Later that day, when Lydia and Silas came home from work, Michael heard the adults talking, heard Ouma Angel telling them about the man's visit, and although they fell silent after Silas had spoken (urging them not to be paranoid? Michael wonders now), he felt their apprehension, in the way Silas rested a hand on his shoulder, and in the way Lydia embraced him, whispering, ‘My boy, my boy,’ as if repeating an incantation against evil.

Ouma Angel faded from his life, becoming a quiet, distant presence who smiled furtively at him (on the rare occasions when they saw one another), as if they shared a secret, or had been through something together that others would find hard to believe. He remembers the last time he visited her, days before she died. Silas had had this uncanny presentiment: Ouma won't be with us for long. She had moved away from their home in Noordgesig, relocating from township to township, until she ended up in a place close to the city, where mostly whites lived, called Charlton Terrace. The name sounded foreign and intimidating to Michael. She had white neighbours who spoke a version of Afrikaans something like her own, but harsher, like that man in the doorway.

At Charlton Terrace, the weekend noises had a different texture from those in the townships. People were bitter, unsubtle in their attempts at restraint, constantly reminding each other to ‘behave like white people’. But in the end, drunkenness triumphed, and the tumult was as raucous as on any Friday night in Noordgesig or Newclare.

Ouma Angel was shrinking; each time they saw her, she had grown smaller. Her gnarled hands clutching a simple wooden walking stick, she shuffled from room to room, as if trying to absorb the warmth of the wooden floor directly through the bare soles of her tiny, little girl's feet. She spoke to Silas in a whisper, not because she meant to be secretive, but simply because her breath was failing: ‘There are certain things people never forget.’ Michael remembers this among all the things she said (‘She is starting to ramble, it won't be long now,’ Silas told Lydia later on), because of her hoarseness, and because she seemed to be addressing him, rather than his father.

A week later, she was dead. Her heart simply stopped, the doctor said. This was a month before Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and it had been her life's ambition to see him ‘in the flesh’ (even though she only confessed this dream when it became known that he would soon be a free man). She couldn't hold on any longer, her sad countenance said.

‘At least she won't have to see the blacks take over,’ her neighbour told Silas, thinking that no one with a white mother could possibly support ‘majority rule’.