‘Are you awake?’ Last night, the terror of last night! ‘Do you want coffee?’

His mother! He sat up suddenly and looked around and rubbed his eyes.

‘My mother. They took my mother.’

‘They took your mother and the rest of the world.’

‘Where is my mother?’

She shuffled up to him and held out the mug. ‘Where is God in heaven! Take it.’

He dropped his head and began to sniff.

‘A fine one you are,’ she said. ‘What sort of a man do you think you’ll make?’

He didn’t hear her, and anyway he wasn’t going to cry. He remembered it all now, but in a numb, dull way. There were no tears in it. He was quite brave in daylight and she had said don’t cry and had promised to come back. There was some sort of comfort in the old woman. She belonged in a way—to the room and his mother singing and supper in the yard. And she didn’t seem worried or anything other than her usual crabby self. He drank his coffee. It was warm and there was a comfort of a sort in that too. Days were long things. There was lots of time to come back and she had promised.

The old woman was sorting herself out, fussing with an old pair of shoes and her clothing. He watched her and in between knotting the doek on her head and putting a black shawl with a fringe over her shoulders, she stopped several times and looked at him. At last she was ready and came to the bed. She spoke to him directly, in a way no big person ever did, and all the time he looked seriously and unblinkingly back into her eyes and heard everything she said.

‘I’m going out.’ She paused here and seemed to search his face for something. ‘The last time I went out was…’ She paused again, closed her eyes momentarily and then carried on. ‘I’m going out and I’ll try to find her.’

‘She said she would come back.’

The old woman considered this and then spoke very slowly: ‘Then I’ll help her. I’m taking her dress and when I meet her somewhere she’ll put on her dress and be all right.’

‘Can I come?’

‘No. Your father is coming. You must be here.’

He heard those words like ice-cold hands in the small of his back. The old woman had turned away and was moving to the door.

‘I’ll try to find her if God’s in heaven.’

The door closed behind her and he was alone again and as frightened as at any time in the night past. For a moment he wanted to run after the old woman but he remembered his mother’s words, ‘Don’t move. Don’t go away from the room.’

He pulled the blankets up to his chin, and started waiting again, but this time the silence was right inside himself, right deep down where his heart beat and terror lodged, moving slowly that moment like something awakening from a sleep, taking its time, flexing itself and yawning. Days are long things.