Hers was a city of winds and storms, of fierce sun and chilling fog, of long cold rains and terrible droughts, of unexpected hails and gales, and sometimes all those things in one day. A city of unease, Cape Town. A moody city. A place of rock and water. Rock and water. The mountain and the sea had long ago broken and brokered its shape, but history had pushed back at the natural rim of the coast and formed a place out of careful division.

When old women sat on stoeps in faded house-dresses saying terrible things about their neighbours one day and weeping like hired Greek mourners at their funerals the next. It was where men never quite outgrew those first longings for German engineering, and that rite of passage, the purchase of a Mercedes Benz, new or used, could happen well into middle age.

On insomnia-plagued nights, she told herself that she could have learned to live with and inside those stories, she would have found a way to meet them, offer to bandage him up, return him whole to himself. It was only much later when she realised that it wasn’t the stories, it was the constant fluctuation between being showered with attention and then abruptly ignored, being loved with a totalising force, and then treated with an arctic disregard. It was the knowledge that, at any moment, she could be made invisible: that terrible swing between being alive and dead.

She knew that what she had wanted back then, when it felt like they would live there forever, was the option to leave. That she’d found the noise and the filth and the constant nosiness of the neighbours unbearable, that she’d wanted to be able to visit for the Carnival. She’d wanted windless seasons of trees and land and space, the Kirstenbosch home of her girlhood, before they’d been moved from there too. But she kept the longing a secret, knowing its impossibility, knowing the law’s indifference to her preference.

Last week he took us to one of the kramats in Camps Bay - we walked up a path thick with the smell and scratch of fynbos, and at the top, the most incredible view of the ocean. It’s good to talk to him: I think he’s helping me understand everything a bit better, even though I don’t always like what I’m understanding.