The Ride-On Mower Was The One That Told Me

The morning the machine would not start

The battery on the ride-on mower died on a Tuesday in early May, and I sat on that stupid green seat in my slippers for about eleven minutes before I understood what I was actually upset about.

It was cold in the way Johannesburg gets cold in May, which is to say the air was thin and dry and the sun was already too bright at half past seven, and the frost had not come yet but you could feel it queueing somewhere behind the koppies. I had my old fleece on, the navy one with the burn mark on the cuff from the braai in 2011. I turned the key and got that clicking noise, that flat, apologetic tick tick tick, and I got off and opened the little hatch and looked at the terminals like a man who knows what he is looking at. I do not. I was a quantity surveyor for thirty-one years. I can price a slab of concrete to within a few percent from a drawing and a coffee, but I have never properly understood a battery.

So I stood there in the middle of two thousand square metres of kikuyu that I mow every ten days, and I thought: who is this for.

Not a dramatic thought. Not a thunderclap. Just an admin question, the kind you ask when you are checking whether a line item still belongs on the schedule. Who is this lawn for. And the answer came back very quickly and very quietly, and it was: nobody.

Marianne died in September of 2021. The lawn was hers in the sense that she was the one who wanted it, who lay on it, who put the girls on a blanket on it in 1997 with a bowl of naartjies. Kate is in Perth now with a husband who talks about the weather like it is a personal achievement. Simone is in Cape Town, in Observatory, in a flat with a damp problem and a cat called Ronald. Nobody has run across that grass in maybe fourteen years. I mow it. I edge it. Twice a year I have a man come and hollow-tine it. For nobody.

The house was not a shrine, it was a schedule

We bought the place in 1994, the year everything changed and the year nothing changed, depending on who you asked at the office. Four bedrooms, a pool that took me two decades to stop resenting, a garage that eventually held two cars and then one car and then one car and a great deal of cardboard.

People assume the hard part of a house like that is memory. It is not, really. Memory is portable. The hard part is the schedule. The gutters in October before the rains. The pool pump that whines in a specific way when the weir is blocked. The geyser, which I have replaced twice and which now lives in my head as a sort of low-grade dread every time I hear a knock in the ceiling. The electric fence energiser that beeps when a bird lands on it. The tree that drops those small hard berries all over the driveway and stains the paving purple every February.

I was maintaining a building. That is all. And I had spent my whole career telling clients that a building is not a monument, it is a liability with a roof.

I phoned Simone that evening. I did not say I want to sell the house. I said something like, the mower is finished, and she waited, because she is her mother's daughter and knows the shape of a sentence that has more sentences behind it. And then I said the rest of it, and she cried, and then she said, thank God, Dad, and then she cried differently.

Looking at flats made me feel about fourteen years old

Here is a thing nobody warns you about. When you have owned property for thirty years and you start viewing rentals, you feel like a boy.

You stand outside a building at 10:57 for an 11:00 viewing because you are not going to be the sort of man who is late, and you cannot decide whether to wait in the car or on the pavement, and both feel wrong. You have your reading glasses in your shirt pocket and a set of house keys in your hand that belong to a house you are trying to get rid of. A young woman with an iPad arrives and calls you by your first name immediately, and you find that you do not mind as much as you expected to, and then you mind that you do not mind.

I looked at places in Edenvale first, because it was near. Then a bit wider. I ended up spending three or four weekends going through listings, and I got into a strange rhythm with it, scrolling through pages of Sandringham rentals on a Sunday evening with the TV muted and a plate of scrambled eggs on my knee, which is what I eat now when nobody is watching. I had not thought about Sandringham in twenty years. I knew it from driving through it. My old firm did a job on a school hall out that side in the early 2000s and I remembered the jacarandas and the way the streets have a proper, settled, unglamorous feel to them.

The viewings themselves have a texture I did not expect. New paint, always. That specific smell, chemical and hopeful, painted over whatever the last tenant did to the walls. Somebody's shampoo bottle left in a shower recess. A security gate that sticks, and the agent doing that little jiggle-and-lift with it and saying oh it just needs a knack, and me thinking, professionally, that hinge has dropped four millimetres and it will not fix itself.

At one place there was washing on a line in the shared courtyard. A woman's, obviously. Two towels, a pale blue blouse, and a pair of school socks. I stood at the kitchen window looking at a stranger's washing and felt a sudden and completely unearned tenderness for her, whoever she was, and then a hot little wave of embarrassment, because I was a fifty-eight-year-old man staring at a woman's blouse while an estate agent talked about parking bays behind me.

The small humiliations, and the smaller freedoms

I will list a few of them, since I have been honest so far.

I did not know what a lease initiation fee was and I asked in a voice that was too aggressive because I was embarrassed not to know.

I went to one viewing and could not remember which building it was and rang the wrong buzzer and had to explain myself to a man eating breakfast.

At a place with a lovely balcony I said out loud, without thinking, Marianne would have liked this, and the agent, who was about Kate's age, went very still and kind and said nothing, which was exactly right, and I could not look at her for a full minute.

But then. Freedom, and it arrives sideways.

I realised, standing in a two-bedroom with a scuffed skirting board and a view of somebody's satellite dish, that I would never again have to think about a gutter. Not once. Not ever. If a tap leaks, I make a phone call. That is the whole of my involvement. I did the sums on the back of a Woolworths slip in the car afterwards, because that is who I am, and the number of hours I would get back per year was somewhere north of two hundred. Two hundred hours. That is five working weeks of my life that I have been giving to a lawn.

I spent a long time going through the apartments to rent in Sandringham listings I had bookmarked, comparing what I actually needed against what I had convinced myself I needed, and the gap was almost comic. Three bathrooms. For one man. Who uses one.

What I have kept, and what I have not

The auctioneer's people came in June. That was a bad week and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Marianne's mother's dining table, the one with the cigarette burn we never fixed because it was funny, went for less than a decent bicycle. I stood in the kitchen with my back to the door while they carried it out.

But I kept the yellowwood chest. I kept her recipe book, the one with her handwriting getting looser near the end and a shopping list on the inside back cover in pencil. I kept the good braai tongs and thirty-one of the books and the picture of the four of us at Sodwana in 2003 where Simone is furious about something and cannot remember what. I kept two chairs.

I did not keep the mower. A man came from Alberton in a bakkie, gave me two thousand rand, said the battery was nothing and the carburettor was worth the trip, and drove it up two planks with a great deal of confidence and swearing. I watched him go and did not feel a thing, which surprised me, and then I went inside and sat down on the floor of the passage, which did.

I ended up going back for a second look at one of the places I had first seen through a listing for Sandringham Apartments on a wet Tuesday when the light was bad and nothing looked good, and it was better the second time, the way most things are. First floor. The gate still sticks. I have already decided I will fix it myself, quietly, with a screwdriver and about four minutes, and say nothing to anybody.

Where I am now

The house went in August. I signed the papers in an office in Bedfordview with a pen that did not work and then a pen that did.

Last Sunday I sat on a small balcony that is not mine, in a chair that is, with a cup of tea going cold on the rail. Somebody two floors down was playing music with a lot of bass in it. There was a dove making that idiot noise doves make. Across the way, a woman was hanging out washing, possibly the same woman, possibly not, and the sun came through a pale blue blouse and made it briefly, ridiculously, the brightest thing in Johannesburg.

I drank the tea. It was cold. I drank it anyway.