My Car Broke Down Near a Strange Gas Station. The Clock Here Never Reaches 7:41.

The needle had been creeping up for ten kilometres before I admitted it was doing that. Then the dash light came on, a little red thermometer sitting in water, and a minute later steam rolled out from the seam of the bonnet. I pulled onto the gravel shoulder of the N12 and switched off. The engine gave one hard knock and then a grinding I felt in my seat.

When I tried the key again, nothing turned over.

I got out. Late February, close to seven in the evening, and the heat hadn't let up at all. The tar was soft enough to take a heel mark. In every direction the veld was brown and split, flat to the horizon, with one stand of thorn trees that gave no shade I could use.

I'd been in Upington for three days covering a Grade Eight class whose regular teacher had gone in for a hip. Short job. I'd done the register, marked a pile of fractions, and one boy had asked if I was somebody's uncle. Nine years of that across Cape Town, a day here, a week there, whatever the agency phoned about at six in the morning.

I tried the phone anyway. One bar, then none. I wasn't worried yet, mostly because nobody was waiting on me. No one would be standing at a window in Observatory wondering where I'd got to. That's an easy thing to live with until you're standing beside a dead car.

Eleven cars went past before anyone slowed. I counted. Out of habit, I suppose. A bakkie came up from the west, rattling so loudly I heard it before I saw it, dull green paint worn down to primer on the doors. It stopped past my bumper and the driver sat there a moment before getting out.

He was a big man, six foot one at least, broad through the shoulders, in khaki shirt and trousers and boots caked with old dust. Grey-streaked hair cut short. He squinted at me with very pale blue eyes, walked around my hatchback once, and put his hand briefly on the bonnet, then took it away fast.

"It overheated," I said.

"Then something seized, I think. Thank you for stopping. I'm Chidi."

He nodded at the car, not at me. From behind his seat he pulled a length of chain, and he crouched and hooked it under my front end without asking whether that was what I wanted. It was, so I kept quiet. I steered while he towed, which meant forty minutes of watching the back of his bakkie and its one working brake light.

When we stopped at a junction I got out and walked up to his window. "Do you farm out here?"

Nothing. He looked at the road.

"It's good of you to do this. I can pay for the diesel, at least."

He shook his head once. I went back to my seat. I tried again when we pulled in, something about the drought, how dry it looked, and he unhooked the chain, coiled it, tossed it in the back, and drove off. His tail lights were gone before I had the handbrake on. My phone said seven forty.

Twenty to eight, the sun nearly down, and I was standing on the forecourt of a petrol station I hadn't known was there.

It sat right on the road. Four pumps, a low building with a flat roof, and behind the pumps a row of rooms with a door each, painted a green that had gone chalky. A mechanic's bay stood open on the left, a single bulb lit inside. Past the building I could see a cattle trough, empty, with a windmill over it.

The blades hung perfectly still. Nothing moved anywhere. The insects had started up, a high steady shrilling from the veld, and there wasn't any breeze to break it.

The man in the bay wiped his hands on a rag as I came over. He was lean and stooped, grey stubble, overalls dark with oil. I smelled diesel on him from three metres away.

"Amadi," he said, when I asked.

He looked at the hatchback, then at me. "Overheated?"

"And it seized, I think. Could you look at it tonight?"

"No."

He said it flatly, not rudely. "Light's bad, and I'm on my own. Morning. Seven, maybe."

"Is there anything nearer than Beaufort West? Any other garage?"

"Not on this road."

He turned back to his bench, and that was the end of it.

I checked the rooms. There were six doors, and the first five had keys missing from their hooks or nobody had bothered to clean them. I took the last room in the row. The concrete outside the door was still warm through my shoes, holding the whole day's heat. Inside was a bed, a basin, a fan on the ceiling that didn't turn, and a window looking out at the dry irrigation canal behind the building.

I put my bag down and went back around to the front to pay.

The shop smelled of cold chips and floor cleaner. A young man stood behind the counter in a station uniform shirt, thin, short black hair, maybe twenty-three. When I came in he smiled as though I were the best part of his evening.

"Hi there, welcome! You'll be needing a room, I'm guessing?"

"Already took the last one. I just need to pay."

"Oh, no problem, no problem. I'm Thabo."

He turned the register around on the counter and slid a ballpoint across. The pen was tied to the binding with a piece of string.

"Just your name and the date, sir. That's all."

I wrote it. Chidi Kamau, and the date. My handwriting leans to the right and I never learned to fix it. Thabo nodded at it with great satisfaction and took my cash.

I stayed there for a moment with the pen still in my hand, and I did what I always do in a room. I counted. Thabo. Amadi, through the side door, back at his bench with the radio crackling. A woman in a casual summer dress at the end of the counter, shoulder-length brown hair, paying for airtime.

