Tsotsi straightened up again and went to the table where he put the candle down. His head was spinning. He’d held his breath during the examination and now his heart raced and his stomach was convulsing. Tsotsi sat down and waited for the dizziness and nausea to pass.

Then he counted his money. Two shillings. What did he expect after three days without a job. Two shillings. It would buy a loaf of bread and a tin of sourmilk. He blew out the candle and left the room. It took ten minutes to buy the food. When he returned he struck a match and had another look at Boston. He hadn’t moved.

Tsotsi sat down in the dark. I won’t light the candle, he thought. It’s short. I’ll need it when he talks. He ate some of the bread, drank half the milk, and waited.

Walter ‘Boston’ Nguza. Born at Umtata, the son of a humble, tired old woman. Educated there to standard eight at St John’s College. Promising pupil, nearly always first in his class. Mother very proud. Scholarship to St Peter’s High School, Johannesburg. At this period a small, shrunken youth with spectacles. Too serious. No luck with the girls. Then the training college for teachers. Again a scholarship. Mother, older, but very proud. At the end of his first year, having studied until he was almost a wreck, Walter Nguza came first in his class. ‘A man with a future.’ ‘You’ll go far Nguza.’ ‘Serve your people, etc.’ Mother very proud.

The second year, after a loss of appetite and another supreme effort, again head of his class. ‘Take it easy, Boston Boy. You’ll go off the rails man.’ Still shrunken, still wearing glasses, still no progress with the girls. But his mother very, very proud. Third and final year. He never wrote the final examinations for the diploma because in June that year he was expelled for trying to rape a fellow student.

Once, in the years that followed the warm, storm- expectant highveld night in June—he was twenty-four years old as he lay on Tsotsi’s bed—Boston had during an idle moment written down this summary of his early career. He was proud of it. Simple, concise, no sentiment, no unnecessary detail; the straight, rising line of a life—of a hungry boy, a lonely youth, a desperate young man—rising in a clean curve to the point where it broke. The precise spot was a grove of trees near the college tennis courts at ten o’clock on that June night.

He had read it out once to a bunch of the boys.

‘Go on,’ they said when he was finished. He blinked at them. He had already given up wearing glasses. In some ways and for some things it was better not to see.

‘Go on,’ they said. ‘What happened?’

‘There is nothing more to tell.’

‘Afterwards.’

‘There is nothing more to tell. It all ended that night.’

‘Ja.’

‘It’s all finished. Everything. Finished as dead as cigarette ash.’