by Paige Nick
in some background for the story we’ll be running on Sunday.’
Marco had already forgotten the journalist’s name. ‘Please, call me Marco. I’m happy to help, if you think it will shed some light on this terrible tragedy.’
‘So would you say you were close to Professor Noakes, Mr Ca— Marco?’
‘Of course we were close; I mean, we’ve written books together. He’s been like a father to me. He even helped me start my restaurant, the Banting Bistro, which is on Kloof Street in Cape Town.’
‘And how did you two meet originally?’
‘Umm, it all started back in 2012 when Prof, that’s what I always call . . . I mean, called him, got in touch with me. He told me he had an idea for a groundbreaking book on nutrition, and he was looking for a talented chef to co-author it with him. At the time I was actually about to enter MasterChef South Africa. I’d made it through all the first
rounds of interviews. But Prof . . . sorry, give me a moment. . .’ (deep breath) ‘when the Prof told me about his journey, and he took me through some of his early research, it all made sense to me, and I could see how important his project was. So I put aside my lifelong dream
of going on MasterChef and agreed to work on the book with him.
Then he brought in the other three after that. Partnering with the Prof has easily been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.’
‘I’m sure. After all, the book has sold very well, hasn’t it? Do you have any idea who would want to hurt Professor Noakes?’ the journalist prodded.
‘God, no. What an incredible, inspirational man. Of course, there are a lot of crazies out there; just look at his Twitter feed. But look at how many lives we’ve changed for the better with this book. And now I’m hoping to continue the journey in his memory, with a new secret project I’ve been very busy with for the last six months, which I can’t talk about yet. And of course I also extend his legacy through my restaurant, the Banting Bistro, in Kloof Street. I’ve even decided to name a dish after him. Noakes Zoodles: courgette noodles with basil pesto and garlic, for just forty-seven rand ninety-five. Will you include that in the piece?’
‘I can try to put that in, but my editor will probably zap it. We always have space issues.’
‘Thanks, if you could see what you can do, I’d appreciate the expo-
sure.’
‘Marco, there has been some talk of a rift between you and your co-authors,’ the journo started smoothly.
‘What? Who said that?’
‘I’m sure it’s all just baseless rumours, you know how these things go, but of course I have to follow up on them.’
‘Sure, but I don’t know of any rift.’
‘So there’s been no frustration or unhappiness between the four of you? Over how little publicity you’ve all gotten in comparison with Professor Noakes, let’s say?’
‘That’s ridiculous! Did Shaun say that? That might be how my co-authors feel, but I can only speak for myself, and I’ve never been happier. In fact, I’ve been so busy setting up my restaurant, the Banting Bistro, in Kloof Street, which is open daily for breakfast, lunch and dinner, that I’ve been grateful to the Prof for taking the lead on this project as far as publicity is concerned. He saved my bacon, so to speak.’
‘Sure, that makes sense. And Marco, what about the rumours concerning your dissatisfaction with your author photographs?’
‘What rumours? What dissatisfaction?’ Marco asked.
‘Well, it can’t have passed you by that you don’t really . . . how can I put this . . . the author photograph on the book, and the ones the press have in circulation, they don’t look very much like you in real life, do they? There seems to have been some . . . well, to be frank, a lot of air-brushing. And the way they’ve positioned you, it’s like half of you has been cropped out of the shot, don’t you think? You can’t have been happy about that.’
Cheeky bastard. ‘Look, I’m a chef, not a photographer or a model,’ Marco said through gritted teeth. ‘I came up with every single recipe in that book, from scratch. That’s what I do. How our publisher chooses to market it is entirely up to them. I don’t get involved in that side of the business, it’s not my concern or area of expertise.’
‘Okay, so to be clear: you’ve never had any problems with any of your co-authors, and you’re a hundred per cent happy with your author photographs?’ the journalist prodded.
‘Look, this is a creative endeavour we’re involved in, and when there’s collaboration of this kind, and a number of different egos involved, some compromise is always going to be necessary. But we’ve never fallen out over anything. And anyway, I really don’t see what this has got to do with the Prof’s death. Quite honestly, I think it’s insensitive of you to ask these sorts of questions when we’re all going through something this traumatic.’
‘Absolutely, Mr Cannata, and I am really sorry for your loss. Thank you for your time,’ the journalist said.
‘Wouldn’t you rather talk a bit about the concept behind the book, or some of my recipes, maybe? Like which was the Prof’s favourite? And which ones I serve in my restaurant, the Banting Bistro? Anything like that?’
‘Not to worry, your co-author already gave me quite a bit of background info. I’ve pretty much got everything I need for now.’
‘You spoke to Shaun?’ Marco asked, clenching his jaw. ‘When?’
‘I just got off the phone with him; he gave me a lot of really great background info. I’ve got your number, so I’ll be sure to get in touch if I need anything else. Thanks for your time.’ The phone went dead.
The black-and-red pencil Marco was holding between his fingers snapped in half.
