With this first look came an overwhelming sense of despair. Tsotsi knew it was a crisis and that he had come either with minutes to spare or minutes too late. He fought down a sudden desire to throw the lot, baby, condensed milk and spoon, deep into the ruins and never come back again.

Instead he took a deep breath, held it in, and went to work. First he got rid of the ants on the face. The baby awoke once in the course of this and cried feebly, moving his head a little to one side. Tsotsi noticed that the eyes had lost their focus. They were weak and watery and stared with a terrible vacancy up at nothing. It took him a few minutes to kill all the ants, pinching them between his thumb and forefinger. Then he moved the box away from that corner to another where there was also shade but no ants. He went back to the wall to deal with the column on the plaster. With his flat hand, and starting at the bottom, he began to stop it, grinding and rubbing his hand each time to make sure there was not a single survivor. The top of the column was out of his reach, so he piled up a few bricks and standing on that dealt with it in the same fashion. His last reckoning with the ants was to shake and blow the tin and spoon clean of them and then to stomp violently around the corner where they swarmed on the earth in a minute panic. Finally, he shovelled sand over the spot with his feet.

He went back to the other corner and looked down at the baby. A few survivors had crawled out of the folds of his swaddling clothes onto his face. Tsotsi killed them, using the same technique of thumb and forefinger, before sitting down beside it with his back to the wall.

He felt better. Killing the ants had restored some of his confidence. But the urgency of the situation remained, even more so now that he was able to see the baby unobscured by his first feelings of panic and despair. Tsotsi had dealt too long in death not to feel its imminent presence in the shoebox. The baby needed a lot, and he needed it quickly. Food, he thought. It must have food. It must also be cleaned again and wrapped up in other clothes. But food. Food first.

The condensed milk was useless. After he had cleaned the tin and spoon of a few struggling ants, and blown into one of the holes to get out a spoonful, because it didn’t come easily, it was to find as many ants drowned and bogged down in the milk as he had found on top of the tin. Tsotsi left the corner and standing on the remains of a wall hurled the tin and spoon with all his force deep into the ruins. He remembered the cripple. Last night, he thought. It is passed. This is today. Another strange day. He left the wall and broke the momentum of thoughts that threatened to carry him away from the present.