He was halfway down the street when he stopped to rest. He examined his hands first, feeling one with the other, and the parts where his blackened nails made a hard, rasping sound on the calluses of too much work, feeling nothing in either. The silence was sweet, melting like butter on his sore thoughts. There were no reminders of the past or mirrors of the present. He looked back the way he had come.

A man was sitting on the doorstep of a shop a little way down, scratching disinterestedly on the pavement with a matchstick. Beyond him the chaos of Terminal Place was sorting itself out. The crowds were already much thinner since he had left. There was enough room now for the greasy pages of newspaper that had held a sixpence worth of chips to waltz between the legs. Occasional gusts of the same wind came scurrying up the gutter. Small clouds of grey dust billowed up and then fell back exhausted by the effort. Things like empty matchboxes or crumpled balls of paper moved suddenly and for no reason, skipping away across half of the street, to lie there, twitching furtively for a few seconds until another irrational impulse carried them off at a tangent to their first move. It was a warm wind. Morris Tshabalala felt it, screwing up his face each time a flurry of dust swept into it. He wiped away the grit that had collected in the corner of his eyes and then continued his journey. Once he started moving again, his face was even more exposed to the stinging clouds of dust, so he kept his eyes closed, opening them only occasionally to see that his path was clear.

Why do I go on? he asked himself. I am not better than a dog, and slower. Why do I go on? It was a recurring question in his life. It had many forms, each of them sounding in their own way some new depth in the seas of disbelief and bitterness that swept him away from other men into his present loneliness. Is that all of me? he had asked himself in hospital. It seemed so little he could easily imagine his legs jumping around some place else and calling themselves Morris Tshabalala. Another time he had asked himself: What is there to live for now? The beam that had fallen on his legs had also come down like a guillotine on his life, severing him from all the purposes, the plans, the places he had known as a full man. They were gone. Those that hadn’t left of their own accord he had left, turning his back on them the day he escaped without permission from the hospital. He still did it occasionally when he saw a face he knew or seemed to remember, turning away and hiding his until the person was past.

Why does my heart not die for the shame of my life? When we chopped off the heads of fowls in my youth, the bodies ran around a little longer. It is like that with me, only it is my legs that are gone.