Twenty-Six Years of Bunks, and Then a Room With Nothing In It

My sister started it

Ilse phoned me on the Tuesday I paid off the last of my tax and said, in the flat way she has said things to me since we were children in Goodwood, that I could not keep sleeping in her spare room like a parcel nobody had collected.

I told her I did not sleep there like a parcel. I told her I slept there four or five weeks a year, and that for the other forty-seven I was somewhere between Ningbo and Algeciras with the main engine turning over under my feet, and that a man who is home for five weeks a year does not need a place of his own. He needs a bed that is not being used by someone else, and he needs his sister not to move his tools.

She said, "Gerrit, you are fifty-eight."

I said I knew how old I was.

She said, "You came off in March. It is July."

I did not have anything to say to that, so I said nothing, which is what I have always done, and which she has always correctly read as losing.

The floor

The thing nobody warns you about is the floor.

Twenty-six years. Second engineer, mostly boxships, the last eleven with the same operator, running the Far East loop and then the West Africa service, four months on, two off, sometimes five on when the reliever's visa fell over. In all that time the floor moved. Not dramatically. In the Bay of Biscay in February, dramatically. But normally it was a long slow lean, a breathing, the kind of movement your body stops noticing but never stops using. You brace without knowing you brace. You put a cup down and you put it down in a particular way, slightly inside where it should go, because you know the ship will bring the rest.

I came ashore in March and the floor stopped.

For the first two weeks in Ilse's flat in Bellville I kept putting cups down wrong. I would set a mug on the counter with that little inward push and it would just sit there, stupid, exactly where I put it, and something in my chest would go quiet in a way I did not like. Her husband Danie thought it was funny. I did not think it was funny. I thought: the world has stopped helping me.

And I woke at 03:40. Every night. Not 03:30, not 04:00. 03:40, because that gave me twenty minutes to get up, wash my face, get down the ladders and take the watch at four. I would lie in my sister's spare room in the dark, fully awake, with nothing to go and do, listening to a dog somewhere near the Voortrekker Road end and the Sunday traffic that was not there because it was a Wednesday, and I would lie there until half past five and then get up and make coffee nobody wanted.

Looking, allegedly

Ilse's method was not subtle. She would sit at her kitchen table with her phone and read prices at me while I ate.

"One point six in Century City. That is nothing, Gerrit. You have got the money."

I did have the money. That is the strange part. Twenty-six years of not spending it, because on a ship there is nothing to spend it on except beer and the ship's slop chest and whatever nonsense the agent brings aboard in Singapore. I had money and I had no idea what money was for. Money was a number that arrived in the account while I was asleep in a different time zone. Money was proof I had done the four months.

She sent me listings. She sent me so many listings. I would open one on my phone and look at a kitchen and feel absolutely nothing, the way you feel nothing looking at a photograph of a stranger's wedding. There is a whole world of apartments in Cape Town and every one of them looked to me like a room I would be asked to leave at the end of a contract.

I said to her once, and I regret the way I said it, "I have never wanted a house. I do not know how."

She said, "That is not a personality. That is just a hole."

What I actually owned

Here is the full inventory of Gerrit Nel, fifty-eight years old, at the end of March.

One duffel. Navy blue, the third one, the first two having died. Inside: work clothes, two decent shirts, a wash bag, a rolled-up jacket for Rotterdam in winter, a photograph of my parents at Strand in 1979, my discharge book, my certificates in a plastic sleeve.

One box of tools. Wooden, made by me in 1994 in a workshop in Durban, dovetailed badly, still holding. Feeler gauges, a torque wrench I bought in Kobe, calipers, my father's spanners. That box has been to more countries than most people I know.

That is it. Fifty-eight years and I could carry everything I owned up a flight of stairs in two trips. No bed. No chair. No plate. No kettle. Not a single thing that was mine that did not fit in a locker, because for twenty-six years the correct size of a life was one locker and one bunk, and anything more than that was a thing you would have to leave behind.

