Tsotsi nodded.

‘So it was wrong to keep it you see, I mean to want to keep it. Because you can’t, can you? You can’t keep everything without it going sour. That is how it was with me—and that is what this little David taught me. You see…

Miriam closed her eyes and sighed and with her hands clasped in her lap rocked silently on the bed for a few moments before continuing. ‘You see…I don’t think Simon’s coming back. I think my man is dead.’ It was out. ‘I think he’s dead and buried somewhere.’

Out at last. In a sudden surge of almost masochistic courage she forced herself to say it again. ‘I’m thinking these days that it’s almost sure he’s dead. Simon is dead.’

She opened her eyes and found Tsotsi staring at her.

‘Dead. Simon is dead.’

Miriam looked down at the baby beside her. He’d finished his milk, so she picked him up and rocked him on her knees and rubbed his back and after he’d broken a few winds she put him down again and he went to sleep. None of this interrupted her chain of thought. She picked up where she had left off.

‘So Simon is dead, but I got my baby and there’s little David too. It’s hard times but I’m doing washing and my brother gives me something each week and I manage.’ Miriam stood at the door, looking out into the yard. ‘I mean, we got to live. Little David—he’s got to live. Anyway, Simon must and me too. Even you. We just got to live. Isn’t that so? That’s what it is. That’s all it is. Tomorrow comes and you got to live.’

Tomorrow comes, Tsotsi thought, and a little boy has got no father and his mother never came back and anyway he didn’t remember, but tomorrow taught him that he had to live. She was right.

Miriam hesitated for a few seconds at the doorway. When she spoke again her voice was calm and the emotion that had been trembling under it had passed.

‘You are tired. You can rest here if you want to.’

She went into the yard and down on her knees, and the heavy silence was broken by the splash and slap of her labours at the tub. There wasn’t much left to be washed, and when the last had been rinsed out she dragged the bath to one side and began hanging up the washing to dry. Miriam shook out each piece of washing before draping it over a line.

The whiteness leapt and dazzled in the sunlight. The wind trailed endlessly through them and they billowed out and fluttered as brave as flags. Soon there wasn’t a square inch of the yard that wasn’t covered with the restless whiteness. Miriam moved through it all, bent low at the waist like someone struggling through a snowstorm. One shirt in particular held his eyes; the sleeves swinging uselessly at the sides, the collar fallen forward as if the man who had worn it had been decapitated.