The Sea Told Me Where To Live Before The Estate Agent Did

A swimmer who forgot how to float

I swam competitively from the age of nine, and then I coached swimming, and then I ran a small learn-to-swim school in a suburb of Johannesburg for twenty-six years. Water was my whole working life, which is a strange thing to say about a city that sits on a high, dry plateau a thousand kilometres from the nearest coast. I taught toddlers to blow bubbles and I taught nervous grandmothers to put their faces in, and every night I dreamed, genuinely dreamed, of the sea.

My shoulder gave out the winter I turned fifty-eight. Not dramatically. It just wore down, the way a hinge wears, until reaching across the lane to demonstrate a stroke made me gasp. The surgeon was kind and honest. He said the coaching could continue but the demonstrating could not, and that I should think about a life where I was not standing on cold tiles at five in the morning for eight months of the year.

I went home and sat with that. My husband, Deon, had retired the year before from a career in insurance he had merely tolerated, and he said the sentence that changed everything. He said, we have spent our whole marriage inland because of my job. Your job is portable now. Where do you actually want to be. And I said, without thinking, the sea. I want to hear it at night.

The trip that was meant to be a holiday

We went down to the KwaZulu-Natal coast for what we told ourselves was a scouting holiday, no pressure, just looking. We based ourselves in Umhlanga because Deon's sister had a flat there and it was free. I had been to that stretch of coast as a child and remembered almost nothing except the red and white lighthouse and the feeling of the warm Indian Ocean, so different from the cold pools of my working life.

The first morning I walked down to the promenade at half past five out of pure habit, my body still convinced it had a lane to supervise. The tide was coming in. There were already swimmers out past the breakers, older people mostly, doing slow unhurried lengths parallel to the beach. A woman about my age came out of the water, hair flattened, absolutely beaming, and she said good morning to me as though we had known each other for years. I stood on that promenade and I cried a little, quietly, behind my sunglasses, because my shoulder did not hurt at all in the idea of that water.

We were supposed to be scouting. What I was actually doing was falling in love with a way of living. In the mornings the sea. In the heat of the day, shade and a book. In the evening, the sound of it through an open window. I had spent forty years around water that was chlorinated and rectangular and mine to manage. This water asked nothing of me. It just wanted me to get in.

Looking without meaning to buy

Deon, who plans everything, had made a spreadsheet before we left home, of course he had. Rentals to view, just to understand the area. But somewhere around day three the spreadsheet quietly changed its own heading from rent to buy. We started looking at apartments seriously, because at our age the maintenance of a whole house and garden felt like signing up for a second job neither of us wanted. We wanted to lock the door and walk to the sea and not think about a swimming pool pump or a roof.

We looked at a lot of places. Some were beautiful and soulless. Some had a view but you could hear the neighbour's television through the wall. I had a very particular and possibly unreasonable test, which was that I had to be able to imagine walking to water in a costume and a towel without getting into a car. We found a development a little inland of the main beachfront, up in the greener hills, where the apartments in Umhlanga were built around actual open space and walking paths, and there was a lap pool on the grounds for the mornings the sea was too rough for a woman with one good shoulder.

Deon loved it for sensible reasons, the security, the low upkeep, the fact that the whole thing was designed to be closed up and left if we wanted to travel. I loved it for one unsensible reason. From the small second bedroom, if the wind was right, you could just hear the sea. Not see it. Hear it. That was enough. That had always been the whole dream.

The morning we decided

I am wary of writing about property the way people write about property, all square metres and yields, because that is not how it happened for us. What actually decided it was a Tuesday morning. I had gone down to the beach on my own while Deon slept, and I got into the sea properly for the first time, carefully, testing the shoulder, and I floated on my back and looked at the sky going from grey to gold, and a wave lifted me and set me down again like it was no trouble at all, and I understood that I had been treating rest as something I would earn later, always later, for four decades.

I walked back up dripping and I said to Deon, I do not want to look at any more Umhlanga apartments. I want that one. I want to hear the sea from the small room. He looked at me over his coffee for a long moment and then he closed the spreadsheet, which for Deon is roughly equivalent to a declaration of undying love.

We did the sensible things after that. We were not reckless. We spent a good few weeks understanding the wider picture of Umhlanga property before we committed, because the swimmer in me knows you never dive into water you have not checked, and Deon read every clause twice the way only a retired insurance man can. But the decision itself had been made barefoot and wet on a Tuesday, and everything after was just paperwork catching up with a feeling.

What the water gave back

We have been here a while now. My shoulder is not cured, it will never be what it was, but it does not rule my mornings any more. I swim slowly, parallel to the beach, with the same easy older people who said good morning to a stranger and turned out to be neighbours. I do not coach. Occasionally a young parent on the sand asks me nervously how to get their frightened child to put their face in the water, and I show them, gently, the way I showed a thousand others, and then I walk away and let them have it. It is theirs now, not mine to manage.

Deon fishes and reads and pretends he is not happy, which is how I know he is. And at night, when the wind comes off the water, I lie in the dark and hear the sea doing the thing it has done for longer than any of us, and I think of all those cold inland mornings when I dreamed of exactly this, and I forgive my younger self for taking so long to come to the coast.