I Brought Pointe Shoes and a Fourteen-Year-Old Cat to the Highveld

The audition I did not think I was taking

I was thirty-four and had taught ballet in the same church hall in Walmer for nine years when a woman I had once danced beside at a summer school phoned me out of nowhere. She ran a studio in Johannesburg now, north of the city, and her senior teacher was leaving to have twins. She needed someone who could take the Grade Six and Advanced Foundation girls through their exams in the coming year. "You were always the one who counted out loud for everybody," she said. "Come up and teach one class. Just one. Then decide."

I took the bus up overnight because I did not want to pay for a flight for something I was going to say no to. I taught a Thursday evening class to twelve girls in a room with a sprung floor and a mirror that ran the whole length of the wall, which was more mirror than I had seen since I was nineteen. In my church hall in Gqeberha we danced in front of the windows and checked our lines in the reflection after five o'clock, when it got dark enough to see ourselves. Here I could see every bent knee in the room at once. At the end of the class a small girl in the back row with her bun coming loose came up and asked me whether I would be back on Monday. I said I did not know. On the bus home, somewhere around Colesberg in the dark, I realised that I did know.

Packing up a life, and Mister Biscuit

There was not much to pack. A bed, a bookshelf, two suitcases of practice clothes, a box of music on CDs that I refused to give up, and a ginger cat called Mister Biscuit who was fourteen and had lived in exactly one flat his whole life. He had a cloudy eye and very firm views on sunlight. My mother cried more about the cat leaving than about me.

What worried me most was where we would live. I had never rented anywhere I had not been able to walk past first. In Gqeberha I had found my flat because a friend of my aunt knew the landlord. In Johannesburg I knew one person, and she was my new boss. So I did what everyone does. I sat on my bed in the evenings with Mister Biscuit across my feet and scrolled through flats to rent on my phone, trying to translate suburb names into something meaningful. I did not know which roads flooded, which ones were quiet, where the taxi routes went. I had a map open in another tab and kept measuring distances to the studio with my thumb, because I knew I would be teaching until eight at night, three nights a week, and I wanted a short, sensible drive home.

The flat with the window that faced the right way

I flew up for one weekend to look at places. My new boss, Leonie, drove me between viewings and gave me her honest opinion of each one in a single word. "Dark." "Noisy." "Sad." "Hmm." I saw a bachelor flat with a kitchen inside a cupboard. I saw a two-bedroom place that would have been perfect except the landlord said no cats, then paused, then said maybe for a deposit that made my eyes water.

The one I took was the fifth. A one-bedroom on the second floor of an older block, about ten minutes from the studio. Nothing special to look at from the street. But the lounge had a long north-facing window with a deep sill, and when I walked in at eleven in the morning there was a perfect rectangle of sunlight lying across the floor. I stood in it and thought, Mister Biscuit will never leave this spot. Leonie looked at me standing there with my eyes closed and said, "That is a yes face."

I have since told at least three of my students' mothers, when they ask how I found it, that I spent weeks looking at apartments to rent in Johannesburg and that in the end the decision came down to where the sun fell at eleven in the morning. They always laugh, but I mean it.

Nobody warns you about a Highveld winter

I arrived in February, when Johannesburg is green and thundery and the afternoons crack open with storms at exactly four o'clock, as if somebody is timing them. I loved it immediately. The storms were theatrical. I would stand at my window and count between lightning and thunder like I count bars of music.

Then came June. People in Gqeberha talk about the wind, and the wind is real, but it is a damp sea wind and it never really freezes you. Nobody had prepared me for the dry, still, bitter mornings on the Highveld, the frost on car windscreens, the way the air smells of smoke from braziers and burnt grass. My flat had no heating beyond one little oil heater I bought in a panic. I taught my early Saturday class in two pairs of leg warmers and a scarf, and my girls thought it was hilarious. One of the mothers brought me a hot water bottle in a knitted cover shaped like a sheep.

Mister Biscuit, who had spent fourteen years in a mild coastal town, was outraged. He spent July inside the duvet cover. Not under the duvet, inside the cover, a small lump that occasionally rotated. I worried about his old bones and started leaving the heater on low near his basket, which my electricity bill did not appreciate.

The girl in the back row

The small girl who had asked whether I would come back on Monday was called Lerato. She was eleven, the youngest in my Grade Six group, and she was not the most naturally gifted dancer in the room. Her feet were stiff and her turnout fought her. But she watched everything. She would stand at the side while I corrected another girl's arabesque and copy the correction under her breath, mouthing the counts. She was always the last to leave because her mother worked late and fetched her after seven.

In those last twenty minutes, while the room was empty and the heater ticked, she would ask me questions. Why do we spot when we turn. Why must the shoulders stay down. Did I ever cry in class when I was her age. I told her yes, constantly. I told her about my own teacher in Gqeberha, a stern woman called Mrs de Villiers who used to tap our calves with a pencil, and who once told me I would never dance professionally but that I had the patience of a teacher. I had been furious with her for a year. It took me a long time to understand it was a compliment.

Lerato reminded me so much of myself that it was almost uncomfortable. Not the dancer I had wanted to be, but the one I actually was. The child who counts out loud for everyone.

The exam, and what I found out about home

In October Lerato passed her Grade Six exam with a mark that made her mother shout in the parking lot. She was not top of the class. She did not need to be. She ran back into the studio afterwards and hugged me so hard my glasses fell off, and then, mortified, picked them up and handed them back very formally, like a little diplomat.

That night I drove home slowly. It was spring again, and the jacarandas were out on every street, purple everywhere, carpeting the pavements and sticking to the windscreen. I had been told about them but I had not believed it. I parked and sat in the car for a while with the window down.

A younger teacher at the studio, newly qualified and moving up from Durban, had asked me that week how I had found my place. She was trawling through apartments to rent and feeling overwhelmed, the way I had in February. I told her what Leonie told me. Look at the light. Time the drive at the hour you will really be doing it. Ask about pets before you fall in love with a place. And give yourself one winter before you decide whether you belong.

When I got upstairs, Mister Biscuit was lying in the last bit of warmth on the windowsill, though the sun had long gone. He opened his cloudy eye, decided I was acceptable, and closed it again. I put the kettle on and stood in the dark lounge for a minute, listening to the city outside, the distant traffic and somebody's dog and, very faintly, a taxi hooter playing its own rhythm.

I still miss the sea. I probably always will. But I have stopped saying that I live in Johannesburg for now. I just say that I live here.