As if in retribution for this action, the stones came hurtling at him, making him skip and dance like a puppet strung from an epileptic hand. Tsotsi wanted to call out: I understand, my poor slow man, I understand. But he was forced into the darkness where the obscenities came flying at him with as much violence. They were broken only by the sobs, and even though they were not meant for him. They were the most terrible of all when his voice cracked.

Tsotsi had circled and was waiting in front, squatting on a cement platform, in the final darkness beyond the last lamp-post.

He waited until the cripple stopped a few feet away. Then he waited for silence, and after the sobbing and strangled breaths had quietened, he waited to be seen.

Their meeting was wordless. They didn’t need them. Into a few silent seconds they crowded the intimacy of a lifetime, so that when Tsotsi eventually did speak it was as if they had known each other for ever.

‘What do you feel?’

‘Nothing.’ His voice was hoarse, the words rushing like wind through a leafless tree, dead from drought.

‘Nothing?’

‘It is over. Feeling is over.’

‘What did you feel?’

‘A fear of death.’

‘No more?’

‘No more.’ Morris Tshabalala leant back against the ramp. It was the position of his poverty, of the long, empty hours on a street corner while he waited for pennies to fall. But with this difference. He looked up, resting his head against the wall, and not just because he was tired.

‘No more. It is the lesson of my hands. I have this night learnt it in my heart.’

‘Tell me,’ Tsotsi asked.

‘My hands held life.’ Tsotsi waited. ‘My hands felt it. Ow! I picked nipples like berries and the women cried with happiness when they moved to their secret parts. Then came…’ He searched forward.

‘Speak man,’ Tsotsi asked when the pause had yawned out into seconds, and then minutes.

‘The sky fell down. The world turned upside down for me and I walked through life on my hands. You have seen. You have seen enough. These hands no longer feel. Now my heart no longer feels. Tonight my manhood fell down and crawled beside me and felt fear, and felt it so much it no longer feels it. You have seen. You have heard a big man cry. It is enough.’

‘It was the worst of all,’ Tsotsi said. ‘Of all the things since we began, the crying was the worst.’

‘What else was there?’

‘You grunt. When you crawl you grunt like a dog thing.’

‘What else?’

‘You look like a dog man and I feel with you, but now I want to know. How do you piss?’

‘Sitting up, between my stumps.’

‘Shit?’

‘Bending forward as if I am going to crawl.’

‘Woman?’

‘Never. They laugh.’

‘What do you know man? What do you know this night?’

‘You took a long time. You are patient.’