In many ways Tom was very grateful to Emil Coetzee because it was the fact that they had a passing resemblance to one another that had kept Tom out of the poorhouse for a substantial portion of his adult life. Tom made an admirable amount of money impersonating Emil Coetzee at the various bars and clubs that the City of Kings had to offer. Unfortunately for him, at this point in his life, his only other talent was successfully managing to drink and gamble most of the money away.

Tom Fortenoy and Emil Coetzee had been born the same year, 1927, and when they grew up, they both were tall and handsome with blond hair and movie-star good looks. One would have been justified in thinking that, with these similarities, their lives would travel along parallel paths: but they had not, and a somewhat simple twist of fate had seen to it that as one man ascended the social ladder, the other descended it.

It had not always been obvious which man would come out on top and which man would find himself at the bottom. In fact, if anyone was a betting man, as Tom was, they would have stacked the odds squarely in Tom’s favour: he had been born into a relatively well-to-do family that owned a bakery and a haberdashery and lived in a beautiful white bungalow situated on an acre of land in the placid suburb of Suburbs. Emil Coetzee had, on the other hand, been born into a family that had to stretch his father’s civil service salary every month, and lived in a five-roomed flat, Flat 2A, in the Prince’s Mansions.

It is true that Emil Coetzee had gone, on scholarship, to the best school in the country – the Selous School for Boys – while Tom had gone to both Milton Junior School and Milton High School, but from what Tom could gather, Emil Coetzee had been, at best, a middling student, whereas Tom himself had been a stellar one. So although Emil Coetzee had received a superior education, he had not made much of this advantage. As a matter of fact, he had been so unremarkable as a student that although their paths had crossed, briefly, at Milton Junior School, Tom did not remember him.

After school, Emil Coetzee had bumbled around for some years before finding work in the Department of Native Affairs. Tom, for his part, had gone to hone his craft at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Full of the sure-fire politics of youth, he had returned to the City of Kings in the mid-1950s to act in highly acclaimed and intelligently interpreted Shakespearean productions that had been directed by the incomparable Courteney Smythe-Sinclair. He had played a white Othello opposite a coloured Desdemona and black Iago; a Macbeth whose desire for the throne makes him sabotage a Lady Macbeth poised to be the first queen; and an openly homosexual Coriolanus.

On the surface of things, it seemed that Tom still had the odds stacked high in his favour. However, it was at this time that both men began to experience a reversal of fortune. Tom married for love, fathered four children in quick succession, and, as the years progressed, developed a taste for gambling and drink, especially after the country’s politics took a turn to the right in the 1960s and Courteney Smythe-Sinclair’s inimitable productions were banned outright by the government for being too unpatriotic. Tom found the plays he acted in during the latter years of the 1960s particularly unimaginative, uninspired and undemanding, and, as a result, unrewarding. The entire world was going through a seismic shift, and his country seemed a little too content to keep its head buried in the sand.