She was reading the voucher number off her phone to Thabo and hadn't looked at me once. Through the window, two truckers stood at the diesel pump, one holding the nozzle, one leaning on the cab door.

Six people, counting me. I always get the number first and think about it later. Six, and not one of them would have noticed if I'd walked out the back and into the veld.

The clock over the cigarettes read seven forty.

I didn't wait for morning. I'd have lain there under a fan that didn't turn, listening to the insects, doing sums about what the car would cost. Beaufort West was forty kilometres off. That's a long night's walk, but it's only a walk, and the worst of the sun was already going.

I left my bag on the bed and took a bottle of water from the fridge by the door. Thabo rang it up with the same smile and said "Enjoy your evening, sir," which seemed an odd thing to say to a man heading out into the veld. I didn't tell him where I was going.

Nobody there had asked, and I've never been good at announcing myself anyway.

The road was empty both ways. The sky over the west had gone orange and then a dirty pink, and the tar still gave off heat like a stove somebody had only just turned down. I walked on the white line because the gravel shoulder was loose and I had on my work shoes, the black ones with the thin soles.

Within ten minutes my shirt was stuck to my back. The heat didn't ease when the light did. That's what I remember most about the start, how wrong it felt to have dusk come and no relief with it. The insects were going full pitch from both sides of the road, thousands of them, and nothing moved the air.

No breath of wind, not even from a passing truck, because there weren't any.

For a while the road ran dead straight, two poles and a wire running along with it, and I counted the poles because counting is what I do. I got to sixty-one and lost interest. Then the road bent. Then it bent again, a longer curve, and the smell of tar got thicker, the way it does on a road that's been baking all day and has no place to put the heat.

I kept going. My heels started to hurt around what I guessed was the hour mark, and I was pleased about it, in a way. Sore feet meant distance. I drank a third of the water and made myself stop there. I thought about the Grade Eight class in Upington, about the boy who'd asked if I was somebody's uncle, and then about my own flat in Observatory and the cold tap that drips, and how I'd stand under the shower tomorrow night and not care how long the water took to run cool.

I was making decent time. I was sure of it. A good stretch of road lay behind me, and I'd have bet money on that.

Then the pumps came up ahead.

First it was just the glow of the lit bay, low and yellow, and I thought, good, another garage, somebody to phone from. Then the shape of the roof, then the four pumps in a line, and the row of green doors behind them, and past the building the windmill standing over the empty trough with its blades hanging.

I stopped walking. My legs wanted to go on, so for a moment I had to stand there and tell them to wait.

It was the same station. I'd walked out of it with my back to the pumps and I was walking back into it from the other side, and there'd been no turn. I'd have noticed a turn. The truckers were still at the diesel pump, one with the nozzle, one leaning on the cab door in exactly the way I remembered.

I went into the shop because I didn't know what else to do.

"Hi there, welcome!"

Thabo said. "You'll be needing a room, I'm guessing?"

"I've got a room," I said.

"Thabo. I just left. I bought water off you, ten minutes ago."

I held up the bottle. It was two-thirds full and sweating in my hand, so I wasn't wrong about that part.

He looked at the bottle and then at me, and his face stayed friendly and kind and entirely empty.

"Oh, no, I don't think so, sir. I'd remember. We've been quiet tonight."

He laughed a little, as if I'd said something charming. "But we've got one room left, right at the end. Very comfortable."

I didn't say anything. Behind me the woman in the summer dress was at the end of the counter, reading a voucher number off her phone. The same number. I could tell from the rhythm of it, the pause after the fourth digit.

I told myself it was the heat. I'd had three days of marking and a long drive and a car dying under me, and I'd walked without eating since the lunch break in Upington. People lose time like that. People get turned around on straight roads, and the veld all looks the same, brown and flat and split.

But I had two walks in my head, and I couldn't make them agree. In one of them the road bent left, a long easy curve with the last of the sun on my right cheek. In the other it bent right, and the poles leaned in that direction, and the glow of the sky was behind my shoulder.

Both felt like the walk I'd just done. I could see each one clearly, down to the white line, and I couldn't lay one over the other so the bends matched. I stood there at the end of the counter with my wet bottle and tried, and my chest went tight, the way it does when I've lost a class and can't tell which of them I've lost.

"Sir? Are you all right? Can I get you something cold?"

"No. I'm fine."

My voice came out thin. "I need to check something."

The register was still open on the counter where Thabo had left it, turned toward me with the pen on its string lying across the page. I went over to it. I wanted to see my own name. I wanted the plain, ordinary evidence that I'd signed in once, in my own leaning hand, and that this was only a long and stupid evening.

