The Night I Drove Up the N2 With a Cooler Box of Someone Else's Food

The bakkie and the broken mirror

My cousin Sanele lent me his bakkie on the condition that I bring it back with a full tank and no new scratches, which was funny, because the passenger side mirror had already been snapped off at the stem long before I got it. Somebody had wrapped the stump in silver duct tape that had gone grey and furry at the edges. So for eleven hundred and something kilometres I drove with one eye on the road and one on the rearview, twisting my whole body around every time I wanted to change lanes, like a man reversing out of a driveway for two days straight.

Everything I owned was behind me under a tarp. A mattress folded in half and tied with rope. Two suitcases, one with a wheel that only worked if you dragged it at an angle. A kettle. A box of books I have not read since 2019 and will probably never read. My scrubs, four sets, still smelling faintly of the laundromat on Lower Main Road. And on the passenger seat, taking up the space where a person should have been, a cooler box.

The cooler box was Mrs Adonis, my neighbour of seven years, refusing to let me leave without food. She stood in my empty doorway on the Thursday night with a Tupperware of curry and a Tupperware of rice and a Tupperware of something she would not name, and when I said I would just buy padkos at the garage she looked at me the way you look at a child who has said something rude at a funeral. She put the boxes in the cooler herself. She put in two frozen bottles of water to keep it all cold and said, drink them when they melt, so nothing is wasted. Then she held my face in her two hands for about three seconds and went back inside and shut her door, and that was the last I saw of her.

I ate the curry cold somewhere past Colesberg, sitting on the tailgate with the engine ticking, wind coming off the veld like it had a personal grudge. I was thirty four years old. I had been an ICU nurse for eleven years. I was going home because my mother was going blind and I could not do a single thing about it from two thousand kilometres away.

The couch, and the air that would not move

My mother has glaucoma. They caught it late, the way they catch it late in people who do not go to the eye doctor because their eyes feel fine and there is always something more urgent, like a geyser, or a grandchild, or a funeral policy. Her field of vision is closing in like a torch battery dying. She still cooks. She still knows exactly where the sugar is. But she stopped driving eighteen months ago and did not tell me for four months, and when I found out I sat in my car in the hospital parking lot in Cape Town and could not make myself go inside.

So I took a post at a hospital in Durban and moved into her lounge in Verulam. Six weeks, that couch. It was a two seater with one cushion that had given up entirely, and I am not a small man. My feet hung off the arm. I woke every morning with my neck bent at an angle that felt like a professional opinion about my life choices.

The heat was the thing I had forgotten. In Cape Town the wind is rude but it is honest. It shoves you, it takes your washing, it slams doors, and then it is gone. In KwaZulu-Natal the air simply lies down on top of you and stays there. By the second week my sheets never fully dried. I would hang a towel and it would still be damp thirty hours later, faintly sour. There was always the sea in it somehow, even that far inland, a salt weight, a wet cloth pressed on your face. At night I burned a mosquito coil in the corner on a saucer, and the smoke would gather in a slow flat layer near the ceiling, and the coil ash would collapse in its little grey spiral and I would lie there watching it and thinking about money.

My mother would make rooibos at nine o'clock without asking whether I wanted it. She would feel for the mug, run her thumb around the rim to check the level, and hand it to me too full so it slopped on my wrist. It was always slightly too sweet. I never once told her.

Scrolling in the tea room at three in the morning

The night shift tea room at the hospital has a kettle with a limescale ring you could date like a tree, a fridge with a handwritten note about somebody's yoghurt, and a fluorescent tube that hums in the key of despair. That is where I did all my house hunting. Half past two, half past three in the morning, with a cup of instant coffee going cold and my hands still smelling of that hospital alcohol gel, that sharp sweet chemical smell that gets into your cuticles and stays with you into your sleep, so that even at home you catch it on your own fingers and your stomach drops.

I searched around Umhlanga because that was near enough to the hospital and near enough to my mother that I could get to her in half an hour if something happened. That is the whole logic of it. Not lifestyle. Distance to my mother.

I would sit there scrolling with my thumb, filter set to my price, filter set again, lower, and one of the sisters, Pinky, who had worked there nineteen years and had opinions about everything, would lean over and squint and say, ai, that one is too far, the traffic will finish you. She was the one who first said the words to me, standing at the kettle with her back to me, saying that everybody her son's age was looking at apartments in Umhlanga these days and nobody could afford anything, and then she poured her tea and that was the end of her contribution to my future.

The viewings I could not afford

I want to be honest about the money, because nobody is, and it makes everyone feel mad and alone.

I earn what an experienced ICU nurse earns. It is not nothing. I have no debt except a car I sold before I left. But I was also sending money home before I moved home, and I had a moving cost, and a deposit is two months, and my salary would only land at the end of the following month because of how the transfer worked, and so for a period I had precisely enough to be viewing places and not nearly enough to take one.

