The Saturday My Daughter's Tooth Cost More Than My Bank Balance

The morning started like any other job day

I am a plumber. Have been for nineteen years, twelve of them working for myself out of a white VW Polo with a cracked wing mirror and a boot that smells permanently of pipe dope and old rags. That car is not a nice thing. The paint has gone chalky on the bonnet from standing in the Durban sun, and there is a dent on the back door from a trolley at the Builders Warehouse in Pinetown. But it is mine, fully paid off, and it is the reason my family eats. Every geyser I replace, every blocked drain I rod, every leaking Isolating valve I swap out, I get there in that Polo with my tools rattling in the back.

That Saturday I was up at half past five out of habit, even though I had no booking until the afternoon. My wife Nombuso was still sleeping. Our daughter Amahle, who is six, had been off her food the whole week. I had put it down to a cold. Kids get colds. You do not run to the dentist for a grumpy child who will not finish her pap.

But when she came through to the kitchen that morning, the left side of her little face was swollen up like she had a golf ball pushed into her cheek. Her eye on that side was half closed from the puffiness. She was crying in that quiet, worn out way that scared me more than screaming would have, because it meant she had been in pain for a long time and had just given up making a noise about it.

The word abscess and what it did to my stomach

I phoned the after hours line for a dentist in Westville. A woman with a kind but tired voice listened while I described the swelling, the heat coming off Amahle's cheek, the fact that she would not let me near her mouth. She said the word abscess, and then she said something about the infection being close to the eye, and how with small children you do not wait, because it can move fast. She could see us. But it was a Saturday emergency call out, plus x rays, plus the extraction or the drain, plus antibiotics. She gave me a number that made my ears ring.

I stood in my own passage holding the phone and I felt the floor tilt. Because I knew, to the cent, what was in my bank account, and it was not that number. It was not even close to half of that number.

Here is the thing people who work a normal job do not always understand about being self employed. The money you have earned and the money you can touch are two different things. I had done more than thirty thousand rand of work in the previous six weeks. On paper I was fine. In reality I was waiting on a body corporate in Umhlanga that pays at forty five days if you chase them, an estate agent who kept saying the transfer had not gone through, and a guy who had promised me cash for a bathroom renovation and then stopped answering. My invoices were out there. My money was out there. It was just not in here, in the account, on the Saturday morning that my daughter's face was swollen shut.

Pride is a stupid thing to feel at a moment like that

I did the maths a hundred times in about four minutes. I could ask my brother, but he had just paid lobola instalments and I knew he had nothing. I could try a credit card, but mine was near its limit from buying stock for a job the client had not paid for yet. I could go to the dentist and beg for a payment plan, but she had already said, gently, that they needed settlement on the day for an emergency call out.

And the whole time there was this hot, ugly feeling in my chest that I now know was shame. I am the father. I am the one who fixes things. People phone me when their house is flooding and I arrive and I make it stop and they look at me like I am a small kind of hero. And here I was, unable to fix the one thing that mattered, which was my own child's pain, because of a timing problem with money. Nombuso did not say a single word of blame. That almost made it worse.

I sat in the Polo in the driveway just to think, because the car is where I think. My hands were on the wheel. And I looked at the car itself and realised the obvious thing. The one asset I actually owned, free and clear, that had real value, was the thing I was sitting in.

The idea I did not know was an option

I had heard guys on jobs talk about getting quick money against a vehicle. I always assumed that meant selling it, or handing over the keys and losing your wheels, which for me was a non starter, because without the Polo I cannot work, and if I cannot work then next month is worse than this month. Losing the car to solve a Saturday would have been like cutting off my hand to pay a doctor.

So I did what I always tell my own clients not to do, which is search on a phone in a panic. But this time it actually helped. I found that there are places that do loans against your car where the whole point is that you keep driving the vehicle the entire time. The car's value backs the money, but the car stays with you, on your driveway, going to your jobs. I read that twice because it sounded too convenient for the corner I was in.

I will be honest, my first instinct was suspicion. When you are desperate is exactly when you must not be stupid. So I asked the questions I ask a client who wants me to quote before I have seen the job. What does it actually cost, in rand, over how long. What happens if I am late. Do I sign the car away or not. The idea that you could pawn car for cash and still keep the keys only made sense to me once I understood that the arrangement was short term and that the plan was always for me to settle it and take my car back clean the moment my invoices came in.

The drive home with the antibiotics on the seat

I am not going to pretend it was a comfortable decision. Owing money against the thing that earns your bread is a serious feeling. But it was a Saturday, and my daughter's infection was near her eye, and the dentist had said the words fast and children in the same sentence. When you weigh a temporary loan against a permanent regret, the maths stops being about money at all.

I got the cash sorted faster than I expected. I drove the same Polo, my Polo, straight to the dentist in Westville with Amahle in the back seat in her booster, her cheek against the cool window. They took her in. The dentist drained the abscess, started her on antibiotics, and told me another day or two might have been a hospital story instead of a chair story. I paid the call out, the x ray, all of it, on the day, like she needed.

That the whole thing rested on being able to pawn car and still drive it is not something I say with any pride, but I will not hide it either. Two weeks later the body corporate in Umhlanga finally paid, the transfer went through, and I settled the loan and got my car's papers back in my own name, no drama. The Polo never left my driveway through any of it. It took me to three more jobs that same week.

Amahle's face went back to normal within days. She finished her pap again, complaining about the lumps like always. She has no idea that for one Saturday her tooth cost more than her father had in the bank, and that the ugly, faithful little car she gets carsick in was quietly the thing that saved the day. I know it. I think about it every time I climb in and smell the pipe dope and turn the key.