My name was there. Chidi Kamau, and the date. Same line, same spot on the page.

But the writing was wrong. The letters stood up straight, where mine lean. The loops on the K and the d were too wide and too slow, each stroke laid down carefully, drawn rather than written, the way you'd copy a shape off a wall across a room. Nobody who signs their name every day writes it like that.

It was patient. That was the word that came to me, and I didn't like it.

I put my finger beside the line, not on it. The ink was dry.

I left the register where it was and walked out past Thabo without a word. He said "Goodnight, sir," to my back, and I didn't answer him.

The concrete outside had cooled a little but not much. Amadi's radio was still crackling in the bay, and I kept my eyes on the green doors until I reached the last one. My key was in my pocket. That was something. The lock turned the way it had before, and my bag sat on the bed where I'd left it, the zip half open because I'd been in a hurry for my water bottle.

I stood in the doorway and checked it all over like a stranger would. The basin, the dead fan, the dent in the pillow from nobody.

I wanted it to be tiredness. I'd have taken tiredness gladly. Three days of Grade Eights will do things to your eyes, and I've signed my name on forms so often that I've seen it come out looking wrong, the way a word does when you say it too many times. So I decided the register was that.

I decided it firmly and then went to open the window, because the room was an oven.

The window was a sliding one, stuck in its frame, and I never got it open. There was dust thick on the ledge, grey and soft, and nothing in it. No mark, no smear, nobody's finger. But on the glass, at about the height of my shoulders, there were two handprints.

They were pressed flat, fingers spread, left and right, a hand's width apart. Dust had been wiped away wherever the skin had touched, so each print was clean glass in the shape of a palm, and I could see the canal bed through them, cracked and pale in the last light. I don't think they were on the inside.

I think whoever made them had stood out there with their face close to the pane.

I'll admit what I did next, because anybody would. I put my hands up against the glass from my side, lined them up, and pressed.

They fit. Fingers, heel of the palm, the little pads at the tips, all of it. I stood there with my forehead almost touching the window and my hands matching somebody else's, and I had a moment of relief, stupid relief, because it meant I'd done it myself. I'd leaned on the window earlier and forgotten.

Then I looked at the thumbs. Mine sat where thumbs sit. Theirs were set a little off, a finger's width too far out and tilted, the way a thumb would be if whoever owned it had copied the shape of a hand without ever having been taught how one worked.

I took my hands away. The glass was warm where I'd touched it. The prints stayed.

There was a curtain, orange and thin, with a seam coming loose at the hem. I dragged it across and it didn't hide much, but it was enough that I couldn't see the glass. I sat on the edge of the bed with my shoes still on. My heels were raw and I didn't care.

The heat did not break. I'd been counting on night to do that. In Observatory, even in a bad February, the air gives up around ten and you can lie with the window open and hear the neighbours' television. Here it sat. The insects kept at it outside, high and steady, and there was no wind to move the sound around.

The ceiling fan hung over me, blades still, with a dead spider in the cup of the light fitting.

I took out my phone. One bar, then none, then one. No messages, which wasn't news. I looked at the time and it said seven fifty-one. I looked at the battery.

Seventy-four percent, which was what it had been when I arrived, or near enough. I'd walked for over an hour. I'd drunk a third of a bottle of water. My heels had blistered. None of that fit inside eleven minutes.

So I tried to build it from the other end. Breakdown near seven. Tunde and the chain, forty minutes, the station at seven forty. Register, then the shop, the water, the walk. Seven forty again, the same woman reading the same voucher number with the same pause.

I laid it out in order with my fingers on the blanket like I was doing sums for a Grade Four. And every time I got to the walk, it came apart. The bends went one way, then the other. The sun was on my cheek, then behind my shoulder. I stopped doing it.

It wasn't getting me anywhere, and it was making my chest tight again.

I thought about calling someone, just for the habit of thinking it. The agency would pick up at six in the morning, not before. The landlord only ever rang about the rent. There was a woman at the last school who'd once said "Take care, Mr. Kamau," and meant it, I think, but I didn't have her number and I'd never learned her first name.

I went through everyone in my phone and it didn't take long. If I didn't turn up to anything tomorrow, nobody would know it was anything at all.

I switched the phone off to save the battery, then switched it on again to check the time, and then off again.

Sleep came in pieces. I lay down on top of the blanket in my clothes, with my shoes finally off and set side by side at the foot of the bed. I'd go under for what felt like a minute and surface to the insects, the heat sitting on my chest, the curtain a dull orange square in the dark.

Once I woke sure I'd heard the window slide, but it hadn't. Once I woke with my own hands up in front of my face, spread, and I put them down on my stomach and held them there.

