They stopped outside the Ali household in Berea.

‘Silas…’

He was out of the car already, and waving her off.

‘I'm okay,’ he said, his voice echoing in the dark street. The street lamps were out. All that he wanted was the right to sit in this living city darkness and watch the world go by – surreptitiously, of course. But all that he kept on seeing, over and over, was Lydia naked, the young man João propped up on his arms, between her upraised legs. He saw her knees the moment she pressed them against him, against his skin so black it was almost blue. An old township joke, we too have our little racist images. She drew João to her, held him as he shuddered.

Shards of moonlight on the green baize, their lovemaking – they were fucking, for God's sake – had drawn up the dust cloth the way a sheet is drawn up on a bed. On a billiard table, at a party, at his birthday party, in someone else's house.

Despite the frantic attempts of his jagged mind, he could not transform the scene into something sordid, so enabling him to dismiss it, to call her cheap, a whore. There was something so ineluctably beautiful about Lydia pulling the young man to her, embracing his black body in her lovely olive-skinned arms.

He would have to live with that. His wife had found release at last from both her captive demons: from Du Boise and from himself. Now not every man would be a rapist to her.

27

Daybreak, when the Bilal bhangs.

Michael had heard the expression from Sadrodien, a mixture of Arabic and Malay, describing the call to prayer that the ‘Bilal’ makes at each of the five prescribed prayer hours. Michael had since learnt that one of the Prophet Mohamed's first adherents was a black man named Bilal (a faithful servant, a freed slave?). For his foresight and courage – those were dangerous times, the first Muslims had many enemies – Bilal was accorded the honour of calling the fledgling band of faithful to prayer. Now, everywhere in the world, five times a day, a man – European travel brochures call him a ‘muezzin’ – climbs a winding staircase to the top of a tower, supporting his bony knees with his hands, so that it seems he has added an extra element to the ritual of worship, and proclaims to the world: Allah u Akbar! God is Great. Bilal the man has been transformed by time and myth from person into concept.

Not all Bilals are black, Michael thinks. But here in Newclare, of course, he is, a Somali émigré, poor and pious. Michael is there, at the gates of the Griffith Street Mosque, when the Newclare Bilal bhangs the dawn salaat. He watches the faithful arrive, they smile indulgently: so this is the prodigal son that Imam Ismail is trying to bring back into the fold!