‘There were many like that’, he said.

‘Did you see him, by any chance?’ she asked. ‘His name was Simon, Simon Ngidi, and he lived at 913, Block C. A big man, father, such a big, big, big man…’ Her voice trailed off. She saw the answer in his eyes.

When it came to her turn at the tap she turned around and asked him for his tin, and filled that first and then waited while the tap ran into hers. When it was full, another woman helped her get it onto her head. She walked with her eyes fixed straight ahead, moving her legs as if the water in the paraffin tin on her head ran through her body and into them. At the same time the sense of weight in her movement had a perfect proportion to it; she walked with incredible grace.

Miriam managed not to think on the way back to her room, so that when she reached it the pain had passed and in between putting the baby to sleep and the water on to boil—because she was now earning a living for herself and the child as a washgirl—she was able to think about what the old man had said without wanting to cry.

He was right of course. Many had gone like Simon, swallowed up by the earth, it seemed, on the dark mornings of the boycott and whisked away before word could be got home. What he hadn’t said was that most of them had come back since, to tell the same stories of summary trial followed by a few weeks in jail. Simon was one of the significant few who hadn’t returned.

‘Simon, where are you?’ It was always here, in her room, in their room, bare of so much but crowded with so much more, only here that she asked the second question: ‘Are you dead?’

Outside it was easy to hope. He could be somewhere in the crowds, around a corner, down a street. There were so many people in the world that it was easy to think that one of them might be Simon coming home. But here in the room, with the memories of the real man, the big, living, Sunday-lazy man, here life was so painful a memory that death had been from the first a possibility and now with time a probability. But she carried on. You had to. Tomorrow is no respecter of today’s tragedy and comes along and makes it the past, the thing that happened and is over and in a way done with, and gives you another day to get through.

So she had carried on, outwardly adjusting the pattern of her life as best she could, like taking in washing, doing odd cleaning jobs in the nearby white suburb. Inwardly she had fallen into something like a possessive sleep where the same dream is dreamt over and over again. She seldom smiled now, kept to herself and her baby, asked no favours and gave none, hoarding as it were the moments and things in her life.