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original keeper’s quarters where he had lived as a child. One of the windows was open, the curtain looped back. Music drifted out.
    Aletta would be there, dancing alone in an empty room.
    He inclined his head to listen more intently. A rumba? A tango?
    How at odds the notes of Aletta’s music with the low, rhythmic sound of the sea, the swell breaking on the shore.
    No charge of assault was laid in respect of the convict, Witbooi.
    It appeared he had not died – but who he was, why he was in jail, seemed irrelevant. He was simply a guano worker who had laughed.
    Hannes had filed a written report on the incident to be returned to Police Headquarters by the warders when the prisoners left the island in a fortnight’s time.
    Misklip had not been taken with them.
    Nothing more was heard.
    Yet, despite the silence, the shadow of the boy remained – for it was by his laugh that something was released. As if the southern horizon had reared up with land-born cloud.
    Some impending weather. Some ambiguous thunder.
    Besides his report to the police, Hannes wrote another to the lighthouse authorities asking for better medical supplies. Equipment good enough to deal with injuries, assaults or shock.
    But there were other maladies as well. They came without fevers or rashes or a worrying cough. Yet how could he say to the Railways doctor, James McLean, who had saved the boy and taken him off,
    – Have you a medicine to cure unhappiness, Doctor?
    – What unhappiness?
    – I cannot tell. It arrived the day the convict, Witbooi, laughed.
    That a laugh – so unpremeditated – could spawn such sorrow.
    For it was the moment when Misklip – who had taken all his pleasure from playing on a banjo or singing to the tune he wheezed out on his old accordion – rounded on a fear.
    To bring it to an end. Any end.
    ‘Did the boy die?’ Rika asks.
    ‘No,’ says Hannes. ‘And we heard no more about it. I thought the warders would have taken Misklip with them and have him charged for attempted murder. They did nothing. It didn’t seem to matter to them one way or the other. Too much bother, probably. But Misklip was convinced I’d saved him from them. It seems he always believed it. But I didn’t. It was the warders themselves who chose to say nothing. I have a shrewd suspicion Len paid them off.’ He pauses and there is a small catch in his voice when he speaks again. ‘But somehow I think, in fact, it had more to do with Aletta.’

Chapter 3
    ‘Aletta is my wife,’ Hannes says.
    ‘I saw her name on your form,’ Rika replies. ‘You gave no address.’ Indeed, her name is one Rika has not dared to mention before. There is an etiquette, a taboo, which precludes intrusion on another, greater intimacy.
    ‘We lost contact,’ Hannes says. ‘But it seems Maisie Beukes believes she saw her just the other day – even though she’s not a hundred per cent sure it was her. She thinks she is working in a department store in town.’
    ‘As what?’
    ‘Maisie says she saw an assistant at a make-up counter who looked just like Aletta. But she was in the distance and Maisie was with someone else so she couldn’t easily go and see.’
    Hannes lets his gaze drift, detached from her, detached from everything. But Rika knows it is this recent news that is the reason for his agitation, the reason he has chosen her to hear: we cannot sift our histories alone. Somehow they must exist beyond ourselves.
    Ah, Aletta.
    How does one begin to describe something that is so essential to life and yet so inimical to it, so dependent and yet so fiercely aloof from everyone – primal, passionate, embittered.
    She was a keeper’s daughter. Like him, she had been raised in a lighthouse. She had spent some weeks on the island as a girl when her father was relief keeper for another man on leave. There was something in the wild red-gold ofher tangled plaits that was as familiar to him as the gannets and the penguins and the rabbits in their burrows. She had