I found out that I was pregnant the day we took People's Bank in the Estcourt city-centre before the trip to Westgate a week ago. Martin had joked about it when he'd seen me heave my brains out the morning after we'd left in the stolen old BMW, which Martin had ominously obliged all the way from Ladysmith to Jo'burg over the weekend. He was the only one who could drive and had a license and it had happened several times during a getaway, upon being stopped by police, that a simple flash of Martin's dreamy emerald eyes and license got us away scot-free.

We left Estcourt directly after assaulting the bank and with the adrenalin pumping through our bodies, settled in at a hotel close to the N3. We always needed to spend the night at a place with a fast escape route. We'd always check in separately so as not to attract any unwelcome attention, but almost always spent the night together. I remember that Sifiso and Martin often carried guns even when they were naked, sometimes in jest, to make light of it all, but I think mostly, honestly, in sheer fear of what could possibly happen next.

By that time, we had taken to believing that we had stopped doing it for the money. Sometimes we'd be touring and just elect to fleece a place because it was beautiful or because it had a nice name. When we'd just started we were shaky, nervous kids fretful of being caught. Sifiso had already been to juvy many times and he guaranteed prison was no place to be. But even Sifiso with his cautionary measures and misleading ruses could hardly ignore what a piece of cake our raids had become. When we robbed little towns on the outskirts of South African hubs, we dared walk away, take a train or even stay the night. We'd become arrogant about it, taking even from the most dubious dupe, just to prove that we could. And believe it or not, it had worked. For two years and seven months, we had made a name and a sizeable fortune from the fluky successes of our rash robberies.

But that day, our sights were set on a shopping mall, one that had just been opened. Its security was still in trial and error; loyalties had yet to be established. We had expected it to be swift and easy - we'd done malls in rehearsal. The only challenge was the size of the current hit.

It was also around the same time that I'd begun to receive some positive attention for being the only girl in the Z-team. News travelled faster than money in those days. As soon as people recognized our misdeeds, they realized there was something different about this group of wild young criminals. Not only was there a girl, but also, more surprisingly, a white.

I remember hearing a few gleeful women chattering about the infamous trio. I never knew where the name 'Z-team' came from, but that was what they called us - everywhere, and with such conviction that one would think that we had disclosed our name in a press release. Girls had been impressed and intimidated by the infamous woman robber and the men were enthralled. As far as most people knew, we were an urban legend. Nothing more than a figment of people's imaginations, but we were still hot on their tongues. There were rumours of a love affair between the girl and one boy, but also rumours about a gay fling between the boy and the white boy. Martin and Sifiso saw these rumours as a threat. To them it meant somebody was onto us - that our days were numbered. They were afraid. But the stories only convinced me that we had a place, that we had nothing to fear and that things would be fine once we decided to pack it in and live decent lives.

Sifiso had been my man since Grade 5. I grew up in Ntuzuma C on 106579 Street, near Richmond Main Road. Sifiso was born in KwaMashu K, but I don't know whereabouts. We met in assembly in an Indian school called Shri Rhamayan Sabha in Overport. He had introduced himself by making sure that I got to stand in the front of the line when the bell rang. Khethiwe, another girl in my class who had always shoved needlessly, had curled away diffidently as Sifiso ordered her to make space for me. "Get behind her!" he derided. "And that's where I want to see all of you every day!"

I believed instantly that I was in love - at eleven years old. An unimportant girl from Ntuzuma whose mother had been confined to bed with no conceivable ailments, save that enduring Black Label quart. That wretched bottle which, when Thobile's heart bopped with delight at it's predictable emptiness would reappear - fresher and fuller and headed straight for mummy's mouth.

Whether or not I knew what love was, or what it would mean, I know that we did it. At that pathetically tender age we were feigning love as if our lives depended on it. Maybe back then, our lives did depend on it. Sifiso promised me marriage, a house and children and I would foolishly eat every word up like a starving beggar. I didn't know to think it over, to rationalize, I just sincerely believed that I was destined to do what he told me to do. And that fact would define the rest of my sorry life. He was in Grade 6 when he decided to make me his girl. By Grade 7 he was in juvenile prison for petty theft and assault.

My little girl heart was shattered and I thought, for about a week, that I would never move on. The way Sifiso had kept his eye on me and declared his ownership of me at Shri Rhamhayan Sabha - who would ever do that again? But lo, as I moved to Serenations High School, in Sydney, the next town from Overport, I began my pubescent ascent and was instantly over Sifiso. I noticed that the boys in my class who were mostly Indian or Coloured were highly attentive to my developing body and this awareness let me cling to that illusive idea that I was wanted. By the end of the first year of High School, I'd fucked two guys in my class: Gareth, the soccer captain whose mendacious charms and slick gelled hair made him one of the hottest guys in school and Asif Khan, the smartest and least attractive boy in our class against whom I often competed in school academic challenges. By the second year, most of my friends were guys and I wouldn't have had it any other way. But at the end of Grade 9 when I was prancing around my school as if that protection Sifiso had given me had been reborn in the form of a vagina, Sifiso came back.

