As Tom lurched and swerved and swayed his way home along Selborne Avenue, he heard footsteps approaching. The footsteps on the floorboards were the clickety-clack of a woman’s heeled pair of shoes. Floorboards? A woman? Was he back on stage? Who was he playing in this moment? What was his role? Was he finally playing Lear? Was this Cordelia approaching? Was he about to tell Ophelia to get herself to a nunnery, or let Lady Macbeth persuade him to get blood on his hands? Tom tried to push through the fog of his mind so that he could remember what great role he was supposed to be playing. Shylock? Was this Portia come in the guise of Balthasar to teach him the difference between justice and vengeance? There was a clearing in his mind, and Tom remembered that gone were his glory days on the stage, and that he had been reduced to playing Emil Coetzee at bars. In that case, the woman was a lover. Emil Coetzee certainly had plenty of those. The knowledge that it was a woman following him allowed Tom to relax. There was never anything to fear from a woman except the end of her tether.

The heeled clickety-clack crept closer on the floorboards … No, Tom remembered, he was not on the stage now: the footsteps were on the concrete pavement of one of the streets in the City of Kings … Selborne Avenue. Clickety-clack. Clickety-clack. As the footsteps came nearer, the strong scent of a cheap woman’s perfume grew stronger. No, not quite right – modifier in the wrong place – a woman’s cheap perfume. There was a world of difference between a cheap woman’s perfume and a woman’s cheap perfume, Tom thought, just before the woman called out to him.

‘Emil!’ she said.

Tom turned around and heard three shots being fired from a gun. It was only when he began to sink to the cold concrete of the pavement that he realised he had been shot. Had the woman who shot him given him a moment to pause and reflect, Tom would have been happy to know that his performance as Emil was so complete and so convincing that the woman thought he was indeed Emil Coetzee.

As Tom struggled to turn his lolling head, he heard the clickety-clack of the heels come nearer still. The scent of a woman’s cheap perfume … a cheap woman’s perfume … tickled his nostrils, and he would have sneezed had his body not been in distress. He opened his eyes with great difficulty to see leaning above him a woman who was now so close that he could hear her shaky breath. Her back was to the streetlight and so her face was poorly lit, but Tom could tell that she was anywhere between the ages of thirty and sixty. Although he could not see her clearly, he was certain he had never seen the woman before.