The Letters on Mr Patel's Shopfront Started Bending

A Trade That Lives in the Wrist

I have painted signs in Fordsburg and Mayfair since 1990. Not printed them, not cut them out of vinyl on a machine, painted them. One-stroke lettering with a sable brush, a mahl stick resting against the glass, and a tin of enamel that smells like my father's garage. My father taught me on the back of old hardboard sheets, and he used to say a sign-writer's whole career lives in the wrist and the eye, and the wrist is the easy part.

I did not understand what he meant until I was fifty-eight.

Most of my work these days is for families who have been in the same buildings for decades. The fabric shop on Mint Road. The two brothers with the spice counter who still refuse to let me write their name in anything but red and gold. And Mr Patel, who sells hardware and paraffin heaters and everything in between, and who asks me to repaint his front window every second winter because, he says, a fresh sign tells people you are not dying.

The Window That Would Not Come Right

It was a Tuesday in June. I had chalked my guidelines on the outside of Mr Patel's window, two long horizontal lines for the capitals, and I started on the word HARDWARE. I have painted that word perhaps four hundred times in my life. I could paint it in my sleep.

When I stepped back onto the pavement, the second R leaned. Not a lot. Just enough that it looked tired. The W bellied in the middle like a sail. I wiped it off with turps, repainted it, and stepped back again. Now the A had a soft curve in its crossbar that I had not put there.

Mr Patel came out with two cups of tea and stood next to me for a long time without saying anything, which for him is unusual.

"New brushes?" he asked eventually.

"Must be," I said.

I went home that night and threw out three perfectly good brushes. I combed the next one through with oil for twenty minutes, checking every hair. The next morning I went back and the line I painted still wandered, and I was so angry I sat in the bakkie for a quarter of an hour with the radio off.

I Blamed the Boy

My apprentice is a young man called Sizwe. He is twenty-three and he has better hands than I had at his age, though I have never told him so. He had chalked the guidelines for the second window that week, and so of course, the next day, I decided he had chalked them crooked.

I am not proud of how I spoke to him. I told him a sign-writer who cannot snap a straight line has no business holding a brush. He did not argue. He just took the chalk line, held one end against the frame, and asked me to hold the other. He snapped it. It was dead straight. Then he looked at me, and he said very quietly, "Uncle, close your left eye and look at it."

I closed my left eye. The line was straight.

I closed my right eye. The line had a dip in the middle, like someone had pressed a thumb into it.

I stood on that pavement on Mint Road with a hand over one eye like a child playing pirates, and a man selling peanuts asked me if I was all right.

The Grid on the Fridge

That evening my daughter, who works in an office in Rosebank and knows how to find anything, sat me down at the kitchen table. She printed out a page with a grid of squares and a dot in the middle, and told me to look at the dot with one eye at a time. With my left eye, the squares were squares. With my right eye, a patch near the centre went soft and wavy, and one corner of the grid seemed to fade, like old paint on a wall that gets the afternoon sun.

She stuck the page to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a pineapple. She did not say anything else. She did not need to.

I had been to an optometrist many times over the years for reading glasses. I assumed that was where I would go again. My daughter said no, this needed someone who deals with the inside of the eye, and she spent the evening reading about ophthalmologists and what they actually look for when straight lines start curving. I sat across from her pretending to watch the rugby and listening to every word she read out.

What Fear Looks Like at Fifty-Eight

I will be honest about the week before the appointment, because I think men my age are not honest enough about this.

I did not sleep well. I thought about my father, who worked until the week before his stroke. I thought about the forty-odd shopfronts across Fordsburg and Mayfair that still carry my lettering, and whether the next ones would be printed on a roll of plastic by a machine because the old man's hands could no longer be trusted. I thought about Sizwe, and how I had spoken to him, and how he had been the one who noticed first.

My wife caught me one night standing in the passage at two in the morning, looking at the doorframe with one eye closed. She took me by the elbow and walked me back to bed like I was a sleepwalker. Maybe I was.

The Chair and the Bright Light

My daughter found an ophthalmologist in Johannesburg and drove me there herself, because the drops they put in your eyes make the world too bright to drive home in. I remember the waiting room being cold, and a little boy across from me with a patch over one eye who kept giving me a thumbs up, as if we were on the same team.

I will not pretend to understand all the medical detail, and I do not want anyone reading this to take my story as advice. What I can say is that the doctor was patient, that she looked at the back of my eye for a long time with a light so bright I saw purple for an hour afterwards, and that she explained what was happening to the centre of my vision in plain words. She drew me a little picture of the eye on a notepad, which I kept. She told me what could be done, what could not be undone, and why waiting another six months would have been a mistake.

Then she asked what I did for a living. When I told her, she smiled and said, "Then you noticed it before most people would have. Your job is a very good test."

I had never thought of it like that. Thirty-five years of looking at the edges of letters, and it turned out I had been checking my own eyes every single day without knowing it.

Back on Mint Road

I have been going back for follow-ups since then. Some appointments are easy and some are not. There are things I do differently now. I paint in the mornings, when the light is kind. Sizwe snaps every chalk line and I check them only with my left eye, which still behaves. I keep the grid on the fridge, and I look at it every Sunday while the kettle boils, the way some people check the weather.

In August we went back to Mr Patel's window together. Sizwe painted HARDWARE. I painted the smaller line underneath, the one that says the family has been there since 1971. When we stepped back, the letters were straight, all of them, and Mr Patel brought out the tea again.

"Who did the big word?" he asked.

"The boy," I said. "He is better than me now."

Sizwe pretended he had not heard. He had.

What I Would Tell Another Tradesman

If you work with your eyes, a straight line is a kind of conversation you have with yourself every day. When it starts lying to you, it is easy to blame the brush, the chalk, the young person standing next to you. It took me a fortnight and three wasted brushes to blame the right thing.

I am not going to tell anyone what to do. I am a sign-writer, not a doctor. I will only say that I am glad my daughter made the call, glad there was an ophthalmologist who took the time to draw me a picture, and glad I finally said sorry to Sizwe, over a plate of samoosas from the shop next door, for shouting at him about a line that was never crooked in the first place.