THE FANS
Wednesday 10:36am
THE BANTING FOR LIFE FACEBOOK PAGE
Nicky Page
Hi, new banter here. Which list are sprouts on? Good, bad or ugly?
Like 24
Chantal Duining Good!
Like 13
John Combrink Ugh
Like 0
Nicky Page Thank you Chantal Duining
Like 1
John Combrink
This is what annoys me so much about this fad; red lists, green lists, orange lists, it’s all nonsense. The trick to health and successful weight loss is to eat everything in moderation. It’s a terrible idea to deprive your body of an entire food group. Can’t you people see how foolish this concept is, or are you all just sheep who can’t think for yourselves? It’s irresponsible and downright untenable for Noakes, as a member of the medical profession, to encourage this kind of anti-nutrition just to make a buck. He’s become a laughing-stock. Wrap anything in bacon and you’ll sell a truckload of it!
He should be ashamed of himself; we have zero research on the effects this kind of exclusionary diet will have on generations to come. Although I don’t know why I’m here trying to talk all you idiots out of Banting. I’m a medical practitioner, more business for me down the line, when you all get kidney stones or heart disease and then you come running to me. Consider yourselves warned.
Like 2
View 2973 more comments
THE WIDOW
Wednesday 10:42am
Maureen scheduled the seven meal-plan orders that had already come flying into her inbox via direct message that morning (seven more than she’d had in the last three weeks). Then she boiled the kettle and took a cup of tea (with cream) back to the dining-room table, which she liked to think of as Facebook Headquarters.
Some months ago she’d moved the chairs from one side of the dining-room table into the spare room, then she’d pushed the table up against the wall. It was now permanently covered in all her papers, books and notes. There was also a large pinboard, which she’d propped on the table and leaned against the dining-room wall.
The pinboard had been a great purchase; she�
�d picked it up at
CNA shortly after she’d started posting, but now she was starting to run out of space, as well as pins. The thought that she might have to
buy another pinboard excited her. Or maybe she would tile the entire one wall of the dining room with cork, it’s not like she threw dinner parties anymore.
The board was carefully divided into columns, using packaging string. Each column contained one of her personas, their user name and passwords for their respective Facebook and email accounts, as well as some of their basic vital statistics, including height, hair colour
and other outstanding features. It also contained scribbled notes that covered some of their individual quirks (for example, in Herman’s column was a small scrap of paper with ‘he prefers beer to spirits’ on it), as well as the times and dates of each persona’s individual postings on the Banting for Life Facebook page, and so on. There was also a carefully logged chart plotting each persona’s weight loss in detail. It was Maureen’s master plan, and it was essential in helping her keep all her stories straight.
Her habit of posting as other personas had all started with Herman. Once her own weight loss had slowed and ultimately plateaued at her goal weight, she found she had less and less reason to post on the group’s page, and the responses to her posts started to dwindle too. She still commented on other people’s posts, but it wasn’t the same. She missed the kick of adrenalin she got at seeing that dozens of people had liked one of her comments, then logging in a few hours later to see that the likes had gone up into the hundreds. The day she had posted her most dramatic before-and-after photographs, her likes had rocketed into the thousands. It made her bubble with excitement just to remember it. Not to mention the hundreds of comments, thumbs-up stickers, friend requests and votes of confidence she regularly received as a result of the page.
It was then that she’d realised something had been missing from her life since Gus had died. For the first time, she hadn’t felt the cold ache of loneliness. She finally had the network of support she’d been craving; perhaps she could even consider all these new internet voices her friends?
After that, it wasn’t a huge leap for her to come up with the idea
of starting all over again, and that was when she invented Herman. All she had to do was come up with a name and a persona for him; in her mind, he was a simplified version of Gus. She’d lived with him for nearly forty years: she knew him inside and out and all around. Plus, recreating him on a Facebook page made her feel more connected to him, as if he was still there, Banting right alongside her.
Creating a Facebook profile for Herman/Gus was easy-peasy. Once she’d figured out Facebook, she had discovered that all you needed to create a new profile was an email address, which was a piece of (wheat-free) cake, thanks to Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail.
It was tricky remembering all the different passwords and user log-ins, but that’s what the pinboard was for, stabbed with dozens of notes. Another hard part had been coming up with names for all her new personas. Even though her first one was Gus inside and out, right down to his stubborn refusal to try even one tiny mouthful of rocket, despite how she cooked it or tried to disguise it in spinach, she didn’t want to call him Gus. It felt too close to the bone. He also couldn’t be named after anyone she already knew or had been at school with. What if they were on Facebook and stumbled across their namesake and saw her commenting on and liking their posts, and put two and two together? No, it was too risky.
At first she was concerned that whatever names she came up with sounded contrived. She considered using the name of a character from whatever book she was reading at the time, but who on earth was called Heathcliff these days? Eventually, she settled on Herman De Laat for her Gus character.
Some months later, when ‘Herman’ started to bore and even annoy her (as Gus often had in real life), and when interest in him on the page started to wane (especially after he’d admitted to cheating with dried fruit, garnering a number of passive-aggressive comments and ranty lectures), Maureen had created her second persona, Lydia Steenberg.
