Chase Your Shadow

by John Carlin

  He bet all on romantic love and disappointment was his reward. One woman left – Nandi, Jenna, Vicki – and another took her place, but the pattern repeated itself time after time. From petulant possessiveness to frantic dependency, to hysterical fear of loss. No one could ever quite measure up. He had moments of light when he saw that he was driving himself – and them – mad, but he could not help himself. Jealousy ate him up and he saw rivals everywhere.

  He floundered as other men did, only more so. The love stories of the human race were awash with variations on the same banal themes; but he was a man of extremes who had no legs, which gave a uniquely corrosive character to his insecurities about love and sex. Far more than he let on, he felt embarrassed when people saw him without his prostheses on; when it came to revealing his naked stumps to a girlfriend for the first time he battled to mask his anxiety. With his artificial legs on he was a six-foot athletic Adonis, described in magazines as ‘South Africa’s sexiest man’; take them off and the transformation was drastic. He was not tall, he was dwarfish; he was not fast, he was slow; he was not brave, he was scared; he was not strong, he was weak, his balance so precarious a child could knock him over. The Blade Runner and the private Oscar Pistorius were in perpetual conflict. Laying himself bare before an attractive young woman made him laceratingly aware of the strange and vulnerable figure he cut in the contrast between his powerful upper body and the thin, often blistered stumps where the lower half of his body ended. When a new girlfriend first set eyes on the strange disabled figure he cut, the fear of rejection – possibly of hurt or ridicule – consumed him.

  But even if that obstacle were successfully negotiated, there remained another doubt. What if she was with him only for his fame and money?

  Whether a relationship was long or short changed nothing. When he was twenty-four he had what another man his age might have regarded as a fling with an older woman, divorced with two children. But that was a high-stakes drama, and proved too much for her. She left him and, inconsolable, he turned to an older male friend for advice. The friend, who knew the woman, told him to forget it. There was no going back. He had been too suffocatingly demanding for her. The answer to his troubles lay not with the women he fell in love with, his friend scolded him, but with himself. He was too young to be enduring so much unnecessary anguish. He should aim for the sky in his running, not in love. Not yet. Love will come, the friend told him, but meanwhile focus on your running, have fun with girls but don’t fall for them madly every time. Don’t be such a crazy romantic.

  But he paid no heed and he kept swinging, in one relationship after another, from wedding-bell bliss to operatic despair.

  His friend spoke sense, but lacked the courage to tell him what he really thought. It was banal, he figured, it was crassly obvious amateur psychology, but no less true for that. He was falling in love each time with women whom he saw as a reincarnation of his mother. His frustrations came from their failure to match up to the saintly maternal ideal, his jealousies and possessiveness from the panic that they would abandon him, obliging him to endure again the grief of his life’s most irreparable loss.

  The last woman on whom Pistorius projected his dreams before meeting Reeva was a sweet and innocent girl called Samantha Taylor, whom he met through Facebook – which her mother Trish would use to attack him after he shot Reeva. They found they shared the same birthday, November 22. He was twenty-five and Samantha was seventeen. On and off, the relationship lasted eighteen months.

  It was only after meeting Reeva, after Reeva’s death, as the murder trial loomed, that he realized how misguided he had been in falling for Samantha. Not just because she had not been in Reeva’s class, but because of what he learned from his lawyers in August 2013, six months before the trial began. They showed him the list of 107 state witnesses who would be testifying against him and Samantha’s name was on it. The woman with whom he had once thought he would be spending the rest of his days, as he thought he would later with Reeva, was now assisting the police and prosecution, who sought to see to it that he spent many of the rest of his days in jail.

  It was perplexing for him to recall that at the end of September 2012, barely more than a month before meeting Reeva, he had gone on a trip with Samantha to the Seychelles – a free trip sponsored by an airline and a hotel chain – where, under palm trees at the edge of the Indian Ocean, they had declared their feelings for each other – in public, before a TV camera, for a South African show called Top Billing about the lives of the rich and famous. As he gazed into her eyes, she told the interviewer how much ‘fun’ Pistorius was; how she couldn’t keep up with him, he was so full of energy. She gazed into his eyes as he replied, ‘Sam’s special’, ‘She’s very caring’, ‘She understands me’. Drinking in each other’s amorous burblings, he blushed, she blushed, the interviewer told them they were blushing, and then they blushed some more.

