The October My Ceiling Came Down On The Basin

The sound I heard from my bed, and what it actually was

I heard it at about half past eight on a Tuesday night in late October, and I did not know what I was hearing. I was in bed in Heidedal with a cup of rooibos going cold on the side table, watching nothing, and outside the hail started on the roof like somebody was throwing handfuls of marbles at the house. It went from nothing to everything in maybe ninety seconds. My gutters made a noise I have never heard them make. The dogs across the road lost their minds. I remember thinking, quite calmly, that the plants in the yard were finished, and then I turned over and I slept, because I am thirty-eight years old and I have been through Free State storms my whole life and you do not get up in the middle of one.

What I did not think about, not once, was the ceiling board above the basin at the salon.

My shop is in a little strip in a suburb, four doors in a row, a tuck shop on one end and a place that fixes cellphones on the other. I have been in that middle unit for six years. The roof is old corrugated sheeting and the ceiling under it is that soft white board, and the landlord and I have had exactly one conversation about it, in 2021, and the outcome of that conversation was that I painted it myself.

I got there at twenty past seven the next morning with my keys in one hand and a takeaway coffee in the other, and I could smell it before I had the door properly open. Wet ceiling board has a smell. It is like a damp cardboard box that has been left in a shed, but sweeter, sicker somehow, mixed with whatever chemistry is in the glue. And then I looked down and there were shampoo bottles floating. Actually floating, turning slowly in about four centimetres of brown water on my floor by the basin, three of them, plus the little plastic bowl I use for colour, plus a towel that had gone the colour of tea.

Above the basin there was a hole in my ceiling roughly the size of a car bonnet, and the board that used to be there was in pieces in the water and on the basin chair, and above the hole there was pink insulation gone black with wet, and above that, morning sky. Bright, clean, blue October sky. I stood in the doorway with my coffee and I did not put it down for a long time.

Palesa sweeping, and the maths I did on the back of an appointment card

Palesa arrived at ten to eight. She has worked with me for five years and she is the only person I know who says nothing when nothing is the right thing to say. She took one look, went to the back, came out with the broom and started pushing the water towards the door, and she swept for about forty minutes without a word. Karabo, my apprentice, cried a little bit, which I did not blame her for. She is nineteen and it was her first proper disaster.

By nine o'clock I had phoned the insurance and I had a reference number written on the back of an appointment card in my own handwriting, which is bad. The woman on the phone was polite and she did her job and none of what happened afterwards was her fault, but the process is the process. Someone would need to come and look. Then the report. Then the assessment. Then, then, then. Nobody said a bad word to me and nobody gave me a date.

And in the meantime I have a salon with a hole in the roof and no working basin, and a salon with no basin is not a salon. You cannot colour without a basin. You cannot do a treatment. You cannot even give somebody a decent wash and blow. I could still cut dry, I suppose, standing under a piece of sky, with the dust from the ceiling board landing in the client's parting.

So on that appointment card, under the reference number, I started doing the maths that anybody who runs a small thing understands in their bones. December is my year. Not part of my year, my year. From about the middle of November until Christmas Eve my chairs do not go cold. Matric dances, weddings, women going home to the Eastern Cape and to Lesotho who want to arrive looking like the version of themselves they describe on the phone. I make money in December that carries me through January and February, which are the two months where I sit and listen to the fan.

The ceiling had to come down properly, the sheeting above it had to be repaired, the board had to be replaced, the electrics near the basin had to be checked because there was water in that ceiling and there are wires in that ceiling. And the geyser feeding the basin was fine, thank God, but the plumbing under it had taken a knock from the falling board and the little cabinet was swollen and useless.

I was quoted, by the one builder who actually pitched, a number that I will not write down here, but it was more than I had, and it was a lot less than what I would lose if I sat closed through November and into December waiting for a process.

The builder who did not pitch, and a Sunday at my kitchen table

I got three numbers for builders. The first one came on the Thursday, walked around, poked the ceiling with a screwdriver, and gave me a quote on the Friday that was honest, I think. The second one never answered his phone after the first call. The third one said Saturday morning, said it twice, said it with real conviction, and I sat in that wet-smelling shop from eight until half past eleven on a Saturday morning with the door open to air the place out and he did not come. He did not phone. I sat on the reception stool and I watched a plastic packet blow across the parking bays and I thought, this is it, this is the actual texture of trouble. Not drama. Just sitting on a stool waiting for a man who is not coming, while your ceiling drips.

Sunday I did not go to church. I sat at my kitchen table with a pen and I made myself write down, honestly, everything I owned that could turn into money.

