He saw Boston at the moment when he had raised himself on the floor, and spoken. Seeing him like that, with the blood in his mouth and the strange look in his eyes. Tsotsi knew the others had pulled him off before he had finished. He wanted to work a long time on Boston. He had only started. He was not released from the torment of his hate.

He also heard him again, hearing the words, but without their meaning. In those final ensensate moments when he went to work on Boston, his mind had taken up the words, and like dice rattled them out of sequence and shape, throwing them now, as he walked down the street, back into his ears:

One day one day God help you that day
one day you won’t know what to do what to do.

They caught the rhythm of his walking:

It will happen will happen will happen one day it will happen
God help you that day, one day, that day, one day.

He stopped, and with his hands on his ears, and his eyes shut, he rolled his head from side to side, but that didn’t help because the sight of him, and his sound, was inside, right inside. Tsotsi looked around desperately. He was near a lamp-post, and underneath it crouched in a circle was a group of men dicing for money. When they saw him walking their way they stopped their game, looked at each other and then without a word pocketed their money and drifted away into the night.

In a house across the street a party was under way. Tsotsi stood still and tried to see it. The noise of it, the music and laughter and droning undertones of talk, big talk, small talk, love talk, or just the babble of a drunk, this and the light and the smoke from cigarettes was pouring out of the doors and windows, and these were thrown open to their widest as if for fear the walls could not contain it all.

At the moment that Tsotsi stood watching, two girls came running out of the door, hand in hand, laughing their way down the street, and a minute later a man in hot pursuit, a bottle in his hand, calling after them, drinking as he ran. Tsotsi had almost succeeded in ‘seeing’ all of this, when the man slipped and fell in the street, sprawled the way Boston had been on the floor when he first went down. The girls laughed somewhere and the man raised himself on one arm and called out to them, but Tsotsi didn’t hear him, not even seeing him anymore, because that way he was even more like Boston, speaking through his blood. The image came back, and the words as well, and it was worse than before.

He closed his eyes and clenched his fists and walked again, down the street, heedless of the people he pushed aside and the curses that snapped at his heels like small dogs; opening his eyes in time to a quickened pace that carried him sly as a shadow past other doors, other windows where light and murmurs and occasional laughter also fell in the dust; past corrugated iron fences with their slogans of a better world where the wet paint of the slogans had run a time back leaving the words streaked as if with tears, but even his rhythm, or that of his heart, or any of the other rhythms around him in the night, dog barking, dog whining, the thin notes of a penny whistle climbing somewhere in the darkness, a baby born, a cry, all of these in some conspiracy of intention finding the meter and meaning of Boston’s words: