It was Oscar.
Damn it. I felt a rising fury. What did he want? I really didn’t feel like answering.
My first impulse was not to pick it up. Let it ring until it went away, disappeared somewhere, down a drain, got sucked into the wires that twisted and turned, stretched into the big black hole of space. Just the mere sight of his name brought up all sorts of bad feelings. One thing I knew for sure, I did not want to take this call or speak to him again. Ever.
The ringing grew insistent, glared at me from my desk, forcing me closer, to touch it, pick it up.
I had made my decision. I wanted him right out of my life, Samantha’s life, all of our lives. But… then that gnawing feeling. That inner voice. Dammit. What happened if he was in trouble, had hurt himself…? Needed me? Oh God, I was so exhausted by it all.
That was part of the problem. Right from day one, I had never been able to say no to Oscar. From the very moment he had come into our lives back in 2011, he had had this ability to wear me down, worm under my skin, find a way into my heart. But this time it was different, my ongoing compassion and patience had come to an end. I had reached the end of my reserves. At this stage all I felt was intense anger.
But then a thought crossed my mind: maybe it was all my fault I was so angry. Maybe I just had no sense of any boundaries. Maybe I was just really bad at saying no to him. Now I was even more angry. “You bastard,” I thought. “I will pick this up, but I am going to tell you exactly what I think and then it will be over.”
Finally.
“Hi Trish…” All friendly. Upbeat. Polite. Like nothing had happened…
“Where’s Samantha?”
That was it, it was as though an arrow had left a crossbow. Straight away my rage flew out full throttle.
“Oscar, you know what… let me just tell you something. You have such a bloody cheek… How dare you phone here! You were so rude to us at the airport yesterday. How dare you just call, and make out like nothing’s happened?”
White rage almost blinded me. Almost a year and a half of the Oscar Pistorius bullshit. Enough! “What kind of a person are you – that you don’t see all this? How dare you! How dare you just–?”
“Oh no no no, I’m sorry, Trish…” Immediately Oscar the Nice Guy was there. The charming, innocent sweet one he could switch on like nothing had ever happened. I had seen him do it over and over again, pulling the wool over the whole world’s eyes. Just as he did yesterday at the airport when the driver came to pick him up – straight after he had been so rude and offhand to us, he had switched on his smile, his charm. Oscar the public figure, the brand ambassador of Nike, of Thierry Mugler, of Oakley. Poor little Oscar, the guy with no legs, the paraplegic, the mighty Paralympian, the one everyone respected and admired. Oscar – the guy I had accepted with open arms into the family, into Samantha’s life, who had parked his legs at the bottom of Sammy’s bed, the Oscar who got to me every, single goddamn time.
“Sorry for that, Trish, I was in a hurry… I couldn’t talk, I had to leave, you know… the driver was waiting. I couldn’t find the thing I was looking for, I was late – sorry if I was rude, if I sounded like I didn’t care…”
Enough! I had had enough of the apologies, the lies, the tears, all the excuses.
“No, Oscar. You listen here. You know what – I am sick and tired of this. Sick and tired. I have had enough, enough of everything. I have had enough of your lies, I have had enough of your behaviour, your rudeness, I have had enough of your crying, of your pathetic phone calls… of the never-ending bullshit. I have had enough of everything. I can’t do this any more, I can’t I can’t. I won’t…”
I was at tipping point. Hysteria. Rage. It grew, it couldn’t stop. But instead of shouting, I spoke in a very measured tone. Inside the fury was boiling.
“Trish, please–”
“No, Oscar – you listen. You are tearing us apart, Sammy, me… all of us. Have you seen what you have done to her? My daughter is like a rake. She barely weighs 35 kilos. She doesn’t smile, she doesn’t laugh, she doesn’t talk. You are destroying her… she is wasting away. She got home from the airport yesterday and she hasn’t said a word, not a word since then – what have you done to her!”
