Howard relayed the conversation to me: I’m worried about it, sir, because a young woman has gone missing, yes, I am worried. I am very worried. You should be too, sir. The officer, he said, sat back in his chair. We got bigger things to worry about than that, meneer, big trouble all sorts of places here. We worry about keeping you people safe in your houses, meneer, are you safe in your house, meneer? I am safe, thank you, sir. That’s not the point. Other people are not safe, that’s what I’m worried about. And then the officer said, be grateful we keep you safe in your house, meneer, don’t worry about the other people. You said she’s a young lady, this Black? She probably ran off with someone, what d’you expect. Probably doing something she shouldn’t be, what do you know about it?

Howard left in a fury. He came home and poured himself a whisky, he seldom did that. He fumed, then became silent. I went out back and told Emily there was no news about Tiny.

ONE MORNING I went back to my studio. It had the air of an abandoned place, everything just as I’d left it, weeks before. I started tidying it, then I went to the house and got a cloth, for wiping and dusting. I couldn’t ask Josias or Emily to clean my studio, I didn’t want them in there, I didn’t want anyone in there, I’ve explained before.

I went to my painting, I had covered it with a sheet, it stood against the side wall. I threw the sheet off, I undraped it. It looked like an old, a very old, friend. A distant friend, an acquaintance only. Someone whose face you recognized, but distantly. I sat on my chair. I studied the painting. It had . . . how can I say . . . lost its life. It had lost its life. The light it used to hold within it was gone. Vanished. Like Tiny. Why compare it to Tiny, that was absurd. And not right. But the sense of absence, of a space where something — someone — once was, was the same.

I started going back to the studio in the mornings after that, I started fiddling with some other, smaller, canvases. That was alright, I started to relax. I fixed a small abstract, an oil, I didn’t care much for it, but I finished it, it had some beauty in it. I would frame it, I thought, and give it to my mother. But then I thought she didn’t really like or understand abstracts. Perhaps, then, Howard might have it for his office. I would see if Howard wanted it.

I’D BEEN ONCE to Howard’s office. I had been in town for an appointment near his building, a tall dark building that shadowed the others around it. Traffic and horns blaring, I didn’t like it there. Which is strange, because I love New York. Its canyons, its noise. But Johannesburg’s city centre had an air of decay about it, hard to explain. Perhaps it was a residue of the colonial, the British colonial overlords, which hung and clung to its buildings like an old, sour smell. Or it was the decay, the decay that was its moral decay: the Black workers who powered Johannesburg, yet were disenfranchised. You felt it there, you felt it. Black men hung around at corners smoking cigarettes, on breaks from their jobs, or unemployed. Perhaps not many were unemployed, the job market was strong. Perhaps other people felt the excitement of the city, the jobs, the economic power of it, because it had that, certainly. You’d see, coming in, the commuter lines, thousands of Black people coming into Johannesburg to work, lines and lines of them.