Reeva: A Mother's Story (10 page)

But I’m jumping ahead of myself.

When Reeva was twelve, she became my mother and I became her daughter. Barry now says he realises she became his mother too. She was always concerned about us. She truly was an old soul. I felt she’d been on this Earth before. She used to give psychology lessons to my friends and to hers. She always knew what to do. Samantha, who was at St Dominic’s with her from the age of ten or eleven, agrees she was wise beyond her years. She was the sort of friend to whom people who didn’t ordinarily ‘open up’ about their feelings found themselves confiding and telling her everything that was going on in their lives. She understood how the world worked and how you had to work hard and make sacrifices to pursue a chosen path. Reeva was always aware that money did not grow on trees in our garden. When she was about nine or ten, she won R900 on the horses and took it straight into school and approached the bursar to put it in for her school fees! And sometimes she would tell me to behave because she was ‘goody two-shoes’, as I used to remind her affectionately. She gave Barry and me a hard time! She would tell me what clothes to buy. I’m quite conservative and I can pick out a nice enough outfit, but she had
style
. She knew how to put things together. She was good at the handbags and trimmings. The first thing she ever bought me was a string of real freshwater pearls. One of her teachers had a shop with pearls and she must have saved up her pocket money for weeks to buy them. She always wanted me to look nice. Later, she’d buy me clothes and I’d look at them and think, hmm, and put them in the wardrobe, but when I’d try them on I’d see they were perfect. She had a good eye. My friends relied on her judgement too – Jenny used to send her out with a credit card to buy her clothes and perfume.

When Reeva was thirteen, we moved from the country to Kruger Street in Mount Pleasant. It was more suburban, but I wanted to leave the farm and live close to the shopping malls so she could meet her friends safely, go shopping, do the things teenage girls do, meet and chat. At about this time Barry and I separated. Some things in life you like to keep private and this is one of those phases – but there wasn’t any huge drama. We just weren’t getting on living under one roof. We never divorced, or intended to divorce. We simply needed our own space, and we muddled along quite happily being a family to Reeva under two separate roofs. I grew up an only child and I had lived for a long time alone as a single mother with Simone. I’ve always been an independent spirit, so I wasn’t worried about moving with Reeva to my own place in Miramar, a pretty duck-egg blue cottage on Abbey Road – just outside the gates to St Dominic’s Priory and not far from Barry in Mount Pleasant. My parents had died and left me a bit of money, so I could afford to invest in a little house. By then Simone – who, like me, had married for the first time very young – had two sons, Christiaan and Nicholas. They also lived in Miramar, just around the corner, and the boys went to St Dominic’s at the start of their schooling. They’re lovely boys. Reeva was officially their aunt, but she was only a year or so older than Christiaan, who is two years older than his brother, so the three of them grew up together almost like siblings in our extended family.

Reeva was heartbroken over our separation, she truly was. It was a difficult time for her because she loved both of us. There is no good age for a child to experience their parents’ split, but twelve to thirteen is a particularly vulnerable age I think. It was tough on her. She would have liked for us to live together under one roof as a family. She did realise there were problems, but she was devoted to both of us. She never gave us trouble; she was never rebellious or gave us cause to worry. She never took sides. Throughout her school and varsity years she’d live with me during the week and she often stayed with Barry at the weekends. She kept up the feeling of family among us. We always celebrated all our birthdays together and came together for Christmas, but Barry and I would continue to live separately for another fourteen years. Neither of us looked for, or found, anyone else. We were just happier living independently. We saw each other every day, because I worked for him running the spaza shop and I had the contract to do the catering at the racecourse for meets. And if Reeva was involved in something, we’d go together to watch her. And Reeva being Reeva, she was always involved in plays or music or cabaret at school, or modelling competitions outside of school, so she kept us tightly glued. She was always the glue holding us together.

