The Coin Mr Olivier Pressed Into My Palm After My Last School Match

The last board on a Friday afternoon

I learned to concentrate in a church hall in Krugersdorp that always smelled of floor polish and orange squash. That is where the chess club met, every Friday from two until half past five, and where a retired railway clerk named Mr Olivier taught roughly forty children a year how to lose without crying and win without gloating.

I was not a gifted player. I want to be honest about that, because most stories like this pretend the narrator was secretly brilliant. I was stubborn, which is a different thing. Mr Olivier used to say stubbornness was ninety percent of the game and the other ten percent was remembering not to move your queen out too early. He wore the same grey cardigan through every season and he called every one of us "my friend," so that when he said "no, my friend, look again," you did in fact look again.

My parents both worked shifts, so the club was really a form of childcare, and I think Mr Olivier knew that about half of us. He never let on. He treated a kid whose mother collected him at six the same as the kid whose father sponsored the trophies. That evenness was the first grown-up thing I ever noticed in a grown-up.

The habit of sitting with a hard thing

What chess actually taught me had nothing to do with chess. It taught me to sit with a position I did not like and not panic. You get into trouble on the board, and every instinct in your body wants to do something, anything, to make the bad feeling stop. Mr Olivier would tap the table twice, very softly, which was his way of saying breathe. Look at the whole board. The move is there, you just have not earned it yet.

I have used that tapping in my head at moments that had nothing to do with a chessboard. In a hospital corridor when my father was ill. In the front seat of my car outside a job interview I was sure I would fail. Two soft taps. Look at the whole board.

I stopped playing competitively at seventeen, the ordinary way people stop, by simply having other Fridays. But before my last school tournament, Mr Olivier asked me to stay behind after the others had gone. The hall was empty and the light through the high windows had gone that late afternoon gold. He took something out of his cardigan pocket, wrapped in a soft yellow duster, and put it in my hand and folded my fingers over it.

It was a gold Krugerrand. Heavier than a coin has any right to be. He said his late wife had bought two of them the year they married, and that she had wanted the second one to go to "a child who listens." He said I was the one who listened. I was seventeen and I did not have the vocabulary for what that meant, so I said thank you, sir, in the flat way teenagers say things, and I put it in my blazer pocket, and I have felt guilty about the flatness of that thank you for twenty years.

Twenty years in a sock

The coin lived in a sock, inside a shoebox, inside a cupboard, through four house moves. I never thought of it as money. It was Mr Olivier, and it was the church hall, and it was his wife whom I never met. When he died, some years later, I could not go to the funeral because I was working in another province, and I told myself the coin was my way of still having him. I would take it out once or twice a year, unwrap the duster, feel the weight, and put it back.

Then last year my wife and I decided to do the thing we had been putting off since our daughter was born, which was to convert the leaking single garage into a small room she could use for her physiotherapy practice. She had qualified, she had clients, and she was seeing them at a shared rooms across town that took a large cut and gave her the worst hours. A room of her own would change everything, and we were about four thousand rand short of being able to start without borrowing.

I took the coin out of the sock and I sat with it at the kitchen table for a long time. Two soft taps.

Learning what the thing in the sock was worth

I had genuinely no idea what a Krugerrand was worth in real money. I assumed it was a nice keepsake and maybe worth a few hundred rand. So I did the thing everyone does now, which is I sat at the kitchen table with my phone and started reading. I found out that the value tracks the actual gold in the coin, which moves every single day, and that you can look up the current Krugerrand price the same way you would check the weather. When the number loaded I read it three times. It was not a keepsake amount. It was the garage, and the plumbing, and a proper door, with a bit left over.

I felt strange about it, if I am honest. As though selling the coin was selling Mr Olivier. My wife, who is wiser than me, said the opposite. She said a man who gave a coin to "a child who listens" did not give it so it could sit in a sock for the rest of my life. He gave it so it could do something. That reframed the whole thing.

I found a plain guide on how to Sell Krugerrands and read it twice before I did anything, because the one lesson that had actually stuck was do not make the move until you have earned it. I wanted to understand the difference between a dealer paying for the gold content and a collector paying more for the coin itself, and how you avoid the people who count on you not knowing the daily price. I took my time. Mr Olivier would have approved of the taking of time.

The room the coin built

We built the room. It is small, with one good window, and the light comes in late in the afternoon and goes gold in a way that stops me every single time, because it is exactly the light of that church hall. My daughter, who is grown now and does not remember me ever playing chess, treats patients in there. Old people, mostly, with stiff hands and sore backs, people who need someone to be patient and even with them.

I told her the story of the coin once, the whole thing, the cardigan and the orange squash and the two soft taps. She listened all the way through, properly, without checking her phone. At the end she said, so he was right about you. And then, after a pause, she tapped the table twice, very softly, and grinned, because I must have done it to her a thousand times without ever knowing where it came from.