Chapter 3

I would sit on the step and watch him. The sun would fall across his back, and the flowers would nod in the breeze, and I would think about how strange it was that a wall could separate one family from another. We called them neighbours, but I did not know what that meant. They were just the people on the other side—the ones I saw from a distance, the ones whose voices carried over the fence in fragments I could not piece together.

Every house was a different story. I knew that even then, though I could not have said it. The house to our left had a dog that barked at nothing. The house to our right had a child who cried at night. The house across the street had a woman who hung laundry on a line, the sheets snapping in the wind like flags. They were all separate, all contained within their own walls, yet they were all rooted to the same point—the same street, the same soil, the same patch of earth that ran beneath Alberton.

I thought about the trees in the garden. The banana trees, with their broad green leaves, and the others I did not know the names of. They grew in different directions, their branches reaching for different patches of sky, but their roots were tangled underground, connected in ways I could not see. I wondered if people were the same. If the walls we built above ground were only illusions, and beneath them, beneath the soil, we were all woven together like roots in the dark.

I remember watching the children in the street. They were not my friends—I did not have many friends—but I saw them from my window or from the gate. They ran and shouted and kicked balls in the dust. They seemed to belong to the world in a way I did not. But I also saw their mothers, their bellies round with babies, and I thought about how children form in the womb like fruit on the branch of a tree. First, nothing. Then a swelling. Then a shape, small and perfect, growing in the dark until it was ready to come into the light.

I did not understand it then. I only knew that it was mysterious, and beautiful, and that it happened everywhere, in every house, behind every wall. The same process, the same miracle, repeated over and over. It made the walls seem thinner somehow, less solid. As if the stories inside them were not so different after all.

Above it all, the blue sky stretched from one end of the street to the other. It was full of breath, of life, of hope. I would lie on my back in the garden, the grass cool against my skin, and stare up at it until my eyes blurred. The sky did not care about walls. It did not care about which house was which. It covered everything equally, without judgment, without division. I felt small beneath it, but also part of something vast. A single leaf on a tree whose roots I could not see.

The birds gathered in the trees and on the telephone wires. They spoke to each other in calls and songs, their voices rising and falling like a conversation I could almost understand. I imagined they carried messages from one house to another, from one family to the next. A sparrow might take a secret from the house with the barking dog and deliver it to the house with the crying child. A dove might whisper a prayer from my father's lips to the woman hanging laundry across the street.

I believed it. I believed the birds were messengers, spreading news like people spread gossip by word of mouth. They did not need walls or doors or fences. They flew over everything, their wings beating against the air, and they saw what no one else could see. They saw the stories unfolding in every yard, every kitchen, every bedroom. They saw the joy and the pain and the ordinary moments that made up a life. And they carried it all, thread by thread, stitching the neighbourhood together in ways no one noticed.

I once asked my father if the birds talked to each other. He looked up from the flowers, his hands still in the soil, and smiled. "They do," he said. "They tell each other where the good seeds are, where the water is, where the danger lies. They have their own way of speaking." He paused, and his eyes went to the sky. "Maybe they carry messages for us too, if we know how to listen."

I did not know how to listen. I tried, but the birds' language was a mystery to me, like so many other things. I could hear their songs, but I could not translate them. I could see them fly, but I could not follow. I could only watch and wonder, and let the hope of their messages settle into my chest like a seed waiting to grow.

I think about that now—about the walls, the neighbours, the trees, the sky, the birds. They were all part of the same picture, the same puzzle I have been trying to assemble. The facebrick house stood at the centre of it, solid and unchanging, but everything around it was in motion. The flowers bloomed and died and bloomed again. The children grew and changed. The birds came and went. The sky stayed blue, but the clouds moved, and the light shifted, and the shadows stretched and shrank with the hours.

And beneath it all, the foundation held. The place where the house met the earth. The place I kept returning to in my mind, as if it were the only fixed point in a world of flux. I would squat beside it, run my fingers along the line where brick met soil, and feel the weight of everything pressing down and the strength of everything holding up. It was the same for every house, I realised. Every foundation bore the weight of its story. Every wall enclosed a world. Every family was a tree, rooted in the same earth, growing in its own direction.

I remember a moment, a clear one, from those years. I was standing at the gate, looking down the street. The sun was low, casting long shadows across the pavement. A bird landed on the fence beside me, its head tilted, its eye fixed on mine. It did not fly away. It stayed, as if it had something to tell me. I held my breath, waiting. But the message did not come. After a long moment, it lifted off and disappeared into the amber light.

I did not know then what it meant. I still do not know, not fully. But I have come to believe that the messages are not always meant to be understood. Sometimes they are meant to be felt. A whisper in the air, a flutter of wings, a glimpse of something just beyond the edge of knowing. They are pieces of the puzzle, too, no less important than the wild strawberries or the banana trees or the foundation itself.

So I keep returning. To the garden, to the walls, to the sky, to the birds. I keep gathering the pieces, even the ones I do not understand. Because I know now that the picture is not something I will see all at once. It will reveal itself slowly, one memory, one emotion, one image at a time. And when the last piece falls into place, the door will open.

From wonder to knowing. From not fitting in to understanding why. That is the journey, and it began in a garden in Alberton, Gauteng, in a facebrick house with a foundation that holds more than walls. It holds the roots of a life still growing, still reaching, still searching for the light.

And the birds are still flying, carrying their messages across the blue sky, stitching the world together one song at a time.