By the time it is light, Terminal Place is alive. The shops are opened, the hawkers have trundled up their carts and unpacked their wares, the pavements are bustling with women fat with pride and progeny, with men thin with poverty and persistence, and youth full of tease and tit. They bump each other, they buy from each other, bargaining, bantering all the time, they come together and part, friends are seen for the first time in many years, or for the last time in just as many years, many no longer look hopefully for the missing brother or husband or father. And through it all the buses still come and go. They travel urgently, jokingly, joltingly, tirelessly along the tentacled routes flung far and wide, tapering away from the compact body to the last stops in the dusty, rutted roads of the townships.

The life of the Place begins to decline in the late afternoon, the end starting when the windows, high and wide a few blocks away, burn gold with the last reflection of the setting sun. Night is near and night is never safe. The fluid life of the pavements slows, and thickens like porridge left too long on the fire. Windows are boarded up, doors are locked, the bus queues sag like slack ropes between the lampposts. The people go home. When it is finally empty, much later, much darker, the street sweepers drift through last of all, singing softly over the gentle rhythms of their brooms.

It was into Terminal Place, at half past six, when the last of the day had turned those high windows into angry eyes, that Tsotsi and the other two rattled and roared on the 6:10 special from the township.

He left it fifteen minutes later. He left it alone. He had lost the other two in the crowd. But he didn’t care. He had found his victim and he had a feeling for taking him alone.

Morris Tshabalala was his name and he was also a man. But his stature, the extent of his manliness, was not in his body, because there was very little left of it since the accident, and what there was he dragged knee-high through the streets, using his arms like oars; nor was it in his hope, because there was even less of that. How then did he measure himself as a man?…because he used that word, throwing it back at the children when they smiled, even though they had done so in pity, screaming it once at a prostitute who laughed at his money and desperation. Ask him and he will tell you. Bend down low where he sits on the fringe of the forest of legs rushing past on the pavement; better still, squat there so that he can look you straight in the eye. Don’t smile, even in pity, don’t try to bribe him with a penny, because only then will he give you the measure of his manhood.

‘I tell anyman—anyman I tell you—I tell go to hell Mister! Go to hell and cook for your black sins!’