Here Maureen had simply cobbled together the names of two people she’d been at school with: the first name of a girl in her class she had always envied, together with the surname of a boy she’d fancied. Lydia, a sweet young blonde, was the kind of woman Maureen thought she might be close friends with herself, if she were twenty or thirty years younger.
Another trick she discovered was to find or create friends for these people so that if anyone followed them, they would appear to be legitimate human beings. It was an elaborate process that took time and required a lot of ‘friending’ of strangers on Facebook. But time was the one thing Maureen had plenty of – long days stretching ahead of her with nothing much to fill them. And it turned out there were lots of other people out there who also had time on their hands, and no problems accepting a friend request from a perfect stranger with no mutual friends, or any other visible connections, other than a shared favourite recipe, or both enjoying the same sort of music.
A few months after Lydia, came Sizwe Madonda, who was
Maureen’s most ambitious and challenging persona yet. She decided to really push herself out of her comfort zone.
Sizwe was a thirty-seven-year-old black man who liked his pap and beer. He was going through a divorce, and learning to cook for himself, which he was finding a great challenge. Sizwe would burn water if you gave him half a chance. Maureen scanned her notes on Sizwe, which were tacked to the pinboard. He was a Kaizer Chiefs supporter who was coming along nicely weight-wise, slowly inching closer to his goal every month. Coming up with these characters and figuring out their lives was a little like writing a book, Maureen imagined. And she’d always wanted to do that.
It was shortly after Maureen had created Sizwe that she came up with the idea of developing and selling Banting meal plans to other members of the group. All self-help books said that the most successful people were those who turned their hobbies into their jobs, so why not her? She’d seen someone else doing it on the Banting for Life page, offering professional LCHF meal plans for cash. How hard could it be? She loved cooking and experimenting in the kitchen, and she was an ardent Banting convert who’d read the book four times. Plus, she already had three dedicated customers who would be happy to give her little meal plans free advertising on the Banting for Life Facebook Page. Good old Herman, Lydia and Sizwe would be her first clients.
Unfortunately the meal plan business hadn’t taken off as well as Maureen had hoped, but now that she could at last claim that her meal plans were ENDORSED by the Professor himself, she had a feeling they were going to be a huge success.
Maureen logged out of Facebook as herself and logged back in as Lydia Steenberg. Lydia had six new notifications, and one new direct message. Maureen scrolled through the notifications first – most of them were responses to threads she had followed on the Banting for Life page. But one notification was from Facebook, informing Lydia that one of her randomly friended ‘friends’, Simone Kunderman, had a birthday.
‘Happy birthday, have a great day,’ Lydia quickly tapped out on the stranger’s wall.
Within seconds, Simone had acknowledged the message by liking it. Maureen wondered what Simone thought. Perhaps she thought Lydia was an old school friend who had a different surname now, or a work colleague she didn’t remember, but was too polite to question
the source of their friendship. Maureen found it remarkable how little visual evidence one needed to create an entire human being online,
one with a birthday, a history, friends and family, likes and dislikes.
When she’d first created Lydia, Maureen had surfed Google images for pictures that could believably make up Lydia’s life. She was careful to choose obscure photographs of various young, overweight blonde women, all shot from behind or a bit blurry to protect her theft of their identities, but still similar enough to seem legitimate. Maure
en also decided that Lydia had a cat named Ginger Mary, a generic-looking feline who was obsessed with dragging Lydia’s imaginary neighbours’ socks off their washing line into Lydia’s imaginary house. The imagin-
ary Ginger Mary liked sleeping in Lydia’s imaginary laundry basket
on top of Lydia’s imaginary clean clothes. She might not exist, but
Lydia Steenberg was as vivid in Maureen’s mind as if she were her daughter or next-door neighbour.
Maureen checked her plan on the pinboard, and then uploaded a new photograph of a ginger cat to Lydia’s profile, right on schedule. Maybe because in her mind they were such great friends, Maureen had taken things with Lydia further than she ever had with Herman or Sizwe. She’d even chosen a couple of pleasing hobbies for the young woman. She decided that Lydia would enjoy reading local fiction and knitting, and regularly posted pictures of the books she was busy reading, the kinds of books Maureen imagined a girl like her would like – none of that Fifty Shades nonsense.
Lydia was an only child, Maureen had decided, with a relatively
low-pressure job in Human Resources at a large computer company, and she sometimes went for a drink after work with a small group of girlfriends she’d had since school, and one or two she’d met later at college or in the workplace.
When Maureen first started posting as Lydia in the Banting group, the twenty-seven-year-old blonde needed to lose about twenty-five
kilos. Her journey hadn’t been an easy one, on purpose. Because, Maureen felt, everybody loved an underdog.
Poor Lydia had really struggled to lose weight at first. She’d even put on five kilos in her first few months of Banting, and had become very despondent about the whole thing. If it hadn’t been for the communal strength and encouragement of the group (and cutting down on her imaginary dairy and in-between meal snacks), she would have most certainly given up.
