I Am Forty-Nine. My Father Never Saw Fifty-Two.

The arithmetic I did at a truck stop outside Kroonstad

My father died at fifty-one. He was standing in the yard in Seshego on a Saturday morning with a hosepipe in his hand and he went down and that was the end of it, and I was fourteen years old and I was inside watching television.

I have carried that Saturday around for thirty-five years the way you carry a stone in your shoe. You get used to walking on it. You forget it is there for whole months. And then you sit down at a truck stop outside Kroonstad at half past nine at night, with a pie you do not want and a coffee that tastes like the cup, and you take out your phone and you do a piece of arithmetic you have done maybe four hundred times before.

Forty-nine. He got to fifty-one and some months.

That is two years and change. That is roughly, I worked it out, about a hundred and twenty more trips up and down the N1 for me. I could see the whole rest of my life in trips. That is what the job does to your head after twenty years. Everything becomes a distance.

I drive for a courier company. Polokwane down to Johannesburg, Johannesburg to Bloemfontein, sometimes all the way to Gqeberha if somebody is sick. I have done it since I was twenty-nine. I know every filling station on that road. I know which ones have a decent toilet and which ones have a woman at the till who will call you my boy no matter how old you get.

And for about fifteen of those twenty years, I did not go to a doctor. Not once. Not one single time.

Why not

People ask that like it is a puzzle. It is not a puzzle.

First, the time. I am not being dramatic. My shift patterns meant that the hours a doctor's rooms are open are the hours I am on the road between two towns. To see somebody I would have to give up a day. A day is money. A day is one of the trips.

Second, the money. Medical aid, on what I earn, with three children, one of whom was at that stage at university and eating cash like a machine. I ran the numbers many times and every time the numbers said no.

Third, and this is the real one, the one underneath: I did not want to know.

That is the truth and I have only recently been able to say it out loud. I have carried my father's fifty-one around since I was fourteen, and somewhere in me is a fourteen year old boy who believes that if nobody ever tells him the number, the number cannot come for him. It is not logic. It is the opposite of logic. It is a kind of religion.

My wife, Nomsa, fought me about this for years. Quietly, in the way she does, which is worse than shouting. She would leave things on the table. A pamphlet. A number written on the back of a till slip. She never once nagged. She just, every so often, put a thing where I would see it, and then went and did something else, and I would look at it and feel a heat in my chest like shame.

The morning I could not read the delivery note

It was a Thursday in March. I was in a yard in Midrand at five in the morning, still dark, cold in that way Gauteng gets in the autumn, and I had a delivery note in my hand and the print on it was swimming.

Not blurred. Swimming. And my ears were doing a thing, a sort of high sound, like a tap running in another room.

I sat down on the step of the truck. I sat there for I do not know how long. Ten minutes, maybe. And the thing I remember most clearly is not the fear. It is that I was calculating whether I could still make the drop.

That is who I had become. Sitting on a step at five in the morning, with my body sending me a message in the only language it had left, and I am doing arithmetic about a delivery.

The controller, a young guy called Sipho who is about twenty-six and thinks I am ancient, came out and found me. He said, boss, you are grey. He actually used that word. He said, you are grey, boss.

I said I was fine. I said it was the cold.

He said, no.

And then this twenty-six year old kid, who I have been slightly rude to for three years, took my keys out of my hand. Just took them. Did not ask. And he said, my aunty had this, and she said she was fine too, and then she was not fine.

Sipho's list

Here is what I did not expect.

Sipho did not lecture me. He went inside, and he came back out with a piece of paper, and on it he had written three places and their hours. Just that. Three places, with hours, and one of them was open until six in the evening and one of them was open on a Saturday morning.

I looked at that paper for a long time.

Because that was the whole thing, you understand. That was the entire wall. Not fear, not money, not even my father. The wall was that I had never in my life had a piece of paper that told me where to go at a time when I could actually get there.

I had built this enormous story about myself. The man who does not go. The man with the stone in his shoe. And a kid in a beanie handed me a list of clinics with the hours written next to them and about seventy percent of my story just fell over.