  But behind the image of love’s young dream that the couple presented for the cameras there had been all kinds of trouble. In the early days it was because he had a divided heart, fearful of letting go his previous passion, Jenna Edkins, afraid of wholeheartedly committing to his new one, Samantha. On discovering he was still seeing Jenna, she sent him a text message threatening to end it all. His reply, also from his phone, was thick with regret. He confessed that he had been ‘playing’ with her emotions, that he had been ‘a coward and lonely’ and, yes, he had gone running back to Jenna. But she deserved better, he hated himself, he knew that she, ‘Sam’, was the only one for him. He swore that he would spend the rest of his days making it up to her, if only she would give him a second chance. Which she did. Whereupon he dropped Jenna and for a while he and Samantha were at peace. ‘You’re the love of my life’, he wrote to her. ‘You all I dream of. You all I want. You all I need.’ He called her his ‘little butterfly’.

  What Samantha Taylor found as the relationship unfolded was that Pistorius was like the little girl in the nursery rhyme: when he was good, he was very, very good but when he was bad, he was horrid. He could be kind and gentle, and, as so many people on first meeting him would remark, courtesy itself. But, according to her, he would suddenly snap, becoming enraged with Samantha or with her friends, shouting foul abuse in a manner shockingly disproportionate to the cause. She found that the tiniest things would set him off. If he asked her to take a mug from the sitting room to the kitchen or to make him a cup of coffee and she forgot, or if she wore clothes that he found too provocative when they went out, he would fly into a furious temper. It was about controlling his environment and about controlling her. She claimed that his jealousy was such that when they were apart he would ask her not only to tell him what she was doing and where she was but he sought proof; he asked her to send him photographs of herself to his phone so he could confirm that she was not lying. She – convinced that despite it all she was in love with him, fixing her heart on the enchanting side of his two extremes of personality – would do as she was asked. But sometimes she did emerge from the fog of infatuation and wonder what she was doing with him. When he was not in training, Taylor claimed that he would drink too much and he would wave his gun around, causing her to fear he would fire a shot by accident. She felt not physically intimidated but emotionally abused. Advised by her mother and her older sister, Carrie Leigh, who both got to know him well and regarded him with a mixture of fondness and alarm, Samantha would put some distance between her and Pistorius. Whereupon he would call the mother or the sister and, crying on the phone, beg them to intercede with ‘Sam’ on his behalf. Then the couple would be reconciled again and he would whisper sweet nothings and be gently attentive and Samantha, as she would reassure her family, felt happy and in love once more.

  Then they would have another row and he would come back the next day back full of apologies and self-loathing – ‘I’m sorry for being a fuck-up’, read a typical text message – and more pleas for forgiveness. ‘I want to look you in your eyes and tell you I love you so you can
see I mean it,’ he wrote. Then they would be back together again, and it was ‘My baby!’ and ‘Sammy!’ and, in messages sent from some far-flung land, ‘I wish I could hold you’ and ‘I wish you could look into my heart and see how honest and true my love is for you’. Then there was another bust-up and he was sorry again – ‘You deserve so much better than me’ – but begged to be accepted back into her heart. ‘I made terrible choices before I realized I had fallen for you.’

  And so on and so forth, until they broke up in the northern summer of 2012 after he went on a date with a Russian supermodel he had met in New York, at which point Samantha ran off to Dubai with someone they both knew called Quinton van der Burgh, driving Pistorius to distraction. Again he saw his mistake, too late he feared. By text message again, he apologized and said it broke his heart to learn she was with Quinton, but now, yes, now, at long last, he was in touch with his true feelings: ‘No other girl in the world could replace you . . . I love you with my entire being.’

  His honeyed words did the trick and they got back together, which was when they set off on their paid lovers’ trip to the Seychelles, where they did their promotional interview, shared a suite with a private pool, walked hand in hand on the white sand, and returned home to Johannesburg, intoxicated with love, until he met Reeva, who promptly became the only girl in the world for him, the one he loved as he had never loved anyone before.

