Boston looked up. All three were watching him now.

‘Why?’ he asked, and played nervously with the glass between his hands.

‘Why not?’ Tsotsi’s voice had an edge.

Boston shrugged his shoulders, tried to yawn but it didn’t work. So he sighed, as if bored. ‘Sometimes you pick one and he’s got nothing.’

Tsotsi let him wait for the reply. ‘I never make a mistake.’

Die Aap nodded. ‘That’s true. Not once.’

Butcher moved with impatience in his seat. Why all the talk. He liked it. ‘It’s good man. Ja man. It’s good.’ He stood up. ‘Let’s go.’

But Tsotsi was still waiting for Boston, still watching him and his elusive eyes, his dry lips, his pink tongue as he tried to moisten them. Boston found nothing else to say against the idea, nothing that they would understand and maybe accept. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘okay’, so they all stood up and waited while Tsotsi put on his coat, and then followed him out of the room and into the street, Die Aap second then Boston who was saying, ‘Okay’, saying it many times between sighs and forced yawns and exaggerated indifference with Butcher leaving last because he had fetched a bicycle spoke from a box in the corner of the room. That was the reason for his name. He had never missed.

The street they took was crooked and buckled as bad as the corrugated iron fences they passed on the side and Tsotsi led them a way that was sharp with stones, and eyes, and dog’s teeth. It was dusty and the end of a day, but still light, when they left the room. It had been hot as well, it being that time of the year, and the township was heavy that moment of their moving, with hope for the dark clouds in the east and thoughts about a wet world. It was a moment of respite, a slow moment between the long day and the lot done and the lot more to come with the longer night, and the township wore that hour the way a beggar wears his rags, the cast-offs of a better time, accepted but without gratitude, worn without pride. Children were despondent because there were no more games to play, busy women found themselves with empty hands, dogs stood around on awkward legs, old men dozing in the sun felt the sun go and awoke to find their bodies cold. It was an hour of despondent attitudes, when you kicked the dust if you had played in it all day, or stood up and spat into it if you had slept there in the sun. And having kicked you just stood, or having stood just waited, like the women with their idle hands, and tried not to see yourself in the other postures of uselessness.

But the moment of their passing, the four of them walking down the street with a purpose, was also the passing of that moment of respite, and more than respite, a moment of reckoning it had also been, when neighbour missed neighbour because the slum clearance men had been at work in that area and a few more roofs were down and the walls, without doors and windows, gaped like skulls in the fading light and you could still see the dust settling inside while you remembered the disbelief, the angry impotence, the confusion in the faces that had followed the cart loaded high with the sticks of furniture; a reckoning also for the old man who was prompted by the cold in his bones to count the days past and hope for tomorrow; a reckoning for the women who balanced the little money their men would bring home against their many needs, spending at the same time a meagre portion of hope on their safe return because this day had been Friday and ahead was the night and the four men passing that moment were harbingers of the night, that moment gone now because they had passed and rooms were suddenly grey and cold and mothers calling their children off the streets where shadows were running like rats after the four pipers.