Chase Your Shadow

by John Carlin

  In the event, the magistrate paid little heed to this appeal, limiting himself to the evidence he had heard. In a two-hour reading of his judgment, he set out the arguments for and against bail, offering no clue as to what his verdict would be right up until the end. The tension was excruciating. Pistorius would not be able to cope with jail, living alongside murderers. Even if they didn’t get to him first, how would he be able to carry on living with the memory of what he had done with no aunt or sister or cousin or grandmother to comfort him?

  On the magistrate droned, one moment raising Pistorius’s hopes, dashing them the next. Nair acknowledged the flaws in the police handling of the case but noted also the ‘quite pronounced improbabilities’ of the bail applicant’s account of what had happened. He had a list of difficulties, as he put it, with that version; but neither, on the other hand, was the prosecution’s case watertight. There again, it would be unreasonable to expect the state to have ‘all the pieces of the puzzle now’. As to the possibility of Pistorius jumping bail and fleeing the country, Nair judged it to be limited because of his national and global fame and his physical impairment. Nor did Nair believe he presented ‘a threat to the public’.

  Whereupon, he finally declared on February 22, eight days after the shooting, that Pistorius would be granted bail pending payment of 1 million rand (US$100,000) and his handing over his passport and any guns he might own (other than the one with which he had shot the victim, which was in the possession of the police). On meeting these conditions, he would be free to go home – or, as it turned out, to the home of his uncle Arnold. The Pistorius family members embraced each other, then reached out to hug him.

  He sobbed with relief, but on the streets of South Africa the magistrate’s decision was greeted with outrage by many. It reeked of preferential treatment – rich boy’s justice. It felt like an insult to the many thousands – 46,000 was the official figure for the whole of South Africa – who lay in filthy jails pending trial, many of them either on charges far more innocuous than his or where the evidence of guilt was substantially less. A case in point, as one newspaper pointed out, was that of a fifty-year-old black paraplegic called Ronnie Fakude, who had spent two years in prison awaiting trial not for murder but for fraud. He continued to wait as the Pistorius bail verdict was delivered, able to move only by dragging himself around a crowded cell on his hands.

  South African columnists had a field day. Justice and equality were the legacies Nelson Mandela had bequeathed to the country; the favorable treatment received in a law court by a rich and famous white man had put those principles to the test and found them wanting. Justice in South Africa, as a judge had once said of justice in Britain, was open to all men, like the doors of the Ritz Hotel. Pistorius had found himself the best team of lawyers that money could buy and that, aided and abetted – in a view widely held – by an impressionable magistrate, had won him an undeserved freedom.

  Pistorius himself was in no state to dwell on such considerations. For him and his family Barry Roux was the hero of the hour. He had confirmed his reputation as one of the top criminal defense lawyers in South Africa by the meticulous doggedness with which he had successfully pursued what seemed to many of his peers to be an unwinnable cause. But Roux pressed on. He lodged an appeal against the conditions set and, still more surprisingly, won again. A second court lifted the restriction on leaving South Africa and revoked a ban imposed by magistrate Nair on drinking alcohol, deeming it to have been ‘unreasonable and unfair’.

  A further victory came when Hilton Botha was removed from the case after it emerged that he had been charged with attempted murder relating to an incident in 2011 in which he and two other police officers had allegedly fired on suspects inside a minibus. The state’s case was, for now, in disarray.

  Pistorius had won round one of the legal battle and now, instead of wearing a green prisoner’s uniform, he would be in his own clothes, eating his own food, sleeping in his own bedroom at his uncle’s place – for he could not bear to go back to live in his own home. His family would be there to comfort him when images of Reeva stormed his guilty mind – but he would seek comfort, too, in the ghostly presence of another woman, one who had shaped his character, leaving a deeper imprint than Reeva or any other of his lovers had ever done: his mother, Sheila. Tattooed in Roman numerals on the inside of his right biceps were the date on which she was born and the date on which she died.

  4

  If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.

  SIGMUND FREUD

  FROM THE start, Sheila Pistorius had had no intention of enrolling her son in any kind of special school for children with disabilities. Pistorius spent his primary years at a regular school, and when adolescence beckoned she presented him with the challenge of attending Pretoria Boys High School, where the best and the toughest went.

  It was a school that produced champions, high achievers, many of whom would excel in later life in sports, politics, business and the law. A South African institution established in 1901 and famed throughout the land, Pretoria Boys High had been conceived in conscious imitation of the strict and venerable British public school model, and for most of its years it had been a whites-only institution. But around the time of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison the school began admitting black children and soon acquired a reputation for enlightenment, so much so that at Mandela’s presidential inauguration in May 1994, an event that drew heads of state from all continents, its students were invited to serve as waiters.

  In 2000, when Pistorius was thirteen and a year away from starting high school, he and his mother had a meeting with the headmaster, Bill Schroder. Schroder was a giant of a man, in whom benevolence and toughness impressively combined. He took a paternal interest in his boys while also presiding over a regime where old-fashioned caning continued as a punishment of last resort. He took the school’s founding motto Virtute et Labore, virtue and work, seriously and held firm in his defense of the values those words embodied.

