It was simple and it would have worked for a long time if it had only stayed like that. Where had it gone wrong? It had gone wrong because Boston started asking questions, even after he was warned. And Tsotsi had not known the answers.

When he thought of himself inwardly, Tsotsi thought of darkness. Inwardly there was darkness, something like the midnight hour, only more obscure. At night when he lay on his bed it was almost one continuum of obscurity, as dark without as within, the separation being his flesh. Sleep was the moment when it happened, when he merged and everything was black. He never dreamed. This did not disconcert him, provided he lived according to a set of tried and tested rules. He didn’t know where they came from, but he had them, and if he failed to observe them the trouble started.

The first rule was the rule of the working moment. That moment always came as a miracle, a sudden eruption of light as he opened his eyes, and sound as well as sensation, feeling and smelling; being born twenty years old with the smell of the womb in your nostrils and its darkness behind your back. It was a moment of great peril because the impact of the world around him, on his senses, was like a flood that threatened to tear him away from his moorings and cast him adrift on a new day as aimless as the others caught in the wanton tides of the location streets. It was at this moment that his first rule operated. It was simply that before anything else, eating, washing, pissing, he had to see to his knife.

It was a sheath-knife, the blade four inches long. The handle was made of wood and was kept in place by two copper studs, and he carried it in the back pocket of his trousers, and slept with it under his jacket which he rolled up and used as a pillow. He would take it out, in the room in the morning, and look at it. This meant testing the edge on the soft ball of the thumb, and if it couldn’t shave off a thin wafer of skin, then sharpening it. He used a stone for this, which he kept in his room. Sharpening it was, as someone had once shown him, to spit on the stone and then to work the blade lightly backwards and forwards. And if it wasn’t in need of sharpening, he would simply play with it for a few seconds, enjoying the security of it in his hand. He knew the knife, the feel of it was familiar, its purpose obvious, it was his and he knew how to use it. These thoughts were cast out like mooring ropes and tied him firmly to what he knew. Whatever the case might be, the blade dull or as keen as sight, when he put it away in his pocket and looked up, the day was his. He, Tsotsi, knew himself and his dark purpose, and everything was all right. The knife was not only his weapon, but also a fetish, a talisman that conjured away bad spirits and established him securely in his life.