That is a horrible exercise. I recommend nobody does it for fun. My savings, which existed but were not going to cover this and were also the only thing standing between me and a truly bad January. My stokvel payout, which does not come out until December and which is not mine to pull early without letting down eight other women. The equipment, which is worth something on paper and nothing in real life, because who is buying a second-hand hood dryer in Bloemfontein in October. The gold bangles my father left me, which I put on the list and then crossed out so hard I tore the paper.

And the car. A silver 2013 Toyota Corolla with 190 000 on the clock, paid off in full two years ago, and it was that day, sitting there with the pen, that I properly understood that the car was by a long way the biggest single thing I owned that was not the business itself.

The thing about the Corolla

Here is why I could not just sell the Corolla, and here is why the whole thing was so difficult.

I use that car every single day. I fetch stock in it. Not once a month, all the time. Colour, peroxide, the cheap black towels I buy in bulk, the weave I collect from a supplier off Zastron Street. I drop Karabo at home in Rocklands most evenings because she finishes at six and I am not letting a nineteen year old walk that in the dark. I drive to two clients who are old and who I do at their houses. The car is not a luxury sitting in a driveway. The car is a limb.

So there is a very stupid trap in it. The one asset that could get me the cash is the one asset I cannot be without for a single working day. My cousin Tebogo, who I phoned on the Sunday afternoon mostly to hear a voice, was the one who said, you know you can borrow against it and keep driving it, and I said no you cannot, and he said no man, that is a thing, and it turned into one of those arguments where neither of you knows anything.

So I did what everybody does. I sat on my bed that night with my phone at arm's length because my eyes are going, and I typed loan against my car into the search bar like I was typing a shameful secret, and I read for about two hours.

I am not going to pretend I became an expert. I did not. And I am not going to sit here and tell anybody what they should do, because I do not know your life. What I will say is that the phrase I kept coming back to, the one I actually typed in more than once because I wanted to be certain I had understood, was whether it was possible to pawn my car and still drive it, because that was the whole question for me. Not the biggest amount. Not the cleverest arrangement. Just: does Karabo still get home at six.

The part where I did not phone my mother

I want to be honest about this because it is the part of the story I like the least.

My mother lives in Botshabelo and she has money. Not a lot. Enough. She was a nurse for thirty-one years and she is careful with it in a way that my generation is not, and if I had phoned her on that Sunday and told her the ceiling of my salon was lying in a puddle, she would have said come, and she would have gone to the bank on Monday morning, and there would have been no interest and no forms and no assessor.

And I did not phone her.

I typed the words pawn my car into a search bar on a Sunday night rather than phone my own mother, and you can call that pride, and you would be right. When I opened that salon in 2019 she was worried about it and she was not shy about the worry. She said the words small business and she said the word rent and she asked me, more than once, what happens if. I said, I will manage. I have said I will manage for six years.

I could not make my mouth say the thing that would prove her right. It is not noble. It is not clever. It cost me, probably, actual money that a phone call would have saved. But it was mine, and the shop was mine, and I wanted the fixing of it to be mine too.

Palesa knew. She never said a word about it either. She just kept coming in that week, in a shop with no clients, and swept, and wiped down the mirrors that did not need wiping, and once I found her outside sitting on the kerb in the sun eating a Marie biscuit and she looked up at me and said, ausi, it is going to be fine, and I nodded and went inside quickly.

Mrs Nthako, in the chair, on the fourteenth of November

The builder who did pitch, the first one, started on the Monday and he worked with two young guys and a radio playing on a paint tin. They tore the rest of the board down and the smell got worse before it got better. The whole shop was white with dust. My chairs were under plastic for eleven days.

I had the money. That is all I am going to say about how, because how is boring and it is also nobody's business, and because the point is not the arrangement, the point is that on a Thursday I still had my car keys in my bag and I still drove to Zastron Street on the Friday for stock and I still dropped Karabo in Rocklands at six.

The insurance came right eventually. Long after. Long, long after. It settled a portion of it and I will not complain because it came, but it came in its own time and my December did not wait for it.

On the fourteenth of November, a Friday, I opened at eight. The new ceiling was white and flat and slightly the wrong shade of white against the old part, which I can still see every day and which nobody else has ever noticed. The basin worked. The shop smelled of paint and not of wet board, and I had left the door open all week to help it along.

Mrs Nthako was my first one back. She is seventy-one and she has been coming to me since the beginning and she books a wash and set every second Friday. She sat down and she leaned her head back into the basin and I ran the water until it was warm on the inside of my wrist, and I put my hand under her neck the way you do, and she closed her eyes.

And then she opened one eye and looked straight up at my new ceiling and she said, Mmapula, you have done something.

I said yes, mma. A little something.

And I turned the water on and started washing her hair, and my hands were shaking, and she could not see it because her eyes were closed again, and Palesa was behind me sweeping the floor that was already clean.