  But during that meeting, held in the sanctum sanctorum of his study, Schroder felt unusually ill at ease. Sheila Pistorius, then forty-two years old, was an attractive woman with a big smile and an ebullient personality. Schroder, more accustomed to inspiring awe than succumbing to it, vividly recalled the encounter years later. He had met more parents than he could remember, but this one, he said, ‘was THE most amazing woman – quite remarkable, with a special light about her’.

  The school buildings and grounds were unlike anything Pistorius had ever seen or imagined. A forbidding stone archway at the entrance, a Victorian-style red-brick main building, Latin inscriptions on walls, names engraved on wood of the alumni who had fallen in the two world wars, a hundred acres of land with rugby and cricket fields where some of the finest South African sportsmen had honed their talents. It was a scarily imposing scene when glimpsed through the eyes of a child, and all the more so when across a desk there sat a formidably large man of authoritarian demeanor. Yet the boy appeared quite at ease, listening quietly as Schroder and his mother discussed his future prospects, his academic strengths and weaknesses, the sports he would play.

  Mention of sports reminded the headmaster of the reason why he felt less comfortable than he usually did at these meetings. He could no longer avoid broaching the question that had been in his mind from the moment mother and son had entered the room. Pretoria Boys had never admitted a boy without feet before – not, at any rate, during the decade that Schroder had been in charge. Pistorius would start out as a day student, but it was possible, his mother said, that in due course he would become a boarder (the school offered both options) and that prospect rendered the matter all the more delicate. It would be a heavy responsibility for the school, one that would ultimately fall on the headmaster’s shoulders. Unable to restrain his concern any longer, Schroder asked, ‘Yes, but . . . is he g
oing to cope?’

  Sheila Pistorius looked baffled. She exchanged glances with her son, who shrugged. ‘I don’t think I follow,’ she replied. ‘What are you saying?’ Schroder mumbled something about the boy’s condition, his, umm . . . prosthetic legs. ‘Ah,’ Sheila Pistorius smiled. ‘I see. But please don’t worry. There’s no problem at all. He’s absolutely normal!’ She explained that she understood very well that Pretoria Boys was a famously athletic school and that, far from being a cause for concern, it was a large part of the reason why her son wanted to be taught there. She listed some of the sports and outdoor activities he had engaged in from early childhood: cricket, rugby, soccer, mountain biking and wrestling, for which he had won several competitive medals. As for getting about, going to the bathroom at night and that sort of thing, no worries there either. He took off his artificial legs when he went to bed but, Sheila explained, was perfectly capable of walking short distances on his stumps. The boy nodded reassuringly. Schroder looked at him and looked at his mother. Had he detected any edge of anxiety in her voice, or any sign of misgiving in him, he might have hesitated. But he did not. Relieved and satisfied, he bade farewell to them both. The boy would fit in well. He looked forward very much to welcoming her son as a student in the next school year, in January 2001.

  There had been an alternative to Pretoria Boys, another reputable high school in the city called the Afrikaanse Hoër Seunskool (Afrikaans Boys High School). There was huge rivalry between the two, in particular when it came to rugby, and the Afrikaner one was where his father, Henke, had studied. Pistorius, who spoke Afrikaans, chose the one where English was the language of instruction, which happened also to be the language he spoke with his mother.

  His parents had divorced when he was six. Henke left home and went to live seven hundred miles away in Port Elizabeth – as chance would have it, the city on South Africa’s south-eastern coast where Reeva Steenkamp grew up. As the family told it, Henke did not abide by his pledge always to stand by his son as enthusiastically as he had declared he would on the day he was born. He did not disappear. Not at first. He would see his three children once every two weeks, and they enjoyed their outings with him. But money was a problem. The family’s sole breadwinner until the marital break-up, Henke did not meet all his financial responsibilities afterwards. Often because he was not able to. Henke made a living chiefly out of agricultural lime mining, but he was a volatile administrator, one day up, the next down, opening and closing companies with a frequency that exasperated the rest of his family – especially his three brothers, who were all steadily successful businessmen.

  Sheila and the children were obliged to move to a smaller home and she to find work for the first time in her life, as a school secretary, disrupting their domestic stability and giving her less time to attend to the child who needed the most care. The quality of the medical attention he received suffered too. She could no longer afford to pay for her son to attend a private prosthetist, sending him instead to a public hospital to have his legs adjusted to fit his growing bones. They had been a comfortably-off white family in a country where to be born white had always been a guarantee of material security. But after her husband left, Sheila Pistorius had to make every penny count.

  It was lucky for her, as it would be for her son twenty years later, that the extended Pistorius family had money and were prepared to part with it to help their own flesh and blood. The home they moved into was bought not by Henke, but by his wealthy brother Arnold. Pistorius’s paternal grandmother helped out with money too. They would struggle, but they would not starve. Sheila had so little faith in her husband that, with what turned out to be eerie foresight, she approached Arnold and his wife one day and asked them, please, in the event that she should die, to take care of her children. They assured her they would. When the time came for Pistorius to go to Pretoria Boys High it was Arnold, not Henke, who paid the bills.

