The most profound realisation is that you were shaped more by absence than presence.

Malawi was a good man. Whether that was his real name, I could never be sure. Like many Africans at the time, he may have altered it to accommodate the white man’s naiveté, who found true African names too bothersome to pronounce. What I did know was that he came from Malawi; his skin was dark as midnight, his face open and honest, always quick to bloom into a smile. That smile lifted his cheeks, made room for his watchful eyes, and balanced a nose as wide as it was long.

The African sun glistened on his balding head, beads of perspiration tracing their way down the furrows of his forehead before dissolving into the salt-and-pepper bristles of his eyebrows and beard. He was no longer young, yet there was an undiminished vitality in the way he bent to the soil, digging with his bare hands as if the land itself spoke directly to him. I felt his warmth — a man rooted to the earth, at one with his surroundings, who lovingly crafted the soil as a gardener. I, a pale child of the same continent, could only watch in awe, my small hands clumsy, my mind too new to understand much beyond what I could see or touch.

At midday, when work paused, I often slipped into his company. We sat together in the cool shadows of the garage at the back of the property, the air faintly scented with oil and damp concrete. My mother had a saying — that sitting on cold floors would give me worms. In the way of children, I rebelled. I sat on every cold floor I could find, daring her warning to come true. In time, it did, though I suspected the culprit was the sandbox at preschool. Either way, I paid the price, though a stubborn flicker of triumph remained: I had proved her right at my own expense.

Lunch came courtesy of Ruth, our maid, who bore her duties with quiet grace. She brought pilchards in tomato sauce from the red-and-yellow Lucky Star tin, with bread so thick my mother called the slices “doorstops.” Malawi had his own enamel-blue plate and mug with a black trim — always the same. With practiced ease, he showed me how to roll the bread into small balls and dip it into the sauce, the way he might with maize meal. It was an intimate gesture, this small act of sharing. I was too young to drink coffee, but he would sneak me a taste from his mug of Frisco, sweetened with heaps of sugar and milk until it was more dessert than drink. We smacked our lips in unison and let out a long aaaahhhh, grinning at each other.

When he was done, Malawi rinsed his plate and mug himself, often with the garden hose. Ruth, following my father’s instructions, washed them separately and stored them away from our own crockery, for fear of catching “something.” Even as a boy, I sensed the injustice of it, though I could not yet name it.

Ruth was different. Where Malawi was rooted like the earth he tilled, Ruth moved through our house with the fluidity of water — quiet, efficient, yet holding depths invisible to me. She rarely spoke of the family she returned to on weekends, or the home that awaited her beyond the taxi rank. And yet she gave me safety: her voice calling me in for meals, her hands guiding me gently, her calm presence anchoring the chaos of our household. Her bed, raised on bricks to ward off the Tokoloshe, became my nightly reminder of unseen worlds, where danger and magic coexisted beneath the floorboards.

Every afternoon, Ruth joined the long line of nannies walking miles to collect the children from school. Their chatter rose like a song, fragments of stories, gossip, and laughter weaving together into a tapestry I could not read but could feel. Under trees in the summer heat, greetings were exchanged as if the world were one long chain of connections, each link a life known, a story remembered. My father, suspicious and bitter, called it conspiracy. “They could be talking about us,” he would say, a half-smile on his lips. Later, I would hear the echo of his voice: See? I told you so. But what I saw in those gatherings was something else — continuity, resilience, and recognition.

My father was a storm. Berlin clung to him like a shadow, a city erased by bombs and trauma, the birthplace listed on my birth certificate as “unknown.” Rumors followed him: that his uncle might have been his father, that the man I called grandfather was often absent, a nurse traveling endlessly. His anger was constant, unpredictable. A misstep, a stray dog, even a glance from a neighbor could summon the storm. Once, he kicked our pregnant dog down a flight of steps simply for being underfoot. Another time, when a scruffy mutt darted in front of the car, he accelerated instead of swerving. Only my tearful pleas made him stop, and though he shoved the limp body into the boot with promises of a vet, I never heard of it again. I learned early that punishments and cruelties were less about justice than about the timing of his mood, that fear was the measure of a child’s lesson. My empathy for animals grew fierce in those years, perhaps because they, too, lived at the mercy of his temper. The wave of emotion at the time was such that I cried the night after watching the scene where the cat is left in the rain in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

And yet Malawi’s patience, Ruth’s quiet care, and fleeting moments of my father’s charm threaded through my childhood, invisible lines of gravity shaping me.

Curiosity, as it often does, led me to disaster. One afternoon, I carried a box of matches to the far end of the garden. The dry buffalo grass whispered in the heat, brittle and ready, and I wondered what would happen if fire kissed it. At first it was a game: strike, ignite, blow out. But fire, once roused, obeys no games. The flames leapt and roared, devouring our yard and the neighbors’ with astonishing speed. Ash lifted into the sky, smoke stung my eyes, and I stood frozen, mouth agape, heart pounding.

Panic seized me. I ran screaming to the house, tears streaming, and by the time the fire brigade arrived, the entire street had gathered. Hours later, when the last embers cooled, my father demanded: “Fetch me a stick from the plum tree.” The tree, obedient in its silent witness, supplied the branch without hesitation, and the punishment followed.

The fire taught me the first lessons of consequence. The plum tree, the switch, the terror — they were only the surface. What burned most clearly in memory was the knowledge that creation and destruction could be separated by the smallest choice, and that the world was often harsher than a child could imagine.

Then came another lesson, subtler but deeper. One Friday, when my father had just paid Malawi, I slipped the money from his coat. I can still see it: his grey overcoat hung in the garage, the green ribbon and chrome star of the ZCC pinned to its lapel. In the pocket, a green ten-rand note, already promised in sweat and soil. I stole it, and with Koos next door, spent it all on sweets. I do not remember if Malawi noticed, or if my father ever discovered it. What lingers is not the act itself but the weight of betrayal. To steal from Malawi, whose bread I had eaten, whose mug I had sipped from, whose smile had made the world seem less harsh — that was unforgivable. I think I apologized, though memory is faint. His patience, his quiet dignity, was harsher than any punishment could have been.

Looking back, I see my childhood as a balance constantly tipping — between warmth and wrath, belonging and betrayal, innocence and consequence. Malawi and Ruth anchored one side of the scale; my father’s moods pressed hard on the other; and in the middle, I was learning the weight of my own choices.

The tension between my parents had always been there, coiled and unspoken. The good days were fleeting, the laughter and small joy brief interruptions. Eventually, the façade crumbled entirely. One afternoon, while sorting laundry with my mother, we found it: a blue short-sleeve work shirt, red lipstick on the collar. No words were necessary. The marriage was unraveling.

Not long after, the courts asked me to choose between them. I do not remember what I said, only the sense of inevitability, of balance finally snapping. Childhood, with its small certainties, had ended, leaving me in the hollow space between the warmth of Malawi and Ruth, the storm of my father, and the absent stability of my mother.