“Trish, let me tell you, I don’t–”
“You don’t know – of course you don’t. You have no idea what you’re doing… because you are so fucking selfish. Because there’s nobody else but you in your world. You can’t even see what you’ve done to our lives… you’re tearing us all apart, Oscar.”
And somewhere in the middle of it, I knew this had to be it. The end. The buck stops here. We just couldn’t do it any more. It had to be right now that I had to call it. Close the door on him. No more.
He kept trying to interrupt, explain himself, but I just couldn’t listen to another word of it… I couldn’t stop myself. I was like a huge wave in the ocean, on a roll. Later I would realise that I had got my strength from something bigger, from something much greater than me. All those hours of praying – of asking, of pleading with God to help me, give me a message – had given me the strength I so badly needed.
“Something terrible is going to happen, Oscar…” I hardly recognised my voice. It was coming from somewhere else. I couldn’t stop it.
“And it’s going to happen soon. Your life is a web of lies… and the worst thing is, you believe all the bullshit. All I keep seeing is this huge spider web… this web that is eating you, that is taking all of us down. You have got to step out of your life and look at it… you have got to! Because if you don’t, something bad, something really really bad is going to happen…”
“No, Trish,” he said, “I know exactly what I am doing – everything is fine – I have control of it, really–”
“No, Oscar! You haven’t! That’s where you are so wrong. I’ve been watching everything. I see you–”
“I’ve got it Trish, I’m in control.”
“No, Oscar, you are not! You have got to listen to me, you have got to step out of your life. All you are is a cog, an object in a massive money-making machine. They don’t care about you. They’re just using you. Where are they when you need them? Nowhere, they just leave you to struggle on your own. Your friends – where are they when you need them? Where! When you were crying, weeping, sobbing, where were all these people?”
Every word that came out of me was pointed, firm. I was unable to stop.
“In all this time I have known you I have never met your family. And do you know why? Because you are so damned scared that when we meet you will be caught out with all the lies you have been telling, with all the different stories you keep concocting – telling them one thing and us another – who knows what the truth and lies are any more? You keep saying you’ll get help, you keep telling me things will change, but they don’t. You were going to rest, take time out, go on holiday with us to Mozambique… you declined that to go on this fucking motorbike trip to god knows where, with these boys who only want to be your friends because of the good times you heap on them, because they all want to be seen with the great famous Oscar Pistorius… to be seen with the man who’s buying some R4-million McLaren… the only reason they are around you is because you pay… cars… parties, clubs – throwing all this money around.”
“No, Trish,” he said, “they are my friends, my friends…”
“No, Oscar, you are wrong! You have new best friends every other day! And the ones you do have, the loyal ones, you treat like shit. These people – all these guys – can’t you see, they are just with you for the good times? You went to LA, you clubbed nonstop, you went motorbike riding… you were driving fast cars… that was not a holiday… you got yourself deeper and deeper into trouble… into more emotional trouble… You can’t see what’s happening in your life, but I can! It’s a disaster – a total fucking disaster!”
I couldn’t stop now. Everything was coming out, roaring out of my like some god-awful tsunami. “You know why I’m even more pis
sed off? After all the time I spent with you during the Olympics – all the phone calls, the midnight calls, the SMSes, all the emails, all the calls you made to my kids, all the hours and hours I spent with you… You never listened to a single thing I told you. You never went to a psychologist, you never did what I kept telling you to do… even though every time we talked you admitted you needed help, and you swore on your life that you would get it.”
How would I ever forget the Olympics, where instead of watching races and hearing stadium cheers, all I’d heard was him weeping and sobbing, begging for help, begging for Samantha to join him, unable to see his way through. He had wept like a baby, a demented man. That’s really when I began to see the whole thing coming apart, the myth of Oscar Pistorius, the hero of the Olympics.
