‘Shut your eyes, not tight-tight, just let them droop down, down.’ She could hear his voice, deep and warm, as if it were yesterday. ‘Now imagine a long, long, long train.’ He would always repeat words, stretching them out so that they were at once sonorous and soporific. ‘I think it’s a steam train. See all those carriages it’s pulling? Take everything that’s happened today and put each one in a different carriage. In they go, one by one by one by one. When they’re all in safely, tell the engine driver he can pull away. Now watch the train go. Slowly, slowly, slowly. It’s going, going. You can hardly see it now, just a little puff of smoke far away. It’s going to go round that bend and into that tunnel. There goes the first carriage, then the next … and there’s the last. It’s gone, the sleep train is gone.’

Lindi employed a version of her father’s trick now: a carriage for each segment of a day that had begun in the dawn calm of Greenside and the journey here to Mpumalanga.

Paulo Simbini had refused to come back to sit with her after the coach had pulled out of Middleburg. And who could blame him? His picture, with the body lying prone at the bottom of a burning Ponte City, was still in her notebook, a rebuke to her it’ll-be-all-right-in-the-morning reassurances.

Unlike those frenetic childhood nights when the whole point of the exercise was to fold away the day and see it disappearing, she realised she didn’t want to forget this one. Every part of it, from the cussed early-morning taxi driver who’d taken her to Park station, the casual prejudice she’d encountered there, the terror of Middleburg, even the assault, all of it helped to form a graphic reassurance that she was right to be here. It was the difference between understanding an injustice on paper and feeling it in your bones.

Lindi had come to South Africa because Anton had wanted her to, but she would stay because she – not just Anton – thought it was the right thing to do. The equivocation, the weighing up of competing arguments, the things that had always made her the careful but dependable one seemed to have gone. She noticed the change in herself in an almost physical way. For once she had been forced to rely on instinct and she’d found the experience liberating. She imagined it was like being high on some drug. She was free – free of herself. She felt good about herself, and wondered if she’d ever really known the feeling before.