Vinu emerged from the darkness, came up to him. ‘I did not ask you to!’ she said in a low voice, striking at him with her bunched-up fists. ‘I did not ask you to!’

‘Hey!’

Someone paused in the street. God, what would they think? Typical Berea residents, melodrama in the middle of the night. He held her wrists.

‘Why, Michael, why?’

‘Vinu! I am not Michael!’

She looked up at him, slumped against his chest. He held her, the way he would have held his daughter, the way he sometimes longed to reach out and hold Michael. He led her indoors and helped her sit down on the settee, went to make tea. Hot and sweet, said to be good for people suffering a nervous trauma. What has Michael done?

He took the tea and a packet of biscuits back into the living room. Vinu was lying on her side, staring into the swathe of shadows cast by the moon, a full and dirty yellow tonight. The city's pollution was becoming intolerable. What time was it? Did it matter? He wanted to ask: what did Michael do? But first some sustenance. He offered her a biscuit, which she took and absently nibbled on.

‘Here, have some tea.’

She sat up, gazed at him. Her eyes were dry. She had no tears left, but her lip trembled, as she tried to weep.

‘Please hold me,’ she said.

He sat down next to her, held her in his arms. Chastely, protectively, feeling good about being able to comfort her, a tender, fatherly warmth emanating from his chest. She put her hand into his shirt. He remembered unbuttoning it when he was examining his belly out there on the stoep. Her hand was cool, gentle, resting against his skin.

They must have fallen asleep like that, Vinu leaning into Silas, her hand on his stomach. He must have dreamed of her, her nakedness gilded by the last glow of the moon before it sank behind the rim of garbage-clotted hills, the crumbling ramparts of apartment blocks. She has a down of bastard gold, he thought, the gift of indelible beauty that we bushies carry about like a second skin.

When Silas awoke, he was glad that Vinu was gone.

29

Michael alights from the taxi in Jan Smuts Avenue, some distance from the Killarney Mall. He walks slowly, having calculated how long it will take him to reach the Mall. He'll be there at least ten minutes before Du Boise usually arrives. He stops to buy a newspaper, he does not want to hang about the place, creating a presence that a potential witness might note. He is a familiar figure on the Kombi-taxi routes now, but he has established a routine. No, we saw nothing abnormal, the drivers will tell investigators, no one we haven't seen before.