Added to this was another problem which was much more elusive in Tsotsi’s struggle. It started off quite simply as his awareness of Butcher and Die Aap. They were there. He had wondered if they would come and they had. He himself had taken them in, taken them back, so to speak. Why then did he find himself looking at them at odd moments with something like irritation and impatience. Theirs was a ponderous presence. In a subtle, ill-defined way it was intrusive, almost an encumbrance. He had never been conscious of them like this before. In fact it had only rarely happened that he had been conscious of them at all, as the people with whom he lived and had to lead. Boston had been an exception. Boston through definite actions had made Tsotsi aware of him. The same thing had happened now to Butcher and Die Aap, yet they had done nothing.

Out of this vague drift of feeling and thought—the two men at the table alternating with the baby and the box and the bitch under the bluegum trees—emerged another problem, but this was as defined and decisive as the others were nebulous and vague. It was nearing the time when it was expected of him to announce the plan of action for the night, and he had nothing to say.

How had it worked the other times? Boston would be talking and they would be drinking and listening, only half hearing, adrift on the flow and sound of words, their eyes half closed except when groping for another bottle under the table or reflecting on the length of the shadows in the street, and by their length measuring the time between that moment and darkness; Boston telling his long, long story until somehow, something, some small thing like a thought, or a shadow, or a feeling, even a word, some small thing like that would precipitate in his inward darkness a desire, minute and murderous. That was the beginning, because with time it grew and became the purpose he finally spoke that led them out of the room and into the night.

That was how it happened. But now it was different and not happening at all, and it wasn’t just because Boston wasn’t there. What was expected of him, what the other two were waiting for, was a decision and this was something else that Tsotsi had never been aware of before. It involved choice. Was it to be the trains again, or a taxi driver, or a darkened, deserted house in one of the white suburbs. These, and their variations, were his repertoire, and they, Die Aap moody and Butcher twitching with impatience now, were waiting for him to choose.

It was the awareness of alternatives that disturbed Tsotsi and seemed to paralyse his will. Up to that moment he had lived his life as the victim of dark impulses. They had been ready, rising to his moments of need all through his life. Where they came from he never knew, and their reasons for coming he had never questioned. What he realized now was that something had tampered with the mechanism that had governed his life, inhibiting its function.