The following morning, Kagiso woke up much later than he’d planned. By the time he shuffled into the living room, the only communal room, there was not a single trace of the previous night’s revelry. Maude was sitting at the table, a pair of spectacles pinched over her nose, staring at a pile of papers. She started to get up, pushing down on the table with both hands. Kagiso touched her shoulder and told her to stay seated. She seemed suddenly frail. He noticed her ankles were thick. He brought two mugs of tea to the table and sat down next to her.

The papers in front of Maude related to a pension the Seatons had set up for her before they left and which they had continued to fund years after they left South Africa.

‘They want to stop sending me the pension,’ she said weakly.

‘Who? Harry and Helen? That can’t be right.’ Kagiso frowned.

‘No! It’s the company.’

‘Let me see.’ He read the letter through and explained that the insurance company no longer wanted to send monthly statements by post automatically. It would be done online, unless customers expressly asked to stay on the postal system. He imagined some bright young thing coming up with the plan, oblivious to the pre-internet generation for whom this particular product had been designed. Maude sighed with relief, her mind put at rest by his confident assurances.

That matter concluded, Maude had a number of chores for Kagiso. Every time he finished one she seemed to have another waiting. He wondered if she was inventing them as she went along – a mother’s ploy to keep her beloved son close to her, even if only for a few more minutes. In the end Kagiso decided he would take the overnight train, via Pretoria. Maude beamed, like a child with an ice cream, when he told her. She immediately set about making a cake for him to take to Malelane. No amount of protest would stop her.

In fact, he didn’t regret the delayed departure. He needed respite. The meeting with the others in Hillbrow, his argument with Sharmi, the reunion with Lindi, bumping into Willemse again and the funeral itself, all of it had unnerved him. He needed the time and space to think, above all to understand how an idea hatched in the edifying glow of idealism had been transmuted into this uncontrolled and ugly sequence of events, like the scientific perfection of nuclear fission turned into the hateful vengeance of Hiroshima.