But Mikey's reluctance is also rooted in a fear of his own: he knows that Lydia would have written about the time she found him ‘playing Gandhi’ with Mireille in his room, she would have described the relationship between them as ‘untoward’. Or perhaps this is not the muted kind of word that she would use, perhaps she uses the language of dread when she thinks back, still, to the moment she opened the door to his room and found her son and her sister, Mikey and Mireille, lying side by side, naked, only their hands touching, this somewhat chaste gesture in itself evidence of some dissolute ritual, the aftermath of a brutal … here she will hesitate, not say the word ‘sex’ in her mind, not acknowledge, the carnality of her incomplete thought, and immediately immerse its meaning in a cauldron of shapeless evasions.

Mikey remembers overhearing his parents talking, after Silas had questioned Lydia about the grave, tear-filled conferences she was holding with her family, Gracie, Mam Agnes and Jackson. At first, Lydia's response had been uncharacteristically vulgar; then, as if reminded of an injunction (Gracie, Mam Agnes, Jackson?) not to lose her dignity, she had lapsed into a matronly logic:

‘It is obvious that Mireille has been sleeping with Mikey.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘You can see it in her eyes!’

‘And him?’

‘God, Silas, she is older, she is the woman, she should know better.’

Lydia's diary lies on Mikey's lap, forgotten for the moment. He remembers the day they asked them, all the ‘young ones’, what they wanted to be when they grew up. That's how it began, the game he started playing with Mireille. Christmas Day, Mam Agnes and Jackson's house in Soweto. When? Let's see, nearly five years ago? December 1993. ‘The last undemocratic Christmas,’ Silas had said, and everybody smiled, even though they didn't know what the hell he was talking about. It sounded so clever, Alec said afterwards, gossiping with his wife Gracie.

Around the lunch table, the turkey served, Mikey struggling with the rich pudding that the adults dug into with their forks, searching for the ‘magical’ old British tickey concealed in someone's helping, a portent of good fortune for whoever found it. They were bored, the grown-ups, or they had had too much to drink, or the prospect of life under the new democracy that Silas had heralded filled them with sudden and inspired hope. Anyway, they decided to interrogate the future.

‘Tell us what you want to be when you grow up?’ Mam Jackson asked her daughter Mireille, blind, as mothers often are, to the fact that her daughter had already ‘grown up’, that she had a gleam in her eyes, that the mystery of life was unfolding, a flower not only to behold, but to devour. Mireille, Mam Agnes and Jackson's ‘baby’, Lydia's youngest sister, Mikey's aunt, adored simply because she was the youngest, and beautiful simply because she was adored.