Mikey thinks back to the debate they had in class a few days ago. ‘Homer's Odyssey is the basis of the modern novel,’ Miss Anderson had said, looking expectantly at her students. ‘Well, I think so,’ she'd added, when she saw the indifferent expressions on their faces. Lecturing in English literature is a sad profession, it seems, a refuge for failed writers. Miss Anderson once tried her hand at it, gave up, bored with the book she had ‘lived with’ for ten years. She has started writing again, in secret now, it is said, no longer discusses her ‘work in progress’ with friends. Now she confronts her class with the undeveloped ghosts of last night's writing. Wasted on these spoiled, post-apartheid hedonists. She resorts to the desperate intensity of a writer still struggling with her words. Rumours of a tragic love affair with someone who is now in a powerful position. He – a Cabinet minister, it is said – divested himself of Miss Anderson, the ‘white bit on the side’, exponentially decreasing his involvement with her as he rose in the ranks. The inspiration of her creative rebirth is that she was ‘gotten rid of, love abandoned for power.

Does some of her research among male students, and takes comfort there. Mikey can't see why they find her attractive. Thin, gaunt-faced, her shoulder-length hair flecked with grey. Perhaps some new vein of excitement has been opened, the promise of unleashed passion, it glows in her, the tender skin of love gone wrong.

He does not particularly dislike Julia Anderson, Mikey decides; well, perhaps only when she assumes the mantle of literary prophet and starts speaking in well-turned phrases. It makes her seem uglier than she really is, her emaciated features gathered into a fierce scowl. Who can kiss such thin lips? And she always picks on him, uses him as the sounding board for the answers she hopes to get from others. His diffidence, his obvious boredom, provokes her.

‘Well, Mr Ali, what do you think of Homer's Odyssey?’

‘It is clichéd,’ Mikey answers.

Give her the poker-faced treatment, sometimes forces her to direct her venom elsewhere.

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘Example?’

‘“The pink fingers of dawn.” Imagine the sun rising like that?’

‘A metaphor for its time.’

‘Clichéd,’ he insists.

‘No, worse,’ Karabo Nkosi says. ‘Eurocentric’

‘For God's sake! It's set in Europe. It's about Europe’

‘But the Greeks are darkies like us,’ Vinu says.

‘Clichéd, that's all,’ Mikey says.

‘Think about it, Miss Anderson: the pink fingers of dawn over Sandton’ Karabo says.

‘Is that where you live?’ Miss Anderson asks, looking at Mikey.

‘Who me? No, I live in Berea.’

‘The township in the suburbs, Miss Anderson, that's where Mikey lives.’

‘Still, Homer Eurocentric and clichéd?’

‘Dawn would have to be a white woman, then, with pink fingers, is that not Eurocentric?’ Karabo asks triumphantly. He has Miss Anderson's measure, he thinks.

‘Do you have pink fingers, Miss Anderson, can we see your fingers?’ Vinu asks, her fervour false. Surely Miss Anderson must see the mockery of it all.