The House That Smelled of My Mother

The keys felt too small for what they opened

When the attorney handed me the keys to my mother's house in a quiet street in Kempton Park, they sat in my palm like nothing. Three keys on a loop of green garden wire she had twisted herself, because she never trusted the plastic key rings from the hardware shop. I was thirty seven and I had never owned a house. I had rented flats since university, always someone else's walls, always a landlord to phone when the geyser burst. Now there was no one to phone. The house was mine, and so was everything that went wrong with it.

I moved in on a Sunday in autumn. The jacaranda across the road had gone bare and the light came in low and yellow through the burglar bars. I remember standing in the passage with two suitcases and thinking that the house still smelled of her, of Sunlight soap and the Rooibos she drank cold by accident because she always forgot her cup. For weeks I could not bring myself to move her reading glasses from the shelf by the front door. I would come home from work and they would still be there, folded, waiting for a woman who was not coming back.

The house was small. Two bedrooms, a lounge that doubled as a dining room, a kitchen with a window over the sink that looked onto the washing line. And a single garage on the side, connected to the house by a short covered path that leaked when it rained. That garage became the thing I could not ignore, though I tried for a long time.

The door that would not stay shut

My mother's garage door was old wood, the kind they stopped making decades ago. It was painted a deep green that had faded to the colour of an old army blanket, and it swung outward in two heavy halves rather than lifting up the way modern ones do. Over the years the timber had warped. The damp had got into the bottom edge and swollen it, and the whole thing sagged on its hinges so that the two halves no longer met in the middle. There was a gap you could put your arm through. To close it properly you had to lift the left half slightly with your knee while you pushed a rusted bolt into a hole in the concrete, and even then it never really sealed.

I did not care much at first. The garage was full of my mother's stored things and I could not face them. Boxes of Christmas decorations. Her sewing machine under a sheet. Tins of buttons. My father's tools from before he died, oiled and wrapped in cloth, though he had been gone since I was nineteen. A pram, my pram, that she had kept for grandchildren that never came. I would open the garage door, look at all of it, and close it again, and the not sealing felt like a small mercy. It meant I did not have to decide anything.

Then the wind came.

The night it banged

It was a bergwind night in June, dry and warm and wrong for winter, the kind of wind that makes dogs restless and doors slam. I was lying in my mother's bed, which I had started calling my bed only in the last month, when I heard it. A bang, then a groan of hinges, then another bang. The left half of the garage door had come loose and the wind was swinging it, throwing it open and letting it crash back against the frame. Bang. Pause. Bang.

I lay there for a long time telling myself it would stop. It did not. Eventually I put on my mother's dressing gown, which still hung on the back of the door, and I went out into the cold with a torch, feeling like a child pretending to be a grown woman. The bolt had jumped its hole. The wood was flapping. I stood in the wind and I lifted that heavy green half with my knee, the way she must have done a thousand times, and I forced the bolt home, and I cried in a way I had not let myself cry at the funeral. Not because of the door. Because I understood, standing there in the dark, that there was no one behind me. This was mine to hold now. All of it.

What the break-in taught me

Two streets over, that same week, someone was almost robbed. A house on the corner, an older couple I vaguely knew from my mother's church. Men had come over the wall in the early hours and got as far as the kitchen door before a neighbour's dog started up and the whole street's lights came on. Nothing was taken, but the woman told me at the Spar, her hands shaking on the trolley, how she had lain awake since, listening.

I went home and I looked at my garage with new eyes. That gap you could put your arm through. That door that did not lock, that swung open in the wind, standing there night after night, open to the street. My mother's whole life was in that garage. My father's tools. The pram. And behind the garage, an internal door straight into the kitchen that my mother had never bothered to lock because the garage was always shut. Except it was not shut. It had not properly shut in years.

I did not sleep that night either. In the morning I made a list, the way my mother made lists, on the back of an old envelope. At the top I wrote: fix the garage.

Learning to phone people

It sounds like nothing, but phoning a tradesman for the first time as the person responsible, the owner, the one who pays, felt enormous. I had spent my whole adult life letting other people manage the men who came to fix things. Now I had to describe a problem I did not have words for. I stood in the kitchen rehearsing before I dialled. The wood has warped. It does not close. There is a gap. I know nothing about garage doors and I need someone to tell me what is possible.

The man who came was patient with me. He walked around the door, pushed at the swollen timber with his thumb, looked at the hinges, and told me the truth, which was that the wood was too far gone to be as good as new but that he could get it closing and locking properly again for now. He spent an afternoon planing down the swollen edge, rehanging the halves so they met, replacing the rusted bolt with a proper lock, and treating the timber against the damp. When he left, the door closed. Both halves met in the middle. The lock turned. I stood in the driveway and opened and closed it maybe six times, like a child with a new toy, listening to the click.

That first round of garage door repairs did not fix everything, but it fixed me a little. It taught me that a problem named out loud is smaller than a problem left swinging in the dark. It taught me that I could pick up a phone.

Going through her things

With the door closing, I could finally face what was inside. I gave myself a Saturday a month. I would put on the radio, make a flask of tea, and go through one corner of the garage at a time. It was slower than it should have been because everything had a story. The sewing machine that made my school dresses. A box of birthday cards I had sent her from boarding school, kept in order, tied with wool. I sat on the cold concrete floor and read my own childish handwriting and I felt her everywhere in that room.

I kept less than I thought I would. I gave the pram to a young couple from the church. My father's tools I cleaned and moved into the house, into a proper cupboard, because I had started using them, badly at first and then less badly. I learned to tighten a hinge. I learned which screwdriver was which. The garage slowly emptied of her life and started to hold a little of mine. My bicycle. Tins of paint for the rooms I was slowly making my own.

The new door, and the sound of it

By the following autumn, almost a year after I moved in, the old wooden door finally gave up. A hinge tore out of the softened frame and I knew the repairs had reached their end. This time I did not rehearse before I phoned. I knew what I wanted. I wanted a door that lifted up and out of the way, that locked by itself, that sealed against the concrete so no wind could throw it open and no arm could reach through. I arranged the garage door installation for a weekday and took the morning off work to be there.

They took the old green halves off their hinges and carried them to the pavement, and for a moment the garage stood open to the street with nothing across it at all, and I felt oddly exposed, as though the house were holding its breath. Then the new door went up on its tracks. It was plain and pale and had none of my mother's history in it, and that was exactly why I wanted it. It was mine. I had chosen it. When they showed me how it closed, the panel came down smooth and even and pressed itself against the floor with a soft, final sound, a seal, a sigh, and then quiet.

That night I lay in bed and I listened, out of habit, for the bang. It did not come. There was only the wind moving through the bare jacaranda and the settled silence of a house that was shut. I got up once, near midnight, and walked through to the internal door and checked it, and then I checked the garage, and everything was closed, everything was held. I stood in the dark kitchen where my mother had made ten thousand cups of tea, and I understood that I had made this house safe with my own two hands and my own list on the back of an envelope.

It was not her house anymore. It had become mine slowly, through winters and Saturdays and one door at a time. And that small mechanical sound of the panel sealing shut at night became, without my noticing, the sound of home.