  She thanked her brother-in-law, but most of all she thanked God. A devout and active Christian, she sang in her church choir, traveled to Jerusalem to visit the holy sites, and taught her children to love and trust the Lord. Life could be hard and cruel at times, as Jesus had found, but God the Father was benevolent, He had a plan. ‘Things happen for a reason,’ she would tell her son. There was a divine method and a deeper truth behind the apparently random suffering one had to endure. God was her rock and she was her son’s, and he absorbed her teachings, attending church services and praying daily as a boy and for the rest of his life. She was the center of his childhood universe, instilling in him the conviction that he might be different from other people but he could do anything, she told him, to which he set his mind and body. It was to her, not to his father, that he would later attribute his fierce drive to succeed.

  While he saw his father less the older he became, his mother was the one who taught him not to feel self-pity, not to show weakness when he was teased, as sometimes happened at primary school, about his artificial legs. She also instructed him to brush off the curious remarks of strangers with jokes, saying his feet had been bitten off by a great white shark, or pointing out the advantages of having artificial legs. You could slam a nail into them, as he sometimes did to shock unsuspecting new acquaintances, and it did not hurt.

  Sheila practiced what she preached, refusing to make any distinction between her treatment of her disabled son and her other children. Hence the story he would tell journalists a hundred times when he became famous of how in the morning, when he was preparing to go to school, she would tell him to put on his legs in exactly the same tone of voice as she would order his elder brother to put on his shoes. That he should consider that story to be the most eloquent illustration of an upbringing during which he was encouraged to deny the limits of his condition says much about the centrality of his mother in his life, and how assiduously she sought to make amends for having brought him into the world not fully formed. But limits there were, and during those periods, sometimes lasting for months, when as a small child the cracks and blisters on his stumps were too painful for him to go to school, it was she who nursed his wounds and comforted him, sitting by his side with his head on her chest, stroking his hair.

  Sheila’s refusal to let her son’s disability hold him back physically or mentally was the engine behind his remarkable triumphs on the running track. She never imagined that he would become world-famous, but she did know that the funny little wooden legs he wore when he was small would inspire curiosity and sometimes mockery. In her determination that he should never feel awkward or ashamed, that he should always stand proud, she drummed one lesson into him. Never, ever forget, she would tell him, that people regard you the way you regard yourself. He listened well and acted on her words. What she failed to foresee was that by hiding the truth from himself and others he might gain in self-image in the short term, but might lose out by failing to face up to the truth of his disabled body, hampering his capacity to develop as an emotionally healthy human being. It sometimes meant pushing himself harder than he really wanted to; it meant smiling and looking strong when inside he felt sad or weak. His success in concealing his vulnerabilities from others built up the outer layers of his self-esteem, but he paid a price in terms of the turmoil generated by the impossibility of reconciling the person he wished to be with the one he was. The striving always to be regarded as normal, at peace with his disability, contained an element of self-delusion, causing him anxiety and stress.

  But the tension between his two evolving personas was not something a child so in thrall to his mother would have been consciously aware of, and he absorbed her lessons, doing as she did when people asked her how she coped with having a son with no feet – denying that there was a problem, always putting on a brave face.

  Sheila Pistorius played the part convincingly. As her son would only fully understand in adulthood, there was a dark side to her own life that she tried hard to hide, the consequence of the anguish she suffered in an unhappy marriage and, later, as a single m
other raising three children with barely enough to make ends meet. Among friends and acquaintances she was resolutely good-humored, revealing little of this inner grief. Everybody viewed her in the same light as the headmaster of Pretoria Boys High. Other teachers there who met her were left marveling at how ‘alive, compassionate and genuine’ she was, ‘how bubbly and cheerful’. Her son would describe her in just such terms when the time came for journalists to write profiles of him.

  Maybe he really did continue to believe into adulthood that all had been well at home; maybe the habit of denying uncomfortable truths had become second nature to such an extent that he failed to register that his mother often drank herself to sleep. She was an intermittent and solitary alcohol abuser who found relief from the pain she feared to confront not only in God but in the bottle. Sometimes she drank so much that she would fail to wake up in the night when her two younger children cried out for her. In such circumstances Carl, the eldest of the three, would take charge and play the role of father, hiding their mother’s condition from his siblings.

  Pistorius was able to persist in seeing in his mother not the wreckage of a life of misfortune or bad choices but a hardy survivor and a moral guide. The lessons she imparted to him all boiled down to the same thing, which he set out in the introduction – on the very first page, in the very first words – of his autobiography, Blade Runner, written five years before he shot Reeva Steenkamp, at a time in his life when his overriding preoccupation was to run as fast as he could. Sheila wrote a note for her son when he was five months old which she intended him to read when he was an adult. The note, as set out in his book, said: ‘The real loser is never the person who crosses the finishing line last. The real loser is the person who sits on the side, the person who does not even try to compete.’