Amadi would look at the car at seven. That was what I told myself in the last stretch, the part of the night where you bargain. He'd find something small, a hose or a sensor, a part he happened to have. By eight I'd be on the road, and by lunch I'd be in Beaufort West, eating something hot and awkwardly telling the story to a waitress who wouldn't care.

And once I was home, I'd turn it into something with a good ending. I'd tell it to someone. I'd have to find someone first.

I lay there until the orange of the curtain went dark, and I watched the ceiling fan not turn.

I didn't wake up to morning. I woke up to the orange of the curtain, bright again, and for a second I thought I'd slept through to the evening of the next day. I checked my phone. Seven forty. Battery seventy-four percent.

I put my shoes on over the blisters and went out. The concrete was warm, the pumps were lit, and the truckers were at the diesel pump, one holding the nozzle and one leaning on the cab door. Through the shop window I saw the woman in the summer dress at the end of the counter.

I didn't go in. I'd already decided I wasn't going to trust my legs again.

So I walked to the edge of the forecourt, to where the gravel ran out and the tar started, and stood there with my arms folded. Cars would come, and one of them would stop. I'd stood like this a day ago, or the same day, and counted eleven before anyone slowed. This time I didn't get to count.

The first lights I saw were low and yellow and rattling, and I knew the sound before I knew the shape.

The green bakkie stopped just past me. The door paint was worn to primer and there was one brake light. He sat a moment before he got out, same as last time.

"Evening," I said.

"My car's back at the station, but I need to get to Beaufort West. Could you take me?"

Tunde looked at me, then at the road ahead. He tipped his head at the passenger door. I got in. The seat was hot and smelled of dust and old rope, and the chain was coiled behind it. I told him he'd towed me in, that I was grateful, that I'd tried to pay him for the diesel.

He drove with both hands on the wheel and his pale eyes on the road. I stopped talking.

The poles went by, then the wire. The road bent, and I watched it hard this time, trying to catch which way. It bent, and then it bent again, and the smell of tar came up through the floor. I don't have anything more to say about that stretch. I was looking right at it and I still couldn't tell you.

The pumps came up ahead, lit, and the bakkie slowed and turned onto the forecourt without Tunde saying a word. The clock over the cigarettes showed through the shop window. Seven forty.

"Please," I said.

"Just keep going. Just don't stop."

He stopped. He sat there with the engine rattling until I got out, and I stood holding the door because I didn't know what else to do with it. Then he pulled it shut himself, reached over to do it, and drove off. He didn't look at me once. The one brake light went red at the edge of the road, then dark.

Amadi was at his bench with the radio crackling. He'd just wiped his hands on the rag, same as before. He glanced up and didn't seem to recognise me, which I was getting used to.

"Your car," I said.

"I need you to try it. Tonight."

"Light's bad. I'm alone. I'll look at seven."

"I'm not asking you to take the engine apart. I'm asking you to turn the key. One try."

"It's seized."

"Then it won't start, and I'll leave you alone, and you can say you told me."

My voice was rising and I let it. Nine years of covering other people's classes, and I could count on one hand the times I'd raised it at an adult.

"Please. Five minutes. I'll pay for the five minutes."

He looked at me for a good while. Then he said something under his breath, in no language I knew or maybe just in grumble, and dropped the rag on the bench. He took the keys from my hand, because I'd been holding them out, and walked over to the hatchback. He sat in the driver's seat with his knees up near the wheel and turned the key.

It caught on the first turn. Not a cough, not a grind. It just started and ran, and I heard a sound come out of my own mouth that I wasn't proud of, a sort of cry. Amadi watched the temperature needle and it sat where it should. He got out slowly and held the door open for me like it was nothing.

"Huh," he said.

I ran to my room for my bag. I threw it across the back seat. I didn't tell anybody I was going. Maybe that was the one thing I did right, though it didn't help.

I pulled out onto the road with my window down and the heat coming in. I zeroed the trip meter. One kilometre, and the pumps shrank in the mirror. Three. Five.

The needle held steady and the engine ran sweet and even, and I laughed once, out loud, alone in the car. At eight kilometres the road bent left. At nine it bent right. At ten the poles on my side leaned the wrong way and I looked at them and then away. Eleven.

I gripped the wheel at ten and two, the way they teach you. Twelve.

The headlights found the pumps.

They came up out of the dark, four in a line, with the lit bay behind them and the green doors and the windmill over the trough. I took my foot off the accelerator and let the car roll. Through the shop window the clock over the cigarettes said seven forty.

