‘What’s your name Tsotsi…your real name?’ he asked once, on one of the first days when he joined them.

Tsotsi gave him a chance, looking at Die Aap first before walking away. Die Aap knew why Tsotsi had looked at him, so when he was gone Die Aap told Boston how much Tsotsi hated questions about himself and how no one knew anything about him except that he was the hardest, the quickest, the cleverest that had ever been and that once somebody had tried to find out something and he was dead.

So Boston stopped asking questions, while he was sober, that is. He drank a lot, especially after jobs, and even then at first he hadn’t actually asked them. But they were there and Tsotsi could see them, behind the blinking eyes that needed glasses, eyes that struggled hard to focus on him, and studied him until too much had been drunk and they turned away, or inwards, or closed for sleep.

His mistake was that he let this continue. A bigger mistake was to start playing the game with Boston, which he did when he began choosing jobs because of the other man, the ones Boston couldn’t do, or hated, or made him sick. Because when Tsotsi did this, and Boston saw it, and made Tsotsi realize that he saw it, then Boston ventured tentatively from silence to the spoken word. That was the stage their play had reached that night at Soekie’s, when Butcher had called for more liquor and Die Aap was half asleep, and Boston prowled the room and Tsotsi rocked on his chair, outwardly calm, the same as always, inwardly uneasy as he watched the blurred shadow of Boston through his low eyes.

Soekie brought a bottle to the table. She was a coloured woman in her fifties and her story was that she had been born in the best bed, in the biggest house of the best European suburb in the city, but her mother never loved her and that was why she lived in the township. ‘I wrote regular’, she always said at the end of her story. ‘I’ve got the address, but I get no replyings.’ What do you write Soekie, they asked her. ‘My birthday,’ she said. ‘I want to know my birthday.’

And so Soekie was at the table with a bottle, collecting her money before pouring a tot into each of the four glasses. She hesitated a moment and then found something to say. ‘Remember this is a clean place.’

On her way back she stopped at the woman in the corner. ‘Rosie. Rose!’ she said. ‘You must go home man.’

The woman opened her eyes. ‘Soekie my friend. My only friend…’

‘No man,’ Soekie cut in. ‘You must go. Nothing more.’

Rosie started crying, so Soekie left her and went into her room.

Boston, who up to then had not stopped his aimless drift around the room, came to the table and, resting his two hands on it, hissed out the word ‘decency!’