The Two Hundred Plates

The call that changed my kitchen

I was elbow deep in a sink of soaking pots when my phone lit up on the counter, dancing in a little puddle of dishwater. I nearly did not answer. I am a woman who runs her catering from a converted garage in Kempton Park, and by four in the afternoon I am usually too tired to talk to anyone who is not a supplier or my own mother. But something made me dry my hands on my apron and pick up.

It was a bride. Her voice was young and careful, the way people sound when they are trying to be grown up about something enormous. She had eaten my lamb potjie and my milk tart at her cousin's fortieth in Benoni, she said, and she wanted me for her wedding. Two hundred people. Two hundred plates of food, a spit braai, three salads, a dessert table, the whole thing.

I remember I sat down on the little wooden stool I keep by the stove. My legs just decided for me. For eleven years I have cooked for other people's happiness, mostly for fifty here, eighty there, the odd hundred for a church function. Two hundred was a different animal. Two hundred was the order I used to daydream about while I was peeling ten kilograms of potatoes in the dark.

I said yes before my head had finished the arithmetic. My mouth is faster than my calculator, always has been.

The maths in the middle of the night

That night I could not sleep. I lay next to my husband, who snores like a diesel engine, and I did sums on the ceiling. The venue wanted a deposit to hold the date. The meat man, an Portuguese fellow in Edenvale who has never once let me down on quality, wanted half up front because the order was so big he had to bring in extra lamb specially. Between the two of them, the money they wanted weeks before the wedding was more than I had sitting in my business account.

Here is the thing about catering that people who eat the food never see. You pay for everything before anyone claps for you. The gas, the meat, the vegetables, the disposable trays, the extra hands you hire for the day. The client pays you the balance after, sometimes a good while after, and the happiest day of their life becomes, quietly, a cash flow problem in your kitchen.

I did not want to go to family. I need to be honest about why, because it is the whole spine of this story. My sister would have lent me the money. She would also have told our mother, and our aunts, and the story of how Thandi bit off more than she could chew would have travelled around every kitchen in the family by Sunday lunch. I did not want to be a woman who was helped. I wanted to be a woman who managed. There is a difference, and only the person carrying it knows how heavy that difference is.

The one thing I owned outright

The bakkie was parked in the yard, catching the last of the light on its scratched white bonnet. A Nissan I had finished paying off two years before, the vehicle I load every function into, trays stacked to the roof, urns wedged behind the seats. It is not pretty. There is a dent in the tailgate from a gate that swung back at me in Springs. But it is mine, fully, no bank with its name on the papers.

I sat in the yard with a cup of rooibos going cold in my hands and I let myself think the thought I had been circling all evening. The bakkie was worth something. It was the only thing I owned that was worth something and that was completely mine. I started reading on my phone about how a person could take a loan against my car without selling it, using it as security for a short amount of time and getting it back once the money was repaid.

What stopped my heart for a second was the obvious problem. I needed the bakkie. Not as a thing to look at. I needed to drive it, loaded with two hundred people's dinner, on the actual day. If handing it over meant it sat in some yard while I hired a truck I could not afford, the whole plan collapsed on itself.

So I read more carefully, the way my father taught me to read anything to do with money, slowly and twice. I found that it was possible to arrange to pawn my car for a short term and still keep using it for work. That was the hinge the whole thing turned on. The paperwork held the value. My hands kept the keys.

I want to be plain here, because I promised myself I would tell this without dressing it up. It was not a magic solution. It was a short bridge over a specific gap, with a cost attached, and I went in with my eyes open. I worked out exactly what I would owe and exactly when the wedding balance would land, and I made sure the second number came before the first with room to spare. My father used to say that borrowing is only dangerous when you cannot see the far bank. I could see the far bank. It was two hundred paid plates away.

Four in the morning, and the smell of thyme

The two weeks before the wedding disappeared into lists. I write everything on the back of old invoices, in a hand that gets messier as the panic rises. Marinade the lamb Thursday. Boil the beetroot. Borrow Auntie Grace's second urn. Count the serviettes twice because I never trust the first count.

The morning of the wedding I was up at four. It is a particular kind of dark, four in the morning, when the world has not decided yet whether it is still last night. My kitchen was warm and yellow and smelled of thyme and garlic and hot oil. I stood there prepping trays in my socks, moving through it the way you move through a prayer you know by heart. Slice, layer, cover, stack. The radio low so I would not wake the house.

There is a terror in it that I have never been able to explain to people with normal jobs. It is the terror of your own two hands. Everything, the deposit money, the borrowed value of my bakkie sitting outside, the bride's careful young voice, all of it was resting on whether these hands got it right. No one else to blame if the rice was wrong. No one else to praise if it was perfect. Just me and the trays and the coming light.

I loaded the bakkie as the sky went grey. Same as always. Trays to the roof, urns behind the seats, the dented tailgate lifting with its usual complaint. I drove my own security to the venue with the whole dinner riding in the back, and I have never felt anything quite like that mixture of pride and fear, both of them full to the top.

The day itself

The venue was a farm outside Muldersdrift, one of those places with a big lawn and old oaks and a view that makes the photographs easy. I set up under a marquee with two women I hire whenever I can, Precious and Lindiwe, both faster than me and kinder than they let on. We laid the dessert table. We got the spit turning. The smell of the lamb went out across the lawn and I saw guests lift their heads toward it, the way people always do, and I knew then that at least the food would be right.

There was a moment near the serving, when the queue formed and stretched and kept stretching, that I had to step behind the marquee and just breathe for a second. Two hundred people. I had said the number so many times it had stopped meaning anything, and then there it was, a living line of it, hungry and happy and holding out plates. My eyes stung. I told Precious it was the smoke.

They ate. They came back for more. An older man in a good suit told me the potatoes reminded him of his late wife's cooking, and he held my hand when he said it. That is the pay you cannot bank. The bride found me at the end, out of her big dress and into flat shoes, and she hugged me hard and thanked me by my name.

Paying it back

The balance came through eleven days later, exactly as I had planned it on the ceiling that first sleepless night. I sat at my kitchen table with my cold rooibos, the way I had at the start, and I settled the short loan in full. Getting the papers on my bakkie cleared, knowing the arrangement to pawn my car and still drive it had done precisely the one job I asked of it and no more, I felt something loosen in my chest that had been tight for a month.

I did not tell my sister until it was all done. When I did, she was quiet for a moment and then she said, Thandi, you should have asked me. And I said, I know. But I did not need to, and that was the whole point.

The bakkie is still parked in the yard, dent and all. When the light catches it in the late afternoon I sometimes think about the morning it carried two hundred dinners and a good part of my nerve down the R28. It is just a working vehicle. But it was also, for two weeks, the quiet proof that I could bet on my own hands and win.