The Locksmith Cut Three Keys and I Only Needed One

The Boxes That Fit in a Corolla

When I left, I did not take much. Sixteen years of a marriage compresses strangely. You think it will need a truck and in the end it needs a Corolla with the back seats folded down, four boxes, a standing lamp my mother gave me for my thirtieth birthday, and a suitcase of clothes I packed in under an hour because I did not trust myself to linger over any of it. Dean kept the house in Bedfordview. I kept the good pots, my late father's watch, and a strange, humming kind of relief that I was ashamed to feel so soon.

I am forty five. I had never signed a lease in my own name before that winter. Dean and I bought our first house together when I was twenty seven, and every address after that had both our names on the documents, on the post, on the little brass plate by the buzzer. Standing in the estate agent's office in June, watching a woman print a lease with only my name on it, Karen Voss, felt like watching someone else's paperwork. I signed it three times because my hand was shaking and the first two signatures looked like somebody trying to forge mine.

Why Sandringham

I did not choose the suburb for any romantic reason. I chose it because my mother lives off Athol Street with her sister, and at seventy eight she has started forgetting whether she has taken her blood pressure tablets, and somebody needs to be close enough to notice. I had spent three nights on a friend's couch in Linden looking at property sites, most of them a blur of photographs that all looked the same, beige walls and staged cushions, until I found a page of Sandringham rentals that I kept scrolling back to at two in the morning, unable to sleep, unable to stop clicking. One flat in particular. Small kitchen, north facing balcony, a jacaranda visible from the lounge window even though it was winter and the tree was bare as a broom.

I viewed it on a Tuesday. The caretaker, a soft spoken man called Sipho, let me in and stood by the door while I walked through two rooms that smelled faintly of fresh paint. There was a water stain on the bathroom ceiling shaped a little like Madagascar. I remember thinking, absurdly, that I liked it. It felt honest. Nothing was pretending to be more than it was, which was more than I could say for the last several years of my life.

The New Set of Keys

The day I moved in, the agent handed me three keys on a plain ring, no keyring charm, no label, and I stood in the parking lot holding them like they might dissolve. One key for the security gate, one for the front door, one for the postbox downstairs that I would not use for months because nobody knew to write to me there yet. I remember turning the front door key in the lock for the first time and how loud the click sounded in the empty stairwell, how my own breathing sounded loud too.

Inside, my footsteps echoed off bare tile. I sat on the floor because there was nothing to sit on and I cried in the ordinary, unglamorous way people cry when they are tired rather than devastated, when the crying is really just exhaustion finding a door. Then I got up, because there is only so long you can sit on cold tile in July, and I made tea in a pot that did not have a matching cup, using the kettle I had bought that morning at a shop in Balfour Park, still in its box, the receipt still in my handbag.

Learning to Be Alone in a Flat That Echoes

Nobody warns you how loud a small flat is when there is only one person in it. Every sound is louder because there is no second breathing to blend it into. The fridge hums and I hear it from the bedroom. A car alarm two streets over sounds like it is in the room with me. For the first two weeks I left the radio on all night, tuned to nothing in particular, just so the silence had something to compete with.

I had never slept alone in a bed before, not properly, not since I was twenty six. I bought a single mattress because a double felt like an admission that I expected company, and a single felt safer, like a decision rather than a wound. I put it directly on the floor for the first month because I could not bring myself to shop for a bed frame. Somehow buying furniture felt like agreeing that this was permanent, and I was not ready to agree to anything yet.

Marge From Downstairs

The kindness that undid me came from a woman named Marge, who lives on the ground floor and grows basil and mint in blue plastic pots along her section of the balcony railing. She caught me in the parking area during my second week, wrestling a flat pack bookshelf out of the boot of the Corolla, and without asking she took one end of the box and helped me carry it up two flights.

She did not ask why I was alone or why I had so little. She just said, when we set the box down outside my door, that the building could be lonely at first and then it stops being lonely, in her experience, usually around the time you learn which neighbour's washing machine bangs on the spin cycle. Mine does. Marge's is fine. She brought me a bunch of mint two days later, wrapped in a wet paper towel, and said it was good in tea when I could not sleep. I still have that mint growing in a jar on my kitchen windowsill. It has roots now.

What a Home Actually Needs

It took four months before the flat stopped feeling like a stopover and started feeling like mine. I am not sure what tipped it. Maybe it was the bed frame I finally bought, secondhand, from a man in Orange Grove who delivered it himself in a bakkie and refused a tip. Maybe it was hanging my father's watch on a small hook by the door instead of leaving it in a drawer. Maybe it was simply time, doing what time does, wearing the strangeness down the way water wears down a stone.

My mother comes for tea on Sundays now, walking the ten minutes from Athol Street with her cane and her handbag, and she sits at my small table by the window and tells me the jacaranda is going to be spectacular in October. I believe her. I have never watched a tree that closely before, waiting for it to bloom, but I find I am looking forward to it, the way you look forward to something only when you plan on still being there to see it.