Michael has a feverish energy that seems to consume his youthfulness. He is taller and leaner, he acquires a dark-clothed attractiveness that strikes at Silas's indifference (he stops asking Michael, ‘How are you?’ as if casually enquiring after the health of a stranger he has not seen for years) and corrodes Lydia's still tender membrane of guilty remembrance.

All this in one month. How rapidly the quicklime sets on pauperized emotions!

The TRC report is handed over to the President. Silas is seen on TV, grey-haired and distinguished – he seems to have greyed markedly in the few weeks while he was working ‘behind the scenes’ – hovering on the edges of the crowd, bemused and smug at the same time. His contradictions slowly become the point of interest in him. He is an ‘intriguing’ man, the shadow who slips in and out of public scrutiny, always whispering to his Minister.

Lydia informs Silas and Michael that she will be starting another job in the new year, part of a research team doing ‘control tests’ on HIV-positive mothers. Testing the effectiveness of a drug to stop the transmission of HIV from mothers to their unborn foetuses. She speaks a new language, slick and coded. She is also rapidly being transformed, terms and thought processes that astonish everyone; her family, her estranged husband, her alienated son, her mother and father, her sister Gracie, all look at her as if she is a strange insect emerging from a cocoon they had mistakenly assumed was her permanent, incarnate being. Wondrous, fearful of her own new wings, Lydia is hesitant at times, speaks as if seeking approval and permission.

‘Where?’

‘At the Chris Hani Hospital … yes, in Soweto.’

‘How will you get there?’

‘I am buying a car.’

Both Silas and Michael have forgotten that she can drive, that she was the family taxi for so many years, ferrying Mikey about, running errands, compensating for Silas's neglect of home and family because of the struggle, and later because of his job in government.

The conversation is quickly passed over. Neither Silas nor Michael asks where she will find the money to buy a car. They forget, too, that she has been working for eighteen years. Another passage in the invisible rites of their separate lives.

A few days later, she tells Silas that Rachel Moss, her boss-to-be, has invited them to dinner.

‘Rachel Moss? Vusi Baloyi's wife?’

‘Yes, the TRC advocate's wife,’ she responds. ‘She has a life of her own, you know.’ Silas and Mikey are invited as well. Rachel has a thing about families. Will they accompany her, out of courtesy?

She is showing signs of the combative Lydia he knows and is more at ease with.