Inspiration, you mysterious emissary from the gloom

Butch couldn’t concentrate. He could hear them talking and laughing. The Drain People.
Gillian had got him onto reading Measure For Measure now, but he kept losing his place. How was he going to improve his acting skills when he couldn’t get through a single one of the Duke’s soliliquies without the muffled voices from the drain throwing him off?
They were near enough to be audible, just far enough away so you couldn’t make out what they were saying. Just muffled voices, sporadic laughter and loud cracks every now and then when they broke more wood for their brazier – branches torn down from the trees overhanging the drains.
And Shakespeare’s hectic. The oke writes in this intense dialect, so you have to read everything twice. You need to concentrate lank.
As far as Butch could tell, the play was about this babe who wants to get her brother off being executed. So she goes to the oke in charge, and he says he’ll only spare her boet if she pomps him. Hectic issues, hey.
Deep inside Butch something stirred.
He was swotting up on Shakespeare for his acting class with soap star Gillian Bogle. And the only reason she was training him was because he’d helped her lose five kilos and saved her acting career.
Was that a Measure For Measure kind of deal? Mmmm.
As he was scheming, Butch put his fingers to his chin and realised with a start that he looked intellectual. He immediately got up and went to his full-length mirror. He struck the same pose.
He definitely looked intellectual. No doubt about it. Then there was an angry crack of splintering firewood from the direction of the drain and his face looked startled, then annoyed. He hated that look.
That was the crack that broke the camel’s back. Butch pulled on a pair of muscle pants – he was reading Shakespeare in his underpants. He turned off the porn movie on the DVD player and waddled out into the yard, where it backed onto the drainage ditch.
As he got to the back fence, his anger melted away, to be replaced by an emotion he hadn’t felt in years: fear. Butch Varnes, all 108kg of him, realised with a start that he was afraid of The Drain People.
His breath and his pulse quickened, his fingers gripped the rusted fence of his backyard and he froze. He knew he had not the courage to confront the mysterious denizens of the night who so polluted his nocturnal thoughts.
So he kept his peace and grasped, besides the fence, a new tool of interaction: he listened. What he heard was sweet water to the arid garden of his wrestler’s mind.
“So now she sits in jail,” a voice said from the darkness. “And just because she was standing by the robot. The other time she was arrested for standing outside a shop and they called it loitering.”
“It’s wrong, that,” came another voice. “Where do they think must she now stand?”
“Exackle! So now she’s in jail for begging and all she was doing was standing by the robot like a normal person. And you know mos we haven’t got a bail. Who’s got hundred rand for that?”
“That’s right! If we had hundred rand, we could go and sit in the Steers with the larnies. But if you haven’t got, of course you must stand on the street.”
The crack of fresh kindling again cleaved the gloom. Like emissaries to the heavens, sparks rose from the ditch’s darkness.
“Where do they now think we must stand? Must we hide in the drain all day as well? Pass me some of that…”
“Ja. And then where must we go in summer when the rains come?”
“No. This city doesn’t want poor people. It’s wrong when you can sommer go to jail just for being poor.”
“Ja. I’m gatvol of Jo’burg. When winter’s over I’m going back to Lambert’s Bay. It’s good there. At least you can fish. And they don’t put you in jail when you not even drunk!”
Laughter lit the gloom, and Butch Varnes reeled.
Like he’d been slapped across his pate, Butch reeled backwards into his arid garden. Then, like the disguised Duke bearing news of salvation to sad Isabella. He hurried back to his tortured room.
But the complex, riddling volume lay unread. Butch Varnes turned on his laptop and began to write! With fingers lit to life by real life’s inspiration, Butch Varnes began to write!