The view from the top of the hill at Tudhope Avenue always reminded Silas of the time he used to visit his father in Coronation Hospital. Ali Ali was dying of cancer, and his mother said that visiting him was the decent thing to do, even if he hadn't always behaved like a real father.

‘You can't blame a man for his religion,’ said his mother, she who had once been the beautiful Angelina Pelgron. She had taken on the name ‘Mrs Ali’, even though it had no legal standing and marked her with the stigma of a second-hand, Christian wife, because she didn't want Silas to be known as a bastard.

Dutifully, Silas did not blame his father's religion, and learned to control his anger at the open contempt his father's Muslim family had shown towards him and his mother. So he went to visit his father every day after school for six whole months. He saw more of the old man during those sombre afternoons than he had in the previous sixteen years of his life.

The crowded ward was somnolent after lunch, patients dozing. Weighed down by the heavy fare – boiled potatoes, boiled fish, boiled peas, everything boiled soft and set in boiled-off fat – they whiled away the slow hours until the doctors made their evening rounds.

His father did not speak much, either because he was too weak from the cancer – Hodgkin's disease, someone told the boy – or had nothing to say to his son, really. When he was well (‘Up and about!’ he used to say, in a poor imitation of Superman's slogan), Ali Ali visited Angelina and Silas because it was his duty to do so, a Koranic injunction to treat all his wives equally. He sat in their living room, drinking tea, staring at the pictures on the wall, perhaps because he was not allowed any in his real home, which he shared with his Muslim wife, or because it gave him something to fix his eyes on, so that he did not have to look at Silas's solemn, expectant face.

At the hospital, they shared that same silent hour of discomfort, apart from the most perfunctory exchange of pleasantries: How are you today? How was school? How is your mother? How is that Iblis of a brother of yours? At three-thirty precisely, Silas would rise, kiss his father on the cheek, and go out into the bright sunlight.

One day, the new patient next to Ali Ali spoke to Silas.

‘Hey, what's his problem?’ he asked in his brash, township-clever voice. One of the Saturday-night intakes, a trauma case, the ward was overflowing with casualties from the latest gang war in the western townships.

‘It's called Hodgkin's disease.’

‘Ja? And who's that?’

‘It's a kind of cancer.’

‘Cancer? Listen, take the old guy home, leave the beds open for the ouens … it's war out there. You want to see sick, look at me.’ A living cadaver with pipes stuck into every conceivable orifice. ‘Twenty-seven holes, they used a jungle knife, the swine!’