Milk! I must get milk for him. He went down onto his knees and bent close to the baby, as if it might whisper a few words of advice or encouragement. He studied the face intently. Those eyes! They made him feel he wasn’t there. Tsotsi brushed his fingers past in front of them. They didn’t blink. The baby’s breathing came in shallow, fretful little sighs ending with a tick-tick-tick-tick from deep in its throat as if something there were counting off a few seconds for every breath. A few seconds of what? Tsotsi put out a finger and touched the small pink palm of one hand and the fingers closed on his like the tendrils of a lazy anemone. He felt the tiny, moist hold with a palpitating heart. He had a name for his experience of that moment. He was ‘feeling for the baby’. He remembered the cripple again.

After a few seconds he pulled away his hand, stood up and wiped away the moustache of sweat droplets on his upper lip. What was he going to do? ‘Milk.’ He said the word aloud so as to rivet his attention to the problem. What was it to be? Another tin from the Indian trader? He almost accepted the thought because of the immediate avenue of action it offered him. But Tsotsi had lost faith in condensed milk, and in the ability of his clumsy hands to minister to the needs of the baby.

Tsotsi noticed absently that the long smudge on the wall where he had attacked the column of ants had been pencilled in lightly again. He repeated his first strategy, but this time using both hands, slapping so violently that his palms stung. It was while doing this that he remembered the thought Butcher had suggested the previous afternoon when he teased the woman. Tsotsi went back to the baby with only half the new column of ants disposed of. He sat beside the baby with this thought, for a long time, because it was a long thought and took its time in passing before he knew its beginning and its end. But when he did, it was also to know the end of his dilemma. He had a plan and as the final part of it he stood up and took the baby out of the box, abandoning that because the stinking yellow muck from the clothes between its legs had soaked through to the cardboard. It was useless now, the bottom having gone soft and soggy. Tsotsi wrapped up the baby in his coat and left the ruin.

At the bottom of the street, not far from Tsotsi’s room— you could lean out of his window and see the spot—there where the road had managed to steal extra inches of land from the shacks and hovels that crowded the side in a warped frontage of corrugated iron, biscuit tins, packing- case wood, sacking and of anything else that could be nailed or tied together in the basic design of a few walls and a roof; there in this widening of the street, littered with stones because feet, thousands of them, to be numbered in generations of coming and going, had worked away the loose sand and tramped down the remainder hard and firm; there in the middle of all of this, snaking out of the earth in a length of grey piping, and this firm on a three-foot beam of wood, buried deep on the day when the ground had been soft and easy on the spade, there, solitary, important, indispensable, hated at times, enjoyed at others, stood the communal tap. This part of the street was known as Waterworks Square, and the tap was the only one in that part of the township.