Tsotsi slammed a clenched fist into the palm of the other hand, and the other two, thinking he had decided, looked at him expectantly. He stood up and walked on stiff nervous legs to the door.

‘What we do Tsotsi?’ Butcher asked. ‘Speak man.’

He closed his eyes and grabbed at his first thought. ‘We go to the city,’ he said.

This was hardly an answer because the city was big and going there could mean a taxi job, or prowling around for a dark house, or a drunk near one of the shebeens around the mine dumps. It was vague and an evasion but Tsotsi didn’t care because the others, reacting to the purpose it suddenly gave to life, had stood up and were following him into the street.

Butcher looked back once at the room. ‘Did you smell man?’ he asked Die Aap. ‘There’s something smelling in there. Stinking like shit.’

6

When Tsotsi said ‘city’ he meant the open space formed by the junction of two streets near the gasworks. It was known officially as Terminal Place, but people referred to it variously as ‘the shopping centre’, because anything and everything could be bought in the small, dimly-lit shops that were crowded along the sides, and from the hawkers’ carts parked in the gutter, or ‘the backyard’, because of its relationship to the rest of the city, which was the white man’s world. One wit had even referred to it as ‘the quid- wrangle’. The sophisticated spoke simply of ‘the beginning’ or ‘the end’, depending on which way they were travelling, because it was here that the buses with their bone-rattled multitudes came together and parted on their endless traffic between the city and the townships.

A few blocks away, if you walked with your back to the massive cooling towers of the gasworks, was the ‘real’ city, the illuminated, glittering arcades of the white man’s world. It might just as well have been on the other side of the earth. The life of Terminal Place, the shopping centre, the backyard, the beginning or the end of so much, this life started and stopped, faltered or was furious for its own intimate reasons.

It starts early in the morning, so early that in winter that hour is still part of the night. The first bus comes with its headlights on and its passengers blinking owlishly at the world through the cobwebs of sleep. These are the first workers and in the cold, steaming morning, breathing their ghosts, they walk away into the city, hands in their pockets, the collars of their jackets turned up and their shoulders hunched almost above their heads. A few of them have stayed behind to buy a tin of hot coffee and a vetkoek from the old woman on the corner. They stand around and drink gratefully and tear off chews of the doughy cake with their teeth. When they talk it is softly, the words thick with sleep and spoken at the back of the throat. Before they are finished the second wave of buses has pulled in and sent another tide of black men hurrying through the streets.