The President has decided to make way for the inevitable future, the Age of the Manager, with deals being struck and countries saved over a companionable glass of whisky, in the hush of dimly lit rooms. His Minister should consider retiring, and so should Silas. After all, he is only a township bushie. What future does he have in the government?

Lydia lives in the present, self-judging, brutally honest. These once self-evident instruments of purgatory do not lessen the dull pain that besieges her consciousness. She is back upstairs, in the main bedroom, while Silas has taken over Mikey's room. It was Mikey's initiative to move down to Silas's study, so that both Lydia and Silas could have ‘proper’ bedrooms (they all avoid the guest-room, with its bare walls and gaping cupboards). This is the only change to their newly established routine. Lydia sits on the narrow balcony outside her bedroom, close to the precipice of an encroaching street, protected only by a rusty railing. She sips endless cups of herbal tea (for the health of body and mind), stretches her legs, admires her slim ankles.

She takes up her diary again, opening it one day with a sense of trepidation. She suspects that someone has read through these pages, but cannot imagine that Silas would do such a thing. Perhaps it was Mikey? She dismisses this thought and continues writing. Now it is a true journal, a record of daily events. Her feet are healing. The stitches have been removed, the cushioning (and deforming) swathes of bandages are gone. She thinks of her enduring loveliness, in spite of her remorse and guilt, and prays that her attractiveness will fade, that she will quickly crumble into a premature middle age of grey hair and sagging thighs.

She thinks: I kissed my son, carnally, on his lips.

Then softens the harshness of this thought, the cat-o'-nine-tails lash of her own confession, by placing it all ‘in context’. She is a survivor, after all, or so she has been told. She kissed her son carnally, she thinks, and he did not respond. Did she then kiss him with carnal intent? This objectified language helps. She kissed him, he started to kiss her back, then withdrew. She held him to her and felt his hard body, no, felt the hardness of his sex. For a moment, a mere moment. She was weeping, that was why he held her. She was distraught, she felt weak. Is that not how all women are described under such circumstances: weak? But it was she who led him to her bed, that narrow, borrowed bed meant for guests, but in which a guest has never slept.