It was a young woman, a black woman, coming towards him in the night. She was wearing a long coat, unbuttoned, and underneath it he could see a white garment that could have been a petticoat. She carried a small parcel and she kept on looking back.

From his position under the tree Tsotsi recognized without hesitation the symptoms of fear. Nothing else moved a human being the same way. He had seen it often. She held her parcel as if it were her last hold on life itself. Even if their hands were empty, they would hold themselves, hand holding hand. She was nearer now and he could see that her parcel was a shoebox. Fear too, and fear alone, made you see a threat of danger in every shadow, which is how she was, her head turning constantly from side to side. But most of all fear made you hurry. She was caught in an ungainly rhythm between walking and running, almost tripping over her feet in her hurry. Once or twice, with a few steps quicker than the rest, it seemed as if she was about to break into a run, but each time something stopped her and she fell back into her stumbling lope.

Tsotsi watched her from under the trees. Without realizing it, his heart began to beat faster. It was almost perfect. The woman came towards him in the night, he didn’t know her, he didn’t hate, but he slipped slyly from tree to tree to the point where she would enter the grove. He didn’t know what he was going to do but his fingers flexed at his side. His hands were ready.

She was opposite him now, having paused on her way to lean against a wall and shake her head. She crossed the street and walked into the grove of bluegum trees.

He caught her by one arm and swung her into the darkness, his hand cutting short the scream of terror that had fallen from her lips like splintering glass.

A second move forced her against a tree and there, with his body pressed against hers, a knee already between her legs and his hand still on her mouth, there he looked into her eyes. She struggled once but he held her firmly. She clutched her shoebox with even greater desperation.

For a few seconds neither moved. He studied her calmly, her eyes, her neck with the pulse of an artery under the warm skin, deliberating his next move while the warmth of her body crept into his and her breasts, full and firm, panicked under the weight of her chest.

Unknowingly he relaxed his grip. With a twist of her head she freed a corner of her mouth and screamed a second time, but before he could do anything his attention was torn away from her to the shoebox she carried. He released her and stepped back sharply.

She had stopped her scream and was staring now at the box with a horror deeper than her fear of him. With both hands she lifted it, and when nothing happened she held it up to him and for a second time he backed away. With a sudden movement she thrust it into his hands, and he held it clumsily. Tsotsi only had eyes for the box now, and ears too, neither seeing nor hearing the woman as she turned away and with a low sob ran back the way she had come, deep into the white night.