Ding-dong-ong-ong. Ding-dong-ong-ong.

Then they stop. The Reverend H. Ransome gets up from his knees. On his way to the door, he passes the window. He stops and looks out. He recognizes the deceit in this small action. It is the desire to see and not be seen. But what he sees is so innocent he dismisses his deceit as unimportant. Then he warns himself against excusing small failings.

They are shuffling into the church, scuffing their feet on the mat at the door before going in. The feeling is there before he knows it. He finds himself angry, impotently angry with their best-suited, unsmiling and stiff devotions. Go home, he wants to shout. Go home. It’s no good. I didn’t know his name. Instead he fumbles in his haste to open the door and cross to the church. He prays on the way: ‘God help me.’

He saw it as he came through the doorway, stepping lightly among the fallen bricks. He saw it clearly as an uncertain line that was scrawled all the way down the yellow, peeling plaster, right down to the shoebox, then over it and into the corner beyond. Seeing it he stopped, and with the strange irrelevance of a panicky mind he remembered an idle moment one afternoon with the others in his room, when his hands had found a pencil that Boston had left on the table. He had toyed with it for a few seconds, leaving a scribble of lines on the tabletop, playing with it like that until he had looked up and seen something in Boston’s eyes that had made him angry and deliberately break the pencil. Even though what he saw now on the wall was as meaningless, he studied it so intently that when he spoke it was as if he had deciphered a strange script and was reading the message.

‘Ants,’ he murmured aloud. ‘Jesus. Ants.’

It was the condensed milk, of course. The top of the tin was an unbroken, liquid brown mass of them that spilt onto his hands when he picked it up. So great was his horror of them that when he felt them swarming over his fingers he dropped the tin and rubbed his hand furiously on his trousers. They were now pouring in an unending stream out of the two holes he had punctured in the top, as if they had rested inside at the very heart of the sweetness. The spoon was just as bad. A crystal white crust of the milk had dried on it and the ants seethed over it in a drunken orgy of excitement.

Tsotsi turned to the shoebox last of all. He was almost too frightened to lift the lid. The baby lay quiet, in a sleep so close to death he believed it to be that until a bubble rose to its mouth and burst silently, leaving a thin smear of spit to trickle away down the side to the waiting ants. There weren’t many. It couldn’t have been long since they had found a way in. But they were there, ringing the opened mouth like the thin edge of another lip. The foul stench again came from the box.