He'd met a man while he was in prison. The story was puzzling at first: Martin Olsen had come to prison as an evangelist to help the young inmates turn to the Lord before it was too late. He had come with his family, who were in charge of the real holy work, but he was there to hand out literature and set up chairs. Once during an interval Sifiso Ntuli and Martin Olsen had struck up conversation - 'the rest is history'. It turns out the prisoner had converted the evangelist instead and after convincing his father that the prisoner in question had exclusive qualities and deserved redemption, they emerged after a slow debacle, as if joined at the hip by an extensive appetite for mischief.

Martin was born on a farm in Kranskop. His family was hardly wealthy but compared to Sifiso and I, he'd led a charmed life. The farm had belonged to grandpa Olsen, who with many other European evangelists and missionaries had relocated to the South of Africa with the hope of saving its dark people with the Gospel around the 1920s and 1930s. Although these families cluttered the Kranskop landscape in large albeit scattered numbers, they trekked every Sunday, some without fail, two hours to the Clear Waters Sacred Church at which they congregated. Those meetings in that church would seal themselves into little Martin's consciousness and never die away. The women so prudishly understated, dressed to turn their back on vanity and groomed to flaunt reticence. The men were upright and austere, oozing ethics and an ideal example of how to live in God's eternal light.

Martin's father John Olsen was a family lawyer with a practice cosily situated forty-five minutes from the farm in which he was joint partner with three other like-minded Christian lawyers. The employees were younger Christians who seemed to be invariably either men whose careers were budding as the partners careers had once budded and with whom the partners could get along but weren't bothered by, or women with no discernable qualities except that their bosses always seemed to need them for one thing or another. The cleaning and security staff who shuffled through the corridors of Schneider and Associates might have been among some of the firm's most deserving clients, but didn't know the first thing about law or its use, so John Olsen (and his associates) never felt the need to look them in the eyes when muttering 'Morning', and it was only their blue overalls, black security suits or pink flowery pinafore dresses that defined them. They were just the help.

And Francis Olsen - Martin's mother - stayed at home to raise the Olsen's seven children Mary, Sarah, Frank, Esther, Martin, Gideon and Joshua. She kept two nannies, two maids and a gardener, as it was all just too much for her to handle. 'Lord knows my fragile frame wasn't made for this...' she could often be heard professing. The large farm grounds with the gardens, the driveway, the pond and four dogs were always well kept, but Mrs. Olsen's hand was Mrs. Olsen's mouth. The workers were to carry out her orders with the highest priority at any hour, though their unfamiliar worker's quarters housed their own extensive families. The maids and nannies, always middle aged women, changed steadily through the years. The only thing that was certain was their insistence upon hauling their large fatherless families to the Olsen farm in Kranskop to Mrs. Olsen's eternal confusion. The gardener Thulani had stayed on the longest, having been the gardener at the Olsen farm during John Olsen's childhood years and throughout Martin's. He had a family of his own consisting of three wives, fourteen children and even more numerous grandchildren. Three of his sons lived with him at the Olsen farm and were somewhat his apprentices, poised to take over their father's duties upon his demise. Though scarcely seen on the grounds of the farm by the Olsen family, their presence was felt as the farm's male head. Although Thulani and his sons had the smallest 'servant family', they had the largest quarters which stood at the top of a small hill by the barbed wire fence and faced the Olsen house.

When Martin met Sifiso, he would tell him repeatedly that he reminded him of Thulani. Always there, like a mountain on top of a hill

The boys went well together. What began as naughty mismatch soon erupted in a torrent of teachings from flattered Sifiso, gloriously dispatching secrets of the trade to his eager new mate. So deliriously pleased was he that he, an orphan, a black man, uneducated and ruined, should be teaching a rich white boy, telling him which way to go. He roared with laughter when Martin made rookie mistakes and rewarded him obstinately when he thrived.

And Martin in retrospect was positively blind - a civil young man with a good head on his shoulders. None of his reputable Christian family would ever fathom what he had done. A local newspaper would consequently publish many articles claiming that poor Martin had been brainwashed, hypnotized after falling at the hands of the dangerous criminal. But did he feel hypnotized? Well, perhaps ... perhaps it was the good kind of hypnosis. The kind that makes you soar away into another world. Into a world where things are happening and people are moving. An ideal retreat where there are no rules, just actions and desires.

