Before sunrise I am awoken by dripping water on the bathroom ceiling. At seven, I call Mr Khoza, a self-employed plumber who lives in a backroom in 8th Avenue.
He rings the bell at the gate persistently. When I arrive at the front door, he is holding a copy of the 'Joburg East Express' in front of his face. He keeps it there for a few minutes. I wait. Finally, with intense irritation and impatience, he enters the house.
In the bathroom we perform our usual song and dance routine which involves placing my small ladder on top of my small kitchen table so that once he reaches the highest rung, Mr Khoza can take one foot off the ladder and place it precariously on top of the door in order to hoist himself up into the bathroom ceiling and inspect my archaic geyeser’s latest affliction.
He disappears into the black hole. I wait nervously for his response. His diagnosis is always aggressive, incoherent, and turbulent. This is partly because he was apprenticed to a temperamental Portuguese plumber with a very limited English vocabulary for many years and partly because Mr Khoza - with good reason - is cautious not to commit himself.
The expletives stream out of his mouth, like an overflowing pot of food on the boil. He shakes his head. "It's fucked," he says. I have to establish whether the problem is redeemable or terminal so I try and get him to elaborate. "Fucked ! Fucked!" he says forcefully several times, spluttering with intensity, apparently believing that the weight of emotion behind the words should be sufficient to make a simple-minded person like me comprehend. "Little fucked or big fucked?" I probe. "Fucked! Fucked! Fucked!" He shouts, beads of sweat breaking out on his frustrated face.
After several phone calls to Mr Karam who owns the plumbing supply shop down the road, I give Mr Khoza the money to buy the parts.
I am still handing him lit candles hours later (I can't find my torch and Mr Khoza doesn’t have conventional plumbing tools to see in the dark).
Finally, the dripping sound gurgles and gasps and dies. Mr Khoza descends from the heavens, wreathed with an aura of satisfaction and achievement.
I am dizzy and so exhausted that I feel that my limbs have been dislocated from their sockets by the time I see him off the property. We stand at the gate like an old married couple, depleted by a domestic row that has been raging like a mountain fire for many years, leaving miles upon miles of scorched earth in its wake.
I observe that Mr. Khoza looks even older and more shriveled than he did when he arrived, his hair standing on end like a sucked mango, his shoulders stooped from the stress of his trade and the tyranny of his emotions.
With relief I wave him on his way, marveling that despite the fact that I feel like a victim of post-traumatic stress, the roots of our association go so deep into our individual and national pasts that our future is inevitably intertwined, like a creeper that has been growing along the walls of an ancient building for so long that it has become embedded in the structure.
