I Took A Night Shift Job In Johannesburg Before I Had Anywhere To Sleep

The offer

The email came through on a Thursday while I was standing in the parking lot of the hospital in Mthatha where I had done my community service, eating a vetkoek out of a paper bag.

Casualty. Night shift rotation. A big hospital in Johannesburg. Starting the first of the month.

I said yes on my phone, standing there, with grease on my fingers, before I had thought about a single practical thing. I did not think about where I would live. I did not think about how I would get to work at ten at night in a city I had visited twice. I thought about the salary, and I thought about my mother, and I thought yes.

I was twenty four. That is my only defence.

The three weeks on Sisi's couch

A woman I had trained with, whom I will call Sisi because she would be furious if I used her name, had a flat in Yeoville and she said, "Come, stay by me, we'll sort you out."

I stayed for three weeks and it nearly ended the friendship.

Not because of anything she did. She was generous in a way I have never been able to repay. It was because a person on night shift and a person on day shift cannot share a one bedroom flat. She came home when I was going to sleep. I came home when she was waking up. Her kettle woke me. My key in the door woke her. We were two exhausted women being extremely polite to each other in a small space and both of us were quietly losing our minds.

And in the middle of that, I was trying to find a flat, at night, on my phone, between patients, in a city where I did not know a single suburb name well enough to know what it meant.

What I did not know

I want to list these, because I have since told this list to about six young nurses who arrived after me, and every single one of them has needed it.

I did not know that a deposit was a real thing that would be asked for in full, in advance, in cash, and that it would be one or two months of rent on top of the first month of rent, and that I did not have that, because I had just paid for a bus and a suitcase and I had been earning a community service salary.

I did not know what "affordability" meant in the way an agent means it. I had never been asked for three months of payslips in my life. I had never been credit checked.

I did not know that the pretty places I was finding on the free listing sites were mostly not real. I made three appointments in my first fortnight. One person never arrived. One asked me to pay a "viewing fee" before he would show me the place, and when I said I would not, he became abusive. One place was real and beautiful and had already been taken two weeks earlier and the listing was still up because nobody had bothered.

I did not know how to think about the commute. I looked at a flat in a suburb that sounded lovely and I calculated the distance to the hospital as fifteen kilometres and I thought, that is nothing. It did not occur to me to ask how a woman finishing a shift at seven in the morning, or starting one at ten at night, travels those fifteen kilometres. Distance is not the number. The number is how you actually get there, at that hour, alone.

The night that changed my thinking

In my second week, a man came into casualty who had been attacked walking from a taxi rank to his home at eleven at night.

I am not going to describe his injuries. It is not that kind of story and he is not my anecdote. But I remember, while I was working on him, thinking, with a completely cold clarity, that I had spent that same evening looking at a flat listing that would have required me to walk exactly that kind of walk, exactly that late, five days a week.

I went and sat on the fire escape at four in the morning and I looked at my shortlist on my phone, and I deleted almost all of it.

After that, my criteria changed completely. It was not about the kitchen. It was not about whether the bathroom had a bath. It was these four things, in this order.

Can I get from my door to the hospital door at ten at night and seven in the morning without walking somewhere I should not walk.

Is there someone at the entrance who knows my face.

Is the lift going to work when I come home at seven in the morning after a fourteen hour night, on the fifth floor, carrying my bag.

Can I actually afford this in month eleven, when the excitement has gone and there is a real bill.

Learning the city's language

The other thing I had to learn was that a city talks to you in a code, and if you cannot read it, you will make an expensive mistake.

"Close to transport" can mean anything from a rank two minutes away to a road you cross on foot in the dark. "Secure" can mean a guard and a book, or it can mean a gate that has not closed properly since 2019. "Backup power" can mean a generator that runs the whole building or one light in the corridor.

Nobody is necessarily lying to you. They are just describing a thing from the inside of a life that is not your life. To a man with a car who works nine to five, that road is not a problem. To me, at half past seven in the morning in a uniform, it was a completely different road.

So I stopped reading listings and I started asking people.

I asked the security guards at the hospital, who I had learned very quickly were the people who actually knew the city, and who were unfailingly kind to me. I asked the cleaners. I asked the ambulance drivers, who know every street in Johannesburg the way you know your own hands.

And more or less all of them told me the same thing, which was to stop looking at individual flats from individual landlords and to look instead at buildings that were properly run by a single body, where there was a real office and a real caretaker and a real system, because it is the management, not the marble, that determines what your night looks like.

That was the first genuinely useful advice I got, and it came from a man in a security uniform on a Tuesday and not from any website.

What I actually did

It took me eleven weeks. I do not want to make it sound quick, because it was not quick, and I nearly gave up twice.

I moved from Sisi's couch to a room in a shared house in the interim, which was fine, and where I was very lonely, and where I ate a lot of two minute noodles standing up.

I made a spreadsheet. Of course I made a spreadsheet, I am a nurse, we make lists for a living. And I put in it every place I saw, and I gave each one a mark out of five for the four things, and I forced myself not to add a fifth column for "how nice is it", because I knew that if I did, that column would win, and it should not win.

I looked at plenty of the apartments to rent in Johannesburg that were run by the bigger managed buildings in the inner city and around it, and the difference between those and the private landlord listings was immediately obvious to me. Not because they were fancier. They mostly were not. It was that when I asked a question, somebody knew the answer, and the answer was the same one I got the second time I asked it.

The one I took is on the fourth floor. There is a man at the door at night. The lift works, and when it does not, somebody comes to fix it, and the notice on the wall tells you when. I pay rent to an organisation and not to a man's personal cellphone number, which I know sounds like a small thing and is not, because a man's cellphone number can stop answering.

What my mother said

She came up on a bus to see it, three months after I moved in.

She walked around it in about forty seconds, because it is not big, and then she stood at the window and looked down at the street for a very long time without saying anything.

I was braced for it. I thought she was going to say something about the noise, or the size, or that she could not believe I was paying that much for this, which honestly is what I would have said.

She said, "You can hear people."

I said yes.

She said, "In Mthatha, at night, you can hear nothing. And when you hear something, it is a bad thing. Here, you hear people all the time, and it is nothing."

And then she sat down on my one chair and she cried, and I did not know if it was because she was proud of me or because I was gone, and I have never asked her.

What I tell the new ones

There are always new ones. Every January a young nurse arrives from somewhere far and stands in the corridor with a bag and a face I recognise.

I tell them: do not sign anything in your first month. Sleep on a couch, hate it, and do not sign anything, because everything you decide in your first month you will decide out of fear.

I tell them: your commute at your worst hour is your actual life. Go and stand at the place at the hour you will actually be standing there. Do it once, in daylight first, then, with somebody, at night. Whatever the flats to rent listing says about being close to everything, only your own feet will tell you the truth about that road.

I tell them: the deposit is the wall. Start saving for it before you arrive, not after, because it is the deposit that keeps people on couches, not the rent.

And I tell them the thing I did not know, which is that when you are looking at apartments to rent, the question is not what the flat is like. Any flat with a bed and a window is fine when you are twenty four. The question is what the building is like at four in the morning, and whether there is a person in it who is awake and who is supposed to be awake, and whether when something breaks, there is somebody whose actual job it is to fix it.

Now

I have been in that flat for six years.

I know the man at the door. His name is Elias and he supports Kaizer Chiefs and he has a granddaughter and he shouts at me if I come home without a jersey in winter.

Sisi and I are still friends, which is a small miracle. We laugh about the three weeks now.

And on Sunday mornings after a Saturday night shift, I sleep with my window open, and I hear people, all the time, and it is nothing.