I pulled onto the forecourt and put it in park, and I let my forehead down onto the steering wheel. The horn didn't go off. I'd hit the middle with the heel of my hand, but the car was off by then, and I was only resting. The plastic was warm and slightly tacky. I stayed there a while, and I could hear Amadi's radio.

When I lifted my head, I looked at the first pump through the windscreen. I'd parked at the bay, beside the bench, that first night. It had been a good long stretch of gravel from the road to the pumps then, a stride or ten. I'd crossed it with my bag. Now I was sitting right up against the island, and the edge of the tar was behind my back bumper, only a few steps away.

I turned and looked. Two steps. Three, maybe.

The station was nearer the road than it had been.

I didn't sleep much after that, but I can tell you exactly when I heard it first, because I was lying on top of the blanket with my phone off and the orange curtain gone the color of weak tea.

It came from behind the wall. A creak, slow and uneven, a long lift and then a hitch and then a short drop. I knew it, which was the worst part. My aunt had a windmill on her place outside Worcester, and on still days when the wind came up just enough, the pump arm would go up and come down with that same sound.

Only hers brought up water. This was a pump arm lifting with nothing to lift.

I lay there and told myself it was the pipes. There weren't any pipes. I'd seen the basin tap and it hadn't so much as dripped.

So I counted. I do that. Seven strokes, a gap, six strokes, a gap. The gaps were never the same length. The windmill was out the back past the canal, by the trough, and I'd looked at it a dozen times since dusk and the blades hadn't moved.

They hung there. Whatever was making the noise wasn't the blades.

It was farther off at first. Then it wasn't. Somewhere around the third or fourth set it was in the canal, and after that I could hear the dry mud give a little under it, a soft crackle between strokes. Each time it was nearer the window, and I thought about the handprints behind the curtain, and I kept my eyes on the ceiling fan.

At the end it was right at the wall, under the sill, so close I could have lain with my ear to the plaster and heard the joint turn.

It stayed there. I don't know if it was waiting or just stopped. I didn't get up to find out, and I didn't pull the curtain. My hands were flat on my stomach, and I held them there until the orange went dark.

The third evening I didn't go anywhere. I woke to seven forty, put my shoes on, ate a packet of chips standing at the counter while Thabo asked if I'd like a room, and sat on the bed and let the clock run, if it was running. I kept the window shut and the curtain across.

Nothing came that night. I think now it just didn't need to. I'd given it plenty to chew on already.

By the fourth evening I was done with the road. I'd walked it, ridden it, driven it. It bent however it wanted, and every bend ended at the pumps. But a ditch doesn't bend. Somebody digs a canal to carry water in a line from where it is to where it's needed, and I figured that if there was one thing in the Karoo that was honestly straight, it was that.

I had a torch in the glovebox, a cheap yellow one I'd bought at a petrol station in Bellville and never used. The batteries were fine. I clicked it on and off twice beside the car, then went around the back of the rooms, past the green doors, past mine, trying not to look at my own window.

The bank was about chest height. I put the torch down on the lip, hauled myself over, picked it up again and dropped into the bed. The mud was cracked into plates the size of dinner plates, with the edges curled up and brittle, and they broke under my shoes with a sound I felt in my teeth.

It was still hot down there. No breeze got into it. I turned the torch along the canal and it ran away from me, narrow and dead straight, with the light going out ahead and finding more of the same.

I'll tell you, I felt good. For about a hundred steps I felt very good. My heels were bad and my shirt was soaked through, but I was walking in a line and I could see exactly where I was going. I wasn't counting poles. I wasn't watching where the sun sat on my face.

Then the creak started up ahead of me.

Not behind. Ahead, out past the reach of the torch, one long lift and a hitch and a drop. I stopped. It stopped. I took a step and it creaked again, and I took another, and it creaked again, and I understood that it was keeping time with me.

Its stroke was my stride, a little slower, a little off. When I sped up, it sped up. The distance between us stayed what it was, and I never got a look at anything.

I thought about turning around. The rooms were back there, the lit bay, Amadi's radio, and I could climb out and sit on my bed and let it be seven forty again. And I thought about doing that over and over until I was the sort of man who did. My legs went hot. My mouth was dry as the mud.

"I'm leaving," I said.

It came out thin, so I said it again, louder, in the voice I use at the back of a hall.

"I'm leaving. I'm going home. You can't keep me here."

I'd have said it to anyone. That's what I'd tell you if you asked. It was what you say when you've had enough, and I didn't think about it at all.

The creak stopped.

Everything else carried on. The insects were still going on both banks, a high shrill with no gaps in it, and my own breathing was loud in my ears. I held the torch out in front of me with both hands. The beam sat on the mud. Nothing moved in it.

