I found the sheet on the second day, at the far end of the section, under a heap of things the trucks hadn't taken away, and it was folded in two and heavy as if there were water inside it, and when I opened it I saw that it was whole. Whole, all of it. Long enough for a roof, and no holes in it, and only two humps in the middle that wouldn't flatten even if you stood on them.

Nobody finds a whole one. The good stuff went out in May with the trucks, and what was left was pieces, and with pieces you make a shelter, not a roof.

And I had the number. They had painted the number for me on the packed earth in white paint, the name on the list and the number on the ground, and Zanele didn't, because in May Zanele was sleeping at her mother-in-law's stand and they made the list on the stands and not on the people. So I was in and she was out, and the difference was twenty metres, and the twenty metres were twenty metres of nothing, bare earth, and there was nothing in between, and yet there was.

Mr Ngobese came every day at around four with the clipboard and read the names stand by stand, and at each name he waited, and if you answered he moved on, and if you didn't answer he made a mark, and nobody knew what happened to the ones who were marked, and so at four people stayed still on their own stand, and for twenty minutes the section was like a Sunday.

The ground still shows it, and this is the thing nobody tells you beforehand: the tracks left furrows in May and the furrows are there, two hands wide, and they run straight through where the houses were, and when you sink a post into a furrow it is hard underneath and soft on top and it goes in crooked, so you shift it half a metre further along, which is inside the furrow before it.

And the sheet meanwhile sat on top of the heap, on my number, good side up, and from every part of the section you could see that piece shining, and people passing looked there and then looked at me, and nobody asked me anything.

I keep the nails sorted by length in three tins cut in half, and every time I look for one I tip them all out, and Zanele used to tell me it was wasted time, and I didn't answer, and the truth is that it is wasted time.

And Mr Ngobese said it in front of everyone, one afternoon, without raising his voice, that he decides nothing, that the judge wrote names and did not write a camp, and that if each of us puts up what he wants where he wants, in a month there will be more people here than before, and then the next judge looks at the camp and does not look at the names, and finds for them. And then he said he was saying it for our sake. And he was right, and that is another thing nobody tells you beforehand.

Amos had the hacksaw, two stands down, and I asked him for it without saying what for, and he gave it to me without asking, because when a man asks for a hacksaw and does not say what for it means he already knows. And I laid the sheet across the two trestles, and took the tape, and measured, and then measured again because the first time I always measure wrong, and I marked the middle with the point of a nail, and while I was marking it Mr Ngobese had got to old Fiso's stand and was reading the names the way he reads them, the surname first and then the name.

And I set the hacksaw on the line. And I pulled.

At the start the metal will not have it, and it jumps, and the tooth slides off sideways and makes a sound that is still nothing, and then it bites. And when it bites the sound changes and becomes that thing you can hear from every side, which is not a working sound, it is the sound of something being broken on purpose, and at four in the section there is no other sound because at four nobody moves. And Mr Ngobese stopped reading. And then he started again from the name where he had left off, which was Fiso, and he read it twice. And I pulled all the way through, and turned the sheet over, and pulled again, and in the end it opened in two the way bread opens.

And two half sheets do not make two roofs, they make two low roofs, which is another thing, and underneath you cannot stand up, and you bend to go in and to come out, and you learn that on the first day and then you stop thinking about it. And Zanele brought her things in, the mattress and the big bag and the pot and the bucket, and she put it all against the side where the sheet comes down, and she sat, and she said nothing, and neither did I, and we stayed there with our heads bent.

Mr Ngobese came by when we had only just finished, and he stopped, and he looked first at my roof and then at hers, and then at the line of the cut, which shows, because a hacksaw cut never comes out straight and mine less than most, and he rested the clipboard on his forearm and wrote, and he did not say anything either, and he went off to the next stand.

And what he wrote I do not know, and I did not ask him, and Zanele did not ask him either.

And in the evening I went out to look at how it had come out, and from outside you see the two low roofs side by side, and on each one there is a hump, the one that would not flatten even if you stood on it, and now there is one on each side, and they are at the same height, and from far off they look like one thing.