I stood by the window, looking out, trying to calm myself by thinking of Janet. But she seemed remote from me. The sunlight — it was a pale winter sun, was remote. What went on in the street was remote from me, the people passing were not people, they were marionettes. I felt a change inside me, a sliding lurch away from myself, and I knew this change to be another step down into chaos. I touched the stuff of the red curtain, and the feel of it on my fingers was dead and slippery, slimy. I saw this substance, processed by machinery, dead stuff, to hang like dead skin, or a lifeless corpse at my windows. I touched the plant in a pot on the window sill. Often when I touch the leaves of the plant, I feel a kinship with the working roots, the breathing leaves, but now it seemed unpleasant, like a little hostile animal or a dwarf, imprisoned in the earthenware pot and hating me for imprisoning it. So I tried to summon up younger, stronger Annas, the schoolgirl in London and the daughter of my father, but I could see these Annas only as apart from me. So I thought of the corner of a field in Africa, I made myself stand on a whitish glitter of sand, with the sun on my face, but I could no longer feel the heat of that sun. I thought of my friend Mr Mathlong, but he, too, was remote. I stood there, trying to reach the consciousness of a hot yellow sun, trying to summon Mr Mathlong, and suddenly I was not Mr Mathlong at all, but the mad Charlie Themba. I became him. It was very easy to be Charlie Themba. It was as if he stood there slightly to one side of me, but part of me, his small spiky dark figure, his small, intelligent, hotly indignant face looking at me. Then he melted into me. I was in a hut, in the Northern Province, and my wife was my enemy, and my colleagues on the Congress, formerly my friends, were trying to poison me, and somewhere out in the reeds a crocodile lay dead, killed with a poisoned spear, and my wife, bought by my enemies, was about to feed me crocodile flesh, and when it touched my lips I would die, because of the furious enmity of my outraged ancestors. I could smell the cold decaying flesh of the crocodile, and I looked through the door of the hut and saw the dead crocodile, rocking slightly on warm decaying water, in the reeds of the river, and then I saw the eyes of my wife peering through the reeds that made my hut, judging to see if she could safely enter. She came bending through the hut door, her skirts held to one side with the sly lying hand I hated, and in the other hand a tin plate where shreds of stinking flesh lay ready for me to eat.