THE STORY/BODY THAT NEEDED ‘thick-lensed spectacles’ did not fall from the tenth floor but was hit by a car; the left arm was not missing but broken.

After the rumpus of our return, the reading and the subsequent tearing up of the poem, Victor and I were spared the unpleasantness of having to expel our guest-writer from our house so that we could have a quiet Christmas with our visitors, my brother and his family. This time Dambudzo ‘expelled himself’.

I was sitting on the veranda, where he had just left me, saying he was going to town, when someone came running onto the property. ‘Come quick – there has been an accident!’ He was holding Dambudzo's press card in his hand.

I hurried to Enterprise Road, where Dambudzo usually tried to get a lift to the city, and found him lying on the roadside.

‘What happened?’

‘I tried to cross the road and did not see that car coming. You know, without spectacles, I am almost blind.’

Dambudzo was dreadfully myopic. When he first moved in with us, he had found a pair of Victor's old spectacles in a drawer and was happy to see properly again. When, sometime later, he lost the glasses, his wry comment, typical of his self-irony, was: ‘I don't want to see this shitty world anyway.’

When the ambulance came, I went with him to Parirenyatwa Hospital. He had bruises on one side and a fractured arm. They kept him in hospital for the week over Christmas. He seemed subdued (no booze of course) but not unhappy. He asked me to bring him my tape recorder so that he could record a book review he was working on.

After he was discharged, I found him in the Park Lane Hotel. Marilyn Poole had given him a hundred dollars and Lord Acton, husband of Judith Todd, another well-wishing friend, had given him money for a night's accommodation there. As he was one-handed, with his fractured arm in a cast, I helped him transcribe the book review. I don't recall which review it was or why the Herald , where he submitted it, chose not to publish it (it might well have been his review of JM Coetzee's novel Life & Times of Michael K , which had just appeared) but I remember how impressed I was by his brilliance as a critic.