I took up jogging on the day I got out of jail six months ago. Five years ago, before I got arrested, you wouldn’t have wanted to meet a man as bad as I was. Hell, even I wouldn’t have wanted to meet a man as bad as I was.

When the psychologist in jail told me I suffered from Antisocial Personality Disorder, I finally understood why I had left so many scars on the faces and souls of other people in my life. In my teens I took three lives in knife fights. Each life I took is a crown in crook terms, but let me just tell you now that each of those crowns weighs a ton on my soul. When I got arrested and sentenced to five years in Westville prison for a string of house robberies in Ballito I found that my reputation preceded me. I was welcomed with open, bleeding-knife tattooed arms by the blood spillers in jail, the 27s gang.

I grew up on the streets. I can make out a crook just by his gait. I can disarm a mugger with a simple 26s or 27s gang salute. Why am I even thinking of that crook life? And today of all days?

“Own it, it is part of your life. It’s your history but now look to the future, because the past is all behind you,” said the psychologist in our last session before I was released from jail.

Now more than ever I heed her advice. I glance back down the hill I have just climbed, and leave the past at the bottom of that hill. I pump hard in the final flat stretch to the two-room building I rent with my girlfriend Gugu and her six-year-old son, Lihle.

I hear Lihle climb into the bathtub and just sit there while I’m stretching my hamstrings behind the building. A minute passes, not a splash of bath water.

“Lihle! You better be bathing in there! I won’t be late for work because of you!” shouts Gugu.

Lihle doesn’t answer. I know he is in one of his sulky moods. The bathroom door is flung open with a creak of the hinges.

“Jesus Lihle! You haven’t even put your facecloth in water!”

“I am bathing,” says Lihle, but there is still not the slightest splash of water.

I’m at the bathroom door in a flash. “I’ll help him finish up,” I intervene.

“Help him?” says Gugu, her weave in one hand, a brush in her other hand. “You are spoiling him, Mandla!”

“Go, Gugu! Get ready for work. You just said you are running late.”

Gugu’s forehead scrunches in irritation. She disappears into our bedroom brushing her weave in short ferocious strokes.

Today I am getting paid for a grass cutting tender that I have been working on for four months. Four months of the blistering summer sun rising and falling on me. Sunny summer days turned to acrid winter while I was on the freeway working to the sound of cars whooshing by. I was on site every day; I inhaled the smell of petrol and fresh-cut grass all day long. The whir of grass cutter machines and whoosh of cars still rings in my ears sometimes.

But all the hard work has paid off because in a few hours I’ll be R50 000 richer.

***

Tell us: Do you think Mandla can stay out of trouble? How? Why not?