The 4 a.m. taxi to town had a boy who sang. Sipho hung from the open door of the Quantum, one hand on the roof, the other slapping the panel for a rhythm, calling the route like a hymn — Bree! Bree! Noord! — and somewhere between the stops he would sing, low, so you thought maybe you imagined it over the diesel and the cold.
The workers slept against the windows, women with hands already tired, men with lunchboxes on their laps. Sipho collected the coins and passed the change down the rows without dropping one, and he sang us into the day. He knew the songs our mothers hummed and some he made himself, about the road, about a girl in Orlando East, about how the sun was lazy and the poor were not.
I was sixteen and going to a school my mother could not afford, and I paid my fare in coins warm from my palm. Sometimes he would not take mine. Sing instead, he said, and I was too shy, so I owed him. I owed him for a year.
They found the taxi in a ditch past the koppie one morning in June, the driver alive, the boy who hung from the door not. He was buried on a Saturday with the whole route there, drivers hooting their horns in a line so long it became one sound.
I take that road still, in my own car now, heater on, doors closed. There is no singing in a car with closed doors. At the place where the koppie throws its shadow I roll the window down, even in June, even when the cold comes in like a hand, and I hum the one about the lazy sun. It is not a good voice. I never learned. But I am paying what I owe, coin by coin, the only way that is left, to a boy who sang us gently into every morning we were lucky enough to reach.