The Chains I Wore in 1997, and the Registration Fee I Could Not Cover

When I was twenty three I wore more gold than sense. This was the late nineties, in Durban, and I was a young man with my first real pay packet and a firm belief that a chain around your neck told the world you had arrived. I bought a rope chain first. Then a heavier one. Then a bracelet to match, and a ring with a flat face that I thought made me look like somebody in a music video.

I am fifty now, and I have not worn any of it in twenty years. It has lived in a shoebox on top of the wardrobe, wrapped in an old vest, gathering the particular dust of things you keep but never look at.

The email that changed the shoebox

My daughter Thandeka is the reason the shoebox came down. She is the first person in my family to finish school with the kind of marks that open doors, and this year one of those doors opened. She got into university to study engineering. I read the acceptance email standing in the kitchen and I had to sit down on the step because my legs did not feel like mine.

Then came the second email, the one with the numbers. Registration fee. First block of fees. A residence deposit. The joy and the fear arrived so close together that I could not tell them apart.

I am not a poor man but I am not a wealthy one either. I drive a delivery route for a wholesaler and I have done for many years, and there is a certain amount that leaves my account before I have even seen it. I sat with a calculator that night and I could make most of the numbers meet, but not all of them, and the gap was the kind of gap that keeps a father awake.

Remembering the vest

It was Thandeka's mother who remembered. She was folding washing and she said, almost absently, what about all that gold you used to wear, is it still up there. I had genuinely forgotten it existed. It belonged to a person I no longer was, a person who thought a rope chain was an achievement.

I fetched the shoebox down and we spread it out on the bed and I felt a strange embarrassment looking at it, the way you feel looking at old photos of yourself with a haircut you were once proud of. The rope chain. The bracelet. The ring with the flat face. A second thinner chain I had forgotten entirely. A pair of gold cufflinks somebody gave me for a wedding I could no longer place.

Thandeka came in and picked up the big chain and put it on over her pyjamas and burst out laughing, and for a moment the fear in the room lifted. She said, Baba, you wore this, in public. I said yes, and proudly, and we all laughed until it hurt a little.

Learning what it was actually worth

I had no idea what any of it was worth. In my mind it was still worth what I had paid for it as a show off young man, which is not how gold works at all. A colleague at the depot told me that the price has nothing to do with the fashion or the make, that nobody pays you for how good the chain looked in 1997. It is the weight and the purity, the gold itself, and the design counts for very little.

He said I should be careful, that there are places that will look at a desperate man and offer him half of nothing, and that I should find proper Jewellery Buyers who would weigh everything in front of me and explain the price rather than just naming a figure and folding their arms.

That advice mattered. I am a man who spent his whole life being sold to, standing at counters while somebody decided how clever they could be at my expense. I did not want to be that man again, least of all with my daughter's future sitting in a shoebox.

The counter

I went in on a Saturday morning with the vest and the shoebox in a shopping bag, feeling faintly ridiculous. The woman behind the counter did not treat me as if I were ridiculous. She laid a black cloth down and put each piece on a small scale and wrote the weight on a slip, and she showed me the reading each time so I could see it with my own eyes.

She explained that the rope chain was the good one, heavy and high purity, and that the ring with the flat face was actually plated over something cheaper, which made me laugh out loud, because of course the piece I had been proudest of was the fake. She was patient about it. She did not make me feel like a fool for not knowing.

When you go to somebody offering Cash for Jewellery, the whole thing lives or dies on whether they will show you their working. This woman showed me hers. The number she reached at the end was not a fortune, but it was real, and it was fair, and it was almost exactly the size of the gap that had been keeping me awake.

What the shoebox paid for

I kept two things. The thin chain, because Thandeka's mother liked it, and I had it cleaned up for her instead. And the cufflinks, because a man should own one nice thing even if he never wears it. Everything else I chose to Sell Gold Jewellery and let go, the rope chain and the bracelet and even the fake ring, which they took anyway for the small amount of real gold in it.

I drove home and paid the registration fee that same afternoon, sitting in the car in the parking lot with my phone, and I watched the confirmation come through, and I put my head on the steering wheel for a while.

Thandeka does not fully understand what it cost me, and I do not mean the money. I mean what it is to hand over the last proof of a younger, sillier, freer version of yourself so that your child can become who she is meant to be. But I would not trade it. Those chains told the world that a twenty three year old had a little money. They now say something much better. They say a girl from my house is going to build bridges and roads, and her father found a way.

Sometimes I think the gold was just waiting up there on the wardrobe all those years for a reason to matter. It finally found one.