Twelve Hours at a Boom Gate in Umhlanga Heat

Six in the Morning, Already Sweating

The first car through my gate every weekday is a silver Polo driven by a nurse who works nights at a hospital up the road. She comes in at ten past six, half asleep, and she lifts two fingers off the steering wheel to greet me. By then I have been standing for forty minutes. By then my shirt is already damp across the back.

I have worked the boom gate at a complex in Umhlanga for nine years. Twelve-hour shifts, four on and four off, days for a stretch and then nights. The complex has a hundred and twelve units, two gates, a guardhouse the size of a bathroom and a fan that turns its head slowly from side to side like an old man refusing something. In February the humidity sits on you like a wet blanket. By eleven in the morning the tar in front of the boom shimmers, and the air coming off the cars is hotter than the air from the sky.

People think a security guard's job is about watching. It is, but it is also about being watched. Every person who drives in sees you. They see if your shirt is ironed. They see if your shoes are polished. They notice, even if they do not say it, whether you look like a man who takes care of himself or a man who has given up. I learned that from my father before I ever learned it on the job.

My Father's Shirt Pocket

My father, Bongani Mthembu, worked thirty-one years as a messenger for a law firm in Durban. He rode the bus from KwaMashu every morning in a pressed white shirt and a tie he knotted in the mirror while my mother complained that he was blocking the light. He did not earn much. But he had rules. Shoes polished on Sunday night. Nails clean. And in his shirt pocket, every day, a tiny glass bottle with a roll-on top that he had bought from a man at the Victoria Street market.

It was some kind of scented oil, warm and woody, a little smoky. He would touch it to his wrists and behind his ears before he left the house, and again at lunch. When I was a boy, I would sit on his lap and press my nose into his collar, and that smell was what safety meant to me. When he died in 2014, the bottle was still in the pocket of the shirt he had laid out for the next day. There was maybe a quarter left. I kept it in my drawer for years and opened it sometimes just to have him in the room.

I never thought about wearing anything like it myself. That was his thing. I was a younger man, and when I wanted to smell good I bought the cheap spray deodorants from the supermarket, or a body spray in a tall can, and I thought that was what men did now.

The Problem With Sprays at a Boom Gate

Here is what nobody tells you about standing in the Umhlanga sun for twelve hours. The spray you put on at half past five is gone by ten. Completely gone. All that remains is the smell of sweat, diesel fumes and the jasmine hedge next to the guardhouse, which sounds nice until you have smelled it every day for nine years.

Worse, the alcohol in those sprays started to burn my skin. I developed a rash on my neck, right where my collar rubs, that would flare up red and itchy by midday. My supervisor once asked if I had been bitten by something. My wife said I should stop using them. But I did not want to stand at the gate smelling like a man who had been standing at a gate. Residents lean out of their windows to sign the visitor book. Delivery drivers come right up to the guardhouse window. I am close to people all day long.

I went through a period, I am not proud of it, where I just stopped bothering. I stopped polishing my shoes every Sunday. I let the rash do what it wanted. I would get home at seven at night, eat, sleep, and go back. On my off days I barely left the couch. My daughter, Nomvula, who was nineteen and studying at DUT, noticed before I did.

Nomvula's Little Box

She came into the lounge one evening in October with a small box wrapped in brown paper. It was not my birthday. It was not Father's Day. She sat down next to me on the couch and said, "Baba, I have been reading about this. Open it."

Inside were three small roll-on bottles. She had been looking into oil based perfumes because a friend of hers in res had the same skin problem from sprays, and the friend had switched and the rash had settled. Nomvula had saved from her part-time job at a coffee shop in Gateway to buy them. She did not know much about scent, she said, so she had asked the lady at the counter questions and smelled things on paper strips until her nose gave up.

I opened the first one, and I had to put it down and walk to the kitchen for a minute. It was not my father's exact smell. But it was close enough. Woody and warm, with something sweet underneath. My daughter, who was only eleven when he died, had picked out something that sounded like him without knowing it. I asked her later how she chose it. She said, "I remembered his collar."

The First Shift With It

The next morning I put it on at half past five, a touch on each wrist and two dots behind my ears, the way I had watched my father do it in the mirror. I did not expect much. I had learned to expect scents to disappear.

At ten o'clock I noticed I could still smell it when I lifted my arm to wave a car through. At one, when I took my lunch in the guardhouse, it was softer but still there, sitting close to my skin instead of floating off into the heat. Something about oil holding onto warm skin, Nomvula explained later. The sprays evaporate, the oils settle. I am not a chemist. All I know is that by the end of the shift I still smelled like a man and not like a gatepost.

And the rash on my neck, slowly, over about three weeks, began to calm down. I cannot say for certain it was only the oils. I also started polishing my shoes again, ironing my shirts, putting on sunscreen my wife bought me. It was all one thing, really. I had started looking after myself again.

Being Noticed

The strange part was how people responded. Not dramatically. Nobody stopped their car to compliment me. But Mrs Pillay in unit 47, who has been signing in visitors with me for six years, leaned out of her window one day and said, "Sipho, you smell like my grandfather's study." She meant it kindly. Her grandfather, she told me, had been a teacher in Verulam, and his study was full of old books and pipe smoke and something warm she could never name.

The nurse in the silver Polo started saying good morning out loud instead of just lifting her fingers. A courier driver from Pinetown, a big man who always looks like he has been awake for three days, asked me what I was wearing because his wife was always complaining about his deodorant. I wrote the general idea on the back of a delivery slip for him. A scented oil perfume, I told him, the roll-on kind, and do not overdo it, two touches is enough. I sounded like my father. I heard it as I said it.

I think what people noticed was not really the smell. It was that I was standing straighter. A man who takes a minute in the morning to put something on his skin that reminds him of his father is a man who has decided the day is worth dressing for. That shows.

What I Keep in My Pocket Now

It has been a little over a year. I still work the same gate, the same twelve-hour shifts, in the same heat that makes the tar shimmer. The fan in the guardhouse still turns its head like an old man saying no. Nothing about the job has changed.

But I keep a small bottle in my shirt pocket now, the left one, over my heart, exactly where my father kept his. At lunch I touch it to my wrists again. Sometimes when it is quiet, mid-afternoon, nobody coming in or out, I sit on the plastic chair and close my eyes and let it take me back to KwaMashu, to the mirror, to a tie being knotted and my mother saying, "Bongani, you are blocking the light."

Nomvula graduates next year. She asked what I want for a present. I told her nothing, that she gave me the best gift already. She rolled her eyes and said I was being sentimental. Maybe. But I have been looking at perfume oils again lately, the small ones, because I want to buy her something that smells like her and like this year of her life, so that when she is old and I am gone, she can open a little bottle and have me in the room for a minute.

My father's bottle, the one with a quarter left, is still in my drawer at home. I have never finished it. I do not think I ever will.