Two in the Morning in a Suburb I Could Not Name

The heat came off her like a stove

At two in the morning I had my hand on my daughter's back and I could feel the fever through her pyjamas. Not warm. Hot. The kind of hot that made me pull my hand away for a second before I made myself put it back. She was fifteen months old and she was making a sound I had never heard from her before, a thin whimper that trailed off into nothing and then started again. Her cheeks were red. Her hair was stuck to her forehead in wet little curls. When I lifted her up she did not grab at me the way she always did. She just went heavy in my arms, like a sack of mielie meal, and that frightened me more than the crying.

We had been in the new place for eleven days. Eleven. I know because I had counted them off, one by one, each morning driving to the new job with the radio on and my stomach in a knot. My wife and I had packed our whole lives into a bakkie and a borrowed trailer and moved across the province for a contract I could not afford to turn down. New suburb. New street. New everything. I did not know which house belonged to who. I did not know the man across the road. I did not even know where the nearest shop was that stayed open past nine.

And now it was two in the morning and my child was burning and I did not know a single soul who could help me.

Nobody to phone

At home, the old home, I would have known exactly what to do. I would have phoned my mother first, then the aunty three doors down who had raised six children and feared nothing. I would have driven the ten minutes to the doctor we had used since I was a boy, the one who still remembered my own childhood illnesses. That whole web of people, that whole map in my head, it was gone. I had traded it for a better salary and a house with a garden and now, in the dark, none of it was worth anything.

My wife was standing in the passage in her nightgown, holding her phone, her face lit up blue by the screen. She kept saying, where do we go, where do we even go. I did not have an answer for her. I had spent eleven days learning the route to work and back and nothing else. I did not know which way was the hospital. I did not know if there was a hospital.

So I did the only thing left to do. I sat on the edge of the bed with the baby against my chest and I searched. My hands were not steady. I typed the name of the suburb and the word I needed most, and I started scrolling through clinics that came up on the little glowing screen, trying to work out which ones were actually close, which ones were open, which ones were real and not just an old listing left up on the internet like a ghost.

The long minutes of not knowing

You learn something about yourself at two in the morning with a sick child. I learned that I am not as calm as I like to pretend. I read the same three lines four times without them going in. I phoned a number and it rang out. I phoned another and got a recording. My wife was wetting a facecloth in the bathroom, wringing it, laying it on the baby's neck, and the baby was fighting it weakly, turning her head away, too tired even to cry properly now.

I want to be honest about the fear, because I think men are not supposed to talk about it. It was not the fever itself, exactly. Children get fevers. Everyone tells you that afterwards, so easily. It was the being alone with it. It was the sense that I had picked up my family and set them down in a strange place with no net under us, and now the ground was giving way and I had nobody's number, nobody's door to knock on, no aunty, no gogo, no old familiar doctor who would open up for us. I had moved us here. This was on me.

Eventually I found a place that answered. A real voice, tired but awake, telling me they were open and where to come and what to bring. I wrote the directions on the back of an envelope because I did not trust my phone or my memory. I remember my wife strapping the baby into the car seat and the baby's little arm flopping and me thinking, drive carefully, you idiot, the last thing this night needs is you in a ditch.

Streets that all looked the same

The suburb at night was a maze. Every street had the same low walls and the same electric fences and the same jacaranda trees dropping their mess on the tar. Twice I turned where I should have gone straight. My wife read the envelope out loud, her voice cracking, and behind us the baby had gone quiet, which was worse than the crying, and I kept glancing in the mirror to check her chest was still going up and down. It was. It was.

We found it. A small place, lights on, a security gate and a buzzer. Inside there were two other families waiting, both looking as wrecked as we felt, and somehow that helped. We were not the only ones awake and afraid. One of the doctors on that night saw us reasonably quickly, an older woman with cold hands and a warm, unhurried way about her. She checked the baby over properly. She explained what was likely going on, wrote down what to give and how often, told us plainly what signs would mean come straight back and what signs would mean simply wait it out at home. She did not make me feel like a fool for panicking. She treated the fear as a normal part of the thing.

By the time the sky started going grey we were home again. The fever broke around dawn, the way they say it does, and my daughter woke up cross and hungry and completely herself, reaching for her cup, and I sat on the floor of that unfamiliar kitchen and felt something let go in my chest.

What the night left me with

We have been in the suburb a good while now. I know the man across the road. I know which shop stays open late. Slowly the map is filling in, street by street, face by face, the way it does when you stay somewhere long enough. But that first night taught me something I have not forgotten. When you move to a new place, before you learn the nice things, the good coffee and the shortcut to the highway, you should learn the plain and boring emergency things. Where the nearest clinic is. Which number actually gets answered after hours. Which way to drive when your hands are shaking.

I keep that envelope, the one with the smudged directions on the back, in the drawer by the bed. I do not need it anymore. But I keep it. It reminds me of the night I learned that being new somewhere is not just about the excitement of a fresh start. It is also about being, for a little while, without a net. And it reminds me how much a single tired, steady voice at two in the morning can mean when you are a father a long way from everything you know.