I Started at a Germiston Hospital on a Monday and Needed a Home by Friday

The phone call that changed everything

I was standing in my mother's kitchen in Polokwane when the call came through. The woman on the other end told me the post was mine, a proper nursing position at a hospital in Germiston, and could I start on Monday. It was a Wednesday. I said yes before my brain had caught up with my mouth, and then I put the phone down and just stood there with my hand still on it, staring at the kettle.

I am twenty eight years old and I had never lived anywhere but home. Not once. I did my training close enough to sleep in my childhood bed, and I told myself that was fine, that it was sensible, that saving money mattered more than pretending to be grown. But the truth is I was scared. And now here was this job, this real job with a payslip and a name badge, on the other side of the country, on the East Rand of Johannesburg, in a town I had driven past maybe twice and never once stopped in.

My mother cried a little and then she got practical, the way she does. She started pulling containers out of the cupboard for me to take. I let her. I needed something to do with my hands too.

Four days to find somewhere to sleep

The thing nobody tells you is how fast it all has to happen. I had the job. What I did not have was a bed to sleep in near it. I could not commute from Limpopo. I could not afford a hotel for more than a night or two. I needed a flat, and I needed it before Monday, and my budget was the budget of a woman who has not yet received a single salary.

I spent that first evening on my phone until it went hot in my hand. I typed in every version of what I wanted. Cheap. Safe. Close to the hospital. Somewhere a woman on her own would not feel stupid for renting. I scrolled through pages of Germiston apartments until the photos started blurring into one another, all the same beige walls and the same brave camera angles that make a small room look bigger than it is.

I made a list in the back of an old exam pad. Rent. Deposit. Whether water was included. How far from work. Whether there was a gate, a guard, a wall. I underlined that last part twice. I did not know Germiston, and everything I did not know made me cautious. I phoned numbers and half of them did not answer. One man told me the place was already gone. One woman was kind and told me honestly that her flat was above my budget and I should not waste my deposit stretching for it.

Learning a town through a screen

By Thursday I had started to understand the shape of the place, the way you can understand a person from their handwriting before you meet them. I learned which areas were closer to the hospital and which meant a longer taxi in the dark. I learned that some buildings quoted a price that doubled once you added the deposit and the levy. I learned to read between the lines of a listing, to notice when the photos were suspiciously old or when the words were doing too much work.

I kept comparing the Germiston rentals I could actually afford against the ones I wanted, and the gap between them taught me something about my own life. I did not need a view. I did not need a second bedroom for guests I did not have yet. I needed a door that locked, a stove that worked, and a distance to work I could manage on a nurse's hours, coming home when the sky was still dark or already dark again.

My cousin lives in Boksburg, not far off, and she became my eyes. I would send her a listing and she would tell me, no, not that street, or, that side is fine, my friend stays there. Having one person who knew the ground changed everything. I stopped feeling like I was throwing darts blindfolded. I started to feel like I was choosing.

The one that felt right

On Friday morning, sitting in the car in a petrol station parking lot halfway to Johannesburg because I had already started driving down with everything I owned, I found it. A modest flat, within a walled complex, at a rent that made me exhale properly for the first time in days. It was not fancy. The kitchen was small and the geyser looked older than me. But it was clean, it was gated, and it was a real Germiston apartment to rent that I could see myself living in, that I could see myself coming home to. I did not have to squint at it and imagine. It just fit.

I phoned. The agent answered on the second ring, which after the week I had felt like a small miracle. I told her the truth, that I started work on Monday, that I had my paperwork ready, that I was a nurse and I was reliable and I just needed somewhere to be. She must have heard the tiredness in my voice because she was gentle with me. We arranged everything by phone and photograph and a rush of documents. By that evening, in a way that still amazes me, I had a place.

The first night alone

I slept the first night on a mattress on the floor because the bed frame was still tied to the roof of the car and I did not have the strength to wrestle it inside on my own. The flat echoed. Every sound was a stranger. The fridge clicked on and I nearly jumped out of my skin. I lay there in the dark listening to a town I did not know yet, a train somewhere far off, a dog, a gate rolling shut, and I felt two things at exactly the same size. Loneliness, big and cold. And something else. A kind of fierce, quiet pride that I had done this. That the roof over me was one I had found and paid for and chosen.

I cried a bit, I will admit that. Then I got up and I made tea in my one pot because the kettle was also still in the car, and I sat on the floor with my hands around the mug and I planned where the couch would go, if I ever got a couch.

Settling in, slowly

Monday came and the hospital swallowed me whole, in the good way, the way that leaves no room to feel sorry for yourself. My feet ached. My name badge was spelled slightly wrong. I got lost twice looking for the linen store. And every evening I came back to my flat, my flat, and it was a little more mine each time.

I learned the walk to the nearest shop. I learned which neighbour played music on Sundays and which one greeted me at the gate. I bought a small plant for the windowsill and did not kill it, which felt like a genuine achievement. Slowly the echo went out of the rooms as I filled them. A secondhand table. Curtains my mother posted to me in a bag that smelled of home. A kettle at last.

Some nights are still lonely. I will not pretend they are not. There is nobody to tell about the small things, the funny patient, the doctor who was rude, the bread that came out flat. But there is also nobody to ask me why the lights are still on at midnight, nobody to move my things, nobody to answer to. I found this flat in a scramble, in a panic, in four short days that felt like they might break me. And now, months later, when I turn my key in the lock and the door gives and the small warm dark of my own place opens up in front of me, I understand what I was really looking for that frantic week. Not just an address near work. A beginning. And in this ordinary flat, in this town I did not choose but somehow grew into, that is exactly what I got.