She hopes that Mikey's visitor – and Mikey himself – will be gone when she goes down into that great whirlpool of sunlight and shadow that the house becomes in the morning. It is the one pleasure she takes from this otherwise forbidding house and she does not want it spoiled. With this thought, the immediacy of the new, dislocated world she finds herself in recedes.

Silas cannot sleep. He is torn between pride and pressing sexual desire. He has not had sex for months, long before he met Du Boise at the Mall and this whole chain of events started. In his room, his borrowed room, lying down like an unwelcome, usurping guest on his son's bed, he returns to his world of the past.

He was much younger than Michael, thirteen, fourteen, when he lay awake in the darkness of his mother's house, listening to the ragged sounds outside. The time of the great removals, when Africans were forcibly moved from Newclare, which had been declared a coloured area. The GGs came late at night to load people onto trucks, the remnants of families who had refused to move to Soweto, or who had simply not found the energy to gather their belongings and relocate into the unknown.

‘Soweto is so far away,’ said their neighbour, Mrs Rathlogo.

And her daughter Dikeledi, his companion since childhood, and even after they had become aware of their bodies, of the attraction created by different textures and shapes, and indeed colours, said, ‘You will have to marry me, or my father will kill you. Do you know what a Mosotho girl means to her father, to her brothers?’

Laughter, gentle, ribald, explorations innocent because of their mutual ignorance, in that same back room where Lydia was to sleep with him, Lydia with the immeasurable experience of her imagination.

The night the grey-suited men arrived with a sudden fusillade of doors opening and closing, escorted by soldiers, their heavy boots marching across the pavements, Silas listened to the world he knew being dismembered. Through the thin walls of the old semi-detached cottage, he could hear everything that happened next door. The Rathlogo family, roused from their beds, were given half an hour to get ready. Dikeledi, her bother Pitso, her mother and father, whose names he could not now recall, human beings and belongings would be flung together on the back of an open truck.

Silas lay immersed in his darkness, aware for the first time of the power of shame. He heard Dikeledi's voice, that indignant, spirited tone that rose up in her whenever she felt confronted by an injustice – when he cheated during a game, or later, when he discovered the power of his male body and took his hasty pleasure, without considering her mood, her need. He heard her say: ‘Have you no shame?’