I waited, I suppose, half a minute. It felt like longer.

Then it started again, only not the way it had been. It was slower, and careful, and it came in pieces. A lift. A drop. Two short strokes close together, then a long one, then a hitch and a last drop on the end.

I'd heard that shape before. I'd heard it in staffrooms and on register lists, said by people reading off a sheet, a beat of the tongue on each part, the stress falling on the second word.

It was making my name. Not the sound of it. Only the rhythm, the creak bending itself around the four beats of it, the way you'd tap out a tune for somebody who couldn't hum.

Chi-di. Ka-mau.

It did it once. It waited, and it did it again.

I didn't wait for a third time. I turned around and walked back the way I'd come, fast, with the torch beam bouncing on the mud and the plates cracking under my shoes. The creak didn't follow. I'd have preferred it did. I kept hearing it anyway, behind my left ear, though when I stopped to check there was only the insects.

The bank came up out of the dark sooner than it should have. I set the torch on the lip, got my elbows over, and kicked at the dirt until my knee found a ledge. When I got my head above the edge there were headlights in my face.

The bakkie sat idling at the corner of the rooms with its nose toward me, rattling the way it always did. One headlight was dimmer than the other. I hadn't noticed that before. Past it, around the side of the building, the shop window showed the clock over the cigarettes, and it said seven forty.

Tunde was standing at the top of the bank with his arms down at his sides. He didn't offer me a hand. I crawled the rest of the way up and stood, and my shirt was soaked through and my heels were stinging, and we looked at each other. He looked older with the light behind him.

"I been trying to tell you," he said.

It was the first time I'd heard his voice. It was lower than I'd have guessed and slow, with the flat hard edges of a man who grew up speaking Afrikaans first. He said it like it cost him something.

"All week," he said.

"Every time. I sat there with the engine going and I couldn't make it come out."

"You could've said anything," I said.

My voice came out higher than I wanted. "You towed me four times. Four. You could've said one word."

"I know."

"What is it?"

He looked at the canal, not at me. "It's too late now. I'm not saying that to be hard. The road won't take you. It's not going to. Nothing holds this place, and nothing holds you, and that's the whole trouble."

"I don't understand that."

"You been telling it you're leaving."

He said it patiently, the way you'd explain something to a boy who'd put his hand in the fire twice.

"Every time. In my cab, at the bay, down there tonight. Every time you say it, you give it something. A bit more road. Another bend. Another hour. How a man like you walks off, which way he leans, when he gets tired. It listens. It's been listening to your going all week."

I thought of the tar smell, and the poles leaning the wrong way, and the road that bent left in one memory and right in the other. I'd thought that was my head. I'd been handing it over, a piece at a time, and thanking myself for being brave.

"It's nearly got it," Tunde said.

"Another few goes and it won't need you for the walking. It'll go itself."

He stopped, and his jaw worked. "It'll go wearing your name."

The bakkie shuddered on its springs. Somewhere around the back of the rooms, a long way off or very close, I heard one stroke. A lift and a hitch and a drop. Tunde heard it too. He didn't turn his head.

I didn't say anything for a bit. I looked at the green doors, and the last one was mine, and the curtain behind its window was a dull orange square.

Then I thought of the register. I'd been so busy being afraid of the handwriting that I'd never asked what it was for. Wide, upright, slow. Every loop drawn carefully. Somebody copying a shape from across a room, and getting a little better each time they looked at it.

It was practice. It had been practising my name.

I'd have liked to find that ridiculous. What I actually did was stand there on the bank and go through the places that knew me. The agency rang at six in the morning and never asked how I was. The landlord rang about rent. There were nine years of schools, nine years of staffrooms where somebody would point at the kettle and say help yourself, and not one of them had my address.

Not one had ever needed it. I was the name on the cover sheet, the one the head of department signed off on Friday. If I stopped answering my phone, the agency would send somebody else to the Grade Eights on Monday and think nothing more about it.

That was what I'd shown it. Not the road, really. The road was only how it got in. I'd shown it what it looks like when a man leaves a place and nobody turns round. It had watched me do it, patiently, for nine years' worth of evenings in four days, and it had learned the whole thing from the best I could give.

And I thought about Observatory. The tap dripping. Whoever walked up those steps in my shirt, with my name in their careful hand, and put the key in. Nobody would look twice at him. Nobody would even need to be fooled.

Another one walking in, and no one anywhere to notice.

I picked the torch up off the lip of the bank where I'd left it. The plastic was warm. Tunde watched me do it and didn't try to stop me.

"It's by the trough," he said.

"It's been there since you climbed out."

"Right," I said.

That was all. I'd done enough talking out loud that week, and I wasn't going to hand it any more on the way.

