My Daughter Chose the Flat Because of the Way the Hallway Echoed

The Last Morning in Kimberley

The removal truck left before we did. I stood in the empty lounge of the house Thandeka and I had bought eleven years earlier and listened to the fridge humming in the kitchen, the one thing we were leaving behind because it would not fit through the new door. Lerato sat on the front step with her backpack on her knees, already strapped in for a journey that was still an hour away.

She was nine. Her mother had been gone for seven months. The doctors had called it an aneurysm, which is a word that sounds too short for what it does to a family. One Tuesday Thandeka was complaining about the price of tomatoes at the Spar on Du Toitspan Road, and by Thursday I was choosing a coffin with a man who kept apologising for his cold.

I had not planned to leave Kimberley. My whole life was there, the Big Hole, my mother's church, the mine engineering office where I had worked since I was twenty-four. But the office was closing its Northern Cape branch, and the offer was Johannesburg or a package. I took the transfer because I could not imagine explaining to Lerato that her father had no job on top of no mother.

Looking at Flats From Four Hundred Kilometres Away

The hardest part of moving cities alone is that you do it twice. Once on the screen, late at night, after your child is asleep, and once in person, when everything you imagined turns out to be smaller or louder or next to a petrol station.

I spent three weeks of evenings scrolling through listings with a cup of rooibos going cold beside the laptop. My new office was in Sandton, and my cousin Sipho, who has lived in Johannesburg since varsity, told me to look east. "Sandringham," he said on the phone. "Quiet streets, close to the highway, near schools. You won't hate it." From Sipho, that is high praise.

So I typed in Sandringham rentals and started making a list in a notebook that had once held Thandeka's recipes. I could not throw it away, and I could not cook from it either, so it became my house-hunting book. Page after page of addresses, rent amounts, notes like "no garden" and "third floor, stairs only" and "landlord sounded tired."

I narrowed it to four places and booked a Saturday to see them all. Lerato came with me because there was nobody to leave her with, and because, honestly, I wanted her to feel she had a say in something. Grief had taken every decision away from her. I thought maybe she could choose a home.

Four Flats in One Saturday

The first flat was lovely on paper and smelled of dog. Lerato held her nose in a way that was rude and completely accurate. The second had a view of a wall. The third was fine. Truly, it was fine, and I could see myself signing for it, and I could see Lerato's face being polite in the way children are polite when they have stopped expecting anything.

By the fourth viewing she was tired and so was I. We had eaten Steers in the car, which her mother would never have allowed, and there was a spot of tomato sauce on her school jersey that she had refused to take off since the funeral. It had been Thandeka's job to buy the jerseys.

The agent let us into the building and we walked down a long corridor toward the unit. The floors were hard, some kind of polished tile, and the ceiling was higher than I expected. Lerato's school shoes made a clean, sharp sound with each step. She stopped. She clapped once, loudly, and the sound bounced back at us.

"Baba," she said. "It talks back."

She clapped again. Then she said her name, "Lerato," quite softly, and the corridor gave it back to her, a little rounder. She laughed. It was the first time I had heard her laugh properly since March, a real laugh with her shoulders in it, and I had to look at the light fitting for a moment so the agent would not see my face.

The Thing About Echoes

I did not understand it then, and I am not sure I fully understand it now. Lerato has since tried to explain it to me with the patience of a child explaining something obvious to a slow adult.

Her mother used to sing in the passage at home in Kimberley. Not well. Thandeka could not hold a tune to save her life, and she knew it, which is why she only sang where the sound would help her. Our old passage had bare walls and a wooden floor, and she would sing Brenda Fassie off-key while carrying washing from the bedrooms, and the passage made her sound better than she was. Lerato used to sing along from her room.

After Thandeka died, the passage went quiet. We put rugs down when we started packing, and the echo went away with them. Lerato told me, months later, that she had stopped singing because the house did not answer anymore.

So when that corridor in Sandringham answered her, she decided. She did not care about the kitchen or the cupboard space or whether the bathroom had a bath. She walked into the flat, looked out of the window at a jacaranda that was not yet flowering, came back out to the corridor, and clapped one more time.

"This one," she said.

I signed the lease the following week.

Learning to Live in Someone Else's Shape

I had always imagined that if I ever moved into one of the Sandringham Apartments I had seen online, I would be the one making the choices, the grown-up with the measuring tape. Instead I let a nine-year-old pick our home on acoustics, and it was the best decision I made that whole terrible year.

The first months were hard in the ways you would expect. I burned rice four times. I forgot that school started earlier in Johannesburg than it had in Kimberley and we were late on the second day, Lerato in tears, me in a tie I had put on inside out. I did not know where to buy the kind of bread she liked, or which doctor to call when she got a fever in June, or how to plait hair. A neighbour from two doors down, an older woman called Mrs Pillay, saw Lerato coming home with her hair escaping in every direction and quietly offered to teach me on a Sunday afternoon. I am still bad at it, but I am less bad.

The corridor became Lerato's place. She sings there on the way to the lift, and nobody has ever complained, though I have seen the man from number six stop and listen once or twice. She sings Brenda Fassie, mostly, songs she should not know the words to at her age, songs her mother taught her by accident.

What I Would Tell Another Father

People sometimes ask me, now that we have settled, how I found the place, and I tell them the truth. I made a careful list of apartments to rent in Sandringham, I compared prices and distances and parking, and then my daughter overruled all of it in about ten seconds with a clap.

I think about that a lot. When you are grieving and suddenly responsible for everything, you start to believe that the right answer is the sensible one. The cheapest, the closest, the safest. But children grieve sideways. They do not tell you what they need. They find it in odd places, a corridor, a song, a pair of shoes on a tiled floor, and if you are lucky you are standing close enough to notice.

The jacaranda outside our window flowered in October. Lerato took a photo of it on my phone and asked if we could send it to her gogo in Kimberley. Then she went out to the corridor to sing, and I stood in the doorway and listened to the building sing it back.