The old woman lets him stand before her, but does not touch him. ‘How old are you young one?’ she asks.

He looks back at his mother who says, ‘Tell her, David.’

So he says, ‘Ten years.’

This seemed to make her angry because she tried to spit again but failed because there was nothing in her mouth, so she snorted, ‘Ten years. You’re still in your mother’s belly.’

He had nothing to say to this and his mother was also silent, but not the old one. ‘Ten years—you haven’t even been born to the troubles of this world.’

This time his mother spoke, but softly, and using the same voice as when she chided him for being naughty: ‘It will come Mama. It will come.’

The old woman sank into a brooding silence, turning her head deliberately so that she no longer saw him.

A minute later, when she seemed to have forgotten his presence completely, he left her and walked once around the yard, coming to a stop a short but safe distance away from the yellow bitch who looked up from her corner, eyeing him with even colder deliberation than the old woman. A step nearer he knew would get her to her feet, her upper lip curled back from her teeth, and another step would bring her snarling at him, straining at the end of the chain which kept her tied to a fencepole. She used to play with him, running up to his feet and rolling over on her back with her legs curled in air so that he could scratch her belly with his toe.

Then, quietly and unexpectedly, a few weeks ago, she had changed, and no longer played and didn’t seem to recognize him anymore. This was a great pity and a great surprize. But only to him, because his mother didn’t appear to notice, and even when he drew her attention to it she only smiled and shook her head. The old woman too, because he was persistent in these things. Surely she would have something to say about the matter, but he was wrong there because all he got out of her was a ‘Mind your own beesness’, and a jet of tobacco juice which not by accident was put down on the ground very near his foot.

So now, the safe distance from the bitch, he took the step which brought her to her feet with a rattle of the chain, and then got ready to run after the next because that had now become a game. But he didn’t take that second step this time because his mother stopped him.

‘Leave her, David.’

‘She doesn’t play anymore.’

‘You’ll have other playmates soon enough,’ his mother said. ‘Go now and get the mat because the food is nearly ready.’

So he went and fetched the mat, the grass one rolled up in the corner, and laid it out for them to sit on. After that his mother gave him a plate of food for the old woman, who received it with a pretence that she didn’t see herself take it, because she had no food of her own, no people of her own, and if his mother didn’t feed her she would surely have died.