She bounced him for a few seconds on her lap, rubbing his back all the time, and then tried again. The same thing happened.

‘Little one! What is the matter? You must drink. Look at you, ai siestog. Just look. What is your name? Drink my baby. What will we call you? Peter. The big fisherman. Drink Petertjie.’

‘His name is David.’

Miriam looked at Tsotsi. ‘Are you his father?’

His father! A big, feathered man, flying them away to better times. Ow, David, he thought. Poor David. There were no better times. Just the river. Tsotsi closed his eyes. ‘David,’ he said, and he was shocked to hear the hard sound of the words, ‘never saw his father.’

Miriam clicked out her sympathy. Anyway, she knew his real name now and could speak to him. Tsotsi listened. They weren’t words—just sounds, soft woman sounds that took him back again…His mother, what the hell does a man do with a mother? Was it really so? Had it really been him?

‘Give him to me.’ The baby was drinking deeply.

He caught his breath and waited. It was the woman speaking.

‘Give him to me. He is sick. Give him to me and I will take him and look after him.’

He thought of his knife first. I will kill her. Here in this room. She and her child. I will kill them fucking dead.

‘I can feed it,’ she was saying, ‘I have good milk. I know about babies.’

Then he thought about the baby. I gave him milk. Me on a Saturday in a shop, I bought it. I killed the ants.

The woman spoke on. ‘You can see him, you can come to my room and see him and he will get big and strong like my child. They will play together, Simon and David. Give him to me.’

A long time passed like that. He never spoke and she only once, to the baby, when she changed to the other breast.

It’s empty, he thought. One tit is empty.

Then he drifted off into his own thoughts again. He remembered the river, he always returned to the river. For all its being dry and littered with rubbish, it flowed unceasingly through his mind because it was the beginning. They had played one game. It was the game of the rusty shell of the old motor car that had crashed into the river one night, and by their time had been stripped clean so that all that remained was the frame, gaping, socketed, like a skull. The game was called driving to hell and gone. It was intricate to play and involved filling up with petrol and water, testing the tyres and oil, loading the luggage in the boot and then all climbing in and driving away very fast. The best part was being the driver, and they took turns at that:

Beep-beep, toot-toot,
Grrr-grrr-grrrrrrr…

Somehow they had always seemed to play it late in the afternoon in the fading light. The rule was that only the driver made the noises. The rest sat silent while he raced the gloom of evening which always fell first there in the river bed.