Mikey rises, places Oupapa Ali's glowing fragment of Kaaba stone, which he uses to illuminate the desolation of urban nights, back in its soft receptacle of clean underpants, and pads to the bathroom. He urinates, watches the steamed froth with some satisfaction, shivers with delight at the end. How pleasing the simplest of our acts of gratification. But it is too cold to go about the house naked. Nature always getting in the way. He returns to his room, slips on a T-shirt and jeans over his chilled body, imagines the smell of coffee in the kitchen. The only indulgence he has detected in his father.

The sun breaks through the strangely sullen sky – this is a city of fierce thunderstorms, quick and transient, not used to this lingering greyness – and fills Lydia's alcove with a sudden brightness. Mikey pauses at her desk. A few unopened bills (does she owe people money independently of Silas?), a letter with a Canadian postmark. Probably Aunt Martha. Wonder how Mireille is? He tries the drawers, conscious of his own guileful posture, the sideways manner in which he pulls at each handle in turn. They are locked. His sense of intrigue grows.

Mikey rummages about in the old tool cabinet – an array of once immaculately clean screwdrivers, hammers, wrenches, grown rusty and blunt with disuse, testimony to Silas's changed station in life – and finds the bunch of keys. Once it must have been a simple collection of duplicates, but over the years, Silas has added stray keys picked up in the street, or abandoned by friends and colleagues when they moved homes and offices. Mikey remembers seeing Silas take the key from a cupboard in a second-hand furniture shop and slip it into his pocket, his face lit up with a shoplifter's secret enjoyment. Now the bunch resembles the jangling credentials of an ancient turnkey, the guardian of some vast, medieval dungeon. A marvellously practical habit, revealing of yet another obsessive side to Silas's bland character?

Mikey quickly finds a key that fits Lydia's desk drawers. Indeed, she had locked them as an expression of her privacy, rather than in any real hope of keeping out an intruder. He sifts idly through the memorabilia of a rather ordinary life. Entrance tickets to the Johannesburg Zoo (marked ‘Non-White Day'), an invitation to Gracie and Alec's wedding, cancelled cheques, abandoned invoices for goods purchased. A solitary dried carnation, preserved, together with a florist's card simply inscribed ‘Love’, in one of those zipped polythene kitchen bags, provided a romantic touch. But whose love, whose errant love is being commemorated? Certainly not Silas's. His businesslike approach demands grand gestures, huge and overflowing bouquets, their imposing beauty transient and superficial. What is he like in the throes of passion, Mikey wonders. Then dismisses the image of bulging eyes and limbs clumsily entwined. He knows that Silas has spindly legs and that Lydia has hair under her arms, the sprouting of which she struggles to control.