One day one day it will happen will happen a feeling will happen one day and God help you that day one day that day

so that at the corner where the church stood, humbly, its cross affirming that God moved amongst men that night, there he threw back his head and ran. He ran like a man possessed, his feet pounding out the panic of that moment, and those who saw him coming their way stepped aside, and all who saw him stopped and watched him pass. ‘Que!’ they said. ‘A mad one.’ But they were not greatly surprized. There were many. In a few seconds he was at the end of the street and like a buck he leapt through the last of the light and into the darkness that ringed the township, marking its limits and the start of the no-man’s land between it and the white suburb.

It was here that he finally broke the spell of Boston and his words. He pushed his body to its limit, working his legs and his lungs until his mind went blank and then keeping on; for a long time it must have been, because when he stopped and leaned against a lamp-post he was in a strange street, in a different place, and at first everything was spinning around his head while the blood pounded in his ears. He stayed there, holding onto the lamp-post, for some time, his eyes shut while he sucked in and swallowed air with a desperate sound. Soon he was breathing easier and the pounding was gone from his ears. When more time passed and he had still not seen Boston again, or heard him, then he knew he was safe. He opened his eyes. The lights of a car had swung into the street further down, and were coming towards him. Tsotsi left the lamp-post and slipped into the darkness. It could be the police. The white suburbs near the township were well patrolled.

He didn’t stop again until a long time later when somewhere in the night a clock chimed an hour he didn’t bother to count. Soon after leaving the lamp-post where he had rested, the rain had fallen. There wasn’t much of it. For all he knew it might have missed the township where they would have gone to bed sighing and sweating and wondering why it came so close and then didn’t come at all. Tsotsi heard the warning roll of thunder, vaulted, distant; he saw the lightning over the rooftops, sudden, very white, like a woman shaking her sheets at her back door, and then it came. First in a few heavy drops that rattled on the leaves of the trees he was passing and then as a drifting cloud of coolness, almost mist it was so light. Street lamps shrunk to glowing, golden monoliths spaced at mournful intervals down the street, and then a shining belt of blackness with the grass like powdered glass on each side. He lifted his chin and caught the feel of it on his face, and he was completely at peace for a moment.