by John Carlin
Bill Schroder recalled receiving complaints from ‘a couple of parents’ about the harsh treatment his teenage prodigy had supposedly been meting out to their children. Schroder said he looked into the complaints against Pistorius but found that he had never been involved with ‘any incident bad enough to come to my desk’. Schroder judged it right not to reprimand him for bullying.
A policeman might have thought differently. In the all-male world of Pretoria Boys the students enjoyed a freedom to inflict harm that they might not have found in the world beyond the school walls. The danger was that they would fail to behave within legal limits once they left – as in the case of one ex-pupil who left the school in the 1980s, an especially unruly boy who used to break the unofficial rule that fighting was fine but you did not kick someone when he was down. He ended up killing his girlfriend, an ex-beauty queen, and then himself.
7
There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy.
DANTE ALIGHIERI, THE DIVINE COMEDY
THE CLOSE-UP of Reeva looking down from the wall of the cottage at his uncle Arnold’s was not the only photograph of her that Pistorius kept. On a table to the right of the framed portrait lay a collage of photos of the two of them in public, playing the celebrity couple, both assuming seemingly natural fashion-model poses. On his laptop computer he kept private photographs showing them in less practiced attitudes, playing the fool or caught unawares staring dotingly at one another. In one black-and-white picture she lay asleep in bed as he cradled her, she safe and innocent in his arms; he, tenderly protective.
He remained a prisoner of his memories and could sleep no better in a plush bed than on the floor of a cell. Not the first night in the cottage, not the second, not for three weeks, until the doctors hit upon the right blend of tranquillizers and antidepressants to ease the torment.
His sister Aimée took on the maternal role now. Carl remained staunchly by his side, but it was Aimée who was able to get inside his disturbed mind in a way no other family member could, making his pain her own, endeavoring with all the sisterly affection she could muster to lighten his burden. She lived with Arnold and Lois in a room on the top floor of the main house. When she was not sitting with her brother for hours on end, she was on standby, ready to rush down in response to the cries of a grown man reduced to the condition of a desperately needy child, still prey to the terror Sheila Pistorius had planted in his mind of an intruder stealing in upon him in the dead of night.
Sometimes Pistorius would call her on his mobile phone when she was sleeping. It might be because the demons in his head were driving him to the verge of insanity; it might be simply because he had heard a strange noise.
One night he succumbed so abjectly to his childhood terrors that he got out of bed and hid inside a cupboard, from which he phoned his sister for help. She ran down the outside steps, past the swimming pool, to the cottage, coaxed him out of the cupboard and held him tight until the frenzy had passed.
One reason, not immediately obvious to the family, for his inability to fall asleep was that he did not want to fall asleep. The medication he was taking solved one problem but caused another. Sleep was no refuge. The images he battled to keep at bay while he was awake took his unconscious mind by storm in the form of ghastly nightmares. He would wake up panic-stricken, the smell of Reeva’s blood overpowering his senses, causing him to retch and vomit.
He had held a memorial service for Reeva in the grounds of his uncle’s home twelve days after the shooting, a week after her own family had performed her funeral rites in their home city of Port Elizabeth. If part of his purpose was to exorcize the ghosts haunting him, it proved of little use, but throwing himself into the task of preparing the ceremony did him some fleeting good. He filled the area around the swimming pool with flowers, covered the ground with candles, and hung a large photograph of Reeva from a tree. About twenty people attended, some of them family members, notably his brother and sister, and some of them mutual friends of his and Reeva’s who remained loyal to him, such as Justin Divaris, the friend who had introduced them to each other and whom he had phoned forty minutes after the shooting. It was an opportunity for all present to recall Reeva’s life.
In the love affair with Pistorius she had played Cinderella to his prince. Her family had inhabited a world far removed from the one he enjoyed of luxury cars, five-star hotels, first-class travel and family mansions. They were a poor white family, a species rarely encountered in the South African narrative as it played in the outside world. Henke Pistorius was a wastrel and Sheila had struggled after her divorce, but Pistorius nonetheless came from aristocratic stock. Reeva had been raised on the wrong side of the tracks.
She was born on August 19, 1983 in lively, cosmopolitan Cape Town, on the Atlantic Ocean, but when she was a small child the family moved to Port Elizabeth, Cape Town’s poor relation on the Indian Ocean, a plain, listless city remarkable for the failure of its inhabitants to profit more from their long sandy beaches and fine summer weather.
