Twenty-nine Durris Road announced itself before you even got through the gate. A large blue ceramic plaque identified the Afrikaans architect who had designed it in the early 1900s. I was renting a national monument. I found that enormously satisfying.
Forest Town is not the kind of suburb that announces itself loudly. Tucked between the Johannesburg Zoo and the grand old avenues of Parktown, it's where the mining magnates settled a century ago — old money, old trees, old walls. Politicians live there. The Oppenheimer orbit once extended there. It's not flashy in the Sandton sense, no glass towers or new-money glitter. Just stately, unhurried, and absolutely sure of itself. The kind of place where the houses have histories.
You came in through big gates into a modest garden, garage immediately to the left. Above the garage sat a neat apartment occupied by a retired English couple — pleasant, unobtrusive, the sort of neighbours you couldn't have designed better. The main house was double-storey: entrance hall, beautiful woodwork throughout, and to the left a vast living room with a double-vaulted ceiling and a grand piano in the corner. To the right a wooden staircase led up to a landing, claw-foot bath straight ahead, one lovely bedroom overlooking the garden, and the master suite — enormous, with a super-king bed set under eaves and dormer windows looking out into the trees. Peter Curle had furnished the whole place beautifully, with the eye of a man who'd spent decades collecting properly. Out the back were the servants' quarters, where Herlimon the gardener lived, kept on as part of the arrangement.
I stood in that vaulted living room on my first evening and thought: after three years in Lanseria sharing a house with John Cartwright, of dirt roads and downloaded movies and making do, I was somewhere I could actually be proud of. That's a shallow thing to admit. I'm admitting it anyway.
The three dogs settled in immediately — Annabelle the yellow Lab, Lady the pavement special, and Rosie, the black Lab I'd inherited from Niels and Carey when they left for Copenhagen. Herlimon was delighted by the company. I bought a Bose sound system, not top of the range but enough to fill that double-vaulted ceiling properly. Good music in a room with real height doesn't just play — it inhabits the space. I turned it up loud. It was great.
The first thing I organised was a poker night.
I had a loose school of regulars by then. Steve Bates was the best of them, genuinely. Some of the others were arseholes, but that's poker. I cooked steak Béarnaise, opened some decent wine, and won. Forest Town, it turned out, suited me very well.
Peter Curle himself would appear two or three evenings a week for a drink. He was a lovely man — looked and sounded, if you can picture it, like a British Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that particular speech impediment wrapped in the most toffee of English accents. I liked him enormously and was deeply grateful for the rent he was charging me, which bore no relationship to what the market would have extracted. He'd mentioned something vague about needing help with his taxes, and I'd agreed readily, imagining an afternoon's work with a spreadsheet.
Then Shepherd arrived.
Shepherd was Peter's Zimbabwean man Friday — driver, fixer, general factotum, a man of infinite patience and a pickup truck. He pulled up one afternoon and began unloading cardboard boxes into the dining room. Then more. Then more after that. By the time he'd finished the dining room had ceased to exist as a room. Floor to ceiling, wall to wall — receipts, invoices, bank statements, documents in several languages spanning what appeared to be several decades of a complicated life.
I stood in the doorway for a long moment. Then I quietly closed the door.
I approached it the way you approach any impossible task — one bite at a time, without looking at the whole elephant too directly. Working through the evenings at the dining room table, once I'd excavated enough of it to sit down, I sorted and categorised and transferred everything onto spreadsheets with the patient determination of a man with nothing else to do after nine o'clock and a Bose system for company. It took months. Peter Curle received a substantial refund and was, by his own account, over the moon. I was proud of the work. I also knew with complete certainty I would never do it again.
It was during those long Forest Town evenings that I wrote for the first time. I'd been carrying the story of the night in Zambia for years — the shot kid, the drunk flight out, the Scotsman with his lion and his Chinese judo student. I finally put it down on paper and gave it to the English couple upstairs to read. They told me it was brilliant. I suspected they were being kind. They insisted I should write more. I filed that away for later.
Mikey moved in at the start of 2010, and he brought the cat.
Catty had walked into our house in Parkview on New Year's Day 2000, uninvited and entirely self-possessed, and had simply never left. Big black male, neutered since, named by six-year-old Angie with the magnificent disregard for imagination that only small children can pull off. Catty. It stuck.
The day Mikey arrived with his bags and his cat I was quietly beside myself with happiness. Here was my son, under my roof, my responsibility for a whole year. After everything — the every-second-weekends, the Wednesday night dinners, the years of borrowed time — this felt like something restored.
And then Catty disappeared.
We searched the house top to bottom. We called. We rattled food. Nothing. By the second day I was putting posters up around Forest Town, and if I'm honest I was in a low-grade panic. I had one year with Mikey. I wanted it to start well. The last thing I needed was for his most vivid memory of moving in to be the loss of the family cat.
We found him on the third day.
He was in the dining room. Behind Peter Curle's tax boxes. Sitting there in the dark among the receipts and the invoices, perfectly composed, as though he'd been conducting his own audit.
Mikey thought it was hilarious. I was so relieved I nearly joined him.
After that we settled into a routine that I look back on now as one of the quiet privileges of my life. I made his school lunch every morning — proper sandwiches, not an afterthought. I drove him in. Evenings he'd find his own way back, homework first without negotiation, then two episodes of How I Met Your Mother on the laptop. Cottage pie, spaghetti Bolognese, the dogs across the Oregon pine floors, Catty on whichever chair he'd decided was his.
It wasn't the family I'd imagined at twenty-three. But it was ours. And for that year, it was enough.