Would it make me happy to see Coetzee living homeless in the Bo-Kaap? Would I want his award to be taken away from him and given to me?

The answer is yes to both questions.

But that isn’t a part of myself I want to encourage. If, as the inspirational memes would have it, we all have two dogs living inside us—the noble wolf and the snapping cur—we can choose which one to feed. I choose to feed the wolf and starve the cur.

I won’t embark on Moira’s social media campaign. Not because I think it has no prospects of success, but because I think it has too many.

It is tempting to bring one’s enemies low like this. Instead of internalising your anger and letting it consume you, you leak it onto social media—a corrosive force that consumes all in its wake.

I am not going to do that. Not because I am a good person, but because the disgust-hangover would be too awful, and I am already sufficiently disgusted with myself every day.

CHAPTER 13

I have an appointment with Lydia Bascombe. I can trust her to make sense of the midden that is my mind.

L. BASCOMBE: There can be no reconciliation without reparations. History has shown that. Here in South Africa, we have seen what happens when you sweep history under the carpet of rainbow-ism. Those issues you thought you had pushed out of sight will fester until you can’t ignore them any longer.

ME: But what am I sweeping under the carpet? What?

L. BASCOMBE: The harm that John Coetzee did to you. You can’t forgive him until you have exacted payment for your suffering. It is not possible.

ME: He doesn’t even know that he harmed me. He is oblivious.

L. BASCOMBE: That doesn’t matter. Take the case of the Rwandan genocide. In the years following the genocide, the Hutus as a people flourished and grew prosperous. They got over the genocide. They put it behind them. The Tutsis, on the other hand, suffer from depression, unemployment, high suicide rates, and a general feeling of hopelessness. As a people, they are not doing well. It says so in The Guardian, so it must be true.

ME: I don’t know what any of this means.

L. BASCOMBE: The Hutus were responsible for the genocide. Well, the Hutu-majority government was. And while there are museums and other official attempts to recognise the genocide, the Hutus never had to pay a significant price for what they did.

ME: A bit like white South Africans, then?