Michael, as he has now defined himself, lives only in the future, in the world of young people and young pursuits. He has no use for the older generation, his mother and father, Kate, his grandparents, God, whom he thinks of as an old man too. Even that other old man with the smile of a mischievous child, Madiba, whom he once thought of as the saving grace of the older world: they all have the same brittle air of vulnerability, of souls fallow despite years of feverish cultivation. ‘The struggle’ sowed the seeds of bright hopes and burning ideals, but look at what they are harvesting: an ordinariness, but also a vanity fed by sly and self-seductive glimpses in the mirrors of their personal histories. In each is born a frantic need for a ‘legacy’, a need to be recognized as a ‘hero of the struggle’. The world – once more – is full of monument builders and statue erectors.

Only once does he envision a future for himself that is remotely like that of his parents – a wife, a life-partner, children, a home, a garden overrun by a large yelping dog, a blue Dane. Mystified by the sentimentality of this hope, full of adult vanity, right down to its mundane detail, he dismisses it: there will be no room in his life for such calamities.

Michael has forsaken the sloppy, comfortable style of his adolescence. He wears tight black clothes and has cropped his hair so short his skull is visible, strangely pale, delicate almost. His external self reflects the coldly strident person being formed inside. He sports an earring, listens now to the hard and driving music that once inspired in him a huge and visible indifference. He has acquired the callousness of uncaring youth. He goes to clubs, comes home smelling of alcohol, sits for hours before the television, languid, lazy. Then, as if snapping out of a trance, he goes to his room, where he works on his computer, the keyboard clicking urgently but precisely until late at night.

Lydia also sees him reading the Koran, and she stands in the darkened corridor listening as he reads aloud the sonorous verses of a mystical poet. When Michael is not home, she examines this book, feeling its gold-embossed cover, its rough-cut edges, as if searching for a clue to this new and mysterious person.

He was once my son, he was once Mikey, a much simpler boy!

Because he now occupies his father's old study downstairs, the noises he makes should be drowned out by the house's strange, inverted acoustics, yet they penetrate the shadowy silence, intruding upon the sleep of Silas and Lydia, until she resorts to earplugs and he simply increases the dosage of his sleeping draught.