Years later – in October 2008 – Reeva brought us back together for ever. Reeva, the Superglue. My cottage in Abbey Road was in a little townhouse complex close to the grounds of St Dominic’s Priory (a historic plot of land which was originally Emerald Hill farm, then a hotel and pub before it was bought by nine pioneering Dominican nuns in the early 1900s). It was considered a safe part of town. We lived there, Reeva and I, until she finished varsity at the age of twenty-two. In 2008 she was twenty-five and living in Johannesburg when I phoned to tell her the lady next door had been broken into and we were having a residents’ meeting in someone’s garage to discuss security. She insisted on flying down to attend the meeting with me; she wanted to be reassured about my security. She always worried about me living on my own. That same night of the meeting, we came home, shared a lovely supper together, and then she went to her room and I went to mine. At 1 a.m., the Jack Russells started barking frantically. I got up and went to take a look and as I did the security alarm went off. Through the grille covering the kitchen door I found myself face to face with an intruder who was attacking the door with a crowbar. He wasn’t deterred by my presence. Having already got the huge lock on the big security gate open, he and his accomplice were pretty determined to break in. He didn’t even look at me as I warned him off; he just carried on trying to force his way in. In the yard outside the kitchen door I had a small mushroom-top
braai
, a mini barbecue or outdoor cooking grill. He picked that up and knocked the entire window through – security bars, frame, glass and everything, and then two of them came running into the lounge.

Reeva shouted out to me, ‘Mummy, quick, come into the bedroom!’ and we locked ourselves in. We both instinctively did that, steeling ourselves behind the locked door. I looked at her, and she looked at me, and we were like two ghosts, shaking from head to foot. We were paralysed with fear. We’d secured the door, but it was just an internal lock, and we didn’t know if they’d break the door down, or what they were going to do. I was terrified they’d rape her. I was cursing myself for calling her in Johannesburg and involving her. I didn’t want her to be here, experiencing this horror. It was truly terrifying. Every mother will understand when I say I wasn’t worried for myself; I was petrified her life would be over if those drug addicts rampaging through our property got hold of her. For fifteen minutes they ran around the house, turning it upside down. They took my laptop. Reeva had a brand-new laptop, but thankfully she’d put it under her bed when she went to sleep. Suddenly it all went quiet. The men had left. The security team arrived and close behind them all the male neighbours who’d agreed in the meeting earlier that very evening to come if they heard an alarm sound.

It horrifies me now to imagine how similar this experience was to what must have happened to Reeva. We weren’t in a toilet cubicle, but we were behind a locked door in the middle of the night. Having shared that experience with her, I imagine just how terrified she must have been in the early hours of 14 February 2013, to bolt herself, alone, behind a secure door. I’ve no doubt of it. She locked herself in the toilet of Oscar’s house that night out of pure terror.

The next morning Reeva said to me, ‘Mummy, you can’t sleep in this house by yourself again. I’m going back to Johannesburg tomorrow and you’re going back to my father.’ She was right. I couldn’t stay there by myself; I was too scared. She packed my bags. As always, she took over. Barry borrowed a truck and took all my stuff the very next morning. So, after fourteen years, I had to go back to father dear…

I’ve always loved Barry, and it was Reeva who brought us back together. In doing so, she saved our marriage and she saved my life. A week later the guy returned to my empty little cottage. The alarm was switched on inside the house so he assumed I was inside. During his first attack, I’d eyed him through the security grille and said the thing you should never say. I couldn’t help myself. I was outraged that he felt he could just invade my home, and when my daughter was there, and I’d shouted, ‘I’ll get you at some stage. I’ll find you – I don’t care how.’ I’d seen his face. They don’t like that. They normally wear balaclavas. So he came back for me. And he must have been incensed to find me gone, because he chopped all my bamboo blinds to pieces and then he left in the drive, as a warning, his big panga machete – the huge scythe they use in the Bush which can chop a head off.

Reeva and I both had to have therapy after that intrusion. She went back to Johannesburg and saw someone. She was so upset she wrote a letter to the local newspaper, saying how sad it was that we must live like this even in Port Elizabeth and that criminals could get away with their disgusting behaviour. On top of her strong sense of righteousness, she became ultra-alert to security. ‘I would rather be too careful and aware than have someone we love injured or harmed in any way,’ she wrote. The experience scarred her. I resisted treatment for a while but I went a bit weird. You get paranoid, you know. If I left home I thought that everyone in the street was going to stab me. But I did feel safe, back with Barry. And Reeva felt comforted knowing we were together. In the long run, it’s been good for both of us, especially now. We’ve never stopped loving each other. We support each other, you know.

