Silas stood about uncomfortably, excluded by this uncharacteristic display of affection between mother and son. Soon his discomfort infected the others. Gracie, for want of something to say, repeated what the doctor had said, how lucky Lydia was. Alec still shook his head at the miracle of it all.

‘All this damage was done by one of those glasses we gave you last Christmas?’ he asked.

Silas nodded.

‘Shit, it's that Swazi stuff, the walls are so thick they break them to use as weapons,’ Alec said.

Gracie feared that her husband would launch into a long and inappropriate technical explanation of the Swazi glass-making industry and cut him short with one of her glances. He grinned and kept quiet, stifling his impulse to say to Silas, ‘Christ, a real cutting Oliphant look. I bet Lydia still snys you with them, hey?’ But he had said this so often before, that everyone knew what he meant by the way he was grinning. The Oliphant women, Mam Agnes, Lydia, Gracie, and even Martha, who had married a Canadian and lived in fucken cold Toronto, had eyes so sharp they could slice the skin off your face. No one seemed to mention Mireille, the youngest daughter, any more. A silence had enclosed her name and her being, ever since she went to live with Martha, and even guileless Alec knew better than to ask why Mireille had vanished, in word and body, from the close world of the Oliphant family here at home.

As if prompted by Alec's unspoken curiosity about the accident – ‘What really happened? Why don't you tell us?’ his attitude implied – Silas said that it had been a freak accident. Lydia, freeing herself from Mikey's limp embrace for a moment, nodded her head in agreement. They both looked evasive, as if they had rehearsed their responses. They were avoiding something, trying to deny – even to themselves – that something dreadful had happened, something capable of precipitating such an accident. Mikey burrowed his head deep into his mother's breasts, trying to hide the scornful look on his face.

‘Age nee,’ Mam Agnes said, determined to change the subject. If Lydia and Silas wanted to discuss the accident, let them do so of their own free will. She gently chided Mikey, ‘What is this, going on like a baby? You are eighteen now, nearly nineteen, in fact, and you still want to suck Mama's titties, hey Mikey?’

Mikey had always been friendly and respectful towards his grandparents, willingly doing chores and carrying out errands, but never close enough to exchange the kind of banter that Mam Agnes was inviting now. But he sensed that she wanted to change the subject, and that she wanted to rescue Silas from the silence he had fallen into.

‘As long as they're not yours, Ouma, I don't like long-life milk,’ he answered.