The Mud Line on the Wall Was Exactly Knee High

The Night the Stream Changed Its Mind

For thirty one years there was a little stream at the bottom of our road in Umkomaas that I could step over in my school shoes. My late husband Desmond used to call it "the dribble". He would say it every time we walked past, as if it were a joke he had just thought of, and I would roll my eyes every time, as if I had not heard it before.

In April the dribble came up our road at two in the morning.

I woke because the dog was crying, not barking, crying, and when I put my feet down off the bed the carpet was cold and moving. I am seventy three. I taught Grade Four Mathematics at the same primary school for twenty six years and I have handled fire drills, a snake in the stock room and a principal who tried to cancel Heritage Day. None of that prepared me for standing in the dark in my nightdress, feeling water push past my ankles like it had somewhere urgent to be.

My neighbour's son, Kyle, came over the wall with a torch and carried the dog and walked me out by the elbow. We sat in his father's bakkie on the high side of the road until it got light.

Morning

When the water went down, it left a line. I had read about this, in the news after other floods, but I had not understood how neat it would be. A brown stripe, perfectly level, running across every wall in every room as if somebody had come in with a spirit level and a paintbrush. I stood in the lounge and held my hand against it. It came to exactly the top of my knee.

Below the line was everything that sits low in a house. The bottom of the couch. The dining room chairs, which had been his mother's. The cupboard under the hi-fi. And on the floor beside the cupboard, in three wooden crates Desmond built himself in 1984, his records.

Desmond's Records

There were about four hundred of them. Jazz mostly, some Abdullah Ibrahim he queued for in Durban in the seventies, a lot of Miriam Makeba, a lot of things I never liked but learned to hum. He used to clean them with a little velvet brush before he played them, and he would not let the grandchildren touch the turntable until they were twelve, which they thought was the cruellest law in South Africa.

The crates had soaked up the water like bread. When I lifted the first sleeve, the cardboard came apart in my fingers and the record slid out onto the wet floor with a sound I will not forget. Kyle's mother found me sitting on the tiles with it in my lap and did not say anything. She just sat down next to me in her good trousers.

The Insurance Woman

My insurer was kind on the phone, I will say that. But kindness on the phone and a claim are different animals. Within a week I had a list of what they needed, and near the top of it was something I did not know how to give them: a proper value for the structure, and for the contents, done by someone qualified to say so.

I had assumed, like most people, that you tell them what you lost and they pay it. I have the receipt for the fridge. I do not have a receipt for a dining room set that came from Desmond's mother's house in Pietermaritzburg in 1979. I do not have a receipt for a first pressing of anything. I did not even know which of the records were first pressings. He knew. He was the one who knew.

The assessor who came round was a young man with a clipboard who kept wiping his shoes even though the whole floor was mud. He looked at the chairs and said they were "old" and wrote something down. I asked what he wrote. He said "furniture, dining, used". I asked him to show me. He did, and I felt my face go hot, because those chairs had held every Christmas of my married life and he had written them up like a second-hand shop.

My Daughter on the Phone From Perth

My daughter Charmaine lives in Australia. She phoned every evening and on the fourth evening she said, "Ma, you need independent valuations, not just the insurer's man. You were a teacher. You would never let a learner mark their own test."

She was right, and I was annoyed she was right, which is how I know she is mine.

She sent me links. I read them on my old laptop at Kyle's mother's dining table, because my own table was drying out on the stoep with its legs in the air like a dead beetle. I learned that there are people whose whole job is to look at a house, or a ring, or a room full of furniture, and put a defensible number on it. I learned that their report carries weight precisely because they have no stake in the answer. I had genuinely never thought about it before. In my head, a value was something you discovered at a garage sale.

The Woman Who Came With a Torch

The valuer who eventually came to the house was a woman about my daughter's age, with her hair tied back and a little torch she shone into the joints of the furniture. She asked me questions nobody else had asked. Where did the chairs come from. Who made them. Had they been restored. She turned one over and showed me a stamp under the seat I had never seen in forty years of sitting on it.

When we got to the crates she did not rush. She asked if she could look at the ones that had survived on the top shelf, the ones Desmond had kept apart. She handled them the way he did, by the edges. She told me that some of what he had kept was worth considerably more than I had imagined, and that some of what I thought was precious was worth very little to anyone but me. She said that second part gently, and I appreciated it, because it was true and I needed someone to say it plainly.

I had been afraid, before she came, that putting prices on his things would feel like selling him. It did not. It felt more like someone finally taking him seriously. A stranger had looked at the records and said, in effect, this man had taste and knew what he was doing. I wish he had heard it.

What I Tell the Ladies at Church Now

The claim took four months. I will not pretend it was easy, or that the money replaced anything. You cannot buy back a stain on a ceiling from a Christmas when the champagne cork hit it.

But I learned things, and since I taught for twenty six years I cannot keep things to myself. At church tea, when somebody mentions their insurance, I have become that woman. I tell them to photograph every room now, while it is dry. I tell them to write down where things came from, on paper, and keep a copy with a child in another city. I tell them that if they own anything inherited or unusual, it is worth finding out what proper valuators would say about it before the rain makes the decision. Mrs Pillay told me last month that she had finally had her mother's jewellery looked at by certified valuators, and that one bangle she kept in a pill bottle was gold after all. She brought it to church to show me. We both cried a little, for different reasons.

The Line I Did Not Paint Over

The house has been repaired. New plaster, new skirting, new carpet in the bedroom that the dog refuses to walk on. The painters wanted to do the whole lounge, and I let them, except for one small section behind the door where the brown line still runs across the wall at exactly knee height.

My grandson asked why I left it. I told him it was to remind me where the water reached. That is partly true.

The other reason is that eleven of Desmond's records came through. They are in a new cabinet now, high up, well above the line. On Sunday afternoons I play one, with his little velvet brush, and I sit on the replaced couch and look at that stripe behind the door, and I think about how close it came, and how much stayed.