When he stopped again he had negotiated two blocks of Main Street and had reached the corner where a lanky, mournful-voiced individual sold newspapers. Although they had never spoken to each other, a nodding relationship had been established between them. The newspaper seller had been at that corner almost every evening for as many years as Morris Tshabalala had been crawling down the busy street to his supper at the Bantu Eating House. Lay-ee-deeshin, he called. A few minutes ago a van had off-loaded bundles of the newspapers. Cit-ee-deeshin, layeetspotreesilts. He was doing good business. Attracted like motherless souls to his cry, white people stepped out of the throng, bought their paper, and even as they scrutinized the headlines were carried away again by the crowds shuffling past.

For a few happy minutes Morris Tshabalala believed his fears to be unfounded. His pursuer wasn’t to be seen. He strained his eyes in the effort to see through the milling, aimless mob, but he was gone, either lost or grown tired and turned back.

‘Layeedeeshin,’ the lanky one lamented high over his head. In his own language and an even sadder tone he spoke to the cripple. ‘They’ve shot a hole in the moon, strue’s gawd. I have read. A hole in the ole moon. Lay-ee-dee-shin.’ He sold a few more papers. ‘What is going to shine at night?’ he asked the world in general.

During a pause in the business of selling, he dropped to his knees and cut the strings around a bundle of newspapers. ‘What else do they say?’ Morris asked him.

‘Irish Fancy by a length, at seven to two. She lead all the way.’ He stood up. ‘Lay-ee-deeshin. Spotreesilts.’

They kept on buying. There seemed no end to the people who wanted to know about the moon and Irish Fancy at seven to two. Morris Tshabalala looked at them without charity. His awareness of the man following him had been a dead drag to his already tired body. But finding him gone had lightened his heart only momentarily. His freedom from anxiety became a freedom to realize with greater clarity than ever before the extent of his infirmity and the gulf that separated him from the rest of the unworried world. Had he been a man he would have taken sticks and beaten the little bastard to death. Instead he had to crawl away like a frightened dog with his tail between his legs. He looked at the street and the big cars with their white passengers warm inside like wonderful presents in bright boxes, and the carefree, ugly crowds of the pavement, seeing them all with baleful feelings.

It is for your gold that I had to dig. That is what destroyed me. You are walking on stolen legs. All of you.

Even in this there was no satisfaction. As if knowing his thoughts, they stretched their thin, unsightly lips into bigger smiles while the crude sounds of their language and laughter seemed even louder. A few of them, after buying a newspaper, dropped pennies in front of him. He looked the other way when he pocketed them.