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they return. I see things and sometimes wonder if they are real. I see people and wonder if they are in fact here in front of me, or if they are ghosts, figments of my imagination. I would reach out and touch them but I doubt that would sit well with them if indeed they are real.
    I am sure this feeling will pass. I know what causes it. Half a life lived here, half a life somewhere else, a return, and with the return the awakenings of a time past. It is like jumping into a mountain pool. The silt is disturbed but it will settle again soon enough and it will be like nothing ever happened.
    A flower from a jacaranda tree falls on my arm. I pick it off and crush it between my fingers.
    It is darker now. A few houses have lights on. As I walk past one on my way back to the car, a dog rushes up, barking. There is a fence and the dog hurls itself against it but cannot get through. Something stirs in me at the sight of this animal. I stand and watch as it grows more frantic. A light comes on at the side of the house and I walk away quickly.
    Back in the car, I come to a point where the road forks and I turn left. The houses here are set further back from the road. There are no streetlights any more.
    I open the windows as I drive. I can see leaves framed against a black sky. The trees smell like dust. A smell of a home I once had but which now I don’t know and which does not know me.
    It hit me as I stepped off the plane – the smell of the place. I stopped at the top of the stairs until the person behind me asked me to move.
    At the airport I gave them my British passport. My South African one has long since expired and I have never wanted to renew it. It felt like I was doing something wrong. I was expecting the woman who looked at my passport to take it with her, walk out of the booth and up to her supervisor. She would point and they would both stare. The exile returns. Who does he think he is?
    Outside the gate to the house, I park the car, get out and look down the drive at the house. I close my eyes and remember the rooms: the hall, the lounge, dining room, study. Upstairs, too. I focus on one room: the bedroom that leads to the attic. The details are clear: concrete floor, a dark patch in one area, wooden beams, fresh splinters on one.
    The lights are off.
    I do not go in immediately. The keys are in my pocket and I feel the shape of them. I look around me. There is no one else here, no one on the road. From here I cannot even see a neighbour’s house, let alone someone inside. I do not feel alone, though. Possibly, here, I never could. I find myself wishing I did feel alone.
    I sit against a tree for a time, not waiting for anything in particular, just waiting. My hands rest on leaves and I burrow into them a short way. I would like to go further in, pull a blanket of them over me. I picture myself digging through the leaves, sand, rocks, slowly burrowing my way towards the house. If I made enough tunnels, dug them close enough to the surface, then perhaps cracks would begin to appear in the walls of the house and the roof and then the whole thing would collapse. I, somehow not crushed by the weight of it, trapped nonetheless by the walls, buried deep in soil.
    I could leave. I wonder why I don’t. What is there for me here? What is this plan that says I have to spend time here? In truth I do not know. If I am honest, I do not know what I want to accomplish. Peter wrote a letter. In it, the product of a brain showing the first signs of a tumour, he made some accusations. Not accusations, suggestions. They rankle. By being here, I feel, I can put things right again, reorder events the way they should be, the way they have been.
    Twenty-eight years since Paul died. Can we be certain of events that far in the past? Our minds change things, alter the sequence, alter intent, and when, as was the case with Peter, a mind is riddled with cancer, then what indeed are the chances? It might as well all be make-believe.
    The letter