  Except that Reeva, like his mother, was now immutable in death and, as he would muse while staring up at the photograph of her on the wall of his cottage, she would always remain his true and unrepeatable one, the incorruptible love whose loss he would never get over. He would have forgotten Samantha entirely were it not for the fact that the clock was ticking down for the trial in which she was giving evidence against him. He might have eliminated from his mind the spats he had had with Reeva, too, were it not that the state prosecutors meant to remind him of them in court. His lawyers told him the prosecution had sent his iPhone and hers to Apple in California to try and get access to messages he had exchanged with Reeva over the internet, on WhatsApp. Finding the text messages between them had been no problem for the prosecution; they got those from the local South African telephone company. Yet they had drawn a blank there, finding nothing that they had written to each other or to other people that might suggest a motive for murder. They did nurture the hope, however, that opening up Apple’s virtual cloud archives to get the WhatsApp material would yield what they needed to prove their case that he had killed Reeva intentionally – evidence of an argument between them, just prior to the shooting. To that end, in October 2013, they embarked on what would turn out to be a laborious campaign through the American legal system, for the iPhone manufacturers would not part with the information until they were obliged to do so by law. Pistorius’s lawyers were alarmed when they first learned of the prosecution gambit, but he was merely mortified at the prospect of the private exchanges between them being aired in court. He did not believe that anything incriminating would be found.

  Overwhelmingly, what the WhatsApp messages contained were gushy messages of love. Pistorous and Reeva competed with each other to see who loved who more. ‘I miss you’, she wrote. ‘I miss you more than you always,’ he wrote back. They built up a small encyclopedia of amorous endearments: ‘My angel’, ‘My beautiful’, ‘My baby’, ‘My baba’, ‘My boo’.

  The name of the woman of his dreams had changed, but not the sentiments he expressed. He transferred all the tenderness he had felt for Samantha, and more, to Reeva, almost from one day to the next. When Samantha found out in December 2012, a month after Pistorius and Reeva had met, that the relationship was turning serious, she sought revenge in the South African press. ‘Oscar has such a way with women,’ she was quoted as saying. ‘She’s probably not the only one he’s got . . . Oscar is certainly not what people think he is.’

  The comment would generate keen interest later, but at the time it passed largely unnoticed. Pistorius was still South Africa’s untouchable hero and the public had taken a liking to the suddenly much-photographed Reeva. They were South Africa’s closest thing to a Hollywood dream couple and Samantha came across as a peevish young woman scorned. As for Pistorius, he was far too besotted with Reeva to pay much attention to the whinings of an old flame.

  But come January, the month before the shooting, he was already falling into the patterns of volatile behavior that had caused so much grief in his relationship with Samantha, and some of his other girlfriends before her. One moment they were crazy about each other – Reeva liked telling him how ‘amazing’ they were together – but then she would complain that he was all over her, not allowing her to be herself. On January 27 she sent him a message seething with recrimination. The catalyst was his behavior at an engagement party for a common friend of theirs, Darren Fresco, who would turn state witness against him, along with Samantha Taylor, in the trial.

  The message, unusually long for WhatsApp, was full of the classic laments and recriminations of a woman saddled with a jealous, self-centered and unreasonably possessive mate.

  ‘I’m not 100% sure why I’m sitting down to type you a message first,’ she wrote, ‘but perhaps it says a lot about what’s going on here. Today was one of my best friends’ engagements and I wanted to stay longer. I was enjoying myself but it’s over now. You have picked on me incessantly since you got back from CT [Cape Town] and I understand that you are sick but it’s nasty. Yesterday wasn’t nice for either of us but we managed to pull thro and communicate well enough to show our care for each other is greater than the drama that attacked us.

