Port Pallid, South Africa, 1984

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.

And so the old skipper did as he was told, collected the boy and took him to the police station.

‘Where you from, Jimfish?’ the sergeant asked.

‘When I was a baby I was stolen and taken away by some people to their village and worked as a slave in the fields,’ the boy said.

‘That’s his story,’ said the skipper.

‘Believe that, you’ll believe anything,’ said the sergeant. He stuck a pencil into the boy’s hair, as one did in those days, and waited to see if it stayed there or fell out before he gave his verdict.

‘He’s very odd, this Jimfish you’ve hauled in. If he’s white he is not the right sort of white. But if he’s black, who can say? We’ll wait before classifying him. I’ll give his age as eighteen and call him “Jimfish”. Because he’s a real fish out of water, this one is.’

The old skipper asked: ‘What must I do with him?’

The sergeant shrugged. ‘What would you do if you landed a catch the wrong size or colour?’

The skipper looked at the boy. ‘I can’t throw him back.’

‘Put him on ice until his family comes forward,’ said Sergeant Arlow. ‘Until then, he can work in my garden.’

No one came forward to claim Jimfish and he remained impossible to classify. In some lights and to some eyes he looked as white as newly bleached canvas; others saw him as faintly pink or tan or honey-coloured; there were even some Pallidians who detected a faint blue tinge to the boy.

Jimfish lived in the house of the old skipper and each morning he waved goodbye when the Lady Godiva chugged into the Indian Ocean, heading for Cape Infanta, the Agulhas Bank or the Chalumna river mouth, chasing shallow-water hake or east-coast sole. When he returned from these trips the old skipper told the boy stories about strange creatures hauled up from the deep. One story above all others the boy asked for again and again.

‘It was 1938 and I was a youngster like you, crewing on the trawler Nerine under Captain Goosen. One day we found in our nets this great big fellow. Blue as blazes with dabs of white. But this fish had four little legs. It turned out to be a coelacanth, which everyone thought had been dead for millions of years, but the one we caught was alive and kicking. The coelacanth can do handstands. And swim backwards. Folks say that humans come down from apes. But millions of years before that, Old Four Legs wandered ashore and decided to stay. Result? Us. And here we are, still fish out of water.’

Jimfish longed to join the fishing boats, but his permit allowed him to work only as a gardener. And so, when he felt sad, Jimfish would tell himself that even if he wasn’t a proper person, and even if his family never came forward, one day he’d be a brother to this coelacanth.

‘Bright blue, with four legs. It can stand on its head and swim backwards. A very queer fish. Like me.’

Each morning Jimfish went to work in the garden of Sergeant Arlow, whose wife Gloriosa kept on so many servants it was rumoured she assigned one to each hand when her fingernails needed attention.

Jimfish was set to work under the gardener, Soviet Malala, a most fiery man whose mother had been influenced by the Russian Revolution, hence the name she had given her son.

The Arlows had a lovely daughter, whose name was Lunamiel, and she had chestnut hair, green eyes and a complexion as soft as a downy peach. They had a son, too, named Deon, whose neck grew out of his collar like the trunk of a baobab and whose sole ambition was to become a policeman as large and loud as his father. It was also rumoured that even in starting a family Gloriosa had relied on a degree of in-house domestic help. But rumour-mongers were careful to keep their gossip from the ears of Sergeant Arlow, because policemen were encouraged to shoot troublemakers on a regular basis.

Soviet Malala felt sorry for young Jimfish and soon became the boy’s teacher. This gardener, who had never been to school, taught himself to read and write. He studied the works of Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin and Kim Il-sung and then wove their ideas into his philosophy, which he named ‘prolo-fisc-freedo-mism’, and he explained its theories with boiling enthusiasm to his young apprentice.

‘Anger ignites. It is the antidote to sickness, cynicism and doubt. Fury fires the masses and blasts them towards the right side of history. Rage is the rocket fuel of the lumpenproletariat.’

In this same year, 1984, a new, choleric, finger-wagging president took charge of the country. He was known as ‘Piet the Weapon’, because of his passion for guns, tanks and fighter jets, and for crushing all who dissented, demurred or disagreed. When he one day paid a visit to Port Pallid, every white person turned out to hear him speak.

Spying an oddly coloured boy in the crowd, the President asked: ‘And what’s your group, young man?’

Jimfish did not hesitate: ‘I’m with the fish, sir. That’s my name and that’s my calling.’

The President was impressed. ‘Good for you, Jimfish. If we all stuck to our own school, shoal, tribe, troop and territory we’d be a lot happier. Those like Nelson Mandela, who oppose me, will stay in jail. There will be no mixing of the colours, no turning back and no going forward. In fact, no movement of any sort, not while I am in charge.’

The loyal Pallidians cheered him to the echo and felt very lucky to be led by a man so strong, so well-armed, so furious, and they sang him on his way:

Good old Piet, he’s the one;

We die for him till kingdom come;