I Added Up My Hours in Taxis and It Came to Forty Days a Year

The Sum on the Back of a Foam Offcut

I did the maths on a piece of cardboard that came wrapped around a roll of high density foam. It was a Thursday in February, the workshop fan was pushing hot air from one side of the room to the other, and I was waiting for glue to go tacky on the seat of a dining chair that belonged to a dentist in Bramley.

I wrote down the time I left home in Soshanguve every morning. Ten to five. Then the time I unlocked the roller door in Wynberg. Ten past seven, on a good day. Then the evening the other way round. I multiplied it by five days, then by the weeks I actually work in a year, and then, because I was annoyed and wanted to see the worst of it, I divided by twenty four.

Forty one days. Every year I was spending forty one full days and nights sitting on a taxi seat with my bag on my knees, watching the back of somebody else's head.

I am an upholsterer. I have been one since I was nineteen, when my uncle let me strip old horsehair out of a Victorian couch because nobody else wanted the job. I measure things for a living. I know what a centimetre wrong does to a cushion. And somehow I had never once measured my own life.

Three Taxis and a Son Who Grew Up in Voice Notes

The route was three taxis. The first one to Pretoria, the second one through to Joburg, the third one out along the old road to Wynberg, where my workshop sits between a tyre place and a man who makes steel burglar bars and sings hymns while he welds. I knew the drivers. I knew which one played gospel and which one played amapiano loud enough to rattle your fillings. I knew which rank had the woman selling vetkoek at five thirty and which had nothing but a cold wind.

What I did not know, for a long time, was my own son.

Kabelo was nine when I opened the workshop. When I did that sum on the cardboard he was fifteen. In between, he had become a tall boy with a deep voice who mostly spoke to me through his phone. I would leave before he woke. I would arrive home after he had eaten whatever my sister left on the stove. On the taxi I listened to his voice notes with the volume low against my ear. "Ma, I need money for the trip." "Ma, they say we must bring a white shirt." "Ma, where is the charger." Small things, the business of a household, and I was answering all of it from a seat near the sliding door somewhere on the N1.

One evening I got home and he had a plaster on his chin. He had fallen off a friend's bicycle on the Saturday before, and I had been at a client's house in Linden fitting curtains. He had not mentioned it because, he said, it was not a big thing. He was right. It was not a big thing. That was exactly what frightened me. I had become the kind of mother who found out about the small things last.

The Weekend My Sister Said It Out Loud

My sister Dineo is the one who said it, because she always says the thing everybody else is walking around.

We were sitting outside on plastic chairs, peeling oranges, and I was complaining about the price of the taxi going up again. She let me finish, then she said, "You know you are allowed to live near your work. People do it."

I laughed at her. I had grown up believing that the house in Soshanguve was the house. My mother had fought for it. Her name was on the papers and then mine. Leaving it felt like a betrayal of something, even though my mother has been gone for six years and the house would stay ours whether I slept in it or not.

Dineo did not let it go. She said she would stay on in the house, she was there most days anyway with her own children. She said Kabelo could finish the year at his school and then we could see. She said, very calmly, "You are tired in a way I don't like."

That night I lay awake and listened to the dogs down the street, and I thought about that number. Forty one days.

Looking at Rooms I Could Not Picture Myself In

I am not a person who enjoys looking at property. I look at a room and I see what is wrong with the furniture. But that March I started doing it properly, on Sundays, with Kabelo sometimes coming along because I bribed him with a burger.

I started the way everybody does, typing things into my phone on the taxi like apartments to rent Johannesburg and scrolling past pictures of glass towers in Sandton that I knew were not for me. I learned quickly that photographs lie in the same way a fabric swatch lies. A grey that looks like smoke in the sample book can look like a wet pavement once it is on a three seater. So I stopped trusting pictures and started walking.

What I wanted was simple to say and hard to find. Somewhere I could walk to the workshop or take one short taxi. Somewhere quiet enough that a fifteen year old could study. Somewhere with a proper door between me and the passage, because I had had enough of thin walls at the back of rented rooms when I was young.

Kew kept coming up because of where it sits. It is a short drive from Wynberg, close to the highway, near enough to Sandton that Kabelo said, with great seriousness, that it was "basically Sandton," which it is not. I found a listing of Kew apartments for rent one night when I could not sleep, and I sent the link to Dineo with no message, just the link, which is how she knew I was serious.

The First Morning I Walked to Work

We moved in at the end of May. I did not bring much. I brought the good chair I had reupholstered for my mother before she died, in a dark green velvet she said made her feel like a minister's wife. I brought my sewing machine for home, the small one. I brought Kabelo's bed, which he had outgrown but refused to replace, and two boxes of school books.

The first night I hardly slept, because I kept waiting for the alarm I no longer needed. At half past four my eyes opened on their own, the way they had for six years. I lay there in the dark and realised I had nowhere to rush to. I made tea. I sat in my mother's green chair by the window and watched the light come up grey and then gold over the roofs, and I heard trucks starting somewhere toward the M1. It was the first sunrise I had watched from a chair, and not from a taxi window, in longer than I could remember.

At seven I woke Kabelo. That alone felt like a strange luxury. I stood in his doorway and said his name, out loud, with my actual voice, and he grunted and pulled the blanket over his head, and I nearly cried, which is a silly thing to admit about a boy refusing to get up.

I walked to work that morning. It took me twenty two minutes. I passed the man who sells airtime and loose cigarettes on the corner, and by the end of the second week he was saying good morning to me by name.

What I Did With Forty One Days

People ask me if the rent is more. It is more than nothing, which is what I paid in Soshanguve. But I worked out, again on a piece of cardboard, what the taxis had been costing me, and what it cost me to buy breakfast at the rank because I had not had time to eat at home. It was not as far apart as I had feared. And there is another part of the sum that I cannot put a number on.

I take on more work now, but I finish it earlier. I am home by half past five. Kabelo and I cook together on Wednesdays, which was his idea, not mine, and mostly it is pap and whatever the butcher had on special. He told me about a girl in his class. He told me he wants to study engineering, and when I asked what kind he said he was not sure yet, and we talked about it for two hours at the kitchen table. Two hours. I used to spend that just getting from one rank to another.

I am not trying to say a flat fixed my life. It did not. The geyser is temperamental and the neighbour above us plays the same Brenda Fassie song on Sundays until I could sing it in my sleep. I still go back to Soshanguve most weekends, to Dineo and her children and my mother's house, which is still my mother's house in every way that matters.

The Chair by the Window

A client came to the workshop last month, a young woman who had just been transferred up from Durban for a job. She needed curtains for a place she had found and she was nervous about everything, the city, the traffic, whether she had chosen the wrong suburb. While I measured her fabric she told me she had spent weeks looking at apartments in Johannesburg on her laptop at night and still did not feel she understood the place.

I told her she would not understand it from a laptop. I told her to work out how long it would take her to get to the job, in minutes, honestly, and then multiply it. I told her about the cardboard.

She laughed, but she wrote it down.

Some mornings I still wake at half past four. I do not fight it anymore. I go and sit in the green chair and I listen to the city doing its business without me for a little while. Then I wake my son with my own voice, and I walk to work.