But I didn’t do it. I left.

I told you I won’t, I must not, tell a lie. I never slept with Joseph Weiss, I didn’t do it.

NO LETTER FROM Eric in London came. Two weeks, three weeks. It would turn to autumn soon. It was March 1973.

Joseph had been with us for fourteen months.

I was sleeping well, long hours, through the night.

DURING THE SMALL HOURS, perhaps three o’clock in the morning, of March 26th, we were asleep in our house. A family, safe and dreaming: how I see us all in our soft white beds, hardly stirring, softly breathing. Emily and Josias, asleep too in their rooms, each of them, on their beds, those iron beds. The dogs asleep, sprawled and still, in the dark, stone yard.

And a noise woke me, that I knew at once came from the backyard. Dogs barking, but many dogs barking. Men’s voices shouting, but many men’s voices. Voices in Afrikaans. Emily — it sounded like Emily — shrieking. The sound of wood splintering and the sound of it again. Dogs again, hysterical. Emily’s voice, hysterical. More shouting, swearing, and then the sound of thudding feet, of running. Jou moer. And then, after a brief lull: unmistakably, the same noise, but coming from the garden now, not the yard on the side of the house, near the gate, the dogs. For several minutes I listened in horror, Howard awake now too. More shouting in Afrikaans, opstaan opstaan, a dog yelping, it was in the garden. More minutes, long minutes. Die fok van hier af. Then, again running, and swearing. Thudding. Wood splintering. More running, then a brief lull, again. And finally from the road, car doors slamming, engines started, the dogs hysterical, still. And as I and Howard put on our dressing gowns and ran to the kitchen, to the yard, we saw the children — the children! — coming from their bedrooms, rubbing their eyes, too.

Emily was already on her way to us, she was at the kitchen door, Josias with no shirt on behind her.

They took Joseph, they took Joseph, Emily said, her breath came in jags. Her face shone with sweat under the yard light. Josias stood, speechless. And Howard.

It’s Howard’s face that I will always remember. A man disarmed. Shattered. And the children crying and crying, inconsolable.

WE WENT AT DAYBREAK to see Joseph’s room, the sun rising as it always did, on a day that was different to any other before it. There was his splintered door, battered in. His chair and table, overturned. And everything, everything else apart from the bedsheets, gone. No paper. No book. No pen. No briefcase. Nothing. His small fridge still filled with ordinary things: milk, butter, cheese, a plate of leftover something. And his bathroom: a white towel hanging, a bar of soap in the shower. Nothing else.

I, Howard, Emily, and Josias stood in the room, as in a wreckage. The children had gone to sleep finally, exhausted, an hour earlier.