by John Carlin
They were right to worry. Pistorius did entertain taking his own life. He felt worthless. Stricken with guilt, seeing no value in getting out of bed in the morning, lacking incentive or motivation of any kind, the future yawned ahead of him vast and empty, with no prospect of pleasure or joy. He derived no consolation from past glories, which served only to mock his present condition. He was going nowhere. He would be better off dead.
Everybody in the family circle could feel in the weeks after he had ended Reeva’s life that his desire to keep on living hung by a thread. The prospect of Ozzie committing suicide was the unspoken fear they all shared. And it was Arnold who took the matter in hand.
Reading up on the subject, he concluded that his nephew was suffering from some variety of post-traumatic stress disorder. He discovered, too, that in the United States, in cases where, for whatever reason, someone had killed a person they loved and then instantly regretted it, statistics showed that 20 per cent ended up taking their own lives. Arnold shared this information with the rest of the family, urging them to be ever attentive to Ozzie’s shifting moods and to give him reason to believe that life still had a purpose. That meant reminding him of God and His mysterious ways, and making it manifest to him, every moment of the day, that they were keeping faith with him and continued to love him. As his aunt Lois would say, ‘If you’ve got a purpose in life and you believe in God, it gives you a reason to understand things when they’re not going smoothly. Humans make mistakes. None of us is perfect.’
Pistorius believed in God too, but he could not understand why, if there was a reason for everything, as his mother had taught him, God had allowed the death of Reeva and the destruction of the ideal love he remained convinced he had found with her. Wrestling with that question as he waited for sleep, if sleep would come, he woke up every morning in despair. For a second or two, as he rubbed his eyes, he would have no memory of what had happened. Then it would hit him like a hammerblow to the head. How to face the day? How to cope with the nightmare of his waking state?
In the first weeks after the shooting, every hour that went by without the dreaded prospect materializing of him ending his own life was a relief for the Pistorius household. They watched him keenly; they tried to read the expression in his eyes as the household sat down to prayer before dinner, holding hands in a circle, in the traditional Afrikaner way. But the tension was hard to live with, and one day Arnold broke it. He sat Pistorius down and asked him if he saw a purpose in life. Could he look beyond the trial and imagine making amends for what he had done and eventually becoming a stronger, better man? Was he aware of the reserves of moral strength that would be required, far greater than any he had drawn on to break world records or compete in the Olympic Games, in order to rebuild a life that would be worth living? Could he contain his despair? Pistorius understood his uncle’s questions and the point behind them. He understood, too, that he had caused his family enough pain already and that to succumb to the selfishness of ending his life would pile an unbearable agony upon them. So, yes, he told Arnold, he did see a purpose in his life. With the help of God, he would dig deep and try to start anew. Arnold chose to believe that he meant it.
But the family never dropped their guard, never stopped keeping a wary eye on him as he padded quietly about his uncle’s property, fiddling at his computer or his mobile phone, working out in the gym, trying to maintain concentration as he read biographies, with a Bible always close at hand. All he could watch on TV were emotionally neutral wildlife documentaries; anything else made him sad or scared. Romantic films, with the crushing memories they would evoke, were out of the question and anything with violence in it would make him nauseous.
He always wore glasses now, with black frames. Often unshaven, with a wispy beard, he had visibly lost weight and had a hunched, apologetic air about him. Delicately courteous, almost feminine in his gestures and gentle tone of voice, he came across as studious and withdrawn, more academic than athletic, more like a seminarian preparing for the priesthood than the sleek force of nature the world had named the Blade Runner.
At home with Arnold and Lois he was on his best behavior, properly observant of the religious pieties. The fey Christian was the Pistorius that strangers and older family members saw. He even took to holding regular prayer meetings and Bible study sessions in the lounge of his uncle’s home with a visiting pastor and a close circle of friends. But he was not pious in his behavior or repentant in his attitude all of the time. He had moments when, aided by the medication he was taking, he forgot his predicament and behaved like any other twenty-six-year-old, dropping the Christian restraint and peppering his conversation, as he had done all his life since adolescence, with the most ubiquitous and all-purpose of English adjectives. ‘Can you believe that fucking guy?’ ‘Crime in South Africa is fuckin’ out of control.’ And so forth. But, suddenly, even in the company of those with whom he was most at ease, he would break off in mid-conversation, his expression darkening; a pall would descend on the room and he was once again a broken man. It wasn’t hard to guess what Pistorius was thinking. It was not hard to imagine the picture he was forming and the sounds he was hearing, the four shots, the door smashed open with a cricket bat, the spectacle that confronted him.
He had destroyed her life, his life, and their life together. After that first day when they had met and they had spent the night talking until 3 a.m., he had been in no doubt that she was the woman for him. She was beautiful, she was smart, she was sassy, she was kind, she took an interest in social issues. She had all the attributes he looked for in a woman and the idea began rapidly to form in his mind that she was the one he would marry and have children with.
