COLUMN: JANINE STEPHEN

An immaculate paint job is a fine thing. But the dings and scratches on a loved vehicle can tell their own travel stories, writes Janine Stephen.

“The Megane’s Achilles heel is its electric windows, which seemed so delightfully posh at first but, after year 14 and many a rough road, became prone to mishap. The switches get dusty and misfire, or the glass occasionally slips off the mechanism and slides into the door panel…”

Isit in the seat of what was once a deep-blue car, a blue like the horizon at dusk. On the radio is betrayal. A man has phoned his neighbour after seeing someone drive off in the latter’s car. “Let’s catch him!” he blurts. But ho-ho, it’s not a robbery, it’s a second-hand car ad. I wince: I know I have to sell this faded blue dream of a car, because it’s the only thing that makes sense now. I have no mechanical skills, and cars of a certain age need a safe pair of hands to diagnose hiccups and wheezes. The car was made in the year the Twin Towers fell, back when Julius Malema was still in student politics. How old is 20 in car years? If it was a pet, it would be game over.

Yet this elderly French hatchback

– a Renault Megane Expression 1.6 ℓ – still has spark. Its paint is peeling like sunburn from a life of street parking in Cape Town; there’s a long gash along the side, either gouged by a trolley or scored with intent by unknown enemies. Some might say the car lowers the tone of the street where I live, which is otherwise blessed with perky Polos and sassy Subarus. But its blemishes are like wrinkles: etched by time and adventures far afield.

Poor Madame was unlucky, acquired by peasant stock (i.e. this freelance writer), which accounts for her lack of cosmetic surgery over the years. I’ve made sure she’s well fuelled and cared for, though: Service followed service with a regularity that any pastor would applaud. The engine purrs with respectable parts; only the odd plastic widget has been bought at cost on Voortrekker Road. Seat covers hide unravelling seams and a steering wheel cover solved the problem of the finish turning to exhalations of black dust. Her key is the original, somewhat bent from being sat on.

So, the scars. A walk around the Renault is like a trip around South Africa. The aerial is a docked stump. That’s from the weekend when she stood stoically on the road above Smitswinkel Bay near Cape Point, a watermelon slice of beach tucked into a valley with no access road. You have to walk down a steep path with bags of food. (Remember the matches!) Cars stay parked and lonely next to the road. As we soaked in candlelight and sea spray in a cottage below, chacma baboons had a big night out on the Renault’s rooftop. We returned to a chewed aerial, a car adorned in baboon footprints, and a turd on the bonnet. The back windscreen wiper is still kinked. Also, the baboons loosened the rubber trim covering the roof-rack grooves… One flew off on the road from Cape Town to Pretoria, much to the shock of the driver behind us, and the other has simply disappeared into that great void of missing socks, hubcaps and working pens, never to be seen again. There’s a filigree of scratches on the right flank that recalls a rough patch of road in Mapungubwe National Park, where the car was entirely surrounded by elephants browsing in the riverine forest with tiny babies, the mothers sideeyeing the midnight blue hump in their midst. They didn’t seem to mind the smell of petrol.

It was on that trip that the temperature gauge hit 50 degrees and never quite recalibrated, much like a person is never quite the same after real travel. I might look the same after a trip, albeit with a tan or an extra 3 kg, and the car might return with an extra layer of dust, soon to be washed off. But the changes – new perspectives, encounters with strangers and entirely unexpected vistas and thoughts – run deep. These colour the future as inexorably as the kilometres that tick by on the odometer and the tyres that wear down. Roads that were once just lines on a map are now written into my memory in glorious

3D. And the Renault has been my constant companion.

The car has French genes, but as dust from its crevices attest, it has gone beyond the tarmac it was built for. Plastic trim and door handles are the usual casualties, shaken loose on corrugations in the Baviaanskloof and the Tankwa, or clogged with earth in Ndumo Game Reserve, Zululand.

It’s been to Springbok, where it rested in relief outside the Godfather bar, water replenished, after an alarming kilometre of Richtersveld track that would have been more sensibly conquered in a highclearance vehicle. It swerved through a maze of potholes outside Jozini and carried me safely away one night after the mood soured in a bar in Alldays. (An extract of a speech by HF Verwoerd was pasted to the wall…)

In Haga Haga, we tipped the vehicle’s innocent nose down the grassy slope of a valley that ended in a patch of coastal forest, where an old caravan was permanently parked: accommodation at rock bottom prices. Rather than force the poor car to cover that obstacle course too often, we let it rest and waded down a stream to get to the beach (even after a boomslang plopped from the trees into the water beside us).

The Megane’s Achilles heel is its electric windows, which seemed so delightfully posh at first but, after year 14 and many a rough road, became prone to mishap. The switches get dusty and misfire, or the glass occasionally slips off the mechanism and slides into the door panel. Result? Very awkward moments when the window is either open or closed. Permanently closed is annoying when you’re passing through a toll booth or driving into a paid-for parking lot; permanently open seems to invite instant storms and icy weather.

The back seat is somewhat scuffed. It has transported countless paintings (its co-owner is an artist, and moving studios or artwork is a fairly regular event), a fish tank, baby Egyptian geese, one vomiting yet wonderful friend, an entire family of Zimbabweans found wandering in their best clothes through an elephantfilled reserve, with no water in search of the border, a wheelchair belonging to an ailing parent, and a potted white stinkwood tree grown from seed.

The shocks aren’t so much worn as absent.

I’ve had punctures outside Harrismith and Howick, and Vermaaklikheid one night, when mole crickets marched over the dirt roads and turned wheel-changing into an episode of Fear Factor. The windscreen wipers are hidden under the front seat because three sets were stolen in rapid succession one winter.

After a carwash in Khayelitsha one day – the easiest way to keep an eye on the vehicle while I did some interviews – I was nearly highjacked, but the car started first time and I accelerated. It proved just as agile in Mkhuze Game Reserve when we startled a rhino that had been wallowing in mud following a battle with a territorial rival.

I remember once telling the insurance company that I parked the car on the street. “Yoh!” the consultant exclaimed. “That’s like donating it to the people!” But the car has stayed safe, and in my heart.

After a strange and dismal Christmas one year with the in-laws in KwaZuluNatal, the car mimicked overheating and sent us back, proverbial hat in hand, for an extra few days’ stay while mechanics puzzled over her symptoms. The car knew best: Things healed and we left after genuine goodbyes; in-laws in their dressing gowns in the garden at dawn, waving farewell.

Indeed, saying goodbye to this chariot of memories will be like losing years’ worth of diaries. But its headlights are dimmed by the equivalent of cataracts and its axles are creaky. It has to go.

Just not today.

I’ve had punctures outside Harrismith and Howick, and Vermaaklikheid one night, when mole crickets marched over the dirt roads and turned wheel-changing into an episode of Fear Factor.