And trucks digest the city's sediment men gloved and silent in the municipal jaws. A marshland of fog and gas muffles the commerce of sound, turns Cape Town into Venice as the light on the dock laps tackle, cranes, yards, grain elevators, suspending them in tidal anchorage. Shimmering like a promise, the yellow mirage prepares sailors for the city, its irradiated bowl. City lights flicker, on, off. Underneath, gaunt men in doorways and ransacked women key back rooms.
Taxis sidle to their ranks, newspapers blow.
I was playing hopscotch on the slate when the miners roared past in lorries, their arms raised, signals at a crossing their chanting foreign and familiar, like the call and answer of road gangs across the veld, building hot arteries from the heart of the Transvaal mine. I ran to the gate to watch them pass. For it was noon, and there was no jade pool. Instead, a pool of blood that already had a living name and grew like a shadow as the day lengthened. The dead, buried in voices that reached my gate, the chanting man on ambushed trucks, these were not heroes in my town, but maulers of children, doing things that had to remain nameless.