In her teenage years, Reeva was friends equally with boys and girls. There was Samantha and Gwyn who shared her love of horses; there was Benjamin, whose father complained about the phone bill because his son spent hours on the phone to her. There was Angus, and Garth, who directed lots of cabaret and musical shows. She went to her high school matriculation dance with him, dressed in a royal blue silk halter-neck crop top and long skirt; her wavy brunette hair down to her waist. She and Garth could both turn on a creative temperament. Garth implored Reeva to play a particular role in a show he was directing. When the day came and he showed her what she had to wear, she said, ‘I can’t do that. I’m not wearing that!’ – and she just walked. ‘I’m leaving!’ she declared. ‘I’m firing myself!’

She was very focused on all her activities. She studied at school and did her homework. She always had a rehearsal for a production of some sort going on. She loved spending time with her friends. She’d be up at the stables with Barry and the horses or helping me out in the spaza shop or with the racecourse catering. She also loved modelling. She was busy, busy, busy. She started taking an interest in modelling at the age of fourteen. It was a fun thing, doing fashion shows and being part of something that was separate from school and university life. She was so beautiful, you know. She had thick dark brown hair, clear luminous skin, freckles, and naturally rosy full lips. You can see Barry’s big blue eyes and you can see me. One day she asked me if I really was her mother and whether she was adopted. I don’t know what that was about! Even when she was a professional, and posing for
FHM
, she said the main appeal of modelling was the fact you get to dress up and play pretend. When she was fifteen she posed for a competition in the local newspaper wearing a black leather jacket. Her first experience of a serious fashion shoot came the same year at a wedding fair, when she posed in several dresses and looked absolutely radiant with her hair half-pinned up in a sleeveless white gown on the beach at Summerstrand – the same spot where nearly fifteen years later we were to hold her ashes ceremony. She had already perfected that innocent yet coquettish sideways glance towards the camera. Even then a tremendous spirit comes across in the photographs. Mark West, who took the pictures, announced she had ‘that X factor’. He said she changed a room when she entered; not in a loud, showy way, just in her radiant serenity. Barbara Robertson, a fashion editor who noted her at a Futures competition, commented on how she had a sort of commercial look about her as well as a lovely freshness and way of letting the camera reach into her soul.

Modelling was something she discovered for herself, and I respected the way she went about making it ‘her thing’. She was never self-absorbed. We didn’t have the sort of bathroom in which she could spend hours in front of a mirror. For her, it was all about looking healthy. When she was that age, she used to give me a list of what she’d eaten every day because she did not want to get fat. So I had to sit and listen to what she’d eaten for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was her own little OCD thing, and I listened patiently because I knew it was part of her ambition to become a model. She wanted to look after herself. I’ve always been a vegetarian or a ‘fishatarian’ – because when I was younger I was obsessed with not eating animals. It was a romantic kind of thing: I gave up meat, then chicken, eggs and fish, and I ended up very sick. The doctor explained that if you’ve grown up eating animal protein, your body continues to need or expect it. But I only ate fish when I carried Reeva in my womb and she was never crazy about meat. I suppose, if your mother is a total vegetarian, you’re just not exposed as much to meat. She certainly had meat now and again. I didn’t try to influence her. She was always going to have her own ideas. As a mother, you have to let them develop their own way. More than anything, she was into fish and cakes. Banana cake was her speciality. She loved baking. Unlike me at her age, she was perfectly capable at cooking and she enjoyed trying out recipes. She wanted to be competent in everything she did.

With the modelling, it wasn’t so much being in the limelight that she enjoyed but the feeling that she was following a path that marked her out as someone who was going to do something special with their life. She wanted to make something of herself. Nobody listens to the bag lady with her trolley full of all her clothes, do they? She wanted to be somebody notable so people would listen to her. There was a tendency, I felt, in some of her early pictures for her to be over made up. She didn’t need make-up. She had strong colouring with her blue eyes, dark hair, freckles and incredibly clear skin. I think she was more beautiful without any make-up. And she had a positive choice of clothing. She always had the handbag, you know. It was in Grade 10 that Mrs Ntlangu became aware she was blossoming. ‘I looked at her one day and noticed how that child is growing and I said, “Reeva, I think you should do modelling. You’ve got a very beautiful face.” When she walked, she had nice upright shoulders. Reeva smiled and said, “Thank you, ma’am” – always so gentle and full of courtesy.’