The brittle humour of their nightly visits was restored. His cheeky response evoked good-natured laughter from them all. Only Gracie gave Silas and Lydia quick, searching looks, wiping the involuntary smile from Silas's face and returning him to his sombre mood. Then Jackson said it was time to go, and kissed his daughter on her cheeks. This was the signal for the others to say goodbye, and leave Silas and Lydia alone for a while. Mikey slipped off the bed in the slanted, gangling manner of his youth, embarrassed in turn now that his parents wanted a few moments on their own.

Perhaps he thought they were too old to exchange private endearments, or feared there was something sinister in their closeness now, an avoidance of intimacy rather than its fostering. He sensed it in his mother, the way she held her body in the bed, warding off his father even as they embraced. At home, in the silent house, he felt it in his father as well, the fervour with which he tackled the household duties that Lydia's absence had thrust on him, cooking and cleaning until he was exhausted. And then sitting in his study until long after midnight, as if trying to avoid having to go to bed. It seemed that Silas did not like being alone in Lydia's bedroom or her bed.

Mikey stood outside the private ward with the rest of the family, listened to them saying yet again how lucky Lydia was that she and Silas had medical aid and could afford a private ward in a private clinic. She was being spared the horrors of a government hospital like the Helen Joseph. Jackson and Mam Agnes recounted their own travails in an even worse institution, the old Coronation Hospital, where you went in half-well and came out half-dead. At least now that apartheid was gone, black and white suffered equally.

Mikey smiled as if he had experienced and therefore understood the justice in all of this, how the awfulness of being a patient in a government hospital united black and white. You smile too much, his grandfather Jackson had once said. When his father emerged from the glassed-in ward, Mikey knew that whatever it was that separated his parents – a shadow, a word, a name – was still there, and that it would be there the next night when they all returned to visit, and that sooner or later they would no longer be able to hide it from the others.

3

Dawn. Mikey lies in bed and observes the sun, still pale, feeble almost, on the dark rows of books that line the shelves in his room. ‘And you are still so young!’ Vinu had said, when she saw his books. He remembers the way she rolled her eyes, mocking, declaring herself ‘forever chaste’, saved from ‘concubinage’ because the Lord Vishnu was too busy with his books to ‘truly’ see her beauty. She had come, seeking not sex, but refuge from the carnage of her parents’ broken marriage. Her language was a means of escape, its suggestiveness entirely rhetorical. But she did say that she smelled history in this house, too much history, and then promptly fell asleep.