The viewings were their own particular humiliation. My cousin worked out my price bracket for me one Sunday, unasked, with a pen on the back of a betting slip, and then went right on sending me Umhlanga apartments that were nowhere near it, which is a form of love, I think, and also extremely annoying. You drive there in a borrowed bakkie with a duct-taped mirror. You park where the agent can see you park. You walk in and the place smells of new paint and you do the thing where you nod slowly and say mm and ask a sensible question about the water, and the whole time there is a calculator running in the back of your skull, and it keeps giving you the same answer, and the answer is no. I once stood on a balcony looking at nothing in particular while an agent said a number out loud and I said, that is quite reasonable actually, and it was not, and we both knew, and she was kind enough to pretend.

On one of those mornings, after night duty, gritty-eyed and half deaf with tiredness, I sat in the bakkie outside a complex and did not go in. I just sat there. Three vervet monkeys came along the top of the boundary wall in single file, unbothered, the last one carrying something orange in its mouth, and they went past me and over into the trees and I thought, they live here and I cannot. It is a stupid thought. It made me laugh out loud alone in a parked car, which is not a good sign in a grown man.

The night I lost him

I am not going to give you his name or his age or his diagnosis, because he was a real person and he does not belong to my story.

I will say it was a Tuesday. I will say that he was stable at the start of my shift and that I spoke to his wife on the phone at ten past eight and told her he was comfortable, and that I believed it when I said it. I will say that things went wrong in the small hours in the way things sometimes do, quickly and then very slowly, and that we did everything, and that everything was not enough, and that at twenty to five in the morning I was standing in a bay with my gloves still on, looking at the monitor, and there was that particular quiet that has a texture to it.

Afterwards I did the things you do. I tidied. I straightened a sheet that did not need straightening, which is a thing nurses do so that our hands have somewhere to be. Then I went to the sluice room and stood with my hands under the tap far longer than any protocol requires.

The consultant, Dr Naidoo, came and found me there. She did not say anything about the patient. She said, when did you last eat something. I said I did not know. She said, come, and she took me to the tea room and made me tea, badly, too strong, and she sat opposite me and did not fill the silence, and after about five minutes she said, you did it right. That is all. She did not say he would have died anyway or that it was his time or any of the other things people say to make themselves feel better. Then she got up and washed her cup and went back out, because there were other people alive who needed her.

I cried in the bakkie in the parking lot before I drove home. I want that in here.

Someone said yes

It was Pinky's cousin's neighbour, or something along that chain, who knew about a place. It is always like that. Not the listings I had scrolled through at three in the morning, not the beautiful ones, none of the Umhlanga property I had spent two months teaching myself to want and then teaching myself not to. A small one bedroom in a plain block, near enough to everything, with a landlord who wanted references and a first month and who did not blink when I said I could pay the deposit in two parts. He said, you are a nurse, and I said yes, and he said, my sister was a nurse, and that was the whole interview.

I moved in on a Saturday. It took two trips. My mother made me take a pot, one of her good ones, and I said no about four times and lost. She stood at her gate while I loaded up and I could see her turning her head slightly to keep me in the part of her vision that still works, and she said, don't be a stranger, you are twenty five minutes away, and then she went inside so I would not see her face.

The first night, no curtains

I had no curtains. I had not thought about curtains at all. It genuinely had not occurred to me that a window is a thing you have to cover.

So the first night I lay on my mattress on the floor of the bedroom and the streetlight came in orange and lay across the wall in a long stripe, and further off there was the sound of the N2, that low constant sea-noise of traffic that is almost the actual sea, and the actual sea somewhere beyond that, and the air was thick and warm and smelled of salt and wet grass and cut branches. I had lit a coil in the corner out of habit and its little red eye worked its way inwards. Sometime after midnight it rained for about four minutes, hard, and then stopped, and afterwards everything dripped for an hour.

I lay there and thought about Mrs Adonis's cooler box, still in the corner, empty, which I had washed out and could not bring myself to throw away. I thought about the man on the Tuesday. I thought about Dr Naidoo making me a bad cup of tea and saying four words. I thought about my mother finding the sugar by feel.

I did not feel triumphant. That is the honest report. I felt tired in a way that sleep does not touch, and I felt about eighty percent less afraid than I had felt for six weeks, and that difference was enough to lie still inside.

In the morning I woke at half past five because there was nothing to stop the light. There were monkeys on the wall outside again, or their cousins, walking along it in that unhurried way, and the whole place smelled of rain on hot tar. I made coffee in my mother's pot because I had not unpacked the kettle. I sat on the floor because I owned no chairs.

Then I phoned her, and she picked up on the second ring like she had been holding the phone, and she said, so, and I said, so, and I told her about the light on the wall. She said I must buy curtains. I said I would. She said, and today you must come for lunch, and I said okay, Ma, and I meant it, and I went and I ate too much and drank rooibos that was too sweet and did not say a word about it.