The Maths I Did On The Back Of A Till Slip

The night the numbers stopped lying to me

I did the sums standing up, in the kitchen, at twenty past nine at night, on the back of a Shoprite till slip that still smelled faintly of the polony I had bought that afternoon. My aunt's kettle was doing its slow angry build behind me. There was a pen on the fridge, one of those cheap blue ones with the cap chewed flat, and I took it and started writing on the white side of the slip because there was no paper in that house that wasn't already a school book or a bill.

Salary in. That was the first line, and it looked wonderful. It looked like the kind of number that people say out loud in Middelburg when they are trying to impress somebody's mother. I had finished my logistics diploma in November and by February I had a proper job at a freight company out near OR Tambo, sitting at a desk with my own extension number, and every single person in my family had said the same thing to me, which was: now you are okay.

Then I wrote the other lines.

Taxi money, both ways, five days a week, plus the days you work Saturday because the shipment is stuck. That was the first bite and it was a big one. Then money home to my mother, which nobody in my family calls black tax but which is exactly what it is, a monthly amount that leaves my hands before it has properly warmed them. Then the funeral policy, because my mother put me on it when I was nineteen and phoning to cancel it would be a bigger conversation than any of the money I would save. Then airtime and data, because the job runs on WhatsApp groups. Then something for food, because I had started buying my own bread rather than eat my aunt's and be reminded of it later.

I subtracted. Then I subtracted again because I did not believe myself. The number at the bottom was small enough to be embarrassing. It was the kind of number you could spend in one careless Saturday. And that number was supposed to be my rent, my deposit, my future, my whole entire independence.

I stood there with the till slip going soft in my hand and I thought, so this is what it is. This is the thing nobody explains.

Twenty four years old, three girls, one room

Let me tell you about the room, because the room is the reason.

My aunt's house is in Kempton Park, and she gave me a bed in the room where her two daughters sleep. They are fifteen and eleven. I am twenty four. There is a bunk against one wall and my single bed against the other, and between them there is a strip of carpet roughly the width of a person, and that strip of carpet is where I put on my shoes every morning while trying not to step on somebody's homework.

I want to be careful here, because I do not want to sound ungrateful. That house saved me. But there is a specific kind of shame in being a grown woman with a payslip and a work email address and a lanyard, who has to whisper on the phone because an eleven year old is asleep two metres away. There is a shame in changing into your pyjamas facing the wall. There is a shame in the fifteen year old sighing when your alarm goes off in the dark, because your alarm is not her alarm, and your life is not her life, and yet your life is happening on top of hers.

It was also, honestly, funny. That is the thing people forget. My little cousin once woke up, looked at me getting dressed at half past four, and said, in a voice thick with sleep, "You are going to work again?" as though I had a choice, as though I had been going out of some strange personal hobby. I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the floor. Then I went to work.

Alarms in the dark and the smell of winter

My alarm went at ten to five. Not five. Ten to five, because those ten minutes were the difference between a taxi with a seat and a taxi where you stand at the rank watching three fill up in front of you.

Winter on the East Rand smells like smoke. Not a nice smoke, not braai smoke. It is coal and paraffin and something metallic that sits at the back of your throat, and in the early morning it hangs low and orange under the streetlights so the whole road looks like it is underwater. You walk to the rank with your hands inside your sleeves. Everyone is quiet. Nobody is having a conversation at that hour, we are all just bodies moving toward the same thing.

And the mine dumps. If you grew up in Middelburg you think you know what industrial looks like, but the dumps out here are something else, these pale flat hills sitting where hills should not be, going yellow and grey depending on the light, with the dust blowing off the top on a windy day. I used to look at them from the taxi window on the way in and think about how somebody dug all of that out of the ground and left it in a heap. It is strange. You stop seeing them after a while. That is the thing that frightened me most, actually. That I would stop seeing them.

The taxi routes became my geography. I knew which one dropped me closest to the office park. I knew that if I missed the second one I would be standing on the side of the R21 with the trucks going past close enough to move my hair, and I would be late, and being late in your first job is not a thing you can afford twice.

Looking at flats I could not have

I started looking in March. I was very serious about it. I made a note in my phone with a budget in it and I told myself I would not go over the budget, and then I spent every lunch break scrolling and going over the budget in my head anyway, just to see how it felt.

The first place I viewed was in a complex near the highway and the woman showing me around kept saying the word "secure" like a full stop. It was fine. It was also, once I did the numbers, roughly my entire salary minus a small amount for breathing. I said thank you very much and walked out into the parking lot and sat in the shade for ten minutes before I could get on a taxi.

The second place had a smell.

I still do not know what the smell was. It was not damp exactly, and it was not drains, and it was not old food. It was something sweetish and heavy that seemed to come from inside the wall of the bedroom, and it got worse when you stood still. The agent did not mention it. She talked about the geyser. I kept turning my head slightly, trying to find where it was coming from, and she must have thought I had a neck problem. I did not take that flat. I think about that smell more often than is reasonable.

