It tells the story of a homosexual teacher in 1980s Apartheid South Africa and his relationships with his long-term partner and a young black boy.
The 13-year-old Disley D. Mashanini is the sole black pupil at a white private school in Sandton Johannesberg, there on a scholarship from a township in the Transvaal.
After André leaves, Pete makes Disley have a bath and then pins some of own clothes so that they fit the skinny little boy's body.
Disley is modest as he changes, but Pete is aroused: "I'd found this impromptu ceremony such an enjoyment that a furious guilt arose in me: if I prolonged this it would become more than a merciful deed, and I would be irretrievably lost".
Pete starts wishfully thinking about what might happen after they finish watching Polanski's Macbeth on video, "Probably after that he was going to seduce me, probably I was due to have the experience of a lifetime, and be entirely lost."
Pete discovers she is laundering money brought into South Africa by André and the novel ends with the suffering typical of the violent world of apartheid and police corruption.