Two Weeks Without Municipal Water, And A Salon Full Of Wet Heads

The tap that made no sound

The first thing you learn when the water goes is that a dry tap does not make a dry sound. It makes a wet sound. It coughs, and spits a little brown air, and then it hisses like it is embarrassed, and then nothing.

I heard that sound at twenty past seven on a Tuesday morning in Benoni, standing at the basin in my salon with a towel over my shoulder and a woman called Prudence already sitting in my chair with her hair sectioned and clipped and half a relaxer on her scalp.

Let me be very clear about what that means, for anybody who has not worked with hair. Product on a head is a clock. It is not a preference. It is not "we will get to it". It is a chemical sitting on a human being's scalp with a number of minutes attached to it, and when those minutes are up, that product comes off, or you are going to hurt somebody.

I had about eleven minutes.

What I did with the eleven minutes

I do not remember deciding anything. I remember moving.

There was a two litre bottle of still water in the fridge for clients. There was a kettle. There was, thank God, a twenty five litre drum in the storeroom that I had filled during load shedding season and never emptied, and which my sister had told me was a waste of space, and about which I have never let her forget herself.

I got that drum out, and my assistant Nomsa and I rinsed Prudence's hair over the basin with jugs, one pouring, one working, while Prudence sat with her eyes squeezed shut and said, over and over, in the calmest voice, "It's fine, my girl, it's fine, take your time," which of course was the exact opposite of what I needed to do.

We got it out. Her scalp was fine. She tipped us both, which she absolutely did not have to do, and she walked out into the morning with her hair looking good, and I sat down on the step at the back door and my hands were shaking so badly I could not open my own phone.

Then I got up, because I had eleven more people coming.

What the municipality said

Nothing, at first. Then a notice on Facebook about a burst main and a pump station, and a phrase that I have since come to know very well, which was "restoration of supply is anticipated within".

Anticipated within twenty four hours became forty eight. Forty eight became "phased restoration". Phased restoration became a water tanker parking at the corner of the road at unpredictable hours with a queue of people and buckets and prams full of empty bottles.

In the end we were dry for thirteen days, and the pressure only really came right in the third week, and even then it came back brown, which is its own separate problem when your entire trade is putting water on people's heads.

Buckets are not a business

For the first three days I ran the salon on buckets.

I want to be honest about how bad this was, because there is a version of this story where I am plucky and resourceful, and I was, but I was also a mess.

I was at the tanker at half past five in the morning in my slippers. I was carrying twenty litres at a time in a container never designed for it, up two steps, four times, before opening. My back went. My kitchen at home stopped being a kitchen and started being a depot. The buckets were open, so there was dust in them, and hair in them, and I once found a moth. You cannot rinse colour out of a woman's hair with water that has a moth in it. You cannot even look her in the eye.

And the water we did get, we could not lift. That is the thing nobody tells you. A bucket on the floor is useless when the basin is at hip height. Physics does not care that you are trying.

By day four I had cancelled colour appointments. By day six I had lost about eleven thousand rand in bookings I will never get back, and two clients had gone to a place in the mall that had a borehole and never came back to me, and I do not blame them.

The lady with the Wimpy cups

The thing that actually changed my thinking happened at the tanker.

There was a woman ahead of me in the queue who ran a small food place, and she was not carrying buckets. She had two big blue drums on a trolley, the proper kind with a screw cap, and she filled them, and she wheeled them away, and she was gone in eight minutes while I was still crouched over my third bucket with my back screaming.

I asked her about it, because at that point I would have asked anybody about anything.

She said, and I remember this exactly, "You are carrying water. You must be storing water. It's two different things."

She told me she kept a stack of empty water dispenser bottles at the back of her shop, the same sort that go on top of an office cooler, and that when she heard there was trouble coming she filled every one of them and stood them in a row against the wall, and that she could run her whole kitchen for four days off them without touching a tap.

I said, but those are for drinking.

She looked at me the way my mother used to look at me. She said, "Water is water. It's the shape of the bottle that helps you."

The shape of the bottle

I thought that was a strange sentence for about a day, and then I understood it completely.

A bucket is a hole with sides. It is open, so it gets dirty. It has no lid, so you cannot tip it. It has no handle worth anything when it is full. And crucially, it sits on the floor, at floor level, and my basin does not.

A sealed bottle with a neck can be lifted, inverted, carried in a car boot without slopping, stacked, kept for months, and, most importantly, put on top of something. Height is everything. Height is free pressure. My whole problem for six days had been that I was trying to move water uphill with my spine.

I bought four bottles that week and I did not do it cleverly. I got two secondhand from a guy who was replacing his office cooler, and I bought two new ones properly. Everybody in this country has seen the standard blue 18.9L water bottles sitting in the corner of a reception area and thought nothing of them, and I had walked past them a thousand times without ever once thinking of them as a thing I could own for myself.

Nineteen litres is about as much as a person like me can handle when it is full. I want to say that plainly because I made the mistake of thinking bigger was better. It is not. Twenty five litres full is a fight. Nineteen is a lift. There is a real line in there somewhere and every back finds it.

The rig

What we ended up with, and what is still in my salon today, three years later, is not elegant.

There is a shelf my brother in law put up above and behind the basins, with a lip on it so nothing walks off. On that shelf sit two bottles, upside down, in a wooden cradle he made from an old pallet, with a short length of food grade hose and a tap fitting he bought at a hardware in Boksburg for less than the price of a bottle of shampoo.

Gravity does the rest. It is not a power shower. It is a gentle, steady flow, enough to rinse a head properly with a bit of patience, and enough that on the days the municipality lets us down I do not have to send anybody home.

Two more bottles live in the storeroom, full, always, rotated every couple of months so nothing goes stale. I refill at a place two blocks away that does it for a few rand, and the whole operation costs me less per month than one client's colour.

Nomsa calls the shelf "the emergency". She says it like it is a person. "Auntie, we are on the emergency today."

What I actually learned

The first thing is that I had been treating water as a service, and I had to start treating it as a stock item. Nobody in my business would dream of running out of colour or peroxide or towels. We count those. We reorder those. But water arrived through a pipe and so it lived in a different part of my brain, a part that was not doing any thinking at all.

The second thing is that storage buys you calm more than it buys you litres. Thirteen days is a long time to be frightened every morning. Now, when the group on WhatsApp starts up about a burst main in Northmead, I feel my shoulders come down instead of going up, because I know that whatever happens today, the twelve women in my book today will get what they came for.

The third thing is that I am much less proud than I was. I have borrowed water from a nail salon two doors down. I have loaned my own bottles to the barber on the corner when his tank ran dry, and he brought them back full, which is a language of its own.

And the fourth thing, which I did not expect, is that I have become a person who has opinions about plastic. My cousin, who works in an office in Sandton, laughed at me at a family lunch for lecturing him about the lids on his office cooler, and I stood my ground and told him exactly where he could get proper water cooler bottles instead of the tired ones his landlord keeps refilling, because I now know that the difference between a bottle you can trust and one you cannot is not something you find out at a good time. You find out on a Tuesday, at twenty past seven, with a relaxer on a woman's head and eleven minutes on the clock.

The postscript

Prudence still comes to me. Every six weeks, Thursday afternoon, and she has never once let me forget it.

She walks in, and she looks at the shelf above the basin with the two upside down bottles on it, and she says the same thing every single time.

"So. Are we jug people today, or are we tap people?"

And I always say, "Today we are tap people."

And she sits down, and I put the towel on her shoulder, and I open the tap, and the sound it makes is the sound of water.