Somewhere in there I widened my search, because Kempton was pricing me out and I did not want to move further from the airport corridor and add another taxi to my morning. That is how I ended up typing the word Germiston into a search bar one evening on my aunt's slow wifi, hunting for a Germiston apartment to rent that sat somewhere in the working part of my budget, close enough to the freight corridor that I could still be at my desk before eight without leaving in the middle of the night.

The landlord who wanted three months

I found a place that was almost right. Small, first floor, a kitchen you could stand in the middle of and touch both walls. I loved it in a way that made me suspicious of myself.

Then the landlord said three months upfront. Deposit, plus first month, plus another month, because I was young and I had no rental history and he had been burned before, he said, by someone exactly like me. He did not say it unkindly. He said it the way you say a fact about the weather.

I sat with my calculator app that night and worked out that saving three months upfront on what was left of my salary after everything would take me until roughly the end of the year, and that is if I ate nothing and my mother needed nothing and nothing broke. I remember putting the phone face down on my chest in the dark and listening to my cousin breathing on the bunk above.

I did not cry. I want that on record. I got up and went back to the search, going through every listing for Germiston rentals I could find, filtering by the number I actually had rather than the number I wished I had, which is a completely different and much smaller list, and much more honest.

My aunt, who is kind, and who has opinions

My aunt is the reason I had somewhere to sleep at all. She is also the reason I sometimes wanted to lie down on the R21 and let a truck sort out my problems.

She fed me. She woke up when I woke up, some mornings, just to make sure I ate something. She once gave me two hundred rand for taxi money and refused to let me pay it back, and when I tried she pretended not to understand what I was talking about.

And she had opinions. Oh, she had opinions. Why do you want to live alone, a girl alone, who is going to know if something happens to you. You are paying rent to a stranger when you have family. Your mother won't like it. That last one was the sharp one, because it was true, and because she said it while chopping onions and not looking at me, which is how the truest things in that house always got said.

I would nod and say yes Auntie and then go into the room, and sit on my bed, in the strip of carpet width of space that was mine, and open my phone and look at Germiston apartments until my eyes hurt. It was not rebellion. It was more like breathing.

The fight

The fight with my mother happened on a Sunday, on the phone, standing outside the house because the reception is better at the gate.

I told her I might need to send less for a few months. I had it all planned, I had the words ready, I was going to explain the deposit and the three months and the fact that this was temporary and that afterwards I would send more, not less.

She did not let me get to the second sentence.

She said, so this is what educated does. She said, I sat in that house and I paid for that diploma and now you are telling me about a deposit. She said other things that I am not going to write down because they still work on me like a splinter.

And I said things too. I said I am twenty four and I sleep in a room with a child. I said I have never once in my life had a door I could close. I said do you know what I earn, Mama, do you actually know, because I do, I wrote it on a Shoprite slip and I have kept it, and there is nothing left of me at the end of the month.

Then we both went quiet, and then she hung up, and I stood at the gate in the cold with the smoke smell coming down and the dogs going off two streets over, and I felt the specific loneliness of having won an argument you did not want to have.

Eating from a pot on the floor

I got the place in July. Not the one I loved. A smaller one, cheaper, with a window that faces a wall, in a block where you can hear the whole building's plumbing. The landlord took two months, not three, because I sat in front of him with my payslips and my bank statements printed at an internet cafe and I did not blink.

I moved in with a suitcase, a mattress my aunt insisted I take, a kettle, one pot, one plate that I did not use, one spoon, and a plastic chair somebody at work was throwing away. That was it. That was the entire contents of my life.

The first night I made pap and I ate it sitting on the floor with my back against the wall, straight out of the pot, because I could not be bothered with the plate, and because there was nobody in the world who could see me. The floor was cold through my leggings. The light was that bare bulb light that makes everything look slightly criminal. And I sat there in my own silence, in a room with a door, and I listened to it.

It was the quietest I had been in six years.

Then I phoned my mother.

She picked up on the fourth ring and said my name in that flat careful way, and I said Mama, I am sorry. I said it before anything else. I did not explain, I did not defend, I did not tell her about the deposit or the smell in the second flat or the man who wanted three months. I just said sorry, and I meant it, and I let it sit there.

She was quiet for a long time. Then she asked, in a completely different voice, what I was eating.

I told her. Pap. From the pot. On the floor.

And my mother laughed. Properly laughed, the way she does when she is caught off guard, and she said, you have no table, and I said no Mama, I have no table, and she said well, get a table, and then she said, phone me in the morning so I know you slept.

I sat there afterwards with the phone still warm in my hand. Outside, somebody's car alarm went and stopped. The mine dump was out there somewhere in the dark, pale under a half moon, and the trucks were running on the R21 the way they run all night, and my rent was paid, and my mother knew where I was.

I did not have a bed frame. I did not have curtains. I did not have a table, and I would not have one until September.

But I had a door, and I had closed it myself, and I had counted every single rand it took to get there on the back of a till slip that I still have, folded into four, in the front pocket of my work bag.