He turned back into the room, and fetching his chair sat down next to the bed. ‘Boston, you’ve read the books.’

‘I’ve read books.’

‘So tell me man. What does it mean?’

‘What?’

‘What I told you Boston.’

Boston closed his eyes. ‘We’re sick, Tsotsi. All of us, we’re sick.’

‘From what?’

‘From life.’

Tsotsi dropped his head and Boston felt the other man’s anguish and for a moment it was like a stab of pain that cut through his own in which he was wrapped like a baby in its swaddling clothes.

He stretched out an arm and touched Tsotsi, and waited for him to look at him, and then into those eyes, desperate eyes, he said: ‘I don’t know, Tsotsi. I know nothing. I am blind, and deaf and almost dumb. My words are just noises, and I make them in my throat like an animal.’ Then he gripped Tsotsi’s arm very tightly because he was suddenly seeing something clearly and it might help to say it: ‘You are different.’

Tsotsi bent forward.

‘You are changing, Tsotsi,’ and then later, ‘You mustn’t be frightened. It happens, man.’

Tsotsi bent still closer, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, until their heads were only inches apart, and in that way he had only to whisper as if frightened that the very walls might hear, wanting his questions to pass as a final secret between Boston and himself.

‘Why Boston? What did do it?’

A sudden elation lit up Boston’s face; he tried to smile, but his lips wouldn’t move, and his nose started throbbing, but despite the pain he whispered back at Tsotsi: ‘You are asking me about God.’

‘God.’

‘You are asking me about God, Tsotsi. About God, about God.’

Tsotsi sat back, keeping his silence then, and in the immediate moments after Boston had spoken, through the last hour of darkness, even when the candle spluttered and went out because it had burnt down to the wood, still silent when later Boston, who had gone his own way with his memories, remembering something clear as the note of a church bell, murmured the first line of a hymn, ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’, silent through the last hour together when the grey light in the room found them in the same attitudes, Boston on his bed, Tsotsi in his chair, silent finally when Boston had sat up in his bed and, looking through the window at the paling sky above him, said, ‘The green fields of my youth’, giving a deep emphasis to green, staying like that, leaning forwards, his arms stretched out before him, and then making his move to the door.

Tsotsi followed him and once tried to stop him. Boston shook off the hand.

‘I must get going Tsotsi. I tell you it was green, green man, the grass in the fields of my youth. I must, man.’

Tsotsi looked at his nakedness, and gave him trousers. He offered him sourmilk and bread, but Boston refused. The last he saw of Boston was the figure of a man, stumbling, half running down the street. Ahead of him the sun had cleared the cooling towers of the gasworks. It was a new day.