Soon Miriam was clearing the line and then turned and came towards the room with her arm piled high with the dry washing.

Tsotsi went to the bed and looked down. His baby was awake, but lying quite still. He felt Miriam come up behind him.

‘You want to take him. Please don’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Not ever. Please.’

‘Is there water?’ She gave him a mug.

‘When will you be back?’

‘Some time.’

‘Where are you going?’

Ding-dong-ong-ong. Ding-dong-ong-ong.

Tsotsi did not yet trust her sufficiently to leave the baby in her care. By nightfall he had returned the baby to the ruins.

He woke up late the next morning. He had slept long. The sun had cleared the rooftops and was already hot.

It was a new day and what he had thought out last night was still there, inside him. Only one thing was important to him now. ‘Come back,’ the woman had said. ‘Come back, Tsotsi.’

I must correct her, he thought. ‘My name is David Madondo.’

He said it aloud in the almost empty street, and laughed. The man delivering milk heard him, and looking up said, ‘Peace my brother.’

‘Peace be with you’, David Madondo replied and carried on his way.

He heard the bulldozers and saw the dust a long way away. It was a strange noise, and he had been hearing it for a long time. When he turned the corner and saw them, he stopped and stared.

The slum clearance had entered a second and decisive stage. The white township had grown impatient. The ruins, they said, were being built up again and as many were still coming in as they carried off in lorries to the new locations or in vans to the jails. So they had sent in the bulldozers to raze the buildings completely to the ground.

He started running from the bottom of the street, and half way up he started shouting: ‘No! Stop! Stop it!’

People stopped and watched him pass, and because of the look in his eyes turned and followed him. A few cried ‘Stop’ with him, but not knowing why.

He jumped through the ruins, leaving the others behind because they weren’t going in there, and because of the noise and the dust. Those who were inside, waiting with sledgehammers behind the bulldozer, they did not hear or see him. They were watching the wall, and it was with something like sadness because they all remembered MaRhabatse.

He got there with seconds to spare. He had enough time to dive for the corner where the baby was hidden, before the first crack snaked along the wall and the topmost bricks came falling down, time enough even then to look, and then finally to remember. Then it was too late for anything; and the wall came down on top of him, flattening him into the dust.

They unearthed him minutes later. All agreed that his smile was beautiful, and strange for a tsotsi, and that when he lay there on his back in the sun, before someone had fetched a blanket, they agreed that it was hard to believe what the back of his head looked like when you saw the smile.