The day the man came to the door and spoke to Ouma Angel in the language of authority, the same language as her own, but brusque and impatient, a shadow fell across her life. Michael felt her fear, the tightness in her chest that made her breathe heavily. He looked up into the man's face and saw a pair of white-flecked blue eyes, narrowed with distaste: before him was a white woman in a black man's hovel, the dark-skinned but fair-headed young boy evidence of the white woman's whorish nature (yes, white women who cohabited with black men were whores, how else could one explain their actions?).

Du Boise, that was Du Boise. Michael knows he has seen that face before, the rheumy blue eyes that Lydia describes in her diary.

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.