Lydia's diary lies hidden, the only real attempt to conceal anything, underneath a sheaf of ancient legal documents: insurance policies, birth certificates, expired vehicle registration papers, the deed of sale to a house disposed of years ago, matters that are usually the preserve of husbands. Now Mikey begins to comprehend the extent to which Lydia, by default, manages the family's affairs. Anyway, collecting obsolete documents, in neat piles but without any obvious order or purpose, is the obsessive habit of people besieged by the constant fear of poverty. Do the rich preserve their past as assiduously?

With Lydia's diary on his simple breakfast tray, alongside the heated-up remnants of the coffee that Silas had made, and cereal soaked in orange juice (he cannot abide the taste of milk so early in the day), Mikey sits now in the rain-drenched garden at the back of the house. It is no more than a quadrangle of grass bordered by dying flower beds – don't plant exotics, not just before winter, he had heard Lydia tell Silas in a rare moment of domestic engagement (even if it was only to disagree). Mikey expects to glance, very leisurely, through the minor traumas of a life lived as best she could. Given Lydia's beginnings, parents like Mam Agnes and Jackson, a husband like Silas, what could his mother have recorded in her diary but the routine passage of life, births, deaths, petty cruelties and vain hopes? Nothing momentous in here, he tells himself, trying to dismiss the feeling of guilt that comes more at the remembrance of how easy it was to invade her privacy, than at the prospect of trespassing onto the secret domain of her life.

Yet, when he cannot bring himself to read the first entry, it is not a sense of decency that deters him, for ‘every enquiring mind has the right to know even the forbidden’, he rationalizes, but an unexpected foreboding. This diary has something to do with Lydia's accident, her subsequent hospitalization, with the name Du Boise that he has heard his parents whisper tensely between them in the hospital room.

A ghost from the past, a mythical phantom embedded in the ‘historical memory’ of those who were active in the struggle. Historical memory. It is a term that seems illogical and contradictory to Mikey; after all, history is memory. Yet, it has an air of inevitability, solemn and compelling, especially when uttered by Silas and his comrades. It explains everything, the violence periodically sweeping the country, the crime rate, even the strange ‘upsurge’ of brutality against women. It is as if history has a remembering process of its own, one that gives life to its imaginary monsters. Now his mother and father have received a visitation from that dark past, some terrible memory brought to life.