So, not a ball then. This is a confident lad, unafraid of putting himself forward.

I stand back and make a sweeping motion with my hand. “Please do.”

I show him into the sitting room and inform him that I have only water to drink. Perhaps he would like a glass? He stares at the splashes of tea on my table and the abandoned, unwashed mugs, and asks for coffee. I explain that I only have instant, and he says that will be fine this once.

I make him a mug of coffee, and he settles into a chair opposite me.

“I thought you lived on a farm in Worcester,” I say.

“No, that’s not me. You’re thinking of someone else.”

“What do you want to tell me?”

“I need to explain that my place is here in the urban world. Here is where the transformation needs to begin, in the economic engine of the country. The countryside hasn’t been a significant player in this country’s narrative for two hundred years.”

“What is your role? Are you the sinless Christ-child?”

“That is too passive a descriptor. I am not the lamb, but the warrior. I am a reformer.”

“I don’t understand why I had a role in this. Why was my blood needed to create you? Why could the reforming warrior not have been a black child? Why did you have to be a mixed-race boy?”

“Because John Coetzee couldn’t resist inserting whiteness into a prominent role in this country’s future. He couldn’t accept that white people have become irrelevant—that their story has been told. He had to make them central to the narrative, even abased and humiliated by rape.”

“Is the humiliation mine or my father’s?”

“It is your father’s humiliation because you don’t experience it as such. You accept what happens to you, and it makes you stronger. You take your place in South Africa’s future as the consort of Petrus. It is your father who is left bewildered and out of time, aware that the world has moved on without him.”

“But I don’t want to accept what happened to me. I am not the peaceful, consenting fiction-Lucy. I am a rage-filled harpy.”

He stands and takes his mug to the sink. “You need to work on that.”

* * *

The child leaves on the heels of a text from Eugene.

Eugene: How goes it with the white whale?

An interesting opening gambit. It focuses on me and my priorities, while also demonstrating a shared knowledge between us—a kind of verbal shorthand.

Lucy: No progress so far. NYT op-ed rejected. Thought about launching social media campaign to smoke him out but decided against it.

Eugene: Those can be brutal for all concerned. Had a meeting in your neighbourhood this morning and noticed the cops outside your house. All okay?