he says! “Eden is a prime location in Big Bay, Cape Town. It’s got smart offices and sexy restaurants all sweet together, with food shops, coffee shops, surfer shops and stunning apartments.” He even gets away with the mail-order ad voice when he says, “See the sea, a stone’s throw away! Yep, that’s Table Mountain! And Robben Island too.” His punchline? “Bring your dogs, your kids, your kites and your boards. In Eden you will never be bored!”
I’d die of embarrassment.
“Owen is just a sharp sales guy with the old trick of using your name every time he asks you to pass the salt.” That’s what Dirk says. Whatever. It works. And Owen is what makes it easy for me to stay at BVD. It was even easy to tell him that I wanted six weeks away from the office.
Forty days away from Eden on the Bay.
Forty days in Eden in Walmer Estate.
My plan was to finish the stuff for the developer deadline and then work by email. I could collect papers in the evening if I needed to. What wasn’t so easy was to answer the obvious questions.
“Jeez, Kari, I can sell it to Steve if I have to but how did that even happen?” Owen stretched back into his white leather office chair, lacing his hands behind his head and sticking his tan Tod-covered feet onto his desk. Never trust a man who loves Italian shoes that much – another Dirk-ism popped into my head, next to all the other thoughts about Dirk that wouldn’t go away. “Come, tell me, are you really moving back? I thought you and your family weren’t even talking.” Owen was in full Owen mode, unhurried and ready to listen. I learned again why Owen’s clients found it hard to ignore him and why Dirk underestimated him: a good listener is not always impressive, but many times they get you to do something twice as fast as a great talker can do.
How had it happened? Good question.
I tried to explain it to Owen, but in the end it was exactly like when I try to explain anything about my family to Dirk or LSD. Like trying to explain colour to a colour-blind person. It’s not a world they can see. Nothing about that life they would recognise.
I did try. I did try.
I told him how I’d helped, even how I’d helped to wash Ouma. That freaked him out, like it had first freaked me out when Ouma had explained it to me. He dropped his lean-back-let’s-talk look and rolled his chair closer, his feet firmly on the ground. “Really, that’s insane, Kari. And the times you weren’t helping with the washing story you were actually just sitting there in the same room as your mother? The whole night until the next morning? You must’ve been really out of it, not to even see her. And then when you two did see each other, it was just like normal?” WTF, he could’ve said if he was a girl, but he didn’t.
“Exactly like normal, like nothing ever happened. Well, obviously it wasn’t normal, but she just said, ‘Salaam, Karima,’ and kept holding my hand.”
It had been a relief. I figured it out while I was talking to Owen. It had been a relief just to be able to greet my mother, to sit quietly and to feel the loss of Ouma with someone who loved her as much as I did. To sit with someone who didn’t know about Dirk. We’d cried a little, not too much and not too loudly. We didn’t want to tear at Ouma’s soul with our tears like the old people believed loud tears did. There was no talk of the past ten years. I was just her daughter and she was my mother. That Valentine’s night of Ouma’s death there was nothing else left for each of us to be. It was a relief.
I saw Dirk’s message as I left the office.
12
06:00 PM Dirk: Hi, I wrote you a mail, please will you read it. You don’t have to reply. Love you x
I didn’t reply. And I didn’t rush to the email either, although it weighed immediately on me, my phone and my laptop. To read that mail I wanted to be somewhere where I could fling my laptop against the wall without anyone seeing. It was reason enough to force me to go home. I had avoided it for as long as I could, but I knew it was ridiculous to avoid an empty house. Plus, I could see that Di and her captain needed their love boat to themselves.
Going home wouldn’t sound like a hard thing to anyone else, but it wasn’t just my home. It was our home. Mine and Dirk’s. How had we got to the point where I had to make myself pull into the garage? I sat in the car for too long, staring out the window at the grey garage tiles, remembering how we’d joked about being allowed to tile the floor in the “grey of our choice”. The whole house had started off as a bit of a laugh. “Let’s take a look, maybe it’s time for suburbia?” Dirk had said, grinning as we stood staring, ice creams dripping, at the plot-and-plan posters stuck up in the windows at BVD at the Eden on the Bay Mall. Five years ago already. Estate Agent Owen (yes, the very same little “o” for Owen) had had his radar on and spotted us from inside his office. He’d talked us into going into Beach View Estate and he painted the scene in our minds as we stood on an empty corner plot. Such an amazing spot! A short walk after a day at the beach, friends, and a braai around our own pool. Away from the crowds. But close enough to beach pubs. You can make it your own! The face of the duplex would be standard, with white cladding, light grey walls, rust-proof stainless-steel bits on the outside. But inside we could pick all our own finishes for the kitchen and bathrooms. You could start to build your future! There had been five house layouts to choose from. Dirk kept saying that the three-bedroom plan meant we could each have our own study. I thought it was too big. I didn’t need my own study. I liked working in the middle of everything, usually at the kitchen table or in a coffee shop, with life going on around me. I knew he knew that. Did he want babies? At that point we still hadn’t talked about our future and I’d pushed the thought away even as Dirk listened just a little too hard when Owen talked about schools in the area. I wasn’t ready to talk babies. Sold! If Owen had first hooked Dirk with the extra rooms, he got us both with the 3D artist’s impression of the upstairs master bedroom. He zoomed in on his laptop, showing us the views it would have, not just of the sea, but also of Table Mountain and Robben Island (if you stuck your neck out on the balcony a bit). For a boy from Pretoria, it was exactly what Dirk needed to show that he had made it. For a girl from Cape Town floating between digs, it was the city at its best. It was the start of being grown up.
“Hell with it, let’s just do it!” Dirk said.
Giddy with excitement, we imagined life in the open-plan kitchen, hanging out in the living area with its stacking glass doors that would open onto a handkerchief-sized lawn where we could maybe put a tiny pool. It was the house of our dreams, our castle in the sky. I went along with the study story.
“Ideal that we can each have our own work space,” I said finally, nodding at a smiling Dirk.
Dirk was the one who upped the crazy. “What do you say, Kari? I know it might seem sudden to you but I’ve thought about us a lot. Shall we go for broke? Put ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ on the title deed?” His eyebrows had arched halfway up his forehead, as excited as if he were asking me whether I wanted a lifetime free pass on the Cobra, rather than just the standard one minute fifty seconds that the rollercoaster ride usually lasts. He knew I loved rollercoasters.
So right there on the corner plot, more or less in the garage spot where I was sitting, I agreed. We got married at Home Affairs. I was so in love I didn’t notice how horrible the Home Affairs office actually was. And I didn’t think about Mama and Dhanyal and Ouma. Or Dirk’s mother and his sister. I didn’t even think about Lily. It was just Dirk and me. Now I wish we had done it differently. Everyone needs someone to wish them luck before they get on a rollercoaster.
Building our house, getting married, made us feel as solid and real as the bricks in the walls, the grey tiles on the garage floor. Our