All that I could feel when I looked at them was the attraction to that idea of Sifiso and Martin. What if I could have it all? Could it be that my years of solitude and emptiness end with these two men, together, with me? When Sifiso made love to me, I felt my daddy who was never there, whose face I have never seen and whose name I will never call. His love was very hard, but I opened up to him and wanted him to do it even harder. To hurt me even, maybe I felt I deserved it. Sifiso went deep inside me and pulled at my very core. He vandalized me and knew exactly how to make me love it. But when Martin made love to me it was soft and gentle and lasted a lifetime. I would feel his hands in places I didn't know could be touched, but he only went as deep as I let him. He spoke tenderly to me and I believe that I was even new to him ... brand new.

When we went to work we cemented our bond. It's as if stealing together made us family. We hardly ever had to depend on anyone else to get the job done; we delighted in this.

Sifiso was in charge of security (he had taken to murdering guards indiscriminately - if he had a clear shot he would take it, no questions asked), break-in and look-out, Martin was in charge of alarm and surveillance immobilization and I was in charge of getting the loot. Sifiso had been a robber long before Martin and I had joined him, but we had done fifty-six robberies together. We had a system and it worked immaculately. There was never any bickering, we worked professionally and everyone had an equal split. A lot has to be said for chemistry. It was the juice that fed our engine and we had tons of it.

Our entry point was on the second floor parking lot. We arrived at midnight and got straight to work. It was the biggest thing we'd ever done and we were all three equipped, but entirely unready. We didn't believe that anybody would bust us, but we seemed to sense that this time, it was not going to work.

"Whoo!" I heard from one of the tall glossy corridors of Westgate Mall. Martin and I both agreed that we should try and make as little noise as possible in the process of robbing a place like this. Although the place was completely dark and silent and the guards were sprawled dead around it, Sifiso was the only one who felt that we had been unobserved, claiming that he'd never gotten busted because of noise to which Martin rapidly replied, "Well, you got busted for something." They then commenced with their hourly masculine fixture, this time an alcohol pouring battle.

"I got my baby a Savannah," panted Sifiso after tiring of Martin's attention. Impossible that it should be that simple. That an entire story should end with such an abrupt and un-poetic question.
"Oh, I'm not drinking..." I said realizing after I said it what had just happened.
"Ha-ha, not drinking? What, are you pregnant?" He was laughing at first. "What are you, pregnant?" That laughter dwindled quickly.
"N... No..." I stumbled feebly. He was scrutinizing me now, the way he does when he's either about to hit me, or kiss me.

After a lengthy pause the roar started again and he lifted me into the air like a trophy, kissing me frantically on my bewildered, parched lips. As he lets me go, he thrusts his fists violently into the air like someone who has just won something and turns around as if to hurriedly relay to his right hand the tentative news he has so obviously overheard.

"Martin ..."
And Martin makes that vile error - the one thing I asked him not to do. I begged him, for his own sake. I said, 'You don't know him like I do. He doesn't care. He's not like you, Martin. Don't tell him.'
"Yeah, man, I know!"
"You know?"
"Well, I mean she told me ..."
"What he means is - " I attempted sensing the peril Martin was in.
"Shut up, woman, I'm talking to my boy!" shouted Sifiso daring me to protest.
"Baby!"

With that came the first blow, across my left jaw. It landed steadily and felt like a ton of steel ploughing my face. And the second blow to my eye, didn't even see him coming. And then in his boorish naïveté Martin approached with a helping hand.

"Get away from her S'fiso! For Christ's sake the woman's pregnant!"
"Tell me what to do with MY woman!"

And with a swift uncharacteristically resolute movement, Martin drew his gun and aimed it at Sifiso.

"Get away from her, man." I could see he didn't want to draw, but had no idea what else to try. A sudden sound of sirens heightened the situation and everything was drenched in dreamy distress.

" ... the fuck? ..." And as if by magic, Sifiso's gun was now aimed at me. He said that there was no getting rid of me. This woman was to go wherever he went.

"Man, what the fuck is this. She's just pregnant," pleaded Martin.
"So you think you gonna just walk in here and fuck my woman, fuckin' knock her up behind my back and get away with it?"
"Nah man, we didn't ... we didn't -"

Martin kept making the mistake of looking me in the eye and not Sifiso. My eyes raced between the two men, begging them to stop this game. But Sifiso's eyes were blinded by a misled rage and Martin's eyes were filled with panicked sorrow.

"This is my woman! You want me to prove to you what a pussy you are my friend?" BANG!

Sifiso turned his gun towards an astonished Martin Olsen and ran backwards to make his escape. A policeman spoke words that Martin could not decipher over a loudspeaker and the police made their entry. As he made the advance towards Thobile's body, his mind was ringing with the irrefutable realization: The girl was dead.