The party quickly broke up. Michael seemed to start the process. He tugged quietly at Vinu's sleeve, helping her to escape from Silas, who had cornered her on the stoep. ‘You're Johan's daughter!’ Silas had exclaimed, when Michael introduced them. Silas kept up his half-drunken patter about Vinu's parents, about how they all went back a long way, his manner flirtatious, leaning up against a wall, legs crossed at the ankle, drink dangling from a limp wrist.

Other guests quickly departed, leaving Jackson's favourite 1960s township jazz playing loudly to an empty room. Lydia said she was going for coffee with Alec and Gracie, making it obvious that Silas was not welcome; he had humiliated her and embarrassed Mikey.

‘Christ! She's your son's age!’ she had said.

Silas drove home slowly, not only because he knew he had had too much to drink, but because he wanted to savour Vinu's smell, her young woman's breath, warm and fragrant (some kind of gum she was chewing, a breath freshener, mint, liquorice?), the green pools of her eyes. Yet, when he climbed into bed and switched off the light, hoping to take Vinu into his dreams, Michael's eyes confronted him. That cool, disdainful stare from Alec's stoep earlier that night, the look of faint disgust. Now Michael was intruding even upon his fantasies, his imaginary – and therefore innocent – seduction of a young woman (he was too old, too tired, to masturbate anyway, he rationalized afterwards). Silas felt hatred for Michael, sudden and fleeting. When it was gone, he lay awake, full of bitter remorse.

Perhaps it was time to go, to leave this place, this house, this country and its contorted history?

20

Michael and Vinu sit under the fig tree's canopy of dying fruit, inhaling the excessive, overripe sweetness of figs abandoned to the birds, to the thunderstorms that assail the city. The overhang of branches retains the day's heat; outside of this warm shelter, the night is chilly. Johannesburg cools down quickly, because of the altitude, six thousand feet above sea level, know-it-all conversationalists say.

‘This is such a fickle place,’ Michael says.

‘The place or the people?’ Vinu asks.

‘Both. They are one and the same.’

It is the sight of Silas staggering into the house that spurs their conversation. He mutters to himself, loudly opens and closes doors, bumps into things. His actions have the characteristic exaggeration of someone not only struggling against the effects of too much alcohol, but also against the tide of emotional turmoil that accompanies drunkenness.