I can’t contain myself. My laughter is out of place, as if I am laughing beside a newly-dug grave. The faces around me seem to come together in a manic jumble of incongruous expressions. My daughter wears a worried, serious look on her face.

‘Why are you laughing? I don’t see anything funny to laugh at.’

But there is, there is. We are all so serious about things that do not merit any seriousness. It is the revelation of utter futility that makes me laugh. To negate myself and all my values makes life, existence, survival, bearable.

I hear voices echoing in my mind …. ‘Please tell me, teacher, please have the courage to tell me that you are a failure. You are a fool. You haven’t learnt a thing in twenty-five years. You can barely survive. It won’t take you long to starve to death. You can hardly fend for your family. You’re looking for the cheapest clothes … cut-pieces, cut prices. You’re nearing the grave without having learnt a thing unless now, at this point, you confront your exploiters. Your subversion of all those sham noble ideas will at least rip that veil off your eyes … revelation … the stark truth … teacher …’

My laughter is really a shriek of pain, the death throes of the desperate. As I dissolve in helpless and hysterical laughter the world around me splinters, disintegrates. In the street reflected in the shattered mirrors of light I see dismembered limbs, shreds of flesh trampled upon by those who flee to avoid disaster. When I look up and wipe my eyes the world lies before me bathed once more in sunshine. Voices grow recognizable again. Limbs are whole again and flesh and blood take on the semblance of reality.

We walk quietly to the bus stand.

‘Look,’ my daughter says, ‘a Christmas tree.’

Beside the garbage heap with its wads of cut hair, mounds of pineapple skins, scraps of food and paper, stands a Christmas tree. It is an old, withered jam fruit tree, a street tree, dying, doomed to be cut down soon. On its puny branches hang an abundance of empty tins, scraps of coloured paper and cloth, fluttering like pennants; an old tyre slung on one of the branches. Also a few crumpled flowers, old shoes.

‘The beggars’ Christmas tree,’ I murmur.

‘Ah, we can share those gifts,’ my daughter says, not without a trace of irony.