Tsotsi came just in time. As he slipped quietly to the door, the woman, Marty, was standing over Boston, nudging him with her foot and speaking in a deep, disgusted voice. ‘Hey! Hey! Wake up. Wake up and get out man. I’m sick of you, bloody dog.’

The other occupants of the room, two men, were watching idly over their drinks.

‘Throw him out,’ she said. ‘Throw out the bloody dog. He’s pissed again on the floor.’

No one had seen Tsotsi in the door, with the result that when he spoke there was an immediate reaction. Marty swung round, and the men made a quick move to hide their glasses. ‘Leave him,’ said Tsotsi.

‘What do you want?’ she asked.

‘Him’—nodding his head at Boston.

Marty left the corner and walked right up to Tsotsi, standing so that she blocked his way. She didn’t fear a damn thing.

‘You’re the one that did it,’ she said.

Tsotsi had nothing to say in reply.

‘You worked him like he is. Lying down, he said. When he couldn’t see because the blood was in his eyes.’

Tsotsi waited for her to finish. He looked over her shoulder at the men, who dropped their eyes, then at the ceiling where a piece of flypaper crusted over with dead bodies hung beside the light.

Marty had come so close to him that when she spoke small drops of spit flew into his face. ‘I wouldn’t do that to a dog. Not to a mad dog and I’m telling you he was a man. So what you got to say?’

She waited. Tsotsi waited.

‘I’m telling you, that,’ she pointed back but without taking her bright, indignant eyes from Tsotsi’s face, ‘that was a man. I know. Some sort of a different man—Well?’

‘I want him.’

‘Why? Aren’t you satisfied?’

‘I just want him—to talk.’

The light faded from her eyes. ‘To talk! Ja ja, he could talk, too much.’

Marty walked away from him, a big, childless, husband- less woman. At the table she lit a cigarette, smoked it for a few seconds, blowing on the glowing tip of the cigarette. She looked at Boston once, and then shrugged her shoulders.

‘Take him. It’s too late. He shouldn’t have come back.’

Tsotsi tried to wake Boston at first, but after the shaking he just rolled over. The two men watched discreetly, dropping their eyes to their glasses whenever Tsotsi caught them. Marty was at her window, leaning there on her elbows, looking out into the night.

‘He’s just pieces,’ she said. ‘Just pieces held together by dried blood, like something broken.’

Boston stank as bad as a backyard. He had also messed in his trousers.

‘Who wants pieces?’ Marty was saying. ‘Who the hell wants the pieces of a man?’

Tsotsi carried him away in his arms.

It took him a long time to get back to his room. At first Boston was quiet, and apart from the weight, it was easy going through the crooked streets, past the idle curiosity of people waiting at their windows for another rain, or lounging about outside. What’s that mean, they asked themselves and each other. That man there, hey! Carrying that one like a baby. They knew the basic meaning: trouble. That was the meaning of most things. But the form of it, the variations that life composed, playing on that one theme, they were infinite. Was it brother, father or friend? Was he alive, dead or dying? Who did it, anyway, and why? What exactly had been done?