The Golf That Sat Under a Tree For Three Years

The first thing I ever owned outright

I bought that Golf with my own money when I was twenty four. A silver Mk4, a bit tired already, a hundred and ninety thousand on the clock, bought off a guy in Boksburg who clearly loved it more than his own children and made me promise to look after it. I did look after it. I washed it on Sundays in my mother's driveway in Benoni, I saved for proper tyres instead of the cheap ones, I knew the sound of every part of it. It was the first thing in my life that was fully mine, not financed, not shared, not borrowed. My name, my keys, my car.

So when a bakkie went through a red robot on Trichardts Road and folded the whole front left of it like a piece of paper, something in me folded too. I was fine. That is the part everyone forgets to be grateful for and I forget too. I walked away with a sore neck and a fright. But the car did not walk away. It came home on a flatbed and it went under the big syringa tree at the side of my mother's house, and that is where it stayed.

A monument to being wronged

Here is the thing I could not say out loud for a long time. Keeping that wreck was not really about the car. The accident was not my fault, everybody agreed it was not my fault, and yet the payout I got barely covered what I still owed and the whole business left me feeling cheated in a way I could not fix. Leaving the Golf under the tree was my way of refusing to accept that. As long as it sat there, dented and dusty, the injustice was still visible. Somebody could still, in theory, make it right.

Nobody was going to make it right. I knew that. But the car became a kind of stubborn flag planted in my mother's side yard, and I watered it with my resentment every time I walked past.

My mother hated it. She said it made the place look like a plot where something bad had happened. She was not wrong. The syringa dropped its berries all over the roof, the paint went chalky, a cat had kittens in the boot one spring and I was almost pleased because it gave me a reason to keep it. Weeds came up through where the bumper used to sit properly. My little cousins used to sit in it and pretend to drive to Durban.

The girlfriend who did not nag

Zanele came into my life about a year and a half into all this. She is the most patient person I know, and the clever kind of patient, the kind that does not tell you what to do but lets you arrive at it yourself while she waits with her arms folded. She never once told me to get rid of the Golf. She asked me questions instead. What was I waiting for. What would need to be true for me to let it go. Whether I thought the version of me that had loved that car would want it to end its life as a nest for cats under a tree.

I did not have good answers. I had a lot of talk about principle and about how they do not make them like that anymore and about how one day I would restore it. We both knew I would never restore it. I did not have the money or the skill or, honestly, the real desire. What I had was a wound with number plates on it.

The morning the tree decided for me

What actually moved me was not a big epiphany. It was a branch. One night a piece of the syringa came down in a storm, a proper heavy limb, and it landed right across the roof of the Golf and caved it in. In the morning I stood there in my slops looking at this car that was already a wreck now double wrecked, with leaves everywhere and the cat family long since moved out, and I started laughing. I could not stop. Zanele came out with two cups of coffee and looked at me like I had finally lost it, and I said, through the laughing, that even the tree was tired of it.

That was the day something turned. I realised I had been guarding a thing that gave nothing back, in a yard my mother wanted for her plants, over a hurt that the car itself could not heal. I did not need a shrine to being wronged. I needed the space, and honestly I needed the small bit of money it might still be worth, because Zanele and I had started talking carefully about a future that had a deposit in it.

Learning that a wreck is still worth something

What surprised me, once I actually looked into it, was that people genuinely will buy a car in that state. My whole assumption had been that a written off, storm crushed, cat inhabited Golf was pure rubbish, fit only for the scrap man who would give me almost nothing and expect me to be grateful. That turned out to be wrong. There are proper outfits in South Africa whose entire business is to sell damaged cars on, for parts, for panels, for the bits that still have life in them, and they are used to exactly the kind of sad object sitting under my mother's tree.

I was nervous about the whole thing because I had no idea what a fair price even was for something so far gone. But when I read up on how to actually sell your damaged car without getting taken for a ride, it was more straightforward than I had built it up to be in my head. You give the honest details, the make, the model, the year, what is wrong with it, the fact that it does not run and a tree has been sitting on it. They tell you what they will give. No pretending it is something it is not, which after three years of my own pretending felt almost like a relief.

What the empty space taught me

They came with a flatbed, the same kind that had brought it home all those years before, and they winched the poor thing up and took it away on a Tuesday morning while I was at work. Zanele sent me a photo of the empty patch of ground with the message that the yard looked twice as big. My mother planted dahlias there within the month. She sends me pictures of them like she is rubbing it in, and she is, and I deserve it.

The strange part is how little I missed it once it was actually gone. All that weight I thought I would feel, the grief for my first car, the reminder of being wronged, it just was not there. It turns out the car had stopped being the car a long time ago. It had become a habit, a mood, a way of staying angry at a stranger in a bakkie who probably does not remember the day at all.

If you have got one of these sitting somewhere, taking up your space and a corner of your head, I understand more than I can say why it is hard to let go. I understand that the whole business of selling damaged cars can feel like admitting the thing is truly over. But I promise you the space it gives back is real, and so is the small money, and so is the quiet. Mine bought us a slightly bigger start than we would have had otherwise, and it got my mother her dahlias, and it taught me that a monument to being wronged is just a way of staying wronged forever. The syringa is still there. It drops its berries on nothing now, and I have made my peace with both of them.