anything flashy. My family is so dozy about safeguarding its goods that my father and sister actually had the following conversation one afternoon, when my phone rang unexpectedly** and I, in surprise, sent my dad’s 21-year-old Passat screeching into the wall of Rondebosch Café.

Dad (coming home and surveying the damage): Hmmm. Do you think M had a bit of a prang?
Sister (puzzled): Nah, I think that’s the one I made four years ago.
Dad: Ah. Well, I’m sure M will tell us if there’s anything to tell. Tea?

It follows, then, that my family takes pride in its anti-snobbism; that we find a certain piety in being ever so slightly dodgy. Not too much, mind; but just enough not to be accused of ostentation. And to ensure our share of interesting neighbours.

When classifying bad neighbours, there are really only six routes one can go: noise, mess, drugs, nudity, madness or sex. As a teenager, I was exposed to nudity, madness and sex; as a young adult, to noise, mess, madness and drugs. As a teenager, my neighbours were a naked violinist (beautiful); an angry old lady (deaf) who would turn her hearing aid up as high as it could go and then complain of unnaturally distorted noises from her neighbours; an oily divorcee (depraved) who would leopard-crawl under the security doors of an evening and ask my sister and me out on dates; and a young woman whose orgasms were quite spectacular (perhaps she was watching the naked violinist). No need for any talks on the birds and the bees for me, no sir. I learnt it all from Cath at 103. As a fifteen-year-old trying to get my beauty sleep before exams, I would bash on the wall, to no avail. Eventually I took to imitating her, grunting and wailing against the concrete in the hope that she would hear me and get the picture. She didn’t. Maybe she could tell I was faking, and thought I needed practice.

When my sister and I left the family bosom, we went one better. My sister moved into a flat opposite one of South Africa’s more embarrassing confessional poets, who also boasts a number of sexual harassment charges; and a feisty fellow we came to know as Masturbating George. The poet would sit about drinking tea and having angst, while MG developed a strange fondness for my sister and would spend his days at the window, drooling and wanking, as she typed away at her thesis. Clearly a chap with an appreciation for academia, we thought.

It was around this time that my sister also began leaving her car unlocked so that the neighbourhood kids could sleep in it. The car in question was a tiny Renault with rather ambitious racing stripes down the side, and a radio that was connected to the headlights using a telephone plug. It wasn’t up to much on the highway, but made a fine shelter for homeless children, who were, I might add, rather better neighbours than Masturbating George.

I’ve known a number of homeless people who made better neighbours than MG, mind you. I shared my backyard in Mowbray with two intrepid braaiers who would come and light a cosy, crackling bonfire in my parking spot, sharing companionship and good cheer over a cup ‘o meths and a nice bunny chow. They did this in the company of Drunk James, who lived next door to me and never – to my knowledge anyway – did very much else, unless you count his habit of drunkenly whistling through the keyhole at my parakeet in the wee hours of the morning.

I got to know Drunk James because he would spend his days hanging over the fence and checking out my friends’ cars. If a particularly posh one came to visit, he’d wink and leer.

“Niche wheelsh,” he’d say knowingly.

Come evening, he would light a fire in my bay. “Relaksh,” he’d say. “You gotsha bay wisha besht view.”

I should point out that my bay overlooked the garbage cans.

A little further afield, a friend of my sister’s had a particularly vocal berghie couple camping in her garden, having invited some of the neighbourhood crew to pitch a tent there. The only rule was that good fences made good neighbours; i.e. she would give them their space if they gave her hers.

Giving privacy from her side was more difficult than it was from theirs, since walls are soundproof and tents are not. Returning home one night after an evening out, she heard a woman’s voice ring out through the garden, every syllable dripping with post-coital smugness.

“Justice,” it purred, “Dit was nou soe lekka, ek wens my hiele lyf was poes.”

Drunk James, Post-Coital Patty and the Braai Buddies are not the strangest kids on the block, however.*** I’ve definitely known weirder; for example Sick-Bucket Simphiwe, who lived above me in the Mowbray building. Simphiwe a) vomited into my pot plants from time to time and b) accused me of allowing strangers to park in his bay and harbouring the fugitives in my flat. “I’ll get those motherf***ers,” he would hiss on his witch-hunts, glaring at me through the windows as he ran laps of the building.

Simphiwe, I should add, had a nasty habit of practising guitar at 1am (he only knew two chords) and watching TV so loudly that it would drown out my CD player even on its highest setting.

“You’re cramping my style, b**ch,” he’d say when I asked him to turn it down.

Another intriguing gentleman in our complex was apparently already there when my friend Sally lived there a good ten years ago. This one drove a white bakkie, although drove is probably the wrong word, since I never actually saw him take it anywhere. He spent his days marooned on the roadside, fiddling with the aerial and peering anxiously at the sky.

“He’s trying to make contact with other life forms,” Sally explained when I asked her about it. “He’s convinced he’s going to get through any day now.”

Also fixing their gaze firmly on the heavens was the church choir on the other side of the building. Given who we were living with, I don’t blame them for needing a little gospel. They practised on Sunday evenings, which didn’t bother me so much; there’s something about singing at twilight that colours a building with a strange pathos and surrealism.

“Give us a J!” one would cry as Drunk James drooled over the fence.

“Give us an E!” the next would warble over the bunny-chow-and-meths picnic.

“Give us an S!” another would holler as Simphiwe hurtled past, muttering.

“Give us a U!” the fifth would howl as chunks of beans splashed into the impatiens.

“Give us an S!” the last would trill as ET-Phone-Home hopefully twiddled his aerial.

“All together now: Who we gonna call?...JEEEE-SUS!”

Amen, sisters, I would think. We could probably use a blitz from a celestial clean-up crew. But I never said that bit out loud. It was my best shot at neighbourly love.

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*Or 20%, as I realised later. But I leave the error there as testimony to the fact that BA students cannot do maths.
** How else do phones ring?
***Though their aliases would make a great name for a band. Greatest Fireside Hits by Post-Coital Patty and the Braai Buddies. Instant winner, don’t you think?