All those nights, he’d robbed me of sleep. The whole family had been on a knife’s edge – texting and talking and trying to help him at every turn. I was tormented by worry, wondering whether he was going to kill himself while he was London. Would we ever see him again? Or would he wait to do it for when he got back? So desperate, so sad, so at a loss… There was a huge hole in Oscar’s soul that we had all tried so desperately to fill.
“You know you never went for that coffee with me because you always had one of your flipping sidekicks with you… You were too busy racing around in your fast cars, frenetic, rushing – you never took my advice, you never went for help even though I begged you to. Now look at you. Nothing about you is real any more, you’ve lost yourself.”
By now he was silent.
“Something is going to happen. Something is going to go wrong. And it’s going to happen soon. It’s going wrong already. Oscar, can’t you see! I know it. Your life, Oscar, is like this terrible accident waiting to happen.”
Although I never said it, spoke the following words aloud, I was terrified that if he carried on in the same way, by the end of that year he would be dead – in a car crash or by his own hand, and I knew, come hell or high water, Sammy would no longer be there at his side.
Then he spoke. He was very quiet. Very measured. Very controlled.
“Trish, please, we can go for that coffee. We can go for that lunch… I would love to have lunch with you. I really want to hear what you have to tell me…”
But it was too late.
“No, Oscar. No! We can’t, because I am not interested in helping you any more. I am over your fucking bullshit… I don’t care what happens to you any more. You have killed every single bit of care I had for you with your lies, manipulation and deceit.”
There, I had said it.
“I need you to listen and I need you to listen very carefully. I don’t want you near my daughter, near my family. Ever. Ever again. It’s done.”
“Trish, I promise. I promise, I will go to a psychologist–”
“No, Oscar. It’s too late… because when something happens, and I promise you it’s going to, I don’t want my daughter to be part of it. I don’t want Sam near you… it’s over. Over. We’re done. I can’t look back one day and regret it, Oscar. You need to leave my family alone. Never call us, never come near us. Ever again. It’s done.”
The call went on for over two hours.
And that was our last conversation. The last time we ever spoke.
That was the last day of October 2012. A few days before the Sports Awards.
Less than three months later, on 14 February 2013, Reeva Steenkamp would be dead, shot four times through a locked bathroom door by the man who had spent a year and half in our family, during which time we had laughed, cried and finally experienced an almost other-worldly darkness descend upon us. My heart broke for Reeva’s parents.
CHAPTER 16
Bitter Endings
The Sports Awards
* * *
After that call Oscar largely disappeared from our world. In the days that followed, a calm, deep sense of relief swept over our home. It was as though something restless and chaotic had been exorcised from our lives.
I have no idea what was going through his mind after our last conversation, but I suspect he might have felt a growing anger, even outrage, in response to what I’d said. Knowing him, I believe he felt outraged and he probably soon channelled any feelings of hurt and rejection into hatred of me. He must have been aware of how much of his real self, his darker side, had been exposed to us over the year and a half that he spent with our family, which would have made him feel very vulnerable.
It occurred to me, too, that when I told him never to contact us again that he may have felt like he had lost a second mother, indeed, his whole adopted family. In many ways I had lost a fifth child. But I couldn’t indulge in any worry about him or how he felt. I had wasted too much time on that already. I needed to focus on my family, especially on Sammy who appeared to have been deeply traumatised by the past year and a half. But I also needed to focus on my other kids and my husband, who had all in varying degrees been adversely affected by Oscar’s unruly presence in our lives.
When Ke and Sammy arrived back home from their day in Cape Town, soon after my phone call ended with Oscar, I told them bits and pieces about what had just transpired – that Oscar had called and that we had had a long conversation that had not gone too well but at this stage I thought I would wait a bit before I told Sammy the intricate details.
Very slowly, over the next few days, details of the Sun City nightmare weekend began to emerge. Sam told me about the fight between Quinton and Oscar at Kyalami racetrack, about how Oscar had lost it in front of a whole lot of people, threatening Quinton, how he’d come back, enraged, to pick her up where she’d been waiting all day, and reenacted the whole fight with Quinton, terrifying her. She told me how scared she had been driving in the rain to Sun City, and how the car skidded and how the whole weekend had been awful, with Oscar unable to see beyond the fight with Quinton. After hearing all these frightening details, any tiny bit of doubt that I had been too harsh on Oscar was now totally erased.
