My Ex-Wife Insisted on Coming Flat Hunting With Me

The Saturday She Turned Up With a Tape Measure

Lindiwe arrived at eight in the morning with a flask of coffee, a tape measure and a printed list. We had been divorced for nineteen days.

"You are going to sign the first place with a nice balcony," she said, before she had even taken off her sunglasses, "and then you are going to discover the geyser is the size of a kettle and you will phone me about it at eleven at night."

I wanted to argue. The trouble with being married to someone for twenty-two years is that they are usually right about you, and the trouble with divorcing them is that they still are.

We had ended it quietly. No lawyers shouting, no friends forced to pick sides. Somewhere around our twentieth anniversary we had looked at each other across the kitchen in Northcliff and admitted we had become very good flatmates who happened to share a surname. Our daughter was at university in Stellenbosch. The house was too big and too full of conversations we were not having. Lindiwe kept the house, because she loved the garden and I could never keep a single plant alive, and I agreed to find somewhere of my own.

What I had not agreed to was company. But there she was in my car, seatbelt on, reading out addresses.

What I Thought I Wanted

I had a picture in my head of my new life. It involved a high floor, a view of the city lights and a lot of concrete. I am fifty-four and I work as a quantity surveyor, which means I spend my days measuring other people's buildings and I had always secretly wanted to live in one that looked like a drawing. Clean lines. No lawn. Nothing that needed watering.

Lindiwe's list was different. Hers said things like "water pressure in the shower, actually turn it on," and "where does the sun come in at four o'clock," and "can he reach the plug points without moving furniture." That last one was a dig. I once spent an entire winter in our old lounge unplugging the heater to charge my phone because I refused to buy an extension cord on principle.

The night before, I had been scrolling through listings of apartments to rent Johannesburg wide until my eyes went dry, saving everything with a rooftop and ignoring everything with a sensible kitchen. I showed her the saved list in the car. She scrolled through it in silence, which was worse than a lecture.

The First Three Places

The first flat was in Rosebank and it was beautiful in the photographs. In person it faced straight into another building, so close I could have passed the neighbours a cup of sugar through the window. Lindiwe stood in the middle of the bedroom and said, "You will never see daylight in here, and you get depressed in June." I had forgotten that about myself. She had not.

The second was in Parkhurst, above a row of restaurants. I loved it immediately. There was a little balcony where I could picture myself with a beer on a Friday. She sent me down to the street at half past twelve to listen. The music from the bar next door was already thumping and it was not even lunchtime. "Friday night," she said simply. I am a man who goes to bed at half past nine. She knew that too.

The third had a fault I would never have noticed. She turned on the kitchen tap, then flushed the toilet, then went back to the tap and watched the water slow to a dribble. "Pressure," she said, and ticked something on her list.

By eleven o'clock I was irritated and hungry and slightly ashamed of how little I understood about my own habits. We stopped at a garage for pies and sat on the bonnet of the car eating them like we had on our first road trip to Durban in 1999. Neither of us mentioned that.

The Conversation on the Bonnet

"Why are you doing this?" I asked her. It came out sharper than I meant.

She brushed pastry off her jeans and took a long time to answer. "Because for twenty-two years I chose where we lived," she said, "and you just showed up and complained about the parking. I want to know you are going to be fine. Then I can stop thinking about it."

That landed. I had always thought of myself as the practical one, the one who read contracts and checked numbers. But the real practical things, the daily ones, had been hers. Which window to open in summer. Which room stayed warm. Which neighbour to avoid. I had been living inside her decisions for two decades and calling them mine.

I told her I was frightened of being lonely. I had not said it out loud to anyone. She nodded and said she was frightened of being relieved, and that she felt guilty about that. We sat there for a while with the engine ticking as it cooled.

The Place in Kew

The fourth viewing was the one I had almost deleted from the list because it did not have a rooftop pool. It was in Kew, a pocket of the city I had driven past a hundred times on my way to site meetings without ever really looking at it. I had found it the night before while half asleep, searching Kew apartments for rent because a colleague had mentioned the area was close to the highway and I hate traffic more than I hate most things.

It was quieter than I expected. The flat was on a middle floor, with a window in the lounge that caught the afternoon sun at exactly the angle Lindiwe's list demanded. She actually stood there with her watch, waiting until four, because she is that kind of person. The light came in warm and low across the floor.

She ran the shower. She flushed the toilet and checked the tap. She found the plug points, all at sensible heights, and gave me a look that said I had been spared a winter of unplugging things. She opened every cupboard in the kitchen and declared it "big enough for a man who only owns four pots."

I walked around measuring the rooms out of habit. Three point eight by four point one in the bedroom. Enough space for my desk by the window. I could see myself working there on weekends, drawings spread out, a radio playing.

"This one," she said, before I could. "You will be fine here."

Signing It Myself

I want to be clear that I signed the lease myself. She waited in the car. That mattered to me more than I can explain. It felt like the first adult decision of my second life, even if the research had been hers.

I moved in on the first of the month with eleven boxes, a mattress, a kettle and the old armchair from the study that nobody else wanted. Lindiwe dropped off a pot plant the following week with a note that said "Water this on Sundays. It is the only plant you can't kill." So far she is right about that too.

What I Have Learned About Living Alone

The first few weeks were strange. The silence in the evenings rang. I would make supper and realise I had made enough for two. I would hear a joke on the radio and turn to tell someone and find only the pot plant.

But slowly I started to build my own small rituals. A walk around the block after work. A Sunday call with our daughter, now just me on the line, which she says she prefers because I actually listen. Coffee at the window at four o'clock, when the sun comes in at the angle my ex-wife insisted upon.

Friends going through their own separations have started asking me for advice, as if I know anything. I tell them the same thing every time. When you start looking at apartments in Johannesburg for your new life, take someone who knows your bad habits. Not someone who will tell you what you want to hear, but someone who remembers that you get sad in winter and go to bed at half past nine.

Lindiwe and I have supper together once a month now. She brings the news from the garden and I bring the news from my small, quiet flat. We are kinder to each other than we were in the last years of the marriage. Perhaps it is because nobody is keeping score anymore.

Last month she asked how the water pressure was holding up. I told her it was perfect. She smiled like she had won something, and I suppose she had.