He chose the old place where MaRhabatse had lived with her niece, and lived long, because the beer brewed in that backyard was famous. MaRhabatse had grown to a big age because when the time came to leave her room and climb onto the lorry she had hired to take her some place else, they found the door too small for the woman who in ten years had not left her room because of swollen ankles. The demolition men were forced to take the door away, and parts of the wall as well, before the big soul emerged to great cheering and many tears. Her passing down the street and into the distance, statuesque in her chair on the lorry, made real the whisper that one day the township would die.

Tsotsi chose this ruin because in one corner there remained an overhang of the corrugated iron that had been the roof, and he had thought about shade. The baby was still silent, so much so that he opened the lid to look, and was only satisfied when he saw the legs kick. He hid it in the corner together with the condensed milk and spoon, before sitting himself down, back to the wall, to think.

Tsotsi knew one thing very definitely now. Starting last night, and maybe even before that, because sitting there with a quiet mind to the events of the past hours it seemed almost as if there might have been a beginning before the bluegum trees, but regardless of where or when, he had started doing things that did not fit into the pattern of his life. There was no doubt about this. The pattern was too simple, too clear, woven as it had been by his own hands, using his knife like a shuttle to carry the red thread of death and interlace it with others stained in equally sombre hues. The baby did not belong and certainly none of the actions that had been forced on him as a result of its presence, like buying baby milk, or feeding it or cleaning it or hiding it with more cunning and secrecy than other people hid what they had from him.

It had broken into his life with shattering improbability. It was irrelevant—and more than that, it was destructive, tearing open the simple hand-worked fabric in which he had wrapped his existence so that other irrelevances had begun to blow their cold way in. Why then had he taken the baby?—this being the time and the place for the question. The end of his logic was death, yet he had saved it. Why? Was there a chosen, a special death for it? He would have liked to believe this because together with the diligence of his clumsy, groping attempts to meet its needs, was resentment. Tsotsi squirmed with anger at the weak hold it had found on his life. Yet in spite of this he carried on, stumbling from one moment of inadequacy to the next, swallowing his pride, curbing his impatience, carrying on because he knew very well he had taken it. He was chancing his hand at a game he had never dared play and the baby was the dice, so to speak.