Good fences make good neighbours

CAPE TIMES, 15 NOVEMBER 2002

I DON’T MIND TELLING you, I’m becoming a little nervous. I live, you see, in what is called a “quiet neighbourhood”. I do not know who my neighbours are, and ordinarily that is precisely the way I like it. Not for me the Mediterranean exuberance of the bustling street, the merry housewives gabbing over the backyard fence, the tousle-haired urchins popping round to borrow a cup of sugar. For me, neighbours are like relatives – you can’t choose ’em, you have to have ’em, but the wise man keeps contact with the blighters to the bare minimum.

I cherish the quietness of my neighbourhood, but of late it has begun to trouble me. Why is it so quiet? Why don’t I ever see my neighbours leaving for work in the morning, for instance? I raised this issue with my friend Chunko. “I think you will find,” said Chunko, “that most people leave for work at some time of the morning prior to eleven o’clock.”

“So?” I said.

“So you are still asleep,” said Chunko.

It makes sense, I suppose, but I am not soothed. If the statistics are anything to go by, the fact that I am seldom made aware of my neighbours probably means that I am living in a community of serial killers, sex offenders and fugitive international revolutionaries. Besides the excitement of discovering last week that James Kilgore, the last member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, has been living in Claremont, I was most struck by the comments of his neighbours. “He was such a quiet man,” they said. “We would never have guessed.”

I briefly lived in Claremont myself, in the days when I was a disgruntled university student, and I am compelled to confess that I would not be surprised to find a good deal more international villains hiding out there. There is a kind of simmering menace that hangs over Claremont, an unnatural stillness in the heat of the summer mornings that would be just the ticket for a Josef Mengele, say, or a Jack the Ripper living out the final years of his long retirement. Whispers have it that Robert Mugabe has a safe house tucked away somewhere above the railway line. Or perhaps I only remember Claremont that way because I spent most of my disgruntled student mornings fending off the kind of hangovers that make the world seem an altogether sinister place. Who can say?

But Kilgore’s neighbours’ comments were food for thought. Admittedly, you would probably expect an international fugitive to keep a low profile, rather than run up SLA banners on a home-made flagpole and play the Internationale on a trumpet each morning and offer night classes to explain precisely what “Symbionese” means. All the same, it is always, as neighbours around the world are quick to tell reporters, the quiet ones you have to watch.

Jeffrey Dahmer? Quiet. Fred and Rosemary West? Even more quiet. OJ Simpson? Seldom had loud parties. So don’t complain about the people across the road that play rap music all night and occasionally throw beer bottles at each other on the front lawn. At least you know they are not sex-killer cannibals or plotting the violent overthrow of the state, or Lord Lucan. You may not have peace and quiet, but you have peace of mind. Now you will have to excuse me. I have bought a drum kit and a tuba, and each night from now on I am going to teach myself to play them. It’s the only polite thing to do. I don’t want the neighbours to worry.