‘David!’ the man called. ‘David!’ Tsotsi looked away. ‘It’s me. Petah. David help me.’ David, he called, all the way down the street.

But Tsotsi had closed his ears. He heard it no more. He forgot it. Right there and then. Knowing it was a voice from his past, he made himself forget. Under the bewildered gaze of Butcher and Die Aap he rattled the dice and played on. That incident, and the memories it had evoked, was the furthest Tsotsi had ever gone back into his past.

His third and final rule was really an extension of the second. It was the rule Boston had broken. Tsotsi tolerated no questions from another. It wasn’t just that he was caught without answers. It went deeper than that. Those questions sounded the vast depths of his darkness, making it a tangible reality. To know nothing about yourself is to be constantly in danger of nothingness, those voids of non-being over which a man walks the tightrope of his life.

Tsotsi feared nothingness. He feared it because he believed in it. Even more than that, he knew with all the certainty of his being that behind the façade of life lurked nothing. Under men’s prayers he had heard the deep silence of it; behind man’s beauty he had seen it faceless and waiting; inside man himself, beyond the lights of his loves and his hopes, there too was nothing, a darkness like an enormous unending night that closed in when the fires burned low and out, leaving only ash as an epitaph to their passing warmth.

The problem of his life was to maintain himself, to affirm his existence in the face of this nullity. He achieved this through pain and fear, and through death. He knew no other way. When Gumboot died, and in those last few seconds before death had looked hard with hate and then fear at the young man who had chosen him, that moment Tsotsi had known he was alive. It was as simple as that.

Tsotsi still sat with his back to the tree with these thoughts, or his equivalents of them, the personal spectres that carried their meaning, some visual, seen inwardly like the face of his first killing, others felt, like the twitch in the nerves of his groin when he had savoured the meaning of killing. These had been passing through his head for a long time and now he was tired. He was not good at thinking.

He stood up, determined to run again, to leave the trees. He was already moving when he heard the sound, so he stopped, slipped quietly into a shadow and waited.

What he had heard were footsteps, about ten at a time, coming at regular intervals as someone moved down the street, crossing the silent squares of grass on the pavement, and then the driveways to the garages with the sound of a shoe on cement. They were regular but rapid, the rhythm of hurry and fear, almost a run. When he heard them coming steadily closer, Tsotsi moved to one of the trees on the edge of the grove.