I went down the bank on my backside this time, heels first, and walked along the canal with the beam low on the mud. Forty steps, maybe fifty. The plates cracked under my shoes. The insects had been going all night but now I could hear every one of them. Then the canal ran out against the concrete trough, long and dry, with a dark green line inside it where water had once stood, and the windmill tower above it with its blades hanging.

I put the torch on the mud, then lifted it.

It was standing between the trough and the tower, arms down at its sides. It had been there the whole time, probably, every night I lay on that bed with my hands on my stomach. Narrow shoulders. The stoop. I knew that stoop.

I'd seen it in the glass of staffroom doors for nine years and never given it a thought. It was wearing it better than I did, honestly, because it didn't seem tired.

There was no face. Where one should be, the head was smooth and pale and flat, with nothing in it yet. Just room. When it turned toward the light, the creak came out of its neck, a long lift and a hitch. Then the shoulder, then the elbow.

It was all joints and no water.

It raised its right hand. The thumb stuck out a finger's width too far, tilted. I'd put my own hand over that print on the window and felt it.

Then it came toward me. Not at me, exactly. Past me. There was a gap in the bank behind me where the canal wall had slumped, and the road was up the other side of it. It wanted that road and I was standing in front of it.

I didn't move. My legs wanted to. I let them want.

"My name's Chidi Kamau," I said.

It stopped. Close enough that I could feel the heat coming off it, which was my own heat, the same as mine.

"I'm forty-one. I've got a flat in Observatory, up a flight of outside steps, and the third step wobbles. The cold tap in the kitchen drips. I keep meaning to tell the landlord and I never do, so I've got a pot under it and I empty it every morning before the agency rings."

The creak shifted. A lift, short. I kept going.

"I did three days at Upington. Grade Eight. A boy there asked if I was somebody's uncle and I said no, and he said, 'You look like one.' I liked that. I don't know why I liked that."

I swallowed. My mouth had no spit in it.

"Before that it was a Grade Six class in Bellville, and a girl called Lerato drew me a card when the regular teacher came back. I've still got it. It's in the drawer with the batteries. There was a boy who chewed the ends off every pencil I gave him. Nine years of them. Most of them I couldn't name you now, but I knew their faces for a day, or a week, and I looked at them. I did look."

The hand had come up to the level of my chest. The fingers were opening.

"My aunt's got a farm outside Worcester with a windmill that works. I haven't been in two years. I'm going home and I'm going to fix that tap, or ask the landlord, and then I'm going to ring her and say I'm coming Sunday. That's where I'm going. I want to go because the tap annoys me. Because it's mine. I want to stand in my own kitchen and be annoyed about it."

It reached. The hand closed on the air in front of my face, where the words were, and I watched it try. It had the road. It had every bend. It had how I walked and how I tired and which side I leaned to.

But this wasn't road. It was a tap, a card in a drawer, a boy with pencil ends in his mouth. Every one of them had an edge on it, and it kept closing its fingers and coming up empty.

The creak climbed. It was no longer a pump arm. It was higher and thinner and it went through my back teeth. I took one step back, only one, and the mud under my shoes split open with a crack, a black seam running from the canal wall to the trough. The head turned toward me, flat and blank.

For a second I thought it was going to say my name, in my own voice.

It didn't have one. The shriek went on until I couldn't hear anything else, and then the whole shape went down. It folded all at once into the trough and lay there flat and empty, with the thin shoulders at one end and the hand with its wrong thumb hanging over the lip.

Above me the windmill gave one long, slow turn, every blade of it, the vane groaning round on its post. Then it went still.

I sat on the lip of the trough until the sky went grey. I didn't want to look in it again, and I didn't want to leave it behind me either, so I sat with my back to the concrete and the torch off in my lap and listened to the insects thin out one at a time.

They stopped. That was the first thing I noticed, the quiet. The second was a breeze on the back of my neck, hot and small, but moving.

When I walked back along the canal, the mud plates cracked under my shoes the same as before, only now I could see them. The climb out was easier than it had been. Where the bakkie had stood by the corner of the rooms there was flat gravel and two tyre ruts, and that was all.

I looked down the road for a tail light. There wasn't one. I'd wanted to say thank you, and I hadn't, and I still think about that.

Through the shop window the clock over the cigarettes said six twelve. I stood there and watched it for a good while, just to be sure it would change. It did. Six thirteen.

Amadi was already in the bay with the bulb off and the daylight coming in flat across his bench. His radio was crackling. He looked up and nodded at me as if he'd seen me yesterday, which, from where he stood, he had.

"I'll look now," he said.

"You're up early."

"I'm up," I said.

