Limbani.

When the sun stops beating down he comes out of the channel, dries off as he walks and picks up the basket. From the shed to the foot of the clay bank a dirt path drops in two stretches, and halfway down, up on the right, is the stake.

He drove that stake in himself. Back then it marked where the edge of the bank ran, and it served to remind him how far in he could dig. Now the edge has reached it. There is a metre and a half of ground left in front of it, and then the air, and then the river.

He goes past it every night with the basket on his shoulder and the stake is still where he put it. When somebody points it out to him, he answers that he'll move it. He says it without looking up and carries on down. He has been saying it for three floods.

Down at the very foot of the bank the clay comes out grey and sticky and cuts under the hoe like old cheese. He throws it into the pit, takes off his shoes and treads it. He knows whether it has sand in it before it reaches mid-calf: if it grinds, he shoves that lot aside with his foot and goes for more; if it opens up when he lifts his foot, it is ready.

He fills the mould, tips it onto the drying line, gives the edge a sharp knock to release it and moves on to the next. Two hundred, three hundred, whatever comes out. He stops when the light comes up.

The good clay on this stretch is right there, on the lip that is falling away. The two facts are one and the same fact, and along the bank that is known and left unsaid: nobody holds the lip of the bank because it is crumbling, and that is why it is the only place a man without a stretch can dig. A stretch is held by one man and the rest work it by his leave. Limbani works the edge.

His father does hold one. The stretch three bends upriver, where the clay lies higher and comes out sandy. Among his people a father is not called a father: you say which stretch he holds. They pass each other in the water every few weeks, each at his own reach, and carry on. Limbani has never bought clay from him. What comes off up there is brick that cracks in the kiln, and cracked brick doesn't get paid for.

Every year the bank pulls back a little further. They dam upriver, they draw water off to irrigate, they plant right up to the water's edge, and then the bank loses its roots and the flood takes it away in pieces. On the stretch it goes by another name. They say it came in hard this year.

His bend is doing well and getting better. Past the last buoy, a few meanders down, it changes: down there it is less every year and there is trouble with the plots along the bank. Limbani knows the difference and keeps it to himself. He says it's ugly downriver.

At four in the morning a boat with a light on it goes down the middle of the river, slowly. It is after the tusks, which get sold a long way from here. Nobody on the stretch is surprised to see it. Limbani watches it go past from the drying line, mould in hand, and carries on.

At sixteen he measured out with a cane where the edge had been the year before and it came to four paces. He kept the cane for a while and then burned it in the kiln like any other bit of firewood.

Beside the path that climbs to the rise there is a heap of black, warped bricks, the ones from the middle of the kiln, that ring like glass when they knock together. He sets them aside there. Whoever carries them up, carries them up.

At twenty-three he drove in the stake. On a Sunday, with the mallet for breaking clods, right at the top, where back then there was ground to spare in front of it. That afternoon he didn't work.

Between eleven and four he is in the channel, with the water at neck height and his head level with the surface. He walks in and stays with his feet on the bottom; if he has to cross the deep pool he crosses it underneath, in bounds, until the ground comes back under him. The whole stretch walks past and the whole stretch puts him down as lazy. He lets it lie.

At those hours he answers with his head. Nobody on the stretch takes it badly: messages are given to him at night, or they are given to Tadala, who is twelve and repeats them whole. Before he says anything at all he runs his thumb along the edge of his hand to get the dried mud off. He does it whether there is mud on it or whether it is clean, and he does it as well when he has just come out of the water. It buys him the second he needs.

At night he talks, and he gets heard. If somebody mentions that from the far bank he comes through just as clearly, he answers that it's the bend, that it sends it back. He says it the way you would explain why it rains in January. If they press him, he'll say the river is low, or that at night the road is quiet and sound travels better. He has never crossed over to check. It has never occurred to him either that there is anything to check.

When the kiln has been fired and is still hot, the flat ground in front of it fills up. Somebody slaps a drum with an open palm and gets a rhythm out of it, and Limbani raps over it. He begins with his back to the river and ends facing it. By then there are people standing up on the road, who have come down to see what was going on.

At twenty-one, three men from further downriver planted themselves in front of him. They asked if he was the one with the voice. They had heard him described and they knew him the moment he opened his mouth to say yes. They stayed for the whole set, until he ran out, and then they walked home in the dark.

He doesn't charge. He has been offered money to perform somewhere and he said no and that was the end of it. He doesn't call himself a singer either, or a rapper, and if somebody calls him that in front of other people he gets uncomfortable and changes the subject with his chin. He says he just talks loud.

