The Needle, the N3, and the Longest Afternoon of My Life

Leaving the farm later than I meant to

My parents live on a farm outside Harrismith, the kind of place where the children run barefoot by the second morning and refuse to put shoes back on by the third. We had gone up for a long weekend, just the three of us, because my husband was working and because my mother had begged to see the baby before he forgot her face. He is not really a baby anymore. He is a toddler now, two and a bit, all stubborn legs and opinions. My daughter is seven and thinks she is the boss of him, which he mostly allows.

We left the farm later than I meant to. We always do. There was one more cup of tea, one more round of hugs at the gate, my father loading a box of oranges into the boot that we did not ask for and could not refuse. By the time we pulled onto the road it was early afternoon and the heat had settled over everything the way it does in that part of the country, a thick, pressing, yellow heat that makes the tar shimmer in the distance like water that is never there when you reach it.

I am not a nervous driver. I want to say that first, because of what came after, because of how small and useless I ended up feeling. I have driven that road many times. The N3 going down toward Durban is a road I know, the long descent out of the Free State highlands, the trucks, the curve of the hills. I had done it with both children asleep in the back more than once. I was not worried about anything that afternoon except getting home before the little one got too hungry.

The needle I did not want to look at

It started so quietly that I almost missed it. We were past Harrismith, well into the open stretch, when I noticed the temperature needle had drifted up from where it usually sat. I am ashamed to say I do not know much about cars. I know how to put petrol in. I know the names of maybe three things under the bonnet, and I would struggle to point to two of them. So when I saw the needle climbing I did what I think a lot of people do, which is tell myself it was fine. It is a hot day, I thought. Cars run hot on hot days. That is normal. I believe I actually said that out loud, to no one, to the windscreen.

But it kept climbing. Slowly, steadily, the way a tide comes in when you are not watching the sand. And then there was a smell, sweet and sharp at the same time, and a wisp of something pale lifting from the edge of the bonnet, and my stomach dropped in a way I felt all the way down to my feet.

"Mommy, what's that smell?" my daughter asked from the back.

"It's nothing, my love," I said, in the bright flat voice we use when it is very much something. "The car's just a bit hot, like us."

I started looking for somewhere to pull off, and that is when I understood how few good places there are to stop on a highway when you suddenly need one. There was no petrol station in sight. There was no shade. There were just the two lanes and the yellow line and the trucks, and the needle now sitting hard against the top of the gauge, and a new sound from the engine, a kind of laboured ticking that I did not like at all.

Pulling onto the shoulder with the trucks going past

I got us onto the shoulder as far left as I dared, half onto the gravel, and the car gave a shudder and then simply stopped being a car. The engine died. The power steering went heavy in my hands. We rolled to a stop in a cloud of our own steam, and for a second there was only the ticking and the hiss and my own heart going far too fast.

Then a truck went past.

I was not ready for how it would feel. It came from behind and the whole car rocked with the push of air, a great thundering shove that I felt in my teeth, and the little one startled in his seat and began to cry. Another one followed it, and another. Each one shook us. The shoulder that had felt like safety a moment before now felt like the edge of something, a thin strip between us and all that moving weight.

I turned the hazards on with a shaking hand. I got out, just for a moment, to look at the bonnet, and the heat off the tar came up through my sandals and the wind off the trucks pulled at my dress and I understood immediately that I could do nothing out there. I did not even open the bonnet properly. I was afraid of the steam, and I was more afraid of being outside with my back to the traffic. I got back in and locked the doors, which was a silly thing to do and made me feel better anyway.

The game that kept us from falling apart

My daughter was watching my face. Children always watch your face. That is the thing no one tells you, that in the worst moments you are not allowed to have the feeling you are having, because there is a seven year old reading you like weather.

So I made it a game.

"Right," I said, turning around. "We are explorers now. Our ship has broken down and we are waiting for rescue. Your job is to spot things. Every red truck is ten points. Every white one is five. Every cow in a field is a hundred points, because cows are rare at sea."

She looked at me like she knew exactly what I was doing, because she is seven and not stupid, but she decided to let me have it, which is its own kind of mercy. She started counting. The toddler stopped crying because his sister was doing something and he never wants to miss out on anything his sister is doing. I handed back the last of the water and half a squashed banana from my bag, and I rationed out the game while I tried to think.

