Every Chain My Father Gave Me Came After a Good Night at the Casino

The Velvet Pouch

My father never gave me a gift on my birthday. He gave me gifts on Sunday mornings.

That was how I learned to read him. If he came home late on a Saturday night and slept until eleven and then appeared at the kitchen table in his gown, humming, with a small velvet pouch in his pocket, it meant he had won. If he came home late and slept until eleven and appeared without humming, it meant he had not, and we did not talk about money that week.

The pouch always held gold. A thin chain when I was eight. A pair of hoop earrings when I was twelve, before my ears were even pierced. A bracelet with a little heart charm when I was fifteen. A thick rope chain when I passed matric, which he fastened around my neck himself with fingers that smelled of cigarettes and cologne, telling me I was his lucky girl.

I believed him. For years I believed that I was the reason he won.

What My Mother Never Said Out Loud

We lived in Pretoria East, in a house that always seemed slightly bigger than our life. My mother was a pharmacist. She worked long hours and came home tired and did the accounts at the dining room table on Sunday evenings, with a calculator and a frown, after my father had gone to bed.

She never said anything to me about the gambling. Not once, in my whole childhood. She did not complain and she did not explain. But I remember the month when the DStv was cut off. I remember the year she sold her car and started catching a lift with a colleague. I remember her face on the Sunday mornings when he came out humming with the pouch, and how she would look at whatever was inside it and then look away and say, "That's lovely, Dad," in a voice I could not decode until I was much older.

I understand it now. Every chain around my neck was money that had come out of the house on a Saturday night and only some of it had come back. The gold was the part that came back. Everything else, the losses, the second mortgage, the borrowed money from my uncle in Polokwane, stayed invisible.

The Divorce and the Drawer

My parents divorced when I was twenty-three. It was not dramatic. My mother simply ran out. She moved into a townhouse in Moreleta Park with a small garden and a cat and started sleeping through the night, she told me later, for the first time in twenty years.

My father went to live with his brother. He is still there. He stopped gambling about four years ago, after a programme his doctor recommended, and he is gentler now, and quieter, and he phones me on Sundays. I love him. I want to say that clearly because the rest of this story might make it sound like I do not.

After the divorce, I put all the gold in a drawer. I could not wear it. Every piece felt like it had a Saturday night attached to it. But I could not get rid of it either, because every piece also had a Sunday morning attached to it, and my father humming, and me feeling like the luckiest girl in the world.

It stayed in that drawer for six years.

The Number on the Back of an Envelope

Last year my mother turned sixty-two. At her birthday lunch, I watched her count change at the till to pay for her own cake because she would not let me pay, and something in me turned over.

That evening I sat at my desk with a pen and the back of an envelope. I added up, as honestly as I could from memory and from things my aunt had told me over the years, how much my mother had quietly absorbed. The car she sold. The overdraft. The school fees she paid alone for two years. I am an auditor by training and I cannot help putting numbers on things. The number on that envelope was not something I could ever repay. But I could repay a piece of it.

I went to the drawer and tipped everything out onto the bed. Eight pieces. A lifetime of Sunday mornings.

Learning What the Gold Was Actually Worth

I knew nothing about selling gold. I had a vague idea, from radio adverts and signs on the side of the highway, that it was something people did when they were desperate, in back rooms, for not very much money. I did not want to be cheated and I did not want to feel ashamed, and I was not sure which of the two worried me more.

So I did some homework. I learned about karats and how to check the little stamp on the clasp with a magnifying glass. I learned that the price of gold changes daily and that the sensible thing is to know roughly what it is that morning before you walk in anywhere. I learned that reputable Gold Buyers will weigh your pieces in front of you and explain how they arrived at their offer, and that you are allowed to walk away.

A friend from work, who had sold her late grandmother's rings the year before, sat with me one evening and went through it all. She told me the hardest part was not the money. It was the moment you put the pieces down on the counter and let go of them.

She was right.

The Counter

I went on a Saturday morning, which felt fitting.

I laid the pieces out one by one. The thin chain from when I was eight. The hoops for ears that had not been pierced yet. The heart bracelet. The rope chain from matric, heavier than I remembered. The person helping me was patient and matter-of-fact. Each piece went on the scale. Each one got tested. Nobody asked me why I was selling and I did not volunteer it.

I had read enough to understand that I was taking part in a Gold Exchange of a very simple kind: my father's luck, turned back into the money it had once been. Weight and purity and the price that morning, nothing more. When the offer came, it was close to what I had worked out at home, which made me feel less like a fool.

I kept one piece. A tiny pendant, a gold star, which he gave me when I was ten. I do not remember what he won that night. I only remember that he put it in my palm and told me I was the brightest thing in the house. I wanted to keep the part of him that meant that.

Everything else went.

The Envelope I Gave My Mother

I did not tell my mother what I had done until it was done. I knew she would refuse.

I put the money in a plain envelope with a card, and I drove to her townhouse on a Sunday morning, with coffee and croissants, and I gave it to her at her little kitchen table while the cat watched from the windowsill.

She opened it and went very still. Then she asked where it had come from. I told her the truth. All of it. The drawer, the Sunday mornings, the envelope with the numbers. I told her it was not nearly enough, and that it was never meant to be enough, but that I could not wear the gold anymore knowing what it had cost her.

She cried, and then she was cross with me, and then she cried again. She said it was not my debt. I said I knew that. She said she did not need it. I said I knew that too.

In the end she used it to fix the leaking roof over her spare room, which she had been putting off for two years, and to take a short trip to the Drakensberg with her sister. She sent me photographs from a walking trail, both of them in sun hats, laughing at something off camera.

What My Father Said

I told my father too, eventually. I was afraid he would be hurt.

He was quiet on the phone for a long time. Then he said, "Good. I am glad it went to her." And then, after another long pause, "Did you keep the star?"

I told him I had. He said he remembered that night. He said he had lost a great deal more than he won, but that he had wanted me to have something to show for it.

People sometimes see Cash For Gold signs and feel sorry for whoever is walking through the door. I used to. But some of us are not there because we are desperate. Some of us are there because we have finally decided what the gold was for.

I wear the star most days now. It is very small. Nobody notices it. My mother noticed it the first time and touched it with one finger and did not say anything, and for once I understood exactly what her silence meant.