The kettle

The agent was a young woman named Chantelle who kept calling me sir and driving too fast on the M5. She showed me four places in one Saturday. I went because Ilse came, and because Ilse in a car is a force you do not argue with.

The fourth one was in a block off the Voortrekker side of Salt River, second floor, empty. Truly empty. New enough that it had never had anyone in it. Bare screed, a window, that particular smell of paint and dust that has not decided anything yet.

Chantelle went out to the car to take a call. Ilse stayed in the doorway, watching me the way she watches me.

And I did what I have done in every engine room I have ever worked in. I paced it. Heel to toe, along the long wall, counting. Eleven. Then across, seven. I have paced the length of a main engine at two in the morning in the Indian Ocean with the hull temperature at forty-one degrees and my shirt stuck to me, counting frames, because pacing is how you learn a space when you cannot see all of it at once. Eleven by seven. About the length of the flat where the purifiers were on the Vessel I did nine years on. I knew that shape. My feet knew it before I did.

And then, standing in the corner where the kitchen would be, with the South Easter starting up outside and rattling something on the roof of the block behind, I thought: the kettle goes there.

That was all. Not a vision. Not a swelling of the heart. Just that. There is a plug at knee height on that wall and the counter would come to here and the kettle would go there, on the right, because I am right-handed and I have made coffee at 03:40 for twenty-six years and I know exactly where my hand goes.

I stood in that empty room and I wanted a kettle in a specific place, and I had to put my hand on the wall.

Ilse did not say anything. She is not a fool. She just looked out the window at the mountain doing the thing it does in the late afternoon, going that flat purple, and let me stand there.

Deciding

I did not buy that one. Chantelle was disappointed, I think. It faced the wrong way and the wind funnelled straight down the side of the building and I have had enough wind.

I bought one three weeks later, further along, on the second floor again because I do not trust ground floors and I do not trust lifts. When I signed I remember thinking that in my whole life I had never signed for anything I would still own next year. Everything I had ever signed was a contract with an end date on it. Someone was always going to come and take the bunk back.

The strange work started after. I had to buy a bed. A grown man in a shop, being asked what he prefers, and having no answer, because for twenty-six years my preference was: whichever bunk. I stood in that place in Ottery for forty minutes and could not choose, and eventually bought the one nearest the door out of pure cowardice. Same with a chair. Same with plates. Ilse came with me for the plates because I told her I could not do the plates.

The looking never really stopped either, if I am honest. Even after I signed, I would catch myself scrolling Cape Town apartments at three in the morning, comparing mine to ones I had not chosen, the way you check a chart after you have already made the turn.

Where I am now

I still wake at 03:40. I have stopped fighting it.

What I do now is this. I get up in the dark and I go through to the kitchen and I put the kettle on, and it is on the right, where I said it would be, on the counter, next to the wall, and the floor under my bare feet does not move at all. Not a millimetre. I have stood there for a long time some mornings just noticing that.

The wind comes over from the south east and finds the corner of the building and makes a noise I am starting to know, the way you learn a ship's noises until you can hear a bearing going in your sleep. There is a light on the mountain that comes at about a quarter past six this time of year. I have started to be able to tell the time by it, which is a thing I did not know you could do on land.

Ilse asks me if I am happy. That is the wrong question and I have told her so. I do not know if I am happy. I know that I have a room with a kettle in the correct place in it, and a duffel bag in the cupboard which I have not fully unpacked, because I am not a liar and I am not going to pretend that took three months to fix.

But last week I bought a lamp. Nobody asked me to. I saw it, and I wanted it, and I knew where it went.

That is further than I expected to get.

I still do not know what half of these blocks are worth, and I still open property for sale in Cape Town some nights out of habit rather than intent, the way an engineer walks a machine that is running perfectly well.

Eleven paces by seven. I counted it again the week I moved in, with my own boots on my own floor, and it came out the same, which I suppose is the point of a floor that does not move.