Who Is Tuned In to Thandi's Eleven-Kilometre Transmitter on a Johannesburg Hill?
At dusk above the city, a house singer switches on her own small transmitter and sends a signal exactly as far as eleven kilometres, which makes the question of who is listening very precise.
Twenty to seven. The jacarandas on the hill have dropped half their purple onto the bonnet of a hatchback, and Thandi is on her knees in it, feeding a cable through the back seat.
The transmitter is the size of a bread bin. It has two dials and a piece of tape that says nothing. She straps the aerial to a lamp post with a bungee cord. The sun is low and orange, and over to the east the highveld is building a storm the way it does in November, slowly and with opinions.
She flips the switch. A small red light comes on. That is all. No countdown.
Eleven kilometres, she tells me. That is how far it goes on a good evening, with the wind behind it. Past that it is just air.
So I wonder about you, out there in the dark. Maybe you are the night nurse on the third floor, with the window cracked. Maybe the guard in the booth with a flask and a torch. Maybe a man under a bakkie in Bryanston, passing a spanner to his own radio.
Thandi sings over a low kick drum that she runs from a laptop on the passenger seat. She does not announce herself. She sings about a door that someone left open. The frequency is one she will not give me. She says people who need it find it, and people who find it by accident are the best kind.
I ask her if it bothers her, that she will never know the number. She thinks about it. A taxi hoots somewhere down the slope.
"Eleven kilometres is a lot of people," she says, "if you think of them one at a time."
At five past seven her phone buzzes. One message, from a number she does not know. She reads it aloud.
"Is this the weather?"
