Damon Galgut

The moment the metal box speaks her name, she knows it’s happened. She’s been in a tense, headachy mood all day, almost like she had a warning in a dream but can’t remember what it is. Some sign or image, just under the surface. Trouble down below. Fire underground.

[Ockie] imagines himself one of his Voortrekker ancestors, rolling slowly into the interior in an ox-wagon. Yes, there are those who dream in predictable ways. Ockie the brave pioneer, floating over the plain. A brown-and-yellow countryside passes outside, dry except for where a river cuts through it, under a huge Highveld sky.

The first time I saw him I thought, he won't last.

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were.

And maybe that is the true reason for this journey, by shedding all the ballast of the familiar life they are each trying to recapture a sensation of weightlessness they remember but perhaps never lived, in memory more than anywhere else traveling is like free-fall, or flight.

So for a while I had two lives: one that was empty and adrift, in the hospital by day and another that was illicit and intense, by the side of the road at night. The one had nothing to do with the other.

He knows that he is beautiful and somehow this makes him ugly.

They park in the driveway under the awning, with its beautiful green and purple and orange stripes. Beyond it, a diorama of white South Africa, the tin-roofed suburban bungalow made of reddish face brick, surrounded by a moat of bleached garden. Jungle gym looking lonely on a big brown lawn. Concrete birdbath, a Wendy house and a swing made from half a truck tyre.

Innovation and change: it was one of her key phrases, a mantra she liked to repeat. But it was empty. Ruth Ngema would go to great lengths to avoid any innovation or change, because who knew what might follow on?"

All the images and impressions and countries and continents he'd vised had been erased. What you don't remember never happened.