Lost and Found in Johannesburg by Gevisser Mark

Author:Gevisser, Mark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
Published: 2014-02-04T16:00:00+00:00

The Ballad of Phil and Edgar

Although C never takes his wedding ring off his finger, mine sits in a bowl on my desk amid the flotsam of a work-at-home life: clips, coins and lozenges, bits and pieces of technology, a passport photo. I often fish the ring out and fiddle with it while I work, as I am doing right now. I screw it on and off, I flick it into goalposts made of books, I tap it against the teapot. I weigh it in my palm and am impressed, each time anew, with its heft. When I rub it, I conjure the empty rows of chairs at Mrs Austin’s chapel on the day we were married and I fill them with family and friends, with characters fictional and historical, with all the people we might have invited to witness our union had we succumbed to one of the more conventional affairs that grace our families’ respective photo-albums.

My parents are always there, at this imaginary Edenvale, as are C’s parents, whom I never met. So too are two older men, Edgar and Phil, whom I have interviewed several times over the past decade. Phil was the man who told me about his curfew-busting evenings at ‘Peter’s place’ in Forest Town; Edgar his oldest and closest friend. It would be presumptuous to call these men fathers, or mentors, or even friends: we did not, for example, invite them to the farewell party we held shortly after our marriage, at which we revealed to our astonished friends that we had eloped. But such is the pleasure of an empty chapel: you can fill it retrospectively, endlessly, variously, and I often find Edgar and Phil there, sitting on those grey office chairs amid the ring-boxes and the swans.

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Their own wedding bands were the first things I noticed when I met Phil and his friend Edgar for the first time in 1998, at a Soweto tavern named Scotch’s Place. Both rings were assertive and masculine, planed rather than curved, and spoke of the substance and solidity of their wearers. Edgar, like Phil, was a married grandfather; he owned a home in a middle-class part of Soweto and drove a car; he was approaching retirement from his own clerical job at a commercial company in town.

These were the days when a wedding ring still meant you were straight, or in the closet. And so Edgar and Phil’s fingers flashed a particular code as the two men sat in the semi-obscurity of Scotch’s interior, having chosen a table that put them directly in the flight path between the door to the yard and the bar. As patrons streamed in and out, Phil or Edgar would mutter something sotto voce, and a young man or two would linger for a moment, engage in conversation and maybe sit down. By the time I left, three hours later, chairs had been pulled up all around them and tables pulled together. All these kids had impossibly waspy waists, with button-down

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