She was watching him carefully when he reached the end. His eyes were excited and his hands trembling because never before had he spoken so many words at once.

‘What are you going to do with him?’

‘Keep him.’

‘Why?’

He threw back his head, and she saw the shine of desperation on his forehead as he struggled with that one mighty word. Why, why was he? No more revenge. No more hate. The riddle of the yellow bitch was solved—all of this in a few days and in as short a time the hold on his life by the blind, black, minute hands had grown tighter. Why?

‘Because I must find out,’ he said.

She considered this, but finding her thoughts going around in a circle she turned to the baby again. She uncovered a medicine bottle of milk in her blanket and put it on the table.

‘Give him this tomorrow,’ she said, ‘with a spoon. I will come in the afternoon at the same time.’

Then it was the business again with the blanket, and her own baby with a safety pin between her teeth. She straightened, picked up her bucket and went to the door.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said.

‘Tomorrow –’ and she went out.

He gave her time enough to reach her room, and then he picked up the baby and slipped out into the street, and then up to the ruins, but even so he looked back twice on the way in case she had hidden somewhere and was following him.

After hiding the baby, he set off purposefully in the opposite direction from which he had come. It was a long walk and took him right through the township, reaching his destination towards the middle of the afternoon. Tsotsi found he couldn’t control himself. His heart raced and strange sounds broke from his lips as he ran down the footpath to the bottom of the river.

It was true. The pipes were exactly as he remembered them, choked with dry leaves and sand now, smelling rusty. The only change was that more rubbish seemed to have been thrown or blown into the riverbed. He hurried down it. When he found the shell of a motor car, almost as he remembered it, there was no longer any doubt. It was true, it had happened, and to him.

He didn’t stay a second longer than was necessary, almost running in his hurry to leave the river. Once he got back among the houses and people, he slowed down. It was dark when he reached his street and he slipped into the first shebeen to ask after the whereabouts of Boston.

11

Tsotsi finally traced Boston to a shebeen bossed by a woman called Marty. Boston had found himself there shirtless, shoeless, wearing only an old pair of khaki trousers held up by a belt of fibrous yellow rope. He was lying in a corner of the room on the floor, lost to the world in a stupor which had lasted now for the three days that had passed since Tsotsi’s attack, and out of which he had awoken at times, only to lurch off in search of still more booze. Spit bubbles burst as he breathed through his lips because his nose was blocked with blood.