The Flat That Was Only Mine, Above the Lake Lights

The Day I Carried My Own Kettle Up Two Flights

I am fifty-three. For twenty-six years I lived in a house in Primrose with a garden that needed me every weekend and a wife who stopped needing me somewhere along the way. We did not shout much at the end. That was almost the worst of it. We just moved around each other like two people sharing a corridor, polite and tired, until one evening in autumn we said the quiet thing out loud and could not unsay it.

So I packed. Not everything. You learn fast how little of a house is actually yours when you start lifting it. A toolbox. Half the books. A kettle she never liked because the whistle was too sharp. My side of the wardrobe looked smaller than I remembered once it was folded into bags. I carried the kettle up two flights of stairs to a flat on the East Rand, set it on a counter that had never held anything of mine, and stood there listening to a silence that belonged to me and nobody else.

I had never lived alone. I went from my mother's house to a shared room at technikon to married. Fifty-three years old and the first night in my own place, I did not know where to stand.

How I Even Found It

I will be honest, I did not have a plan. I had a deadline, which my lawyer kindly called a transfer date, and a budget that had just been cut roughly in half. I spent two weeks after work scrolling listings on my phone in the car park, before I could face going home to a house that was being divided. Most of what came up near my job was either a townhouse I could not afford or a bachelor room that smelled of someone else's bad week.

A colleague of mine, a younger man named Sifiso who had split from his wife the year before and somehow still smiled, told me to stop looking at the whole country and look at one patch of it. He sent me a link to some Germiston apartment to rent listings near the lake and said, go and stand on the balcony before you decide anything, the photos never tell you about the balcony. I thought it was a strange thing to say. He was right, as it turned out.

I viewed four places in one Saturday. The first three I have already forgotten. The fourth had a small lounge, a kitchen you could not swing a cat in, one bedroom, and a narrow balcony facing west. The agent was still talking about the geyser when I walked out onto it and stopped listening to her entirely.

The Balcony, the Water, and the Refinery Burning Orange

From that balcony I could see Germiston Lake. In the late afternoon the water goes the colour of weak tea and then, as the sun drops, it turns to hammered metal, all broken light. Past it, the refinery. By day it is just pipes and towers and a smell you stop noticing. But at night it burns. Little orange flames on the flare stacks, strings of white lights along the gantries, the whole thing glowing like a city that forgot to go to sleep.

I signed the lease the following week. I had looked at a few other Germiston rentals that were cheaper by a few hundred rand, but none of them had that view, and I had decided, somewhere in those two weeks of car parks and bad listings, that I was allowed one thing that was just for me. The deposit cleaned me out. I did not care.

That first week I would come home from work, make tea with the sharp kettle, and take it out onto the balcony and just sit. No television. No conversation I had to manage. Just the water going dark and the refinery coming up orange and the sound of the N3 somewhere behind me like the sea if you did not look too closely.

Learning to Cook for One Is Harder Than It Sounds

Nobody warns you about the portions. For twenty-six years I cooked, or was cooked for, in twos and threes and sometimes fours when my daughter brought a boyfriend home. The first time I made a pot of curry in the new flat I made enough for six people and then sat looking at it, knowing I would be eating the same curry on Thursday and feeling like a fool.

So I learned. I learned to buy two chops instead of a tray. I learned that an onion and an egg and a bit of leftover rice is a perfectly good supper for a man on his own. I learned to eat standing at the counter sometimes, and that this is not a tragedy, whatever the women's magazines in the doctor's waiting room imply. I bought a small radio and put it on the windowsill and now the flat has voices in it when I want them and silence when I do not. That switch, the fact that I control it, still feels like a small luxury I am getting away with.

Sundays, and My Daughter on the Balcony

My daughter Lerato is twenty-four. She took the separation harder than she lets on. For the first month she would not come to the flat, I think because coming here made it real. Then one Sunday she phoned and said she was bringing lunch, and she arrived with a roast chicken from the shop and a bottle of cooldrink and a face that was trying very hard to be fine.

We ate on the balcony. She went quiet when the refinery lights came on and said, Dad, this is actually beautiful, in a surprised voice, as if beauty was not something she expected to find in her father's reduced life. Now she comes most Sundays. We do not talk about her mother much. We talk about her work and my knees and whether the ducks on the lake are the same ducks each week. She has started leaving a jersey here, draped over the one spare chair, and I have not moved it, because a jersey over a chair means someone is coming back.

The Relief of a Room With No Argument In It

I will tell you the thing I did not expect. I thought I would be lonely, and some nights I am, the kind of lonely that sits on your chest at two in the morning. But mostly what I feel in this flat is relief. There is no argument held in these walls. No old silence soaked into the carpet. When I shut the door at night the quiet is not a punishment, it is just quiet.

A man at work asked me recently if I missed the house. The garden, the space, the double garage. I thought about it honestly. I said I missed who I thought I would be in that house. I do not miss the house. If anyone asks me now where I ended up, I tell them, a small place near the lake, one of those Germiston apartments that looks like nothing from the road and holds the whole sunset once you are inside it.

I am fifty-three, I live alone for the first time in my life, and last Sunday my daughter and I counted eleven ducks and argued pleasantly about whether one of them was new. The kettle still whistles too sharp. I have decided I like it.