Boston regretted having done it, because in those long years Marty was the nearest he had found to something good, and it was finished. The police turned on the pressure, then, and the gang broke up and for a long time he didn’t go near her place. When eventually he did chance his arm one day, it was to be served coldly like the others, coldly, kept at a distance as if nothing had ever passed between them, neither love nor hate. That hurt more than anything else she could have done to him. He kept away again, and two years passed before that night two days after Tsotsi had beaten him down.

Boston awoke at the darkest hour of the night.

Sitting in his chair, waiting for him, Tsotsi had heard the time pass as a sequence of sound, starting with early night, the music and laughing, and through that to a time when the laughing had stopped, and then still later the music as well, voices mumbling then in sleepy accents, and then almost at the end the occasional, defiant revels of the last one, sudden voices that were shouting until they too passed and at the last there was silence.

The bed creaked, and then Boston asked aloud in the darkness: ‘Where am I?’

Tsotsi left his chair and lit the candle. The two men looked at each other in the wan light. For a moment, for the smallest, blinked fraction of the silence that passed as they eyed each other, there was fear in Boston. Then the defeat, the total and final defeat of his body, of himself, of his manhood, was remembered and he cared no longer and his fear passed. He closed his eyes and Tsotsi went back to his seat. It was better with his eyes closed. There were no irrelevances, like other faces, or objects or colour—just his pain.

‘Why did you bring me here?’ he asked.

‘I need to speak with you,’ Tsotsi said.

If it had been the Boston of any other time, he would have sat up rigid in the bed, his eyes bright with excitement. Now he was no longer interested. All that had happened was too total, too final and complete for him to retrace his steps back to some point along the way where he had still been stumbling to this moment.

‘Have you seen me?’

‘Ja.’

‘You did it.’

A long silence and then Tsotsi replied: ‘I felt you.’

What is he trying to say? That he felt for me, Tsotsi? A flicker of interest, so he opened his eyes and stared, and then a second later closed them again. What did it matter?

‘My youth,’ Boston said, saying it because he found the phrase on his lips, saying it because in the broken, shattered days that had passed since Tsotsi’s attack it had been in his mind constantly, evocative, charged with nostalgic pain. It had a meaning he couldn’t even explain to himself.

Tsotsi tried again. ‘I need to know things, Boston man.’