I went on the Saturday. Nomsa came. She did not say a word in the car. She held her handbag on her lap with both hands like she was worried it would run away.

The room

The waiting room was full of women and children and one old man with a stick who looked at me like he knew.

There was a nurse, a sister, and she was maybe forty, and she was doing about six things at once and she still somehow gave me her whole face when she looked at me. She took my arm. She put the cuff on. She pumped it up and let it down and her expression did not change and she did it again on the other arm, which I have since learned is not a good sign, when they do it again.

Then she sat back and she said, sir, how long have you been feeling like this.

And I said, feeling like what.

And she said, sir.

Just that. Sir. With about four kilograms of meaning in it.

So I told her. I told her about the swimming print and the tap running in another room. I told her about the headaches I had been calling tiredness for probably six years. I told her about the fact that I could not get through a shift anymore without stopping twice, when at thirty I did the whole run without stopping once.

And then, and I am not a man who does this, I told her about my father in the yard with the hosepipe. I do not know why. I had known this woman for eleven minutes.

She listened to all of it. She did not interrupt me once. And at the end she said, so you have been waiting thirty-five years to find out if you are him.

I said yes. Because it was true and I had never once put it in a sentence.

What the number was

The number was bad. I am not going to put it in writing because it embarrasses me. It was the kind of number where the sister goes quiet and then goes and gets somebody.

But here is the part I actually want to say, and it is the reason I am writing any of this down.

It was fixable.

That is it. That is the whole hinge of my life, right there. Thirty-five years of fear, a boy at fourteen watching television while his father died in the yard, a man at forty-nine doing arithmetic in trips, and the answer was a tablet the size of a grain of rice and a conversation about salt and about the two litres of Coke I was drinking a day on the road and did not think counted because it was not food.

I sat in that plastic chair and I felt something come out of my chest that had been in there since 1990.

The sister said, your father, in his time, with what he had, in that yard, on a Saturday, in that town. She said, that was a different country, my brother. She said, you are not him. You are a man with a number and the number can move.

Two years of Saturdays

I have been going for four years now. Every couple of months, same place, mostly the same sister, who now knows my children's names and asks about Karabo's studies before she asks about my chest.

The thing that changed everything was not medicine. It was hours. It was the fact that I could go on a Saturday morning, or at half five in the evening, without giving up a trip. Everybody talks about medical care like the problem is knowledge. It is not. Every man I know on that road knows exactly what is wrong with him. The problem is that his body's opening hours and his life's opening hours have never once overlapped, and so he has made a whole personality out of not going.

I have started saying this to the other drivers, which has made me deeply annoying. There is a fellow, Willem, who is fifty-four and built like a fridge and has been laughing at me for two years. Two months ago he sent me a message at eleven at night, no greeting, nothing, just: what was the name of that place. Then nothing for a week. Then: I went.

That is all he has ever said about it. I went. From Willem that is basically a symphony.

I have started keeping a note in my cab, on a card, of a clinic in each town I stop in regularly, because the excuse I used for fifteen years was that I was never in one place long enough. That excuse died the day Sipho handed me a piece of paper. Now when a driver gives me the excuse, I hand him the card, and I watch about seventy percent of his story fall over too, and it is the most satisfying thing in my whole week.

Fifty-two

I turn fifty in November.

I want to tell you that I do not think about the number anymore, but that would be a lie, and I have done enough lying about my health to last me. I think about it. I will think about it on the day. I will probably be somewhere on the N1 outside Kroonstad and I will feel it go past.

But it is different now. It used to be a wall coming towards me. Now it is just a date, and I have a card in my cab with the hours of three clinics on it, and a sister in Polokwane who will ask about my daughter first, and a wife who has stopped leaving pamphlets on the table because she does not need to anymore.

My father was fifty-one and some months and he had a hosepipe in his hand and nobody had ever taken his blood pressure in his life. Not once. That is the fact I keep coming back to. Not once, in fifty-one years.

My son is nineteen. He is going to know his numbers by the time he is twenty-five if I have to drive him there myself.

That is the whole thing I am trying to say. The stone does not have to go in his shoe. It stops with me.