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the square. I dart to catch it.
    The spiky skin stings my palm. I pop the reptilian peel between my teeth and suck the slick sweet off the stone.
    – Who’s stall’s this?! a bass voice booms.
    I spin to see a fat ass forming big bongos in front of my stall.
    The video-toting tourist in hard-core hiking boots flips over the bead animals as if to find some flaw in the handiwork. She spurns them one by one: topples a giraffe, tips a turtle’s feet up, tangles gecko tails.
    – How much?
    I hope to stay calm as I put the animals on their feet again.
    – Depends. Was there one you had in mind?
    She picks up a penguin.
    – How much for this here bird? she twangs.
    – That penguin’s a hundred rand.
    – One hundred? I’ll give you half.
    She plonks the penguin down and manhandles a gecko instead. So far I’ve traded a whale for a stone and now a woman wants a penguin at cost. I have nada to hand over to Zero, never mind profit to pocket. I ought to heed Zero’s Survival Tip #2 and haggle to and fro, but her gung-ho air kills this tango.
    – I’m sorry. That’s what I want for it.
    – You just lost money, boy.
    She drops the gecko and shunts on to Hunter’s cowries.
    – You walk on by, shoots Hunter. I have fuckall to sell to you.
    The woman stomps off, lugging binoculars and bazooka-lensed camera.
    Hunter laughs and I echo her as I fix the penguin’s bent feet.
    Hunter and me in cahoots. An old white woman with dry, gooseberry-husk skin and a lovesick coloured boy. A killer duo.
    A whisper of paper swirls over the hard fabric of the world.
    I can smell low-tide kelp on the cool harbour wind.
    I realise I haven’t seen the stray market dogs all day.

10
    A FARM SOMEWHERE SOUTH of the Limpopo. Noon.
    Panganai and Tendai tug tufts of candyfloss from pink clouds as the Chinese girl in a pink tutu rides a circus horse round and round.
    The frenzied jabber of the dogs and the rumble of a diesel pickup haul Jabulani out of reverie.
    He smells the pap Jonas has cooked in the dusty, dour light.
    A yelled command is a high note over the deep-river tones of men singing in his language.
    Jabulani gears himself to see a gang of hardened, jaded old men.
    The barn door slides open and the men plod in. They give off a gamey reek of smoke and sweat.
    Sidestepping the stranger, they scoop water out of the drum with enamel mugs. They drink half and tip half over their heads. The curing cool of the water draws smiles from a few of the men.
    Jonas shyly shuffles his feet. The men are younger and jauntier than he had imagined. They must be Polemen.
    – Boys, this is Jabulani, says Jonas. He is a teacher.
    The way they nod their sodden heads at him reveals deep awe of teachers. They all, not so long ago, sat at the feet of a teacher with a slate and chalk in hand, keen to learn about the world beyond the Limpopo.
    Jabulani hops on to an old army troop truck with the Polemen.
    The Polemen murmur their feeling of injustice as they go by the Shadowmen behind barbed wire. They have it good. They stay under the shade cloths. They are not stung by the sun. They are not hounded by the gunmen.
    The marijuana the forlorn Shadowmen tend to under the shade cloths is absurdly green. A fizzing, green-mamba green. The plants dance as innocently as lotus or palm in the dry wind.
    When the army truck halts on a dusty unwired space, they carry the poles from the back of the truck to put in the holes.
    One of the men shinnies up a pole, hammer in his back pocket and nails in his mouth like some fanged demon gecko. They tie the shade cloth to a rope and he hauls it up and over the crossbeam. Once this is spun taut as trampoline skin he hammers it down.
    Jabulani’s job, just as Jonas forecast, is to dig holes with a pick.
    All picks fall in sync. Men sing to the rhythm of the falling picks as red dust smokes skywards. If a man stands to rub his sore spine, a gunman barks at him to get on with the job.
    A haggard, wiry man floating long, white,