Barry Steenkamp had made his living as a racehorse trainer. Sometimes he was up and sometimes he was down, like Henke. But unlike Henke, even his highs were very low. Barry had a son by a previous marriage; his wife, June, a daughter. Her parents would describe Reeva, born after both had thought they were past having another child, as their ‘late lamb’. The home where the family lived was barely a step up from the type owned by black working families in the segregated townships nearby during the apartheid era. Standing on an unkempt plot of land in a residential area known as Miramar, the little house had grey walls and a zinc roof and suffered from comparison with the large, red-tiled homes in which most of their white middle-class neighbors lived. Fortunately there was a good mixed-race Roman Catholic high school called St. Dominic’s Priory a short walk away, and there it was that Reeva studied during her adolescence, excelling through hard work and establishing a reputation as a kind and uncomplicated classmate of whom her teachers always spoke well. She had her first taste of what the future would bring during her teenage years when she made it to the finals of the Miss Port Elizabeth contest. But her ambitions at that stage lay elsewhere. She wanted to study law. Her parents could not pay her university fees, but she pushed herself in her studies and obtained a bursary, completing her degree at Port Elizabeth’s Nelson Mandela University in 2005, when she was twenty-two.
Uncertain whether she wanted to make a career in law, she explored possibilities in modeling and had her first break a year after leaving university. After dying her naturally dark hair blonde, she was chosen as the white face – others were the black, Indian and ‘colored’ faces – of Avon cosmetics in South Africa.
Her one uambiguous passion, having grown up in a horse-racing family, was riding. She would get up early in the morning when she was a teenager and go to Port Elizabeth’s Fairview racetrack to exercise the horses her father trained. She was what in racing circles they called a ‘work rider’. It was in this closed social world that she met the man who would become her first serious boyfriend and with whom she would remain in a relationship for six years. He was a jockey and his name was Wayne Agrella. He was a diminutive man with a big name in South African racing circles.
They might have married, she might have gone into the law, and together they could have accomplished the dream of dragging her parents out of penury that had driven her through her school and university years. Often she would tell them, ‘Don’t worry. Give me time. I will look after you.’
A misfortune while she was still in law school made them fear for a while that it would be they who would have to look after her. She fell while riding and broke her back. In what would have been the most perverse of twists, she might have been disabled for life. She lay in hospital for six weeks nursing two crushed vertebrae, with her doctors uncertain whether she would ever be able to walk again.
But she made a complete recovery, graduated and decided to change her life. She never rode aga
in, split with the jockey Agrella – the relationship would be described later on in court as ‘emotionally abusive’ – decided to go into modeling full-time and moved to Johannesburg, as ambitious South African men and women from the provinces – among them Nelson Mandela in his day – had long done. Her parents, in particular her father, had their doubts about her renouncing the law, but she appeased them by telling them that they should be patient; she would return and take up legal practice in due course.
She arrived in the big city, had the word ‘Lioness’ tattooed on her ankle, and set out to conquer the world. Her success did not initially match her ambition. At five foot seven she was short for a career in the fashion world and, though she did manage to sign up with an agency called Ice Model and land a few early photographic jobs, it took her years to reach the point of being able to spare enough money to alleviate her parents’ growing financial distress. While the man she and all South Africans knew as the Blade Runner was already an international star on the way to making millions, she spent five largely anonymous years in the city in which he had been born experiencing as much frustration as joy.
She had a busy social life, with plenty of dancing in nightclubs; she did some live presenting for Fashion TV South Africa, but complained about the cattiness of her competitors in the modeling world; she struggled to get by and badly missed her parents. She found some salvation in the arms of a businessman called Warren Lahoud, with whom she began a relationship early in 2008 that lasted more than four years. But she had not yet made the yearned-for breakthrough in her career, and in October that year she endured an experience on a visit to Port Elizabeth that would offer an eerie portent of the tragedy that lay ahead. She was alone at home with her mother when thieves ripped the burglar bars from the outside walls and stormed in. As the thieves ransacked their home, the two of them hid for fifteen minutes inside a locked room, silent and frozen with fear. Mother and daughter were so shaken by the incident that they sought professional counseling.
The year 2009 showed little improvement in her fortunes but in 2010 things began to look up: she began appearing in advertisements for Toyota cars, Pin Pop lollipops, Cardinal beer and Hollywood chewing gum. Her dream, though, was to appear on the cover of a mainstream magazine. She took a step in that direction when she was flown to the island of Bazaruto in Mozambique to pose as a calendar girl for FHM magazine, a monthly publication for men of a type known in South Africa as a ‘lads’ mag’. At the end of 2011 she made her breakthrough. She was chosen for the cover of FHM, where she was described as the ‘December Summer Sizzler’. ‘I’m super honored to be on the cover, especially the December issue, and am excited to see what lies ahead,’ she told the Port Elizabeth Herald, which, echoing the city’s pride, described her as ‘a beauty with brains’.
Success at last followed success and in the middle of 2012 she was invited to fly to Jamaica to appear on a South African reality TV show called Tropika Island of Treasure. Poignantly, and in questionable taste, the show was broadcast two days after her death. It ended with a set-piece address to the camera in which she said, ‘You fall in love with being in love . . . I don’t have any regrets, any bitterness . . . the way you go out and make your exit, it’s so important. You’ve either made an impact in a positive way or a negative way, but just maintain integrity and maintain class and just always be true to yourself.’
