My Son Learned to Drive in My Car and Rearranged My Whole Dashboard

The Bakkie Was Not Meant for This

For eleven years my car was entirely mine. A grey double cab, slightly dented on the passenger side from an argument with a gatepost in Hilton. Radio permanently tuned to the same station. A cup holder full of loose coins and a tyre gauge. A dashboard that held nothing except dust and a little laminated card of my late mother's favourite verse, tucked into the edge of the speedometer.

Then my son Siyabonga turned seventeen, passed his learner's test on the second attempt, and climbed into the driver's seat with the expression of a young man about to take over a small country.

Within a month, my dashboard was unrecognisable.

The First Lesson

We started in the empty car park of the showgrounds on a Sunday morning. I had imagined this moment for years. I would be patient and wise, a calm voice beside him, passing on everything my own father had taught me in a white Corolla on the dirt roads outside Greytown.

What actually happened is that I gripped the door handle so hard my knuckles went white and said "Brake. Brake. BRAKE" at least forty times in an hour. He stalled eleven times. He mixed up the indicator and the wipers so often that we drove around that car park with the wipers flapping in perfect sunshine. I am fairly sure we were being filmed by a family having a picnic on the grass.

On the way home, with me driving, he sulked. I sulked. We did not speak until supper.

The Phone Problem

The real war started in week three, when we moved onto actual roads.

Siyabonga does not know how to get anywhere without his phone. This is not a criticism, exactly. He has never needed to. He has grown up with a map in his pocket that talks to him. When I tried to explain that I would give him directions, he looked at me with genuine pity.

"Dad, you said turn left at the garage and there were two garages."

He was not wrong. But the alternative, as far as I could see, was him holding the phone in one hand and steering with the other, which was not going to happen in my car while I was alive and sitting in the passenger seat. We argued about it in the driveway with the engine running until my wife came out and turned it off.

The next Saturday he came home from the mall with a small paper bag and the look of someone who had won an argument in advance.

The Holder

He had bought one of those Car Phone Holders that clips onto the air vent, with his own pocket money. He did not ask. He simply went out to the bakkie, attached it to the vent beside my mother's laminated verse, put his phone in it, and sat back.

I went out to complain. I had a whole speech prepared about my car and my rules and how in my day we used a map book and a sense of direction. But when I got there, he had already set the route to my sister's house in Edendale, and the screen sat at eye level, out of his hands, and a calm voice was telling him to proceed to the route.

I got into the passenger seat. I did not give my speech.

Losing the Argument Gracefully, Eventually

I would like to say I accepted this like a modern father. I did not. For two weeks I made sarcastic comments every time the voice on the phone spoke. "Oh, does she know a short cut? Does she know about the potholes on Sweetwaters Road?" Siyabonga ignored me with the patience of a monk.

But I noticed things. I noticed he was looking at the road more, not less, because he was not trying to remember my vague instructions while also managing the clutch. I noticed he was calmer. I noticed that when the phone told him to turn, he indicated properly and early, which is more than I do.

And I noticed, privately, that I was calmer too. I was not doing two jobs anymore. I was just a passenger who occasionally said "watch that taxi."

The Battery Wars

Of course, the phone died. It always died. A seventeen-year-old's phone is always at four percent. Halfway to a rugby match in Howick it went black, the voice stopped, and he panicked and nearly took the wrong off-ramp.

The following weekend another paper bag appeared. This time it held Cables, two of them, one short and one long, which he threaded around the gear stick and plugged into the old socket I had forgotten my bakkie even had. I came out to find my dashboard now featured a phone, a holder, a coiled cable and my mother's verse, slightly bent, pushed further along the speedometer.

I took the verse out and held it for a while. Then I put it back in a place where it would not get bent, up by the rear-view mirror, and did not mention it.

The Night Drive

The lesson I remember most was in month four. We drove to Durban and back at night, because he needed experience on the highway in the dark, and because his cousin was having a birthday at a restaurant on the beachfront.

The N3 at night is a serious road. Trucks, rain at Hammarsdale, the long descent past Field's Hill. I was nervous. He was nervous. The phone sat in its holder, charging, its screen dimmed, showing us the bends before we reached them.

Somewhere around Cato Ridge, he asked me, out of nowhere, what Gogo had been like when I was learning to drive. I told him she had refused to get in the car with me for a full year and that my father had done every lesson, smoking out of the window. I told him about the Corolla and the dirt roads and the cow I nearly hit outside Greytown. He laughed so hard he had to slow down.

I realised that this was the longest conversation we had had in perhaps two years. Without the phone in his hand, without the television, without his friends, there was just the road and the two of us, and the dark.

His Test, and My Car

He passed his driver's test in the sixth month, first time. The examiner told him he had excellent observation, which I chose to take personal credit for.

He drives my mother's old Polo now, which we kept in the garage after she passed. The first thing he did was move his phone holder and cables into it. The second thing he did, which I did not know about until later, was to spend his first proper wages from his weekend job at a hardware store on a magnetic mount for my bakkie, picked from a shelf of MagSafe Chargers, because he said my habit of leaving my phone on the passenger seat to slide around on corners was, and I quote, "a safety hazard, Dad."

I have kept it. I use it. My phone sits at eye level when I drive now, charging quietly, and I would not admit this to him for anything, but I am glad of it.

My mother's verse is still up by the rear-view mirror, where I moved it that day. Every time I look at it, I think about how she refused to sit beside me while I learned, and how I almost made the same mistake, and how a seventeen-year-old with a paper bag made sure I did not.