The house has a high, diamond-mesh fence around it. A car parked under a do-it-yourself carport (the uprights not completely upright), a small, well-kept garden, the grass cut as closely as the uneven earth will allow. There is something jarringly new: a ‘water feature’ has been built on the old asphalt pathway. Water spouts from the mouth of a lion, just like at Uncle Alec's. It dominates the entrance. The door that once opened directly into the face of the morning sun is now partially obscured from the street. What a grandiose search for privacy!

A dog raises its head lazily, decides that Michael does not pose a threat, goes back to sleep. A curtain parts and someone peers at him through a window. Then the door opens, and a man comes ambling up the path. A pre-emptive form of self-defence, Michael thinks. Show no fear, and maybe the potential intruder will go away.

‘Can I help?’ the man asks.

‘No, no, just passing,’ Michael answers. ‘Admiring the fountain.’

The man looks back at the fountain, admires what he imagines Michael finds admirable, his suspicion gone, his posture relaxed.

‘I found it here when I bought the place. Some crazy old bastard believed it would keep the tsotsis out.’ The man's laughter echoes in the growing dusk.

‘Well, goodnight,’ Michael says with a smile, and hurries off. He feels the man's eyes on him, as he passes through the smog-filled twilight. He inhales the smell of smoke as if testing the quality of the air. In households everywhere, fires are starting up. People still use coal stoves?

What am I doing here? Michael asks himself. Looking for Du Boise, for the ghost of Du Boise?

He walks back to the main road, waits for a taxi. It is already crowded when it arrives, and he has to perch on the edge of his seat, beside a woman who clutches her bag, more to give him room than out of fear that it will be stolen. He breathes in her familiar, intimate smell, closes his eyes and tries not to identify it. Sweat, deodorant, the kind used by thousands, millions of women, the kind his mother uses. Why does Kate smell different? Christ, is there such a thing as a black woman's smell and a white woman's smell? No, he thinks, it is not the smell of the skin or its colour, it is the odour of an occupation. He peers at the woman next to him through half-closed eyes and sees the nurse's white uniform underneath her sweater. He moves away from her, and she shifts away from him too, offended. They sit in their awkward, alienated postures until the taxi reaches West Street. He climbs out and hurries off into the ghostly darkness.