His sister fries mandasi at the minibus stop, from before dawn until midday. One night she paid the ferry fare, crossed on her own and was back before he had finished his set.

She told him one thing and that was that: that he could be heard.

He came back with the business about the bend. She started stacking her trays and didn't push it. Since that night she has stayed on this bank and the subject has not come up between them again.

That night, before loading the row into the kiln, Limbani stood looking across. There is not much to see from here: a line of reeds, the odd loose light, the water in between. He stayed like that for a good while and went back to the mould.

Tadala knows what he says out on the flat ground, only with words that are not the same ones. She goes round the yard singing them while she counts the drying line. He hears her from the pit and carries on treading.

At the minibus stop, in among the stalls, there are people selling flash drives. Two thousand kwacha each, with two hundred songs on them, copied off a computer nobody has ever seen. He bought his as a boy and it is the only one he has ever had. Almost everything on it comes from Blantyre and almost all of it is in Chichewa.

He got his Chichewa from school and from the radio, and in Machinga it is not the language of every house. On the flat ground people understand him all the same. He raps in Chichewa because that is what you rap in, and if anyone asked him why he wouldn't know what to answer.

The first time he started up it was to patch something over. Somebody had carried a radio out onto the flat ground and halfway through the night its batteries ran out. It left a gap. Limbani carried on by himself, rapping with no music, until he ran out. Nobody told him to stop and nobody said anything to him when he finished. He was fourteen and that is how he tells it, as though he had plugged a leak in a roof.

He changes the verses from one night to the next and he has them written down nowhere. He has been told more than once that this is done in the city, in Zomba or in Blantyre, with university people in front of him and others waiting their turn to answer him back. He says yes with his head. He has not gone down.

Between one set and the next he eats standing up, leaning on the cut-down drum he keeps inside the shed. He eats a frightening amount, always the same thing and always at night. On the stretch they put it down to how hard he works.

His mother washes other people's clothes in the channel, thirty metres from where he sleeps, and spreads them on the grass along the bank. They see each other every day of the year. Sitting down to talk, as far as either of them remembers, never. She leaves his plate covered on the ground in the yard, against the wall, before she goes to bed; he comes in before dawn, eats in the dark and leaves it in the same spot, turned upside down. They have been doing that for years. The only thing she says to him about the voice is to keep it down, that there are people sleeping.

The buyer comes up the road with the pickup right on midday, which is the worst hour. Limbani hears him coming a good while before anything is in sight, from the water, with his back turned and his ears level with the surface. He comes out streaming, counts the faces of the stack with him, gets paid and is back in before the engine starts. His shoulders and the back of his neck shine orange from the hours in the sun over the clay. He says it's the dust off the mud, and on the stretch that gets accepted, because it happens to everyone.

A stack is counted from the outside. Four faces of whole brick, properly lined up, and the price comes off that. The cracked ones go in the middle, where nobody looks.

Once he got a man who, instead of counting faces, took the stack apart down the middle. He found the cracked ones, paid him half the thousand and carted the lot off anyway. Limbani didn't argue. On the next stack he did exactly the same thing.

What actually keeps him awake is having a whole batch come down on him and having to start from nothing with a cold kiln. He doesn't say that in those words either. He says it by counting the bricks he has already laid out on the drying line one more time, last thing, when he has already counted them.

He made the mould himself with a borrowed handsaw and a board off a tomato crate. It came out a finger longer than the usual ones and that is how it stayed. His bricks can be spotted at a glance: in Liwonde there are walls where you can see from the street which course is his.

For every thousand bricks he wastes more mud than anyone else on the stretch. He has others hanging on a nail, brand new, and he goes on using the same one. If somebody suggests he cut it down, the conversation is over. He doesn't lend it either.

The shed is a frame of poles and sheet metal up against the kiln. Inside there is a mat, a board doing the work of a shelf, and the drum. For a door stop he uses the first brick he ever laid, as a boy, with one corner eaten away; whoever trips over it knocks it out of the way, and then somebody puts it back.

He leaves the chain coiled inside the hat, on top of the board, before he gets into the water. Nobody has ever touched it. This year the sweatshirt does up halfway and stops there, and it is the same sweatshirt as last year; he said so once, with the zip half up, in a what-a-nuisance sort of voice, and since then he leaves it like that.

As the afternoon comes down he comes out of the channel, dries off as he walks and goes up to the shed. He puts the mould under his arm, walks past the stake and goes down for the first basket.