I phoned my husband first. He was calm, which helped, and then he was not able to do anything from where he was, which did not. He told me to call for a tow and stay in the car with the doors locked and the children buckled, and he stayed on the line while I looked. Sitting there with the heat building inside the car even with the windows cracked, I searched on my phone for a tow truck near me, my thumb slipping on the screen because my hands would not quite settle.

Waiting, and the kindness of a stranger who did not stop

The first number I tried did not answer. The second one did, a man with a gentle voice who asked me where I was, and I realised I did not exactly know. I told him I was on the N3 heading down toward Durban, past Harrismith, on the left shoulder, that there was a green sign I could half see in the distance, that there had been a bridge not long before. He was patient with me. He asked what I could see and I described it like I was describing a dream, and somehow between us we worked out roughly where I was, and he said he would send someone and it would be a while because it is a long road and help is spread thin on it.

While I waited I kept the game going until the game ran out of steam, and then I sang, badly, the songs from the baby's favourite programme, over and over, until my daughter begged me to stop and we both laughed properly for the first time, a real laugh, and something in my chest loosened half a turn.

A bakkie slowed as it passed. The driver did not stop, but he lifted two fingers off the wheel in that small country greeting, a little are-you-alright, and I lifted my hand back, and even that tiny thing, that acknowledgement that we existed out there in the heat, made my eyes sting. People warn you about the road. They tell you not to trust anyone who stops. But there is also this, the ordinary decency of a stranger checking without crowding, and I have thought about that man and his two raised fingers more than once since.

The minutes went long and thick. The toddler fell asleep eventually, red-cheeked and damp, his head tipped sideways. My daughter leaned on my shoulder from behind and asked if the car was going to be okay and I told her the truth, that I did not know, but that we were going to be okay, which was the part that mattered. I had used the quiet to look up a few more options for towing services in case the first man did not come through, scrolling through listings while I watched the mirror, but I did not need them in the end.

The slow relief of a flatbed appearing in the mirror

I saw it before I believed it. A flatbed, orange lights turning, slowing down behind us, pulling in ahead onto the gravel. I have never in my life been so glad to see a vehicle I did not recognise. A man climbed down, older, unhurried, with a cap pushed back off his forehead, and he came to my window and asked if everyone was alright before he so much as looked at the car. I will remember that. He asked about us first.

He opened the bonnet the way you open something you are not afraid of, and he looked, and he made a small sound through his teeth, and he told me what I already suspected, that it had overheated badly and should not be started again, that I had done the right thing stopping when I did even if it did not feel like the right anything at the time. He was matter of fact about it. There was no lecture about coolant, no making me feel like the foolish woman who does not know her own car, though I was braced for it. He just got to work.

Watching him load the car was its own strange comfort. The clank of the chains, the whine of the winch, the way the whole heavy dead thing that had been my enemy for the last two hours slid up onto the back of his truck like it weighed nothing. He strapped it down. He let my daughter watch from a safe distance, and he answered her questions, and when she asked why the car got sick he said cars get tired just like people and need a rest, which was a kinder answer than mine.

He had room in the cab for the three of us. I buckled the toddler onto my lap and my daughter squeezed in beside me and we rode down the hills in the high seat of that truck, looking out over the whole valley opening up ahead, the heat finally breaking as we dropped toward the coast. The children thought it was the best thing that had ever happened to them. The toddler kept pointing at everything. My daughter told the driver all about the points she had scored, the cows especially.

What I carried home from the side of that road

We got home late and shaken and whole. My husband was waiting at the gate the way my father had been standing at the other gate that morning, and he took the sleeping baby out of my arms and held onto me a moment longer than he needed to.

The car needed a lot of work. That is a boring story and not the one I think about. The one I think about is the shoulder of the N3 in the afternoon heat, the trucks shaking us, my daughter counting red and white and keeping us both from falling apart without knowing that is what she was doing. I learned a few things that day, practical ones. I keep more water in the car now. I check that needle like it owes me money. I have the number for tow truck services saved. But the real thing I carried home was smaller and harder to say. It was how thin the line is between an ordinary afternoon and a frightening one, and how much of getting through it is just keeping your voice bright for the small people in the back seat until the help you called for finally turns in behind you with its lights going round.