Fourteen Years of Giving My Sister's Address

The form at the bank counter

The woman at the bank in Vredenburg asked me for proof of residence, and I slid my sister's municipal bill across the counter like I had done a hundred times before. She looked at it, then at me.

"Mrs Shereen Adams," she read. "Are you Mrs Adams?"

"She's my sister," I said. "I live there. Sort of."

Sort of. I was thirty-four years old and I had been saying "sort of" about where I lived since I was twenty. She needed an affidavit, a letter from Shereen, a copy of Shereen's ID. I had none of it, because I had walked straight off the boat in Saldanha that morning with a duffel bag that smelled of diesel and hake, and I had nineteen days before I went back out.

I drove home to Mitchells Plain that evening with the window down and that word sitting in my chest.

Fourteen years in a galley

I started on the trawlers at twenty because my uncle Ismail knew a skipper who needed a galley hand, and I could cook. My mother had taught me in a kitchen so small you could stir the pot and open the fridge without moving your feet, which turned out to be good training for a galley that tilts fifteen degrees in a north-westerly.

People think the hard part of a fishing boat is the weather. For me it was always the coming home, because I never quite came home anywhere. I came back to Shereen's house in Tafelsig, to the back room that was technically her sewing room, to a single bed with my name nowhere on it. Her kids called it Uncle Riaan's room for three weeks at a time and then it went back to being the place where the overlocker lived.

Every letter I ever got went there. Bank cards, traffic fines, medical aid statements, the letter telling me my granny had left me her wedding ring. Shereen kept a shoebox for me on top of her wardrobe, and every time I got back she would hand it down without a word.

I am not complaining about Shereen. She is the best person I know. But there is a particular feeling of being thirty-four and having your post kept in a shoebox by your little sister.

The night off Lambert's Bay

The decision came at about two in the morning on a calm night off Lambert's Bay, when the nets were down and I was on deck with a mug of rooibos looking back toward the land. The lights of the coast were faint and strung out like somebody had dropped a necklace.

I had money. Not rich money, but trawler money adds up when you have no rent and nowhere to spend it for twenty days at a time.

Gerald, our bosun, came up for a smoke. He is fifty-eight and has been paying off a house in Steenberg since before I was born.

"You look like a man doing sums," he said.

"I'm thinking of buying a place."

"Where? You don't even know which side of the mountain you like."

He was right. That night I wrote a list on the back of a stores order form: a quick drive to the N7, somewhere I could lock and leave for three weeks, and a kitchen with a window. After fourteen years of portholes the size of a dinner plate, that was the thing I wanted most.

Learning a language I never spoke

Back on shore I sat at Shereen's kitchen table with her laptop typing things like "small flat near harbour" and getting nowhere. Shereen leaned over, took the mouse, and typed property for sale in Cape Town as if it was obvious, which I suppose it was.

The first week was humbling. I did not know what a levy was, or transfer duty, or that the bank would want three months of payslips, which for a fisherman can look like three different jobs depending on the catch. I phoned uncle Ismail, who bought his house in 1987, and asked what he wished he had known. He thought for a long time and said, "Check the water pressure in the shower. And look at who parks badly." That was the best advice I got from anyone.

The flats I walked through

Over two shore leaves I looked at nine places. A flat in Parow above a panel beater that smelled permanently of spray paint. A place in Milnerton with a balcony that looked straight into somebody else's, where a man was ironing in his vest. I started to feel the old sort-of feeling again, like maybe I was just a person who lived in between places.

Then a friend of Shereen's from church mentioned she had moved into a new complex on the northern side and loved being able to lock up when she visited her mother in Worcester. Some of the new-build apartments in Cape Town I had seen online looked like hospital wards in the photos, so I drove out on a Sunday expecting not much.

I went straight to the kitchen of the show unit, because that is what a cook does. There was a window over the sink, looking out at a strip of sky and the top of a palm tree. I stood there with my hand on the counter long enough that the sales lady asked if I was all right. I was imagining cutting onions while it rained outside, with no deck moving under my feet.

Shereen's last affidavit

It took four months to sign, mostly because I was at sea while documents waited. For the last time Shereen signed an affidavit at the police station saying her brother lived with her. She handed it to me in the car park and said, "This is the last one of these I'm doing for you." She was smiling but her eyes were wet. I think she was going to miss the shoebox more than I was.

The first letter

I moved in on a Thursday in March with a duffel bag, a mattress Gerald helped me carry, my mother's cast iron pot and a box of spices I had hoarded in my locker on the boat. The first night I cooked breyani and ate it standing at that window, watching the light go orange over the rooftops. Nothing tilted. It was so quiet I could hear the fridge.

Two weeks later the first letter arrived, a rates reminder in a boring brown envelope. My name, my unit number, my street. I put it on the counter and looked at it for a while before I opened it. When I told the crew, Gerald just nodded and said, "Ja. Now you live somewhere."

What I tell the young ones

Last season a twenty-one-year-old galley hand called Luthando from Gugulethu asked me how a cook off a trawler ends up with a place of his own. I told him I wasted years thinking it happened to other kinds of people. I told him to open a savings account today and never touch it, and that when he goes looking at Cape Town apartments one day, he should walk into the kitchen first, check the shower second, and look at who parks badly.

Last month Shereen gave me a birthday card. She had posted it, properly, with a stamp, to my own address, even though she knew she would see me that weekend. I asked her why she bothered.

"Because I can," she said.