But Betty is in Canada. Yes, go and find Betty. Or was it Australia she fled to with that misery-guts of a husband? Stop holding onto such futile dreams! All grey hair and sunken tits, she must be by now.

And what did he suspect was going on in there? Mother and son being intimate? Well, that's the nature of relationships between mothers and their male offspring. But there was something different about Mikey, an arrogance, strutting about like a cockerel. It started when Lydia was in hospital.

Shit! Kate, he's been sleeping with Kate!

The sun began to dull in the haze of smog. Silas felt thirsty, he could do with a beer, take a six-pack and go and sit out there on the grass verge, the border between the past and the future. Where the township joins the suburbs, where Africa has come home to roost. Enough of this nightmarish obsession with Mikey's sex life. Life was going on, sins were being confessed, murder, rape. Assassins confessing to the Truth Commission. Imagine this: in that distant past, they had made plans to kill his Minister by substituting his heart pills with stimulants. These days, getting that slow heart to beat faster would be a noble gesture, not a murder.

The TRC report was due to be handed over to the President on the twenty-eighth day of October. We'll make that date, no matter what, the Archbishop had said. Piety and determination. That's how God made this crazy fucken world in seven days.

He rose at last, his anguish deadened by the sonorous voice of his everyday muse, the clerk of the soul, telling him that it was better to deal with the prosaic affairs of the world than with the poetry of his heart. He walked stiffly to the front door. You grow old and your arse grows cold. Now whose words was he perverting? he asked himself. God, he hadn't read anything in years, not a stirring poem or a novel steeped in a slow ferment of words.

What does Nelson Mandela do when he goes to bed?

14

The day had passed uneventfully. The President had had to leave the meeting early. A confrontation brewing between ‘the Arch’ and people in the movement. He was to meet with all sides, try to find a dignified way out of ‘the mess’.

‘Silas Ali, he works for the Minister, he's a good man, is he?’ the President had asked no one in particular, but everyone around the table had nodded their agreement. The Old Man's way of confirming something he already believed.

In the end, no one had mentioned Kate's dress, and she had begun to feel uncomfortable. Cold semen did not feel sensual on the skin. As soon as she could, she left work, drove home and lay in a hot bath for an hour, trying to stem her renewed feeling of disquiet. Before leaving the office, she had asked Van As, the President's security chief, if he could locate security records on ‘François du Boise, a Lieutenant in the old Special Branch’.