Ouma Angel was shrinking; each time they saw her, she had grown smaller. Her gnarled hands clutching a simple wooden walking stick, she shuffled from room to room, as if trying to absorb the warmth of the wooden floor directly through the bare soles of her tiny, little girl's feet. She spoke to Silas in a whisper, not because she meant to be secretive, but simply because her breath was failing: ‘There are certain things people never forget.’ Michael remembers this among all the things she said (‘She is starting to ramble, it won't be long now,’ Silas told Lydia later on), because of her hoarseness, and because she seemed to be addressing him, rather than his father.

A week later, she was dead. Her heart simply stopped, the doctor said. This was a month before Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and it had been her life's ambition to see him ‘in the flesh’ (even though she only confessed this dream when it became known that he would soon be a free man). She couldn't hold on any longer, her sad countenance said.

‘At least she won't have to see the blacks take over,’ her neighbour told Silas, thinking that no one with a white mother could possibly support ‘majority rule’.

Michael decides to retrace their township sojourns. It is an impulse, sentimental, bizarre. It is the kind of thing Silas would do, or Uncle Alec. Michael hates dwelling on the past, looking back is such a fruitless exercise, he says. It is one thing to study history, quite another to go and search for ‘meaning’ in the petty annals of dusty streets. Yet he feels it is something he must do, perhaps to get away from the claustrophobic fervour of the ‘new South Africa’. The new South Africa. It is a phrase his father uses, and Kate, and Julian, and, of course, Vinu's parents. Politicians of all persuasions use it whenever they feel the need to sound idealistic, whether to celebrate or to lament the way the country has changed. Michael is always amazed by the sudden drama in their voices, the way even the dullest orator takes on the tone of an actor in one of those science-fiction films about distant galaxies, and exotic and hybrid beings. This new South Africa can be as strange as Ouma Angel's Charlton Terrace, just before she died.