One day, when he woke up, he sensed that someone had been watching them. A pair of eyes – adult eyes – had observed them for a few fleeting moments, transforming a scene of beauty into something vile and shameful.

The retribution was swift. Mireille was sent away, banished to Canada. When he first heard Aunt Gracie pronounce that word, slowly, painfully, Ca-na-da, he knew that it was truly cold there, as befitted a place of exile.

He grieved. He had lost Mireille and was alienated from his mother. She gave him fearful looks, constantly fighting back her tears. Soon, however, the whispering came to an end, a new and irresistible tension filled their lives, a force outside of their private lives, a fleeting moment when history became utterly important, inescapable, and compelling. Nelson Mandela became President, and the word ‘freedom’ took on an almost childlike meaning, so magical was its effect. Mikey heard Mam Agnes say, ‘We're free,’ when Mandela stood up to take the oath, her voice hoarse, filled with tenderness. Then, aware that Mikey was watching, she quickly reverted to her old, disbelieving self, her joy pressed like a dead flower between her unsmiling lips.

Still, Mikey could not believe the euphoria that swept through his family, cool Uncle Alec and laconic Grandpa Jackson, cold Gracie and an increasingly self-contained Lydia, their usual, crusty suspicion of life's good intentions flung aside like an unfashionable, worn-out coat. Until that enchanting April passed, and autumn came and the winter suddenly, and only Silas was left to walk about with a new sense of pride.

It helped Mikey too. He forgot about Mireille, discarded her along with the other adolescent obsessions, as the smell of her perspiration (how different it had seemed once – like incense) faded into the myriad of sexual odours he was encountering. That fragile spring, that cruel month of flowering liberty, allowed his mother to forgive him what she saw as his trespass, innocent and ‘led-into’, but a trespass nevertheless.

Mikey stretches his legs, wakes up, startled by the brightness of the sun. He had fallen asleep, allowing Lydia's diary to slip from his lap. He bends down, retrieves it and dusts it off. A sticky white pollen adheres to the cover. He looks up. The sun has penetrated the lush shade provided by the garden's solitary tree. It is a fig tree, dark and gnarled, and probably dying of old age, he thinks. He has seen it bud, a glory of delicate green leaves in early spring, but barren otherwise. It has not borne fruit, not since they moved in here, anyway. Now he is astonished by the unseasonal abundance of figs, large and coarsely veined, high up in its boughs, which are bent with their weight. Most are already overripe and have burst open, oozing a white sap on which ants have feasted and fruit flies died greed-filled deaths.