Within a week of meeting her he had to travel to Scotland, to the University of Strathclyde, to receive an honorary doctorate. He had been engaged in a project with scientists there to develop prosthetic legs that would be both practical and affordable for poor amputees in Africa. All he had wanted then, though, was to be close to her. When he could not be with her he would bombard her with messages from his phone. He pursued her during those first weeks with the single-minded energy that he deployed in athletics competition. She was alarmed at first by his zeal, telling friends that his smothering attentions provoked mixed feelings in her. She was attracted to him – she called him ‘a rock star’ – but feared that in a relationship with him she would not have space to breathe. He was more sure about her at first than she was about him. But within a month she had made up her mind.
She took an interest in his running, accompanying him to the track when he trained; she shared his enthusiasm for fast luxury cars; she prayed with him at mealtimes. They started calling each other by pet names, ‘my baba’, ‘my boo’, ‘my angel’. She did not move in with him but spent nights at his home when he was traveling, even getting to know some of his neighbors at Silver Woods. When he told her he planned to buy a house in Johannesburg and move there early in the next year the two of them looked at new furniture together. They seemed poised to build a shared future.
One bullet to the brain had put an end to those dreams, replacing them with the nightmare images and sounds that assailed him day and night. Only one recourse was left to him: to try and seek refuge in happy memories. It did him good to remember her alive. Alone in his cottage, he dwelt on their brief time together, daydreaming about the life he had hoped to share with her, the children they might have had. He had loved her then and he loved her now and he would love her all his life. If those who doubted him could only come into his cottage, they would know. When they walked in, the first thing they would see, hanging on the main wall across from the entrance, looking down on the room like the Virgin Mary in a Catholic church, was a large framed photograph of Reeva, a professional black-and-white portrait of her face, smiling, misty, provocative and strangely knowing.
6
He who has conquered his own coward spirit has conquered the whole outward world.
THOMAS HUGHES, TOM BROWN’S SCHOOL
DAYS
‘ANYTHING YOU can do I can do just as well’ was the spirit in which Oscar Pistorius started out his life, aged fourteen, at Pretoria Boys High School. Soon he would be put to the test.
The new boys were packed off for three days to a remote farm owned by the school. It was early in the year, high summer, parched and hot in the South African Highveld, ideal conditions to test their mettle with a mile-high climb up a rugged, stony hill.
There was a military quality to the culture at Pretoria Boys. As one former head boy put it, they strove to break you down when you arrived and then rebuild you in the school’s image of itself as a breeder of champions. It was all about discipline, solidarity, tribal mystique. Among the school’s alumni were a number of illustrious judges, politicians and entrepreneurs and, most valued of all, sporting legends who had represented South Africa in international competition, notably in rugby, the sport that best represented the school’s manly virtues. The idea the school liked to nurture was that the successes students achieved in later life owed at least as much to the resilience and esprit de corps acquired within its walls as to individual ability.
It was impressed upon the staff that they were there to enforce a tradition. If need be, with severity. Failure to doff the school cap in the presence of an adult or to address them as ‘sir’ or ‘madam’ meant instant punishment. But the teachers were not entirely without mercy. In Pistorius’s case, given his condition, they might have excused him from taking part in the hike up that hill, had he asked. He didn’t.
The expedition leader was Paul Anthony, a rugby coach who had spent most of the four decades of his life at the school, first as a student and then as a teacher. Most of the boys made it up and down the hill in reasonable time. But half a dozen labored to make it back. Anthony set off in a van to pick up the stragglers.
‘It was my very first encounter with Ozzie,’ he recalled. ‘I was startled, to say the least, on seeing his wooden legs.’ Pistorius was in shorts, sweating profusely and covered in red dust, the color of the Highveld soil. ‘His legs were chafed and bleeding at the point where the stumps and the prosthetics met,’ Anthony continued. ‘I told him to jump into the van. Four or five other boys had already accepted the offer. But he refused. I insisted. I said, “Come on, it’s no disgrace. Look at these other guys in here.” But he wouldn’t budge. He was last in, but he finished the course. I was really, really struck by his tenacity.’
Pretoria Boys was a big school, with more than 1,200 boys. Anthony had no more contact with Pistorius until the following year. When he did, it was in the company of his mother. But he did not make the connection, not even after the meeting was over, between the boy before him and ‘the boy from the hill’. Pistorius was wearing long trousers and there was no mention at that time of his artificial legs, either by his mother or by him. Reflecting after the encounter on the influence Pistorius’s mother had had on his character, Anthony made a connection between her smiling exuberance and her son’s stoical drive. Two months later, when he heard the news of her death, it struck him that there was another quality they had in common. When he had met her he had seen no glimmer of the illness that was eating away at her insides. Oscar and Sheila Pistorius shared a genius for masking pain.
The reason he had met them at the start of the 2002 school year was that Pistorius was about to become a boarder and Anthony was the staff member in charge of the ‘house’, in the British public-school terminology used at Pretoria Boys, to which the boy would belong. The house was called ‘Rissik’ and Anthony’s title was ‘housemaster’. He would play the role of surrogate parent for Pistorius during the two years he remained in that post. As Anthony discovered at lights-out on Pistorius’s first night as a boarder, his disability was not going to present any special challenge.
