Open Writing

Personal items can disappear in an instant, yet take hours, days or even months to be found.

There was the mysterious case of Madeleine’s keys. At the end of a thoroughly enjoyable day at our house, when she wanted to leave and we wanted to begin setting our home straight, she fumbled around in her handbag for several minutes. A look of panic grew on her face, her eyes began to gleam with anxiety. “They’re not here,” she declared, “I know I put them in this pocket but my keys are not here!”

She turned her bag upside down, emptying the contents onto the dining room table. Lipstick, tissues, identity document, purse, spectacle case, diary, pen, and a hundred other items revealed themselves, but no keys. Not even a jingle.

With our help she turned the house upside down, we searched in the garden where she’d sat, we searched under the cushions on the couch she’d migrated to a little later, we searched in the pot-plants next to where she’d stood for a while, we grovelled on the ground to search under the piano, tables, chairs, we hunted in the bathroom, we peered through the windows of her locked car. The keys were nowhere.

Defeated, we returned to her handbag to search once again. This time, a faint jingling was heard as she lifted it. “They have to be in here!” she exclaimed, turning it upside down again. When it was empty, there was still no sign of the keys, but as she turned the empty bag the right way up again, the tinkle of keys rattling together was definitely heard. Sheepishly, she opened an almost-invisible zipped compartment underneath the bag, and there they were…

Madeleine got home a lot later than she expected that evening, but at least she did get home, keys and all.

Recently, I had a similar experience. Every South African resident is required, from the age of sixteen, to carry an Identity Document, known to all as an ID. This is an official booklet with a photograph on the front page, a 13-digit identifying number unique to the individual, and contains details of citizenship, place of residence, date of birth, gender and so on. Without this document, no South African can acquire a driver’s licence, open a bank account, apply for a loan, get married or divorced, register the birth of a child, or any of a hundred or so other legal actions.

My daughter, having emigrated to England to be with her husband, gave me the task of selling her car. Before she left, we spent hours at the bank, presenting our Identity Documents, proving who we were and arranging for me to have Power of Attorney on one of her bank accounts and on the sale of the car.

A buyer was found relatively quickly and apart from the delay of their cheque taking a week to clear into Diane’s account, instead of a day or two, everything went smoothly. That is, until the day when, in rather a hurry, I needed to collect the original registration documents for the vehicle so that final transfer could be made to the buyer. Clutched in my left hand was a thick dossier of legally certified documents proving that I had Power of Attorney to sell the vehicle. The young gentleman assisting me took photocopies of all that he needed from the file, then smiled. “Do you have your ID with you?” he asked. I grinned back. “Of course,” I said, opening my handbag. I scrabbled around inside and started to feel rather warm, scrabbled some more, emptied it out on the counter in front of several other customers and agents: make-up bag, card-carrier, wallet, diary, note-book, next year’s diary, pen, comb, hand-cream, tissues, cell-phone…. How could so much fit into my little bag? I thought irrelevantly. “I ALWAYS have my ID with me,” I stated, embarrassed and bewildered, “but it’s not here…”

The kind young man said, “Never mind, do you have your driver’s licence with you?” I slipped the credit-card sized licence out of my wallet and handed it to him. While he was photocopying it, I searched the inside of my empty bag one more time before putting all my belongings back.

Where could my wretched ID have gone? I wondered. Eventually, clutching the registration papers for the car, I left the building.

During the next week I searched every corner and cupboard in the house. I returned to the branch of the bank where I’d made the final payment for the car: I remembered using my ID there to prove that I had Power of Attorney to transfer the money to clear her loan account. No-one had seen it. I re-traced my way through everything I’d done that day, asked at various shops in the mall, and hoped and prayed that I hadn’t dropped it at the airport where I’d gone to meet my stepson for a coffee between flights. By the time I left the airport - I’d been flustered as he’d missed his flight, we hadn’t met up after all and I didn’t know quite where he was… What with the worry of the car sale and the uneasiness about my step-son, I could have easily dropped my ID anywhere without noticing.

Eventually, I did the sensible thing and went to Home Affairs where I spent five minutes and fifty Rand on four photographs, then an hour and a half and twenty Rand to apply for a replacement ID. Shaking with the sheer effort of reaching the head of any queue in South Africa, I came home.

Five days later, Leon and I were driving home from lunch with Mum. As we neared home, I opened my handbag to take out the house keys. Right on top was my ID, sitting there smugly as if it had never vanished into thin air…

This type of occurrence is one of the mysteries of life. Things that we cannot find with the help of friends and family looking in the same places we search ourselves, suddenly materialise when we least expect it.

I suppose it is explained by the stress of the moment, when we find that something we know is always there isn’t immediately apparent. We start looking in all the least likely places for it, looking around it and over it, not even expecting to find it. Eventually, it turns up where it is usually kept, surprising everyone.

Life is indeed a mystery.

Until next time…. ‘here comes Treble!’

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by Isabel Bradley