That was one of the things you learnt in the township without ever actually being taught—how to measure the time of a queue by its length. It wasn’t as simple as it sounded, a question of so many feet meant waiting so long. The number of buckets and paraffin tins came into the equation. Even the tap itself was a variable. It alternated between a strong, resounding burst of water that hammered onto the bottom of the paraffin tins with a roll like thunder, and a liquid, weak trickle that whispered when it hit the bottom of a bucket and after that flowed silently. There was something of a law to this alternation. It flowed weakest when it was needed most, in the early morning, then again at noon, and at supper time. So unconscious had been the learning of all this that Miriam Ngidi made her calculations without realizing it. About three o’clock, maybe thirty people, mostly with one bucket each. She reckoned on half an hour.

Her baby was awake. He hadn’t cried once during the walk from the room, and for the past few minutes he hadn’t even moved, not even to pick at the ends of the knotted doek on her head which was his favourite game, yet she knew he was awake. It’s still the same, she thought. In my stomach, and now on my back. I still know when he is awake or sleeping, then without being able to see, and now without having to look. Even so, she did, turning her head so as to see over her shoulder. It was sucking a thumb and looking up innocently at the sky with eyes as deep and as cloudless. He was six months old. When he heard the cluck- cluck of his mother’s voice, he jerked his hand out of his mouth and waved it as if a friend stood far away in the distance. In those eyes, quietly serious, so wide they seemed to reflect great horizons, in the gesture of the small hand that seemed to beckon them in, she saw a portent of great manhood. A bolt of pride surged through her. Her son! Hers, Miriam Ngidi’s baby—the man they would call Simon.

She picked up her paraffin tin and hurried forward. The queue had moved a few precious feet. When she stopped again it was to look down at the ground. The baby was going to sleep. You quickly learned the signs. The weight of him on your back seemed to increase in a strange way, yet it was the same baby. The little body relaxed and the shape of him—you could feel it, the arms and legs when he was awake—seemed to melt and merge into that same mysterious obscurity of the months in your womb. He was asleep, he was happy. The thought of her baby drifted out of her mind and somewhere else she heard that small voice that was hers, and was never silent and always asked the same question. ‘Simon, where are you? Simon my man, where are you? My man. Where are you?’