Late in 1998, Lincoln, a former journalist turned truck driver, picks up the ghost of a 17 year old white schoolgirl on a dark Joburg highway. She becomes his confessor, as he relates fragments of his life, hoping to seduce her. He is driving a shipment to Port Elizabeth, where he grew up, but does not want to return home with the news of being HIV positive. He would rather drive forever. Sooner or later Lincoln abandons the map completely, as he proceeds to willfully get lost. He gets stuck in an indeterminate phantom time, struggling to stay awake, losing and finding himself on a journey through eerie nocturnal landscapes and memories he has forgotten. Ban, the ghost's obsessive-compulsive best friend, wakes up after her funeral having tried to commit suicide. He is pursued by memories of Marga while she was alive, in particular her theories on AIDS and sexuality, and his secret love for her. A number of forces, real and imagined, are driving him towards overcoming his fear of leaving the house. Ban feels abused by his mother Helen's lifestyle. She is a con artist with a taste for reckless men, the latest of which is Derrick, who represents to Ban everything which is morally reprehensible about adulthood and growing up. Ean's discoveries in the course of his spring clean of the house, and the stories Lincoln tells the ghost, uncover Helen's great secret. She survived apartheid by denying her coloured family and living as a white woman, rejecting the black father of her child early on for her dream of becoming a .great white actress. When Ban runs away from home with the intention to commit suicide, and Lincoln emerges into the dawn with finer hopes of returning home, they meet without recognising one another as father and son, but unexpectedly give each other hope to carry on. In a world the one does not believe in and the other has abandoned, a boy and a man resist and deny the unfolding of their stories. Central to their struggle are the themes of home, family and healing. For Ban, healing means leaving, for Lincoln it requires return. The memories which pursue them will force them into the discovery of who they are about to become.
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Department of English Language and Literature