When they had settled down at the table Butcher screwed up his nose and looked around the room. ‘Jesus! what smells in here?’ he asked.

Tsotsi said nothing, but went to a corner and rolled up the reeking swaddling clothes and threw them into the backyard where almost immediately a host of flies descended on them, and later a small and hungry dog dragged them away to a corner.

They missed Boston that afternoon. They missed his lot of words. Butcher tried his best, but told each of his four stories in a few words.

‘Once I took a man on the trains and he had a hundred pounds.’ What else was there to say about the matter. ‘A hundred pounds.’ Or the time of his escape. ‘We killed him in the kwela-van. We jumped on him.’ Boston would have gone on for ever with a sentence like that. ‘The four of us did jump on him and kick him.’

When these two were told there was left only the time he had worked with Morgan ‘Blackjack’ Mogotso and the white woman whom he caught alone in the house. When those were also told, there was nothing left. They sat in silence and for a long time the only sound was the strange sucking noises Die Aap made when he put his big lips to a beer bottle.

Tsotsi surprized them both with his question. ‘Where’s Boston?’ Die Aap blinked and Butcher opened his mouth but nothing came out. It wasn’t the thought of Boston that surprized. He had been constantly but unvoiced in both their minds that afternoon. What surprized them was Tsotsi asking. He was looking at Butcher, waiting for him to speak.

‘I don’t know,’ Butcher said.

Tsotsi closed his eyes and then looked into the street. Butcher fidgeted in his seat. He felt that capital should be made of the mention of Boston to keep the words flowing. But how? ‘Maybe at Soekie’s place,’ he said. And then later: ‘We left him there, at the back.’ He struggled once more with the silence. ‘He’s bad. Wragtig bad hey’, and he looked at Die Aap, who took his lips away from the bottle, said ‘Bad’, and then had another drink.

Then Butcher gave up. The few sparks of interest and word about Boston died away. Tsotsi closed the subject by ignoring it as abruptly as he had opened it, and that only because he was thinking about condensed milk. He had decided to forget about it when he left the ruin. I have fed it, I have hidden it safe, I will come back tomorrow, he had said to himself. In the meantime I will carry on as always. It hadn’t worked that way. The thought about the shoebox and its contents, the enigma of his memory of the bitch, these slipped back repeatedly into his consciousness no matter how determinedly he had thrown them out a few minutes before.

The simplest things started the sequence. Butcher had teased a woman and before Tsotsi knew what was happening he stood at the door thinking about the baby. A little later Butcher had smelt the rags and back it was again. The baby, the shoebox, the bluegums, the bitch—over and over again, sometimes this cycle extending itself to include another detail like condensed milk—which is why he had asked about Boston.