The hot day and all the beer he had drunk made him feel drowsy. He raised his head and looked towards the sun, sinking behind the tall buildings that marked the boundary of Berea. He remembered the sun shining in through the high, square window of his and Lydia's first home in Noordgesig, a township on the edge of Soweto, recalled the small-house quietude of the day winding down, the noises in the street. There were many such half-drunken Sundays when Lydia refused to make love to him and he fell asleep, waking up when the sun in the square window gave way to cold shards of moonlight and she told him it was time for dinner. And then, one day, the moon was caught in the bars of a window that seemed familiar yet very different somehow, further away than even that distant township window that the architects had put in as an afterthought. Even bushies need light occasionally, they must have schemed. He heard Lydia's voice, different as well, hoarse and rich, vibrating like a singer's voice too deep to be played so loudly through a set of worn-out speakers. ‘Naai her, naai her good!’ another voice said, while someone laughed above the sound of an idling car engine, and then Lydia's voice was sharp, ascending into a scream, before fading into a moan so removed it seemed to come from his dreams.

Silas woke from his beery sleep, slumped in the easy chair, his mouth dry and the sky dark. He heard the car's engine running, looked out through the window and saw the empty seat and the door ajar. He stumbled outside, light rain on his face, switched off the engine, looked around, saw Lydia sitting in the wicker chair in the dark corner of the stoep. He must have rushed right past her. He closed the car's door and locked it.

‘Lyd, you all right?’

‘No, Silas, I'm not all right.’

He approached her with a sense of foreboding. She was in one of her inconsolable moods. Like the day Steve Biko was killed, and she mourned his death bitterly even though she was only seventeen years old, and had no way of knowing, Silas had said, what Biko stood for.

‘Silas, it's the thought that they could murder people … just like that,’ she had said, snapping her fingers the way the clevers do in the townships, and then had gone so quiet that he knew he had alienated her.