And there, the third mistake. He bought the ticket with money from his pay packet. In the moment and its exuberance he had forgotten a cardinal piece of advice for getting home safe on the Friday night train…don’t let anyone see your money. Why after all remember the silly warning when thousands of his own people stood around him, who like him were honest men and about their own business of getting home safely and quickly. One whole year and never any trouble on the 5:49 (always ten minutes late)…and so he forgot to slip a small coin apart when they had paid him, and instead now tore his pay packet open in a hurry, because the others behind him were in a hurry, because of their laughter and curses, tearing the pay packet open to find a small coin among the notes.

He hurried to the platform and waited there. See! He was still alive! But Tsotsi was closing in on his man, and when the train, the 5:49 (always ten minutes late), pulled into the station and the crowd surged for the doors, he used that moment to close in on his man.

And now in the train (still alive!), jammed in with as many as the coach could hold, going home in a smell of hard work and tobacco smoke, his ears as full as his nose with the low murmur of tired voices, himself impatient because the writing man was coming to his room at six-thirty and there was still a half-hour walk from the station, and in between all this thinking of Maxulu, then his tie, and seeing it crumpled by the rush to get in, wanting to straighten it but finding with slow surprize that he could not move either arm.

He never had time to register the full meaning of that moment. He tried a second time, but Die Aap was strong.

Tsotsi smiled at the growing bewilderment on the big bastard’s face, waiting for and catching the explosion of darkness in the eyes as Butcher worked the spoke up and into his heart. Even as that was happening, Tsotsi bent close to the dying man and in his ear whispered an obscene reference to his mother. A moment of hate at the last, he had learnt, disfigured the face in death.

Die Aap still had his arms locked around the man’s waist. As the body slumped the other three crowded in and with the combined pressure of their bodies held it erect…a move unnoticed in the crowded coach. Boston who was nearest, and who was also sick, sick right through his brain, through his heart into his stomach, and was fighting to keep it down, Boston it was who slipped his hand into the pocket and took out the pay packet.

When the train pulled into the station the crowd made a second surge for the door, as happened every night, and the few on the station who wanted to go further up the line battled their way against this flood to get into the coaches, as also happened every night, but the 5:49 (ten minutes late) did not pull away, as happened occasionally on Friday nights, because those left behind in the coach and the few who got in found Gumboot Dhlamini and saw the end of the bicycle spoke.