He could have killed my daughter.
The week went by. Peace had been restored to our home, even though Sam was still withdrawn and quiet, as she always tended to be when she was under stress. I think one of the many things affecting her mood was uncertainty about whether Oscar was still expecting her to join him at the Sports Awards scheduled for Sunday, 4 November. Weeks earlier, before all the Sun City weekend drama, Oscar had invited Sam to attend the event, which was being held at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg. Oscar and I had had our last phone call on the Tuesday before the awards. Although I think by this stage Sam wanted the relationship with him to be over, she was still uncertain about whether he meant to keep the date. As messed up as things were, at this stage, they had not officially broken up.
But in the end, he just left her hanging, not calling to cancel or to confirm. I know she now really regretted having opened her heart to him. As messed up as things were at this stage, in reality, they had not broken up and were still officially a couple. One of the things she said over and over again after her relationship ended was: I really wish I hadn’t given him a second chance.
That Sunday night I was working in my study when I heard the most terrible screaming. I ran downstairs to see what was wrong. Sammy was in the TV room crying like a wounded animal: “No, no, no! Not her, not her!” She just kept sobbing, “No, no, no!” over and over again. I turned to the TV to see what was upsetting her. The Sports Awards were on. And there was Oscar, smiling as he stood on the red carpet. On his arm was a beautiful blonde woman in a pink tasselled dress.
“That’s her, Mom, that’s Reeva,” Sammy sobbed. “She’s the one who’s been following me on Instagram… on Twitter… it’s her, it’s her, it’s her…”
Sammy was inconsolable, sobbing over and over again. She had literally just seen herself replaced on national television. And there Oscar stood grinning. All smooth and well turned out in a great black Armani suit – with not a flicker of emotion or remorse in his eyes. At
that moment, I was so angry, I just said: “Good! Now hopefully you can just get rid of him, forget about the bastard and move on.”
Kerri-Lee, who was watching the awards with Sammy, told me how Oscar’s date, Reeva Steenkamp, had been following Sammy for months already on social media. She knew all about Sammy, what Sammy was up to, and where she had been. How during the Olympics Reeva had regularly popped up on Oscar’s timeline. “She’s been after him for a while, she never leaves him alone, commenting on everything, flirting with him and now she’s got her date with him. Good luck to her,” said Kerri.
Apparently, Sammy had had her suspicions for a while, even writing Oscar a letter three days before the Awards, asking him if anything was going on between him and this blonde model, Reeva. When she had voiced her fears, Oscar in his usual “deny everything” stance, got really angry and irritated with her and accused her of being “a psycho”, emphasising that there was absolutely nothing between him and Reeva, who, he claimed, was dating his “best friend”, rugby player Francois Hougaard.
The Sports Awards was the swan song for Sammy and Oscar’s relationship. As hard as it must have been to see her boyfriend betraying her so publicly like that, I think, looking back at everything, that event really saved Samantha’s life. Experiencing it head on, feeling the pain of the end of her relationship in all its entirety, in such a public way, finally made Sammy realise that she and Oscar were over forever… Any man who could do something so cruel, so hurtful, didn’t deserve her love.
For Reeva, this was her “coming out” event, the official announcement of her relationship with Oscar.
Their pictures appeared everywhere in the newspapers, on the social pages, on the celebrity gossip sites. Reeva seamlessly assumed the space that Sammy had very recently occupied. The replacement was literally overnight. I couldn’t help but think that Oscar did this with careful deliberation. What better way to send a triumphant message to Sam and our family that he had moved on? It was a calculated, cruel, and direct hit, but it helped us all to let him go.
Oscar: An Accident Waiting to Happen Page 14