I begin to dream of water. A great wave destroys glass houses on a beach. Or I look up and realise I’m about to be engulfed. I take one last breath before the deluge takes me. When I surface, the whole world is different. I find my heart under water too. For some years I have been meditating on my heart. Not knowing how to do this (in books it just says things like, now move your awareness to your heart centre. What? What even is that? Like, how do I do that exactly?), I began trying to picture my heart. To my surprise it was a desert valley surrounded by hills on a full moon night, a Karoo scene but with a sense of wolves in the hills. Whenever I visit I stoop down and take a pinch of sand between my fingers. Everything is cast in white light, a holding scene with a small rustle, a crackle, a flitting bat more felt than heard momentarily blotting out the stars. This is my heartscape.
On a recent visit I reached down for the sand and found it shifting and falling upwards, swirling through my fingers. I realised I was under water. This happened when I miscarried. I came to my heart to find it flooded. Only the mountain tops stuck out. On them were the fires of women at which I sat to dry among the quiet chatter. But now, when I surface, there is no land anywhere and only a strange sky lit by either the moon or a hazy sun. Will I be forced to let go and sink? (What dies when you drown in your imagination?)
It is probably because I am coming up to my birthday again. Washing dishes one Sunday I get more and more upset, great splashes of oily brown water leap and dribble as I work myself into a lather. If I had more friends, if I had more time, if I had more discipline, I stab into the water and fish for knives, slash my inadequacies, disembowel my dependencies, gut my incapacities before popping them onto the drip tray to dry.
My husband says I always get like this before my birthday. It is a little like the run up to menstruation, when suddenly your life becomes plain in front of you, the layer of dust atop the books, the unmet corners all strung up in spider’s webs. How did it get like this? And you are helpless at the sight. So you cry bitterly at a colleague’s throwaway remark or the pile of clean but not folded laundry. Once you begin to bleed, and in my case, once my birthday passes, so does the vision, until the next cycle. I will be 38.
My birthday begins at 2am with a call from my gran.
“Robyn, I, I don’t … what’s happening? I. I.”
“Oh, it’s okay, gran,” I say. My ear plugs have gone flying in my scramble to answer the phone. She lives in a frail care centre, so I know she’s safe. Still, my heart is pounding.
“It’s not okay!” she says. “I don’t understand anything.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, and keep saying it.
She’s slurring and I wonder if she’s having another mild stroke. Her crying intensifies and then she seems to click out of it and begins apologising for calling. She uses oddly formal language: “Forgive me, forgive me.” Like this we exchange our sorrow, our remorse. The line goes dead.
After I finish crying, my husband, who has been ill and sleeping in a different room, walks down the passage to the toilet and stands in dog shit. One of our dogs has the squirts – the one whose only method of asking to go outside is a long, hard stare. I clean up while Ricky holds his foot over the basin, washing it over and over. We kick the dog out for the night but let him in again in the morning, and he proceeds to do it again in the kitchen, on the mat. I clean up, field some birthday calls and begin packing. We are going camping. I am adamant I want to be in nature on my birthday, as I was last year.
On my 37th birthday, we went hiking. We were both feeling a little ill from our Covid shots, so we didn’t go far. But still, on top of an outcrop of rocks I saw an otter climb out of the river and disappear into the reeds. Then another climbed out behind it. I was astonished to see these creatures only an hour from Joburg and looked them up when I got home. Some say they represent children. I think then that I’ll get pregnant with twins.
But this year there’s a car Ricky is keen on buying. For months we’ve been looking for something larger and safer than what we have – we marvel at the fact that when we bought our cars 10 or more years ago, we never even looked up safety ratings. It didn’t occur to us. Now we feel we need something better for the baby, and for ourselves. After three months of looking, something good has come up. Ricky test drove it and wants me to.
Buying a car is a momentous decision for us, who don’t cavalierly make big ticket items. I don’t even easily buy shoes (I’ve needed winter boots for a few years now but cannot bring myself to buy something I deem less than perfect. I just make do.) Still, I want to go camping. I don’t particularly want to buy a car on my birthday.
We go to the dodgy dealership on Louis Botha, and after running my hands down all the panels and staring into the open bonnet as though I knew a thing about the criss-crossing wires and hulking metal in front of me, we decide to buy it. We do the paperwork. Ricky keeps having to wipe his sweating hands on his shirt as he makes the payment on his phone. I drive it home and feel strange at my new imposing height. We have a computer on the dash and a dedicated place for sunglasses by the rear-view mirror. Is this what being an adult feels like?
We pack the camping gear into our new car and hit the road, only several hours late. At one point we hear a crunch but ignore it. We listen to a very good album very loudly on a sound system that doesn’t require us to pull the door panel to stop a buzzing. When we get to the campsite, which is two and half hours from home and very far from any shops, we realise we have forgotten Ricky’s hiking shoes and the mushrooms for the meal: mushroom risotto. We also realise the crunching noise was the sound of the front grill falling off.
Setting up the tent, monkeys jump into the car and steal a packet of expensive fudge. They eat it brazenly in the tree overhanging the car. One of them also pokes its head into the tent while we’re talking softly in the morning. How did it learn to use zips? Outside they’ve tried but failed to get into my Gaviscon.
That night, both Ricky and I get bad stomachs – maybe from roadside pies? – and have to run across camp to the ablution blocks. Then I try to sleep on the hiking mats we’ve always used but my hips are just too sore. I think I’m too big now. After several hours I give up and try to sleep in the car, but the alarm keeps going off. Finally I fall asleep just before dawn sitting up in the back seat.
In the morning we walk to a pool of clear water among the sun-soaked rocks. We make coffee and eat rusks and I swim. We talk about death and how I want the image of water, maybe this exact pool, at my birth, so I can also flow and be open, and we watch the bright green reeds waving slowly while above them the water hondjies hit into one another. I feel then that it has all been worth it.
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