‘It was 9.30 and I went around and talked to each kid in bed. I got to Ozzie. He was cheerful. He said it was great to be here. But he had a question. He’d had no time to brush his teeth. Could he go? He jumped out of bed and I was completely taken aback. He was on his stumps, on which he moved nimbly. I just gaped. He came back to bed, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.’
Some months later Pistorius went on another school outing, this time to a rock pool where the boys took it in turns to hurl themselves down a slide and crash into the water, repeating the action over and over. Bill Schroder, the headmaster, was present. Less accustomed than Paul Anthony to seeing Pistorius in action, he winced at the boy’s recklessness. ‘After they got out of the water they had to clamber up some steep, rocky edges before they could slide down again,’ Schroder recalled. ‘I said to him, “Don’t do it!” He was on his stumps, where the skin was terribly thin, and he could so easily have cut himself badly on the rocks. But he insisted he could do it. He begged me to let him, absolutely determined to be seen to do as the others did.’
‘He never let you be in a position where you might feel sorry for him,’ Anthony said. ‘It was amazing how motivated and confident he was, how completely he put you at ease about the fact he was missing his legs. He had no complex that you could see. He never came across as a kid without legs.’
Whether his companions at school let him forget his disability was another matter. Teenage boys are not ones for tender mercies, and less so at a school where rugged self-reliance was the most prized of virtues and the most despicable sin was to go crying to teacher when you were bullied or abused. By long tradition, Pretoria Boys was a place where if you were fat, if you were thin, if you had a big nose, if you were Jewish or belonged to some other minority, you were not allowed to forget it. You were called names, you were pushed around, and you had to learn to get used to it. As one former student described it, ‘you had to earn your stripes’.
While the school would become less harshly militaristic under the reforming hand of Bill Schroder, who was headmaster from 1990 to 2009, the boys did not shrink from reminding the kid with no legs of his singularity. One night a group of his schoolmates played a prank on him intended to ram home the cruel truth that, for all his bravado, he was more vulnerable than the rest of them. He woke up in his dormitory to find flames all around him. Someone was shouting that everybody should evacuate the building. He reached out a hand to grab his prosthetic legs, but they were not where he always left them, at the foot of his bed. He looked up and down, panic-stricken, but could not find them. Recounting the incident in his autobiography, he wrote, ‘I was almost in tears, terrified that I was going to be left to die.’
It turned out that the other boys had sprayed the dormitory’s steel cupboards with lighter fluid and then set fire to them. They carried on laughing at the fright they had given him long after the flames had died out.
If the incident exposed a brittle pride, or left a lasting trauma, he never let on. Anxious always to be perceived as ‘one of the boys’, he certainly did not vent his hurt to his housemaster, Paul Anthony, who remained in the dark as to what had happened. If there was one lesson you learned from your peers at Pretoria Boys, it was that in the face of physical or emotional pain, you had to ‘man up’. No feeling sorry for yourself, or seeking sympathy, allowed.
Yet after he left school he never stopped mentioning the incident, recounting what happened in detail in interview after interview years later, after he had become famous. What he left out was the part where, in his autobiography, he confessed to having been close to tears and in terror of his life. Even in his book, he ended up by shrugging it all off, presenting himself as a good sport capable of taking a joke. The point was to recall the incident as an example of his capacity to confront his disability and take it in his stride.
Nothing during his schooldays was going to hold him back. Not even rugby, among the most violent and physically demanding of team sports. Pretoria Boys was demanding enough academically, a field in which he muddled along but never excelled, but rugby was where the school’s prestige was most heavily invested. It did not matter if you were the school dunce, if you played for th
e first XV rugby team you were regarded as a god. Pistorius did not make it that high, but, determined to show that he would allow no limits to be placed on his ambition, he played rugby for the school at junior level.
Paul Anthony remembered one time when he watched him play against a school from Johannesburg. He also remembered wondering before the game began what would happen in the event that Pistorius was tackled around the legs. He was. As he raced down the wing with the ball under his arm, a rival player dived into him from the side. To the horror of the tackler Pistorius’s legs came off. But he got up and kept going for the line on his stumps.
‘The game stopped,’ Anthony recalled. ‘He slipped his prostheses back on and carried on playing. Ozzie never ceased to astonish. But just as astonishing a thing for me that day was to discover how fast he was.’
Someone else, unconnected with the school, would notice it too. His name was Francois van der Watt and he would play a decisive role in Pistorius’s life.
One day during his first year at school, when he was still fourteen, he fell while running and broke his prosthetic legs. He went to his grandmother Gerti, who lived in Pretoria, for help. It was an emergency. He needed a new set of legs immediately. Instead of turning to his usual prosthetics specialist in Johannesburg, forty-five minutes’ drive away, she looked in the phone book, found a number in Pretoria and dialled it. The person who answered the call was Van der Watt.
