ME: I thought this session was about me.

L. BASCOMBE: It is. Of course it is. Have you had any contact with your father since he was arrested?

ME: No. They are calling him a monster, you know. The media. They are calling him the Monster of Worcester.

L. BASCOMBE: And how does that make you feel?

ME: It makes me wonder what a monster is—what a monster looks like. Does it wear Lacoste golf shirts and offer me a glass of sweet sherry when I am invited for lunch? Does it worry constantly about whether I am doing okay financially and hide its relief when I say that I am? Did it sometimes bring an ice lolly for me from trips into town when I was a child?

L. BASCOMBE: Medical science struggles to understand psychopathology. Has your father had a difficult life? Unresolved traumas?

ME: Not to my knowledge.

L. BASCOMBE: There must have been something. It’s not necessarily a major event like death or abuse, but something that might seem quite trivial to the outsider.

ME: His parents were happily married. They died when he was an adult. He lived a comfortable, middle-class life. He never went to boarding school. He married a woman who came from a moneyed background. He has been solvent and enjoyed good health his whole life. He lost his wife eight years ago, but seemed more relieved than grief-stricken. That’s not my definition of a hard life.

L. BASCOMBE: You can find no mitigation for what he has done? His crime is unforgivable as far as you are concerned?

ME: I didn’t know it was my job to forgive him. I didn’t realise the onus was on me to decide that.

L. BASCOMBE: It is going to be very hard for him to move forward without knowing that he has your forgiveness. It will hold him back.

ME: Why do we care whether he moves forward or not? He’ll be spending the rest of his life in prison.

L. BASCOMBE: We’ll see.

* * *

White South Africans react with relief when an act of apparently random violence turns out to be personal. I know this to be true because I have reacted that way myself.

Random violence makes us nervous because it could happen to any of us. If people all around you are being hit by comets, you start worrying that you could be hit by a comet too. And you know there is nothing you can do to protect yourself because comets strike without warning. There is no hiding or evading to be done. You could be in a high, high building or a deep, deep hole, and still be hit by a comet.