The sharp claw of déjà vu gripped me as I watched the women come to a halt before a huge wooden billboard. They set to hacking and sawing, pushing and pulling at it, and soon the billboard was on the ground; the sensual face of the man holding a pack of condoms bit the dust.

‘Dis women de craze?’ my co-passenger asked as we watched the women breaking up the wood and sharing it into small bundles.

‘They are not crazy. They are just gathering firewood,’ I explained to him. It was my writing acting itself out. And James thought I had laid it on too thick. I wished he were here to see reality mocking his words.

‘I no understand,’ the old man said.

I also don’t, I wanted to say, there is so much we can’t understand because we are only characters in a story and our horizon is so narrow and so dark.

When I returned to the tenement house, she was there by the door. I almost passed her like I always did, but her voice stopped me. ‘You no go come inside?’

I looked at her wise, wise eyes, then I went in. I sat down on the rumpled bed. The warmth in the bed rose up like welcoming arms and hugged me.

Kela

At first I thought it was the heat that made them dream on Poverty Street. But Joshua told me that people could be dreamers even in cold weather. ‘Kela,’ he said, ‘people become dreamers when they are not satisfied with their reality, and sometimes they don’t know what is real until they begin to dream.’

The mornings were usually cool, but by eleven a.m. the sun was already high in the sky, and by noon the heat would really begin to show its hand: it would force the people off the main street and back roads, and since the heat was worse indoors, the people would sit out on their verandahs on old folding chairs; they would throw open the shop doors and sit before the counters, stripped down to their shorts and wrappers, their bare torsos gleaming with sweat. Gasping for breath, they would stare through glazed eyes at the long, tarred road that dissected the street in two. By two o’clock, the tar would start melting, making tearing noises beneath car tyres, holding grimly on to shoe soles.