Being true to herself included breaking up with Warren Lahoud, in whose home she had been living. The news came as a blow to her parents, who regarded him as a decent companion and a ‘gentleman’, with whom she might have led a safe and contented existence. The better news was that she was now earning enough to send them money to buy food and pay their utility bills. Her parents had been struggling more than ever to get by on their own. Barry Steenkamp was no longer training horses and was making what money he could chopping wood in the bush, heaping the cuttings into little piles and selling them by the roadside to passers-by for lighting fires at barbecues. Her mother, June, baked cakes and made sandwiches which she sold to punters at a sparsely attended racecourse outside Port Elizabeth. (In one of their daughter’s last communications with her parents she told them she had made a money transfer equivalent to US$100 so that they could watch the pay TV channel on which Tropika Island of Treasure would be broadcast.)
But Reeva was still not making a lot of money. In the months preceding her death, she had been living not in her own apartment but in a room at the home of the parents of her best friend, a makeup artist called Gina Myers, in an unfashionable neighborhood of Johannesburg. But she was starting to aim higher. Her role model, she told her agent, was Cameron Diaz, the Hollywood actress with a reputation for beauty, intelligence and mischievous wit. She started to move in more affluent circles, encouraging her to develop a taste for luxury cars and celebrity men. Rumors abounded of an affair with Francois Hougaard, a well-known professional rugby player with dashing good looks. Her postings on Twitter in the second half of 2012 suggested a flirtation with him.
But then she met the most famous young South African of them all, the rich and debonair Oscar Pistorius, and new vistas opened up. Feted as the country’s golden couple, photographs of Pistorius and Reeva appeared all over the newspapers and magazines. Public exposure was what she had wanted and now it was what she had, beyond all previous expectations, to the point that she struggled with being in the public eye. She was continually the subject of unwanted attention, which placed more stress on her than on Pistorius, who had long grown used to it. But it was a price she was willing to pay. He loved her and, as those photographs he cherished of the two of them together seemed to confirm, she loved him.
That thought offered Pistorius as much comfort as it did distress during the memorial he organized for her in the garden of his uncle’s home. Weeping most of the time, he was fulfilling what he felt to be his religious obligation, while carrying out his own attempt at catharsis. But while the memorial was a private affair, the public were alerted to the fact that it had taken place by a statement issued from a ‘reputation management’ firm working on Pistorius’s behalf.
Cynics, of whom there were many in South Africa, jumped on this, arguing that his chief purpose had been to convey to the world at large the message that he had loved Reeva and that he could not possibly have killed her deliberately, as the police claimed. Shashi Naidoo, a friend of Reeva’s who attended the Steenkamp family funeral in Port Elizabeth, said, ‘I think this is a sad attempt to alter public perceptions.’ Columnists in the South African newspapers made much the same point.
Pistorius tried to shield himself from what people were saying. Trawling social media on his smartphone and roaming the internet on his laptop had been entrenched habits before the shooting. Not any more. Yet it was impossible for him to shut himself off entirely from the noise he was generating online. All it took was an unguarded remark by a visitor to his uncle’s home, or a snippet of overheard conversation, to offer him a glimpse of the outer circle to his private hell, where voices shrieked that he was a liar who should rot in jail.
Many members of the public that had once adored him now regarded him with contempt – precisely the outcome he and his mother had striven so hard to avoid ever since he first became conscious that he was different from other people. Here, at his uncle Arnold’s, he had found a hiding place from the world’s prying eyes, but the truth from which he could not fully avert his gaze was that many in South Africa and beyond refused to believe his version of what had happened that night – they saw him, in a country rife with criminal violence, as one murderer more.
A honed alertness to how people viewed him had come with his physical condition, but his vigilance had been sharpened by celebrity. Living his life in a mirror, ever attentive to the impression he made on others, he had cultivated a humble, understated persona in the years of triumph before he shot Reeva. Guided by professionals at Nike and other sponsors who fed off his success and had a vested interest in preventing him muffing his lin
es, he had learned to keep to a tight script. But that script had changed now. Before, he had grown accustomed to headlines like ‘Big-Hearted Blade Runner Wins Another Gold’. Now it was ‘Famous Athlete Kills Woman He Loved’. Before, he had been able to shape how the public viewed him; now that was out of his hands. He was center-stage, the lights of the world still blazing upon him, in a classically beguiling drama no TV reality show could compete with, and bereft of all possibility of shielding his despair from the world.
But Pistorius had once before had a glimmer of the pillorying he was facing now. It had happened in London, when he was at the peak of his fame, five and a half months before the shooting.
His crime back then, a trifle now, had been to respond rather inelegantly to defeat by a Brazilian runner called Alan Oliveira in the 200 meters final at the Paralympic Games. It was as if he had forgotten for a moment how hard he had worked to portray himself as a measured, even-tempered champion – as if he had omitted to register that he was live on TV, not unloading his rage to sympathetic friends in the locker room. He regretted it at the time and he regretted it still more now, for it was ammunition his detractors were using to back the argument that he had been a fraud all along. ‘Oscar Is Not Such A Saint’ a headline at the time had read.