Authors: John Carlin
How would he do in Athens, though, in a giant stadium before a large crowd? All he had was eight months’ athletics experience behind
him. He would be competing against veterans, a number of them single-leg amputees, who were five or ten years older than he was. Also, Louw had identified a critical weakness in his technique. He was not fast off the starting blocks – not fast enough to win the 100 meters at this level. Having failed as yet to master the art of the sprinter’s classic, crouching start, down on one knee, he lost explosivity by using a standing start, as long distance runners did. In the 100 meters he would be giving too much of an early advantage to his rivals to have any hope of winning. He took part in the race anyway, but Louw judged that the best bet at this stage of his career was the 200 meters, where he would have more time to make up ground lost at the start.
Dr Gerry Versfeld flew to Athens to see him run. Familiar as Dr Versfeld was with being in the company of amputees, he was astonished at the spectacle of so many lean, fit sportsmen and women with missing limbs. ‘It was a big eye opener, even for me. It was the first time I saw people with disabilities do such things,’ Dr Versfeld said. ‘The message, loud and clear, was: these are not crocks, these are people with talent and part of our society.’
It was another doctor who, more than half a century earlier, had hit upon the idea of engaging disabled people in competitive sports. The doctor’s name was Ludwig Guttmann, a German Jew who had fled to England early in 1939 to escape Nazi persecution. A brilliant neurosurgeon, Guttmann treated soldiers with spinal cord injuries after the end of the Second World War at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, near London. One day it struck him that a good way to lift his patients’ morale would be to persuade them to take part in organized sports. In 1948, on the very same day that the summer Olympic Games began in London, Guttmann launched what became known as the Stoke Mandeville Games. This led twelve years later, in Rome, to the first official Paralympic Games.
Pistorius would become the most celebrated beneficiary of Guttmann’s generous legacy. At the Athens Games of 2004, while still only seventeen, he stole the show. ‘His only problem was getting going,’ Dr Versfeld recalled, ‘but he still managed to get bronze in the 100 meters. Then, in the 200 meters, he also got off to a bad start and was ten meters behind in no time, with four or five other runners ahead of him after the gun went off. But then he built up the most amazing head of steam. He wobbles a bit from side to side when you look at him from the front, but from the side, which was my vantage point, he was poetry in motion. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. I was immensely proud.’
He was the youngest runner in the field, but he won the race and, with a time of 21.97 seconds, set a new world record.
Bill Schroder, his headmaster, was thrilled. Pistorius’s triumph was the school’s triumph too. But he was also concerned. ‘He lost his mother at a very, very impressionable age and then, overnight, he was catapulted into iconic wonderkid national status. He was only seventeen and he was being feted in the newspapers, sought out for interviews by women’s magazines. Any boy would become impossible in such circumstances at that age, but then he had no mother. His father, Henke, only started taking an interest in him for the first time that I ever saw after he became famous. Plus he had no legs. I was exceptionally worried about how he’d cope, all the more so as I realized that we in the school were the only ones who might be able to give him his bearings.’
Schroder determined that what he should not do was allow him special treatment. Pistorius thought he deserved it. Suddenly a celebrity inside and outside the school, he was becoming a law unto himself. But Schroder was the law at Pretoria Boys. Inevitably, during his final year at school, after Athens, the two clashed. First, over a sponsored
car that Pistorius had received. Schroder ordered him to get rid of it. Pistorius protested at first but then grudgingly acquiesced.
The second time, he informed Schroder that he had to take time off from school to take part in an athletics competition in Finland. Schroder told him he was not going. He replied that he had to, it was an opportunity that might never be repeated to take part, not in a Paralympic event, but in an international able-bodied athletics meeting. The exchange became heated, as Schroder recalled. ‘He said, “I must go.” I said, if you go, you’re not coming back. I told him he had to do all the things the others did, with no special privileges, by tradition of the school. I won and he stayed. But he was enraged with me, I know. I heard that he began speaking of me to people as “Mr Fucking Schroder”.’
Apart from the principle, there was a practical reason why Schroder did not want to let him take time off from school. He had a duty to discharge as a dormitory prefect. In a room full of junior children he was the one in charge, his job to double up as mentor and enforcer of discipline. Within the confines of that room he had practically the same measure of authority as Schroder had over the whole school. The difference was that he was only eighteen and there was a risk that he, as anyone else that age might have done, would abuse his power.
After he shot Reeva Steenkamp some said that he had. Word spread among those who chose to believe that he had killed her deliberately that at school, in his capacity as dormitory prefect, he had been a violent bully.
How seriously the accusation was taken depended on whether it was measured by the standards of urban middle-class cohabitation or by the higher threshold of rough behavior tolerated within the walls of Pretoria Boys High. Rumors did reach some teachers that he had a violent temper – that sometimes he ‘flipped’, as one of them
put it – and that he threatened the younger boys. But that was hardly news at Pretoria Boys. Others who had been students there reported that their first years had been ‘sheer terror’, that the prefects to whom they reported were supposed to play a supportive role but in practice used the younger boys to polish their shoes, to clean their bedrooms, and did not hesitate to punish them if they deemed they had broken a school rule. As one former pupil said, ‘You were in constant fear of transgressing the norms; you were the slave class of the boarding and house systems.’
Heavy-handedness was the norm. Bullying went with the territory, and for boarders it was especially tough. It was boot camp, as former students would say, an excellent preparation for military life. Prefects were sergeant majors with license to subject their subordinates to all manner of indignities, not excluding physical violence to a degree that might be judged illegal in civil society. What was considered unpardonable among the boys was to go and tell the teachers when someone had done something to you that you did not like. But while the boarders never ‘sneaked’ when they were at school, during the vacations some did confide in their parents. Some of them talked about the boy with no legs.
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
T
HE 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.