They came to it, starting early in the morning, and then all through the day, still there when the sun set and then after that returning intermittently through the night to chase away the dogs gathered to lick up the drip, yet all it gave was water. They came to it with buckets and basins and babies on their backs and in their bellies, they came to it old and young, some so young they never remembered, the oldest now so far gone in living that at their last the most they could do was shuffle with the queue and keep a place for an absent one, and all it gave was water. They came to it laughing, they came to it silent, or singing or sad, and to all it only gave water.

And because they had to wait so long for it—at noon the queue would stretch back past Tsotsi’s room—because there stranger met stranger in a common purpose, a common thirst, and you could talk there waiting in the queue about nothing or everything and never meet again; because there you could see the face of the baby heard being born last night, or that of the man who prayed so long and loud, or the one who beat his wife, or the wife herself, blacker for bruises; because of all this, more than just waiting for water, a dull enforced drag of hours wasted in the sun while you shuffled nearer the tap. That stocky length of wood and gurgling pipe was rooted in their lives.

In the Church of Christ the Redeemer its water was sprinkled on the newborn in a double baptism because the children, especially as soon as they could walk and carry, were sent into its servitude. In the same church there had been a sermon on patience the Sunday after the mêlée amongst the women when the water was cut off.

In the deeper intimacy of the smoke-filled rooms, in the living breath of their language it had been raised to the pedestal of idiom. It was a language sharpened by wits so that ‘talk at the tap’ caught click and consonant of women idle at gossip as they moved in starts nearer the water; and sharpened by truth in ‘sweet as the water’ because there was the story of old Jenkins Malopopo who had stood his turn through a hot day, empty-handed, so that he could have his last drink from it, straight from the tap you see, and then die; and birth too, and this story lived in the words ‘a baby is born between drops’ because one had been, there beside it, in the sun, and the mother had stood up afterward and waited because her paraffin tin was not yet full.

Among those who took their turn in the queue that Sunday afternoon was Miriam Ngidi. She was eighteen years old and carried her baby on her back. When she reached the queue she put down her paraffin tin and prepared herself with a sigh of resignation for the long wait that lay ahead until she reached the tap. It would take her half an hour.