When the man crawled out of Terminal Place, Tsotsi was forced to drop back in case he became suspicious. This did nothing to dampen his morbid interest. If anything it increased it, because from the perspective of a few yards he noticed details that he had missed before. At that distance he could see the first budding of the hump he would one day carry around like a mountain on his back, if he lived long enough. There was also the thing about his movement. It was all in the arms. From the shoulders down he might just as well have been a sack of potatoes because he dragged himself like that. In this he reminded Tsotsi of something. At first he couldn’t think what it was, and when he did remember he was excited. He moved like the bitch of his memory. It was a comparison that worked both ways because it also revealed something about the bitch that he had not realized. Her back legs had been useless, too. She had used only the front ones, like him.

After this discovery Tsotsi’s interest in his victim rose to an obsessive intensity, and he let his time and opportunities slip by. This man, this half-man, this unsightly and disfigured remnant of a man Tsotsi recognized with all the certainty of his unnumbered years as being the true figuration of life. He was a symbol of this precisely because he was bent, and broken, and so without meaning that other men had abandoned him. This was the final reality to life. Everything else was just rouge and lipstick on an ugly face. Smiles and laughter changed nothing, no more than a new pair of trousers would have given back the cripple his legs.

Tsotsi was convinced of this. The conviction was so absolute it was part of himself, of his life and of his way of living. It was there like the blood in his veins and his heartbeat. Where it had come from he did not know, but he had it. He had a deeply intimate and personal knowledge of the grotesque anatomy of life.

He had never seen it so clearly, though. In the past it had come like a bad aftertaste to those moments when unavoidably he had been brought to the brink of a memory. It had been like that after the incident with the policeman and his prisoner, the one who had recognized Tsotsi and called him David. For days afterwards Tsotsi had brooded and it wasn’t upon the man who had cried: ‘It’s me, Petah.’ He had known it was better to forget him, and had promptly done so.

Tsotsi brooded because when he had finished that dice game with Butcher and Die Aap, and the man’s hopeless cries were heard no more, he had stood up and seen the truth again so clearly he wondered why it was that he kept on forgetting it. The world was an ugly place. It was the ugliness of things that had gone crooked and were now twisted out of all meaning. It was a deformity that began with houses that had been badly matched to the bodies they held, being too small, or too windy or cracked open to the rain like the careless laying of an egg on sharp rocks. Then there were the bodies themselves. In the cruel confinements of their lives they had grown awry. The very effort of living was a pain. You could hear it in your bed at night if your ears had been sharpened enough by disgust. The world was one long wheeze and rattle as it laboured uncertainly in sleep. Butcher’s hands were another living embodiment of this reality. So too the dead face of Gumboot Dhlamini, the one they had taken on the trains. It was true of all life. The only trees in the township, those around the cemetery, had expressed it in their stunted growth, drawing out the full meaning in their misshapen silhouettes seen against the windy sky. It amounted to the basic horror of existence.