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from Peter, the things he wrote – I attribute it all to cancer. But that is not all. The lies and insinuations no doubt prompted by his guilt over what happened, over what he did.
    I know this is the reason for me staying a little longer, this wanting to put things right again. I am not blind to this. I want to put it behind me, as I did once before.
    I look up at the sky. Still no stars. There is the noise of an owl, and crickets, always the crickets.

4
    It is dawn when I wake. I have slept more soundly than I did in the hotel. There is a spider on my leg. I kick it off and wipe my face in case there are more. I feel dirt wiped onto my face, and dampness. I grit my teeth and there is dirt in them too, as if I have spent the night underground.
    The damp is from mist that descended in the night. It is thick and I cannot see the house.
    I get up, piss against a tree. My head hurts, my neck too.
    I walk down the road to the gate. When I begin to see the shape of the house, I stop. It seems lighter like this. As if I could walk up to the house and then straight through it. Or, wave my arm and watch it break and curl away, like smoke. I hold my breath as if even that could make it disappear.
    I stand in the hall. All is quiet. I draw in a breath and hold it. Silence. The house smells closed up. Something died in here, I find myself thinking.
    I listen. I realise I am listening for Peter.
    I take it in this time, the house I mean, look around me properly. Here in the hallway the tiles are different. The carpets are probably different too, but they are the same colour as I remember from my childhood. In front of me, in the lounge, is a sideboard. My father kept liqueurs there. I stare at it. He appears before me, as if real: my father. He is dressed in shorts and a collared shirt. This is Port Elizabeth in the early 1980s. He comes into the lounge, a grin on his face. Though I cannot hear anything, there is the sense that someone is talking to him. A joke. He goes up to the sideboard and kneels and I see his bald spot that we used to tease him about before Paul died, and I see him open the cupboard and take out a bottle and two glasses. He opens his mouth and shouts something, but there is still no sound. He laughs, but again nothing.
    Then he stops, as if he has heard something. An intruder. He turns his face towards me, half turns. My heart stops. He does not see me. Of course he does not see me. But he is looking right at me. I cannot help looking behind me to see if there is someone there, but it is me he is looking at. There is still a grin on his face, but it starts to fade, to disappear and his shoulders slump as if under an unbearable weight.
    I shake my head to get rid of this thought, or vision, whatever it should be called. Walking into a place like this, the house in which you grew up, is bound to have a strange effect, bound to awaken memories or conjure visions. I feel I can imagine them here. My family. Smell their scent. As if they have just left the room I enter.
    I walk through the house and open windows. I need to get the air in.
    I sniff the damp air. Maybe the smell comes from out there, not the house itself but that which surrounds it.
    The kitchen is as I remember. The tiles are the same. There are still flowers on them in places where they haven’t been worn away. The cupboards, too, are exactly the same. For a moment I wonder if they are in fact the same or whether my mind is playing tricks on me. Perhaps I have forgotten everything, and am fooling myself that I remember. Perhaps the tiles were replaced soon after I left with a similar pattern, and then perhaps once or twice more, each pattern resembling the one before. The last pattern is definitively not the first, but able to pass for the first because of the gap of twenty years. Somehow the weight of change eliminates the difference from the first.
    In the lounge there is a photograph on the table, covered in dust. I pick it up. Three boys, two with