It took months before Ben felt like the silence in Canada was something he could live inside, rather than just survive. At first, it had felt like the absence of home. But slowly, carefully, it began to feel like its own kind of presence, different, but not empty.

Canada was quiet in a way Johannesburg had never been. Not just because of the snow, though it muffled everything like cotton, but because the air itself seemed gentler. No gates clicking shut behind them. No dogs barking in the night. No distant pops that could be fireworks or gunshots.

They didn’t make an announcement. There were no dramatic speeches, no suitcases dragged through the driveway. Instead, the idea of leaving crept in like a draught through an open window, slow, barely noticeable, until suddenly it was everywhere.

It started like any other evening. The lights flickered once, twice, and then went out. The television died mid-sentence, plunging the lounge into silence. Ben sat cross-legged on the floor, halfway through a drawing of a dragon curled around a crumbling city. His mom cursed under her breath, fumbling for the matches.

Ben still played with Tshepo after school, but things had begun to shift. The warmth that once existed between their families cooled, not because of anything the boys had done, but because of the unspoken fears creeping in from outside. The street they lived on had become a boundary, one that marked not just geography but the slow unravelling of trust.

The signs were subtle at first. The corner café where Ben used to get peppermint crisps closed one Monday without warning. A hand-scrawled note on the door read, “Closed until further notice,” but everyone knew what it meant. They’d been robbed, again. Probably at gunpoint. Again.

Ben du Toit was ten years old when the weight of the world began to press on his narrow shoulders. He lived in a fading white suburb of Johannesburg called Kensington, where cracked sidewalks ran beside high fences and broken gates. His father, Willem, a former electrician, now sold used appliances out of their garage. His mother, Elsa, used to teach Afrikaans at the local school before she was retrenched.