Jimfish

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In the mad middle years of the 1980s, in Port Pallid on the Indian Ocean, the old skipper of an inshore trawler, the Lady Godiva, was standing on the harbour wall one day, watching a line of leaping dolphins slicing through the waves, when he felt a tap on his shoulder.

‘When I turned around,’ he told Sergeant Arlow, ‘there stood this boykie on the lip of the sea wall, looking at me with sea-green eyes. He might have come right up from the water, he was that close to it.’

‘Better haul him in and let me see him,’ said Sergeant Arlow, a great bear of a man, who decided all moral questions in Port Pallid. ‘We will make a plan.’

The people of Port Pallid caught, thought, bought and sold fishes and weighed, sorted and grouped them into neat little piles; and they did much the same with people, adhering to the religion of Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, a Dutch visionary who taught that people were happiest when coralled in separate ethnic enclosures, colour-coded for ease of identification and tightly controlled. All moral questions were matters for the police, and since Sergeant Arlow was the entire police force in Port Pallid it was he who decided to which group people belonged and whether their papers and passes and permits were in order.

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