Their actual meeting came as a moment of sudden terror. It was purely by accident that Tsotsi stepped on the hand. It was an even purer coincidence that just before it happened he had started thinking yet again about the baby, the bluegums, and the bitch. So compelling and exclusive was the power of this mystery that momentarily he had forgotten about Butcher and Die Aap, and where he was and why he was there. By agreement the three of them had wandered off separately into the crowds with their eyes and ears open. Tsotsi was asking himself again why it was that the bitch crawled so far and no further, always almost reaching him, but not quite, and what was the meaning of the dumb fear inside himself when he saw her. Coming at that moment the oath ‘Whelp of a yellow bitch!’ had torn into his thoughts, stampeding them into a split second of chaos and terror. When, almost simultaneously with his oath, Morris Tshabalala had pushed away the offending foot, it had felt to Tsotsi as if the bitch had at last reached him and was at his legs with her yellow teeth.

The moment passed in a blink. When he looked down at the pavement his thoughts fled and his terror lingered in his heart only as the troubled echo of its passing. His mind would have been a blank were it not for the burning hate of the cripple at his feet. It turned so violently in his guts that he almost kicked him. He remembered in time that he was in Terminal Place and that the crowds were big enough to be brave with a man who kicked a beggar. But he remembered also the hour and his purpose. What happened next was as natural in the pattern of his life as waking and sleeping were in those of other men. I’ll take you, you bastard, he thought. Tonight I’ll take you. His choice was made.

In terms of hard economics, of the profit of the job measured against the likely loss of a life, the choice was indifferent. Those beggar boys never made that much that it was worth following one away when you could have just as easily piled your gang into a taxi and taken your chance at the driver somewhere along the road back to the township. They were much more the game of those younger years when you had got tired of snatching in shops and were beginning to think of bolder and bigger schemes. But it was typical of Tsotsi to act at times in disregard of the hard and fast rules by which those like himself had learnt to live. It was this perverse streak in his nature that made him pick one specially for Boston the previous evening, and had now chosen one for himself.

It was his ugliness, the slow, creeping deformity of the man that kept Tsotsi faithfully behind his back. He studied him with fascination. In the crowds of Terminal Place he was able to follow unobserved and yet get close enough to hear the swinish grunt the cripple made after every reach of his long arms. He caught snatches of the lunatic conversation he kept up with himself. Once he was so near that looking down he saw where three deep creases had already been groined into the neck by the repeated effort of forcing the head back so as to see ahead. The beggar had to do just this from time to time and Tsotsi noticed that the skin folded up and bulged out like the ropes of a double-stranded noose, and then he looked like a dog who had been pulled up short by a savage jerk of its leash. His hands were the same lifeless grey of the pavements. Their nails were almost bluish-black.