‘Tell about the girl then.’

‘What is there to tell?’

‘You tried your luck with her?’

‘Ja.’

‘Just like that.’

‘Ja.’

…That was one story Boston could not spin out, not even during the long afternoons in Tsotsi’s room, waiting there with him and Butcher and Die Aap for darkness. In the years that had passed he’d tried only once.

‘I didn’t do it. I tell you I didn’t—not the way they thought I did. I was out walking. Hell, I remember. I was sick of the books and scared. You believe that. I was already scared of the exams. It was a warm night. I’m telling you, that sort of night still gives me creeps under my skin. Near the tennis courts I bumped into this girl. She was also a student. Like I was telling you, I never had any luck with the girls. It had got so bad I was scared of them. When I saw her there I wanted to run. But she started to talk. What could I do? What did I know about what she had in her mind. You see, she just wanted to play, but I tell you I had no luck with the girls. So when she came near me and started rubbing. Hell! Was that a hot night. You see I didn’t know when to stop. I didn’t know that you went just so far and no further. She started screaming and they came running and found me. She was all in tears. But I mean, what could I do? What could I say? That’s how it happened.’

Could you now honestly say he was to blame? Or the girl for that matter? And the others? The stern-faced, the disappointed, the shocked (‘Nguza! No!’), they had come running only when it was already over. His mother? There was a thought there. But in the end it didn’t matter who was to blame because it came down to the same thing: Walter Nguza packing his few things and leaving the college, saying to himself, numbly, ‘It’s a mistake.’ That was putting it in a nutshell. A mistake. Couldn’t really even call it an injustice.

Since then he’d had an obsession with mistakes and seen so many of them—for some men even died, like that fool Gumboot—that in his twenty-fourth year he had finally arrived at what he called the philosophy of error. ‘It’s a mistake,’ he said when he was drunk, which was the time when he saw it clearest. ‘The whole bloody thing, from beginning to end, from Adam to Walter Boston Nguza is one big mistake. No kidding.’

He went straight from the college to the railway station and spent his whole day there waiting for the train. Had it been a morning train he might have avoided the biggest mistake of all, not going home, because that is what happened. He was given too much time to brood on the image of a tired, getting-old, very proud woman hoeing in the fields. He could see her shield her eyes from the sun and look down the road, and seeing him, come running to the hut to meet him. ‘Mother…’ He went no further. It was too painful.