He knows that she will not mention Kate, that her mood will swing between anger and sorrow for days, that there will be a huge but unspoken barrier between them. That he will feel the silence, even as they talk about mundane things, about her health, about how he is doing at university, about how overgrown with grass the garden is. Everything is going to pieces around the house. Why doesn't his father do something about it all?

He goes to her, kneels, and lays his head in her lap. It is an inborn gesture, one that Mikey the baby, the child, used to make when he wanted to ask forgiveness for a transgression undiscovered as yet. He is quickly conscious of the subterfuge in his actions, of trying to dilute the disturbed stillness already beginning to set inside of her, and thinks how much he is like his father – Silas – after all, a man capable of crossing emotional divides only through touch.

Mama's smell is so sharp it shoots up into his nostrils, like the menthol spray he uses when he can't breathe. But it is a different smell, heavy, and makes him feel drunk. He knows that if he raises his head and tries to get up, he will be unsteady on his feet, that this will make her even more anxious, and that she has enough on her mind as it is. He worries too that she might feel rejected, that she might think he is recoiling from her odours, but starts to compare this strong reek with Kate's, and with Mireille's, long ago, when she lay naked alongside him, aroused by their game of abstinence.

He stays there, with his head in his mother's lap, even though he is frightened by his own thoughts, and his head throbs as he detects, for the first time, a different interpretation – inside his body – of the quality of Mama's smell. She too is rigid, holds herself as if she is afraid of what she may do if she moves, compensates by taking away the hand she had placed on his head, tenderly, when he first knelt down before her. He feels her fear as well, entering her skin and her mind.

Then he senses another presence. Silas is outside, staring morosely at the house, unable to walk up to the door, slip the key into the latch, push it open. Mikey rises abruptly, his mind sober, his hand aching where the stone cut into it, and he is able to push away the other image of his mother. She looks at him with her eyes narrowed, he looks straight back at her, and then at the door. When he walks away, there is an acknowledgement, for the first time, of a conspiracy between them, shapeless and undefined, the shadows of two complete strangers cast in their images, shadows they are unlikely ever to explore with words, and so to reveal their cruel meaning.

13