He didn't ask anything else. I waited on the step until his watch said seven, and then he walked to my hatchback, which was parked tight against the pump island, and popped the bonnet and bent into it with a rag over one shoulder. It took him about a minute.

"Hose," he said.

"Split right along the bottom. That's your water gone."

He held it up so I could see the long lip of it, black and dry.

"Seized, no. I don't know who told you seized."

"I thought it had."

"Mm."

He had a spare in a drawer, of course he did, and a clamp, and he did the job while I stood holding a bottle of water that he'd filled from the tap behind the bay. I drank half of it. It tasted of pipe and I could have wept.

He charged me eighty rand. I paid cash and he folded the note into the chest pocket of his overalls without counting it.

"I want to look at the register," I said.

"Before I go."

Thabo was behind the counter with his chin on his fist, not asleep exactly. He straightened up when I came in and gave me the big friendly smile, and for a second it was the stranger's smile and my stomach dropped. Then he said, "Morning, Mr. Kamau. Hot one coming." He said my name like he'd read it off something.

I decided that was good enough.

"Can I see the book?"

"Sure."

He turned it around for me. The pen was still tied on with its string.

I went through it from the front. Every line was my name. Chidi Kamau, Chidi Kamau, in my own hand, leaning right the way it always has, the K cramped at the top because I never leave myself enough room. The dates stepped along down the pages. There wasn't one loop in there that was too wide, or too slow.

No other guests, either. Not the truckers, not the woman with the airtime.

The last page was gone. Torn out close to the binding, so there was just a ragged white edge with a few bits of paper still stuck in the staples. I ran my thumb down it. Nobody had a copy of that page now, whatever had been written on it.

"Everything okay?"

Thabo said.

"Yes," I said.

"It's fine. Thanks."

I carried my bag out from the last green door. I'd left the curtain drawn, and I stopped for a moment and then pulled it back. The window was clean on the inside and the dust on the ledge was undisturbed. The glass still had two prints on it. I put my hands up against them one more time, and the thumbs sat a finger's width too far out, but the rest of the shape was fading as I looked at it, the way a breath goes off a mirror.

I didn't wait to see it finish.

The car started on the first turn. I pulled out past the pumps, and the gravel gave way to tar with a small bump. In the mirror the station sat low and flat with its windmill standing over the trough. I didn't watch it long.

The road ran straight. I'm not exaggerating that to make a point. It ran flat and straight between two lines of poles with the wire sagging from one to the next, and the sun came up in front of me and stayed there. I counted poles, because it's what I do. I got to sixty-one, which is where I'd lost interest the first time, and kept going to a hundred and something, and then I stopped counting.

The trip meter passed twelve and I hardly noticed. At twenty I laughed out loud, by myself in the car. I'd had the window down all the way and the dry air blew through, and it smelled of dust and nothing else. No tar.

I came into Laingsburg a little before ten, with the needle sitting where it ought to. I pulled into the first petrol stop I saw, a Shell with a faded canopy and a boy in a green cap hosing down the forecourt, and I filled the tank. The woman in the booth took my card.

"Where're you coming from?" she asked.

Just making conversation.

"Short of Beaufort West. There's a place about forty kilometres out. Four pumps, a row of rooms with green doors, an old windmill."

She frowned at me, friendly enough. "On the N12? No. Nothing out there, sir. Not for ages. The nearest is us."

She looked at the boy, who had stopped hosing. He shook his head.

"Right," I said.

"Must be mistaken."

"It's the heat," she said, and handed back my card.

I sat in the car afterwards in the shade of the canopy. The engine ticked as it cooled. I had a folded sheet in the side pocket of my bag, a staff contact list from a school in Bellville that I'd been meaning to throw out for a year. Down at the bottom, under the head of department, was Nneka Nwosu, School Secretary, with an extension and a cell number in pen.

She was the one who always rang me back to confirm a booking. Thank you, Mr. Kamau. Eight o'clock sharp, please. Brisk.

She'd never once asked me for anything but a time.

I typed the number into my phone and saved her under her whole name. I looked at it for a bit. Then I pressed call before I could talk myself out of it.

It rang four times. "Nneka Nwosu."

"Hello. It's Chidi Kamau. The substitute. Grade Six, last year."

"Mr. Kamau."

Paper rustled. "Is there a problem with Monday?"

"No," I said.

"No problem. I just wanted to say I'm alive."

There was a pause on the line. I heard a printer going somewhere behind her, and a bell.

"Well, good," she said slowly.

"I'm glad to hear it. Are you all right?"

"I think so," I said.

"I'm in Laingsburg. I'm on my way home."

"Then drive carefully," she said.

"And Mr. Kamau, ring again if you like."

I said I would.