The city is dead. With the life of its pavements drained away, the straight unpliant lines of the city lie exposed. Street lamps stick up like golden-headed pins holding it to the earth. They are the only light because now the shop windows are dark. At the taxi ranks the night drivers are slumped over their wheels in sleep. Tsotsi passes them because they only take whites. He also passes night watchmen, sitting on boxes in the doorways, wrapped up in old army coats and armed with knobbed kieries like brooding angels who have executed judgment. Soon Tsotsi is completely alone and then he moves like the last, small impulse in a dead body.

It was a long walk back to the township, but Tsotsi stopped only once on the way. Even then he had to try several times before finally succeeding. Because he wanted to stop. He needed to think. But each time he sat down—once on the closed-in seat of a white bus stop, a mile later beside the fence of a lumber yard, and then after that just on the pavement of a dark street—each time he lost control of his thinking. Like a driverless car down a steep hill, his mind moved with gathering momentum past images and incidents until they were racing past so fast he didn’t have time to recognize their meaning. They came without any sensible sequence. A shoebox, Boston drawing a thin line of blood across his arm with the knife, the mummified face of the baby blooming out into a black hole as it cried, then the bitch, then the beggar pissing between his stumps, then an Indian shopkeeper saying ‘Very good baby milk…’ The inward acceleration of his thinking was terrifying. He seemed incapable of holding on to one thought long enough to avert the next one.

Walking helped because it stopped him thinking. He hung determinedly on to every physical sensation involved in picking up one foot and placing it in front of the other. He concentrated on the vague feeling he had of the pavement through the soles of his tackies. He studied the swinging rhythm of his arms and noticed that they were synchronized with that of his feet. But when he stopped again the same thing happened.

At first he would actually have to search for something to think about, as if his mind had stalled just over the top of the precipitous incline. What is there? he would ask himself. What is there to think about? This question was the push that brought him to the edge. ‘The baby!’ he would say and then he was on his way down.

The baby. Now, okay…and Boston. Yes. Okay now… and the bitch too, bluegums, shoebox, beggar…and by then it was happening again and he would jump to his feet with a pounding heart and walk away.

Once he had turned his back on the centre of the city his way lay through an extensive factory area, where Tsotsi made his third unsuccessful attempt to stop and think. It was a world which must have had as its model the plaything precision of a child’s blocks. The streets, crosslaid in the faultless squaring of a grill, were completely untenanted. Only once did he see a sign of life, when a car appeared at an intersection ahead of him. It nosed its way uncertainly across the street as if it had wandered in by accident and got lost.