  ‘I was not flirting with anyone today. I feel sick that u suggested that and that u made a scene at the table and made us leave early. I’m terribly disappointed in how the day ended and how you left me. We are living in a double standard relationship where u can be mad about how I deal with stuff when u are very quick to act cold and offish when you’re unhappy. Every 5 seconds I hear how u dated another chick you really have dated a lot of people yet you get upset if I mention ONE funny story with a long term boyfriend. I do everything to make u happy and to not say anything to rock the boat with u. You do everything to throw tantrums in front of people. I have been upset by you for 2 days now. I’m so upset I left Darren’s party early. SO upset. I can’t get that day back.

  ‘I’m scared of u sometimes,’ Reeva continued, ‘and how u snap at me and of how u will react to me. You make me happy 90% of the time and I think we are amazing together but I am not some other bitch you may know trying to kill your vibe. I am the girl who let go with u even when I was scared out of my mind to, I’m the girl who fell in love with u and wanted to tell u this weekend.

  ‘But I’m also the girl that gets side stepped when you are in a shit mood. When I feel you think u have me so why try anymore. I get snapped at and told my accents and voices are annoying. I touch your neck to show u I care you tell me to stop. Stop chewing gum. Do this don’t do that. You don’t want to hear stuff. You cut me off. Your endorsements your reputation your impression of something innocent blown out of proportion and fucked up a special day to me. I’m sorry if you truly felt I was hitting on my friend Sam’s husband and I’m sorry that u think that little of me. From the outside it looks like we are a struggle and maybe that’s what we are. I just want to love and be loved. Be happy and make someone SO happy. Maybe we can’t do that for each other. Cos right now I know u aren’t happy and I am certainly very unhappy and sad.’

  This was another level of dissatisfaction from the kind he had experienced with the young Samantha Taylor. Reeva’s grievances were commonplace, but behind them lay the experience of a worldy woman who had endured her share of difficult loves and who used to tell friends that she had been in an ‘abusive relationship’ before leaving Port Elizabeth for Johannesburg. She had thought through what she did and did not want in a man. He felt somewhat out of his depth. Although he had matured as an athlete and as a public figure, and had built up the Pistori
us brand to be as powerful as it was convincing, his emotional development seemed to have been arrested; he remained stuck in the weak, whimpering phase of puppy love. He had twin personalities and the women he fell for brought out the weaker of the two. There was subjugation in his love for Reeva, to whose scoldings he replied in the only register he knew: simultaneously defensive and abjectly apologetic.

  ‘I want to talk to you,’ he began, also via WhatsApp. ‘I want to sort this out. I don’t want to have anything less than amazing for you and I . . . I’m sorry for the things I say without thinking and for taking offence to some of your actions. The fact that I’m tired and sick isn’t an excuse . . . I’m sorry I wanted to go but I was hungry and upset and although you knew it it wasn’t like you came to chat to me when I left the table. I was upset when I left you cause I thought you were coming to me. I’m sorry I asked you to stop touching my neck yesterday, I know you were just trying to show me love . . . I had a mad headache and should’ve just spoken to you softly. I’m sorry.’

  Reeva, as if aware this was territory where even the Blade Runner could not compete, held her ground. She responded by pressing home the advantage, defining the kind of relationship she wanted to have. She was who she was and he would have to accept her as such – not as an extension of himself, nor as some idealized image of perfection to which she could never hope to aspire.

  ‘I like to believe that I make u proud when I attend these kinds of functions with u. I present myself well and can converse with others whilst u are off busy chatting to fans/friends. I also knew people there tonight and whilst u were having one or 2 pics taken i was saying goodbye to people in my industry and Fix wanted a photo with me. I was just being cordial by saying goodbye whilst you were busy. I completely understood your desperation to leave and thought I would be helping u by getting to the exit before u because I can’t rush in the heels I was wearing. I thought it would make a difference in us getting out without u being harassed anymore. I didn’t think you would criticize me for doing that especially not so loudly so that others could hear. I might joke around and be all Tom boyish at times but I regard myself as a lady and I didn’t feel like one tonight after the way u treated me when we left. I’m a person too and I appreciate that you invited me out tonight and I realize that u get harassed but I am trying my best to make u happy and I feel as tho u sometimes never are no matter the effort I put in. I can’t be attacked by outsiders for dating u AND be attacked by you, the one person I deserve protection from.’