Six Years of a Deduction I Never Read

The line I never looked at

For six years I got a payslip from Charmaine every month, printed off her home computer in a font that was too big, and every month there was a line on it that said UIF and a small number next to it. I never looked at that line. I looked at the number at the bottom. That was the only number that mattered to me, because that was the number that had to cover rent in Boksburg and my share of the car and the food and whatever my mother needed that month.

I am a dog groomer. I have been doing it since I was twenty three. I work at a small place in a converted house, three of us, and the smell of that place is in all my clothes permanently. Wet dog. That specific smell of a coat that has been soaked and is now drying, which is not the same as a dry dog and not the same as a wet towel. Under that, the shampoo, the oatmeal one that we use on the itchy ones, sweet and slightly medicinal, and the cheaper one that smells like green apple sweets and makes my eyes water by four in the afternoon. There is a drain in the middle of the old kitchen floor that the previous owners put in and the water goes down it with a sound I could pick out of a hundred sounds.

I fell pregnant at twenty eight. I turned twenty nine in the middle of it, in a plastic chair with my feet up on an upturned bucket while Charmaine ate a Steri Stumpie and told me about her sister.

Being big in a queue

The first time I actually thought about that line on my payslip was when Sipho asked me, quite reasonably, what we were going to live on when I stopped working. And I said, well, there's the UIF thing. Because I had heard people say it. It exists in the air in this country, the way people say it. You'll get UIF. Like it just arrives.

I went in at thirty four weeks. I want to be very clear about what thirty four weeks feels like when you are standing. It is not a general discomfort. It is a specific pressure, low down, like something is trying to leave and has decided to take its time. Your back is not sore, your back is simply gone, replaced with a hot bar. Your feet swell inside your takkies until the laces leave marks. And you cannot lean, because there is nothing to lean on in a queue, so you shift from one side to the other like an animal at a fence, and you count the people ahead of you, and then you count them again because you have lost track.

I was there early. That is the thing nobody tells you about being early. Being early only moves you up the queue, it does not move the queue. I stood and the sun came around the corner of the building at about half past nine and found me and stayed on me. A woman ahead of me with a baby on her back offered to hold my place while I sat on the step and I nearly cried at her, which she took very well, like it happens all the time. It probably does.

When I got to the front I found out that one of my forms was wrong. Not missing. Wrong.

Charmaine's handwriting

Charmaine is a decent person. I want that on the record because most of this story sounds like it is her fault, and some of it is, but she is decent. She has run that salon for eleven years out of her aunt's old house and she does the payroll herself, on paper, in a hardcover book with a red spine, and every month she writes our hours in it in her enormous looping handwriting where the sevens look like ones and the ones look like a slash of temper. She has never had a bookkeeper. She has never had a system. She has a book and a calculator and a genuinely good memory, and for eleven years that has been enough.

The form she filled in for me had my last day wrong. She had written the day I told her I was planning to stop, not the day I actually stopped, because I worked an extra week and a half that nobody wrote down anywhere except in the fact that I was there, doing it, with my hands in a Chow.

Bruiser. He came every eight weeks and he hated us with a consistency I found almost admirable. A Chow Chow the colour of dirty cream with an undercoat like felt, and if you have never dematted a Chow, imagine pulling apart a duvet that is attached to something that wants to bite you. He had to be muzzled and he knew the sound of the muzzle coming off the hook. His owner always said he's fine at home. They all say that. Bruiser was my last dog, at thirty two weeks and change, sitting on a stool with my belly turned sideways so I could reach him, sweating, my forearms full of that dead cream fluff that gets into your bra. That was my last day. Not the one in the book.

So I went back to Charmaine and she said sorry my girl, ag no, and she fixed it, and she fixed it in pen, over the old writing, so that the new date sat inside the ghost of the wrong one and you had to know what you were looking at. That got sent back too.

Two in the morning

Then the baby came and time stopped being a line and became a sort of weather.

Here is the actual texture of it. It is quarter past two. She is on the boob, she has been on the boob for forty minutes, and if I move she will wake up and we will start again. My phone is in my right hand at an angle where my thumb can just reach. I am trying to read a document. My eyes will not hold a line of text. I read the same sentence four times and each time it means something different and none of the meanings are the one I need. There is a reference number I wrote on the back of a Dis-Chem slip and the slip is somewhere in the bed. I find it under my own leg at ten to three.

Sipho works shifts at a plant near Alberton and when he was on days he left before I woke properly and when he was on nights he was asleep in the room with the curtain doubled over and I would not have woken him for anything on this earth. He is not a man who dodges. He would have gone and stood in that queue for me if he could have stood in it. He just could not be in two places, and the places were never near each other.

And my mother. My mother's advice was that in her day you just went and spoke to the manager. She said it many times. She said you must speak to someone in charge, Nomsa, you are too soft. There is no manager. There is a system, and the system does not have a manager, it has a queue and a form and a number, and my mother's whole theory of life did not survive contact with it. But she kept offering the theory, kindly, at volume, while holding my baby beautifully, which I could not do at that stage because I was so tired I was holding her like a parcel.

Somewhere in there I had a bad afternoon. I sat on the edge of the bath with the door closed and the water running so nobody would hear me and I thought, quite calmly, I don't want the money anymore. I want to stop. It was not a big feeling. It was flat. That was the part that frightened me, that it was flat.

Where I stopped doing it alone

A woman I know from the salon, a client actually, one of the Yorkie people, said her husband's business used UIF consultants when they had a mess with their staff records, and that maybe I should just let someone else carry it. I said no at first, because paying somebody to do a thing you are entitled to felt like being robbed twice.

I changed my mind on a Tuesday. Not dramatically. I just did not have another Tuesday in me.

So I handed it over. I took photographs of Charmaine's book, the red one, the page with my hours going back and the corrected date sitting inside the ghost of the wrong one, and I sent them, and somebody else read the forms with eyes that could hold a line of text. They asked me questions I could answer in a WhatsApp between naps. Apparently a lot of what goes wrong with UIF claims is exactly this, small employers doing their best on paper, dates that do not agree with each other.

The end of it, more or less

It took what it took. There was more waiting. Waiting after you have handed something over is a different waiting, thinner, and I could sleep through it.

When it came right I did not celebrate. I was standing in the kitchen with the kettle on, and I felt the way you feel when a tooth stops aching. Not happy. Just no longer braced.

She is fourteen months now. I am back at the salon, back in the green apple shampoo. Bruiser still comes. And on the first payslip after I went back I found that line and I read it, properly, the whole thing, for the first time in six years.