They stayed that way, Boston deep in his decency, Tsotsi considering a sudden, irrational impulse that had come to jump up and run away somewhere, considering this while rocking on his chair, outwardly the same, as always, both of them staying that way while many minutes passed, until a cry from the night where the other two had taken the woman made Boston look up.

‘Where they gone?’ Boston asked. Tsotsi made no reply but looked at the empty chair in the corner. Boston followed his eyes.

‘Hell,’ he said, and a second later with the second scream, ‘Hell and Jesus.’

‘What’s the matter. Sick again?’

‘One’s enough,’ Boston said.

‘One what?’

‘You know. You chose him.’

‘It’s not the same.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘She’ll live.’

Boston looked long at Tsotsi. Because it was all ache now, and dull, the edge worn off like Soekie’s old song, because it was that way he could look a long while without stumbling on words. When he did speak it was slowly, as if he had trouble putting words together: ‘You feel nothing?’

‘Feel what?’

‘The big one tonight?’

Tsotsi stared empty-eyed at Boston.

‘That poor bitch out there.’

Tsotsi slipped a shrug of impatience off his shoulders.

‘Feel what?’ he asked.

‘Nothing!’

‘That’s what you said.’ When Boston’s eyes brimmed with disbelief Tsotsi was angry. ‘What do you mean, feel?’ he asked.

Boston put his glass down carefully on the table. He pulled his chair in closer, then resting his arms on the table he looked up at Tsotsi, looking hard, blinking against the blindness of habit, trying hard to focus on the young man opposite him.

‘Listen Tsotsi, I want to know. I really want to know. Feeling. How can I put it. Ja…’ He put his hand into his pocket and brought out a knife. He pressed his thumb down and the blade shot out. Then with great deliberation, wetting his lips with his tongue, he pulled the blade lightly across one arm crooked before him on the table. It wasn’t a deep cut but within a few seconds it began to sweat out its pain in drops of blood.

Boston smiled down at it and then at Tsotsi. ‘I feel that,’ he said.

‘So would I.’ Tsotsi had stopped rocking on his chair. He watched Boston coldly.

‘Ja…now this is it Tsotsi. There is something inside me that is like that,’ and he pointed at the cut in his arm. ‘When we dropped that big one tonight it was like that inside me. I bled man. I’m telling you I bled.’

‘Decency.’

‘Call it what you like…’

‘You called it that.’

‘Ja I did, that’s true. But listen Tsotsi, we’re on to something bigger now. Bigger man. Tsotsi answer me this. Does that happen to you? Does anything, anywhere do that to you?’

Tsotsi didn’t answer. He didn’t even consider the question. What he knew was that he started hating Boston the way he had never hated him before, and that with the passing of a little time and some sound of Soekie’s old song, the hate was deeper and stronger than he had ever known. It was a cold hate, utterly merciless, and because he knew he was going to do something about it, right then and there, he could meet Boston’s eyes without flinching. Boston had gone further than he had ever ventured before. It wasn’t just a name, or his age, or where he came from; now it was inside, right inside Tsotsi that he was carrying the light of his eyes, and that was a world in which no one, not even Tsotsi himself, had ventured.