At Fifty-One I Signed a Lease With My Grown Son, and Neither of Us Knew How to Share a Kettle

The last time I shared a bathroom with my son, he needed a plastic step to reach the tap. He was six, and I was working my first contract at a platinum shaft outside Rustenburg, coming home every second weekend smelling of diesel and wet rock. Tumelo would wait for me at the gate with that step under his arm, because he liked to stand next to me while I shaved and pretend to shave too.

Eighteen years later, in February, I stood in a narrow bathroom on the eleventh floor of an old building in Johannesburg, holding a razor, and my son knocked on the door and said, "Papa, are you going to be long? I have a lecture at eight." He is taller than me now. He did not bring a step.

The Letter That Ended Twenty-Six Years

I was retrenched in October. The letter was polite and the package was fair, more or less, but it is a strange thing to be fifty-one and told that the work your body has done since you were a young man is no longer needed. My wife, Dineo, and I had separated four years before, kindly enough, and she had remarried and moved to Polokwane. Our house in Rustenburg was in her name from an old arrangement, and she needed to sell it. So by Christmas I had a package, a bakkie with three hundred thousand kilometres on it, and nowhere in particular to be.

Tumelo was in his final year of a mechanical engineering degree and living in a commune of a digs in Braamfontein with four other students and, he said, one fridge that belonged to nobody and smelled like it. He phoned me on Boxing Day. I thought he was phoning to wish me well. He was phoning with a proposal.

"You need a place. I need a place that is not this. What if we got something together in town, Papa? Just for a year."

I laughed at him. Then I realised he was serious, and I went quiet, and he thought the quiet meant no. It did not. It meant I could not remember the last time my son had asked me for anything that was not money.

Searching on a Small Screen

He did the searching, because he searches the way young people breathe. I would be sitting in the bakkie at a garage in Rustenburg and my phone would light up with screenshots. He typed flats to rent in Johannesburg CBD into his phone at two in the morning and sent me floor plans like he was sending me football scores. When one search ran dry he would start on apartments to rent in Johannesburg CBD instead, as if a different word might change the prices. Two bedrooms. Two bedrooms with a balcony. Two bedrooms where one was really a cupboard with a window.

I had opinions, none of them useful. I had not lived in a city since I was nineteen, and the town I remembered was the town of the late eighties, which I mostly remembered as somewhere my uncle told me to stay out of. Tumelo was patient with me in a way I did not deserve. He explained that the inner city was not one thing, that some blocks had been rebuilt floor by floor, that people his age actually wanted to live there now because they could walk to campus, to work, to the Rea Vaya stop, instead of sitting in traffic on the M1 for two hours a day.

"You sound like an estate agent," I told him.

"You sound like Mkhulu," he said. That shut me up, because it was true.

The First Viewing

We went in on a Saturday in January. I parked the bakkie in a basement and stood in the lift with my hands in my pockets, the way I used to stand in the cage before going underground. Old habits. Tumelo noticed and did not say anything, which I appreciated.

The flat had high ceilings and a long window that looked across at an Art Deco building with a lion carved over its door. I had worked in the dark for so long that I did not know what to do with that much light. I walked to the window and stood there while my son opened kitchen cupboards and tested the water pressure like he was the father and I was the child he had brought along.

We did not take that one. Nor the next. There was a week where I nearly gave up and told him I would rent a room in Rustenburg and visit. On the Thursday night I sat in a motel with a list he had sent me titled, very formally, places to rent in Johannesburg CBD, with notes beside each one in his small, square handwriting that he had photographed. Next to one he had written: "Has a gym. You will not use it." Next to another: "Close to the Market Theatre. I will make you go." I read that list four times, and not because of the rentals. I read it because it was the most my son had said to me about what he imagined our life might look like.

We signed for a two-bedroom on the eleventh floor the following Wednesday.

Learning the Rules of Another Man's House

The first month was hard in small, stupid ways. Tumelo leaves the kettle with a centimetre of water in it, always, and I am a man who empties a kettle. He plays music while he studies. I go to bed at nine because my body still thinks it has to be at the shaft by five. On the second Sunday I washed his good jeans with my overalls and turned them a colour he described as "tragic grey." He did not speak to me until lunch.

I had expected to be the one teaching. I was the one learning. He showed me how to buy a bus card. He showed me the shortcut through a building lobby to the corner where a man sells the best vetkoek I have eaten outside my mother's kitchen. He taught me that in town you greet the security guard by name, and I learned that the guard on our weekend shift is called Brother Moyo and that he used to be a teacher in Masvingo.

And I learned things about my son. That he wakes in the night and works through problem sets at the counter, his face blue from the laptop. That he is frightened about finding a job when he graduates, because he watched what happened to me. That he still says "sorry" under his breath when he bumps into furniture, the same way he did at six.

The Night the Lights Went Out

In April we had a long stretch of load shedding and one night the whole block went dark at half past seven. The lift stopped. We sat on the balcony with a camping lamp and a pot of pap I had made on the gas cooker I brought from the bakkie, because a miner does not go anywhere without a gas cooker.

The city below us was patchy, some buildings black, some lit by generators, taxi lights moving like ants along Commissioner Street. I told Tumelo about the day in 2009 when the cage stuck for three hours at seven hundred metres. I had never told anyone except his mother. He listened without looking at me, which is how men in my family listen best.

Then he told me that when he was about thirteen he used to count the weekends until I came home, and that somewhere around fifteen he stopped counting. He said it without anger. That was worse.

I did not have anything clever to say. I said I was sorry. He said he knew. We ate the pap. The lights came back at ten and neither of us moved inside for another hour.

What the Window Showed Me

People ask me now, my old colleagues mostly, what it is like living in town. They ask with a particular face, waiting for a story about crime. I tell them the truth, which is that it is noisy, and alive, and that I have never in my life been greeted by so many strangers before eight in the morning. I tell them that these days a lot of Johannesburg CBD apartments are full of young people like my son, nurses, junior accountants, art students, people who would rather walk than drive, and that an old man from the mines fits in better than you would think if he keeps his eyes open.

I have a part-time job now, teaching safety induction at a training centre in Marshalltown. I walk there. Twenty-two minutes. I timed it the first week the way I used to time the cage.

Tumelo graduates in December. He has an interview in Germiston next month, and if it comes through he will probably want his own place, closer to the work, or with a girlfriend whose name I am not supposed to know yet. That is how it should be. The lease was always for a year.

But last Sunday I came out in the morning and the kettle was empty. Completely empty, upside down on the drying rack. He had not said a word about it. I stood in the kitchen with the light coming through that long window across the lion over the door opposite, and I had to sit down for a moment.

Eighteen years ago he carried a step to the bathroom so he could stand next to me. This year, I think, I finally carried one back.