The House Got Quiet Before I Did

The Last One Left On A Tuesday

The thing nobody warns you about is how a house sounds after the last child leaves. Not sad, exactly. Just wrong. Like a song with a note missing that you keep waiting to hear.

Our youngest, Thabang, moved out on an ordinary Tuesday in March. He took the futon, the kettle we had bought him for res years ago, and a box of textbooks he swore he still needed. I stood in the driveway in Kempton Park and waved until his little Polo turned at the corner by the Naidoos' place, and then I went back inside and the silence came down like a lid.

We had bought that house in 1994, when I was pregnant with our eldest and Nelson Mandela's face was on every lamppost. It cost us more than we could afford and we ate a lot of tinned pilchards to make the bond payments. Three children grew up in it. The doorframe in the passage still had the pencil marks, Lerato at four, Thabang at seven, Kagiso stretching onto her toes to cheat her way past her brother. I used to mean to paint over those marks. I am so glad now that I never did.

My husband Sipho found me sitting on the bottom stair that afternoon. He did not say anything clever. He just sat down next to me, his knee cracking the way it does, and we listened to the house be empty together.

The Garden Was Winning

For a while we told ourselves nothing needed to change. This was our home. We had earned it. Why would we leave?

But a four bedroom house with a garden does not care about your feelings. It just keeps needing things.

The garden was the first to turn on us. When the children were small it was a jungle gym and a cricket pitch and a place to bury a hamster called Biscuit with full honours. Now it was just work. Sipho would spend his whole Saturday behind the mower, red in the face, and by the following Saturday the grass had swallowed his effort whole. The bougainvillea that I had planted the year Kagiso was born had become a monster that tore at the gutters. We paid a man called Petrus to help, and then Petrus got a better job in Midrand, and the weeds moved back in like they had been waiting.

And the pool. Heaven help us, the pool. We had put it in for the children and for maybe six summers it was the best money we ever spent. Then the children grew up and stopped swimming, and the pool became a green expense that ate chlorine and electricity and demanded that Sipho fish leaves out of it with a net at seven in the morning in his pyjamas, swearing softly in isiZulu so I would not hear. Nobody had actually swum in it for three years. We were maintaining a small municipal dam for the benefit of frogs.

One evening Sipho came in from netting leaves, sat down heavily, and said, very quietly, "I do not want to spend my sixties doing this." And I heard it. But I was not ready to say it back.

The Fight We Needed To Have

He started sending me links. That was how it began. A message on a Sunday, a screenshot of apartments for sale somewhere near Modderfontein, all clean lines and no gutters for bougainvillea to strangle. I would look at them and feel my chest go tight and I would not reply, and he would notice that I had not replied, and the not-replying became its own conversation.

It came to a head over roast chicken. He said something reasonable, something about how the bond was nearly finished and we could sell and be comfortable, and I put down my fork and heard myself say something completely unreasonable back. I said he wanted to throw away our whole life. I said he had never loved the house the way I did. I said things that were not fair and were not even really about him.

He went quiet in that way he does, which is worse than shouting. And then he said, "I am not asking you to forget them. I am asking you to stop breaking your back for a building."

I cried in the bathroom with the tap running so he would not hear, which is a thing I have done since I was a girl. And somewhere in the crying I understood what I was actually afraid of. It was not the house. It was that leaving the house felt like admitting that the loud, muddy, wonderful part of our life was over. That if I packed up the pencil marks on the doorframe, I was agreeing that no small person would ever stand against them again.

I came out with a red face and told him the truth of it. And my husband, who is not a man of many words, held me in the passage right next to those marks and said, "They are not in the wall, Nomsa. They are in us. We take them with us." I have been married to him for thirty one years and I did not know he had that in him.

Learning To Want Less House

Once I had cried it out, something loosened. We started actually looking, together this time, on the same side.

It is a strange thing, house hunting when you are downsizing. Everyone assumes buying property is a young person's game, the nervous first-timers with their calculators. Nobody writes about people like us, going the other way, wanting less instead of more. When I searched property for sale I kept getting shown enormous places with double garages and rooms for children we no longer had. I had to keep reminding the search, and myself, that the whole point was to want less.

We looked at a lot of nonsense. A place that smelled of damp. A place where the estate agent talked so much I wanted to lie down. And then we walked into a two bedroom on the second floor of a development off the R21, and I felt my shoulders come down from around my ears for the first time in months. There was light. There was a small balcony exactly big enough for two chairs and a pot of rosemary. There was, crucially, no garden that was secretly plotting against us and no pool full of ambitious frogs.

The second bedroom, I decided on the spot, would be for the grandchildren I do not have yet but fully intend to spoil. Sipho saw me deciding it and did not tease me. He just squeezed my hand.

Locking One Door

We have been here four months now. I am still surprised by it most mornings.

Selling the old place was harder than I let on. A young couple bought it, heavily pregnant, eating the estate agent's optimism the way we once did. On the last day I walked through the empty rooms and put my hand flat on the doorframe, on Lerato at four, and I said thank you out loud like a mad old woman. Then I locked the door and gave the keys to the agent and did not look back, because if I had looked back I would not have got in the car.

The lightness took me by surprise. We call it lock-up-and-go, and I did not understand the phrase until I lived it. We went to Ballito for a long weekend and I simply turned a key and left. No arranging for someone to net the pool. No guilt about the grass growing. Just a door, locked, and the two of us free.

I miss the space sometimes. I miss shouting up a staircase. When I browse apartments now, out of a habit I have not quite dropped, it is not with dread anymore but with a kind of quiet interest in this smaller, lighter way of living that I fought so hard against.

Last Sunday Sipho was reading on the little balcony with the rosemary, sun on his face, both knees resting. He looked over at me and said, "I have not held a leaf net in four months." He said it like a man announcing his own parole. And I laughed, properly laughed, in our small home that is exactly the right size for the two people we are now, with the pencil marks safe inside us where nobody can paint over them.