Reeva: A Mother's Story (3 page)

Our landlady came to the funeral and then ‘heard’ via a news agency that we had no money and we wouldn’t be able to pay our rent. Soon after the funeral we receive a letter from her giving us two months’ notice to leave. Don’t worry, we’ll be out in one month, I tell her. Who wants to stay where you’re not welcome? We start packing up all our belongings and move to a small house out in the Greenbushes, next to our dear friend Claire – so it was meant to be, probably, and we appreciate the peace and quiet here now. Some media follow us here too. Barry often goes out of the house to smoke and then the press will print a story asking how Barry can afford to smoke if we don’t have any money. It’s a terrible intrusion.

Horror, disbelief, grief come in waves. I find it difficult to eat properly. I feel no appetite. Weight starts to fall off me. Eating is about sustaining yourself, and you don’t have the will to look after yourself when your most precious loved one is dead. Days, weeks, months mean nothing to me now. I am not engaged in the real world. For a long time I can’t go out, go anywhere. How can I when my daughter’s face is everywhere – on TV, newspapers, magazines. To think how I used to rush out to buy magazines and publications whenever Reeva told me she was appearing in one. And now I’m avoiding them. There is no escaping the brutal truth. I am too much of a wreck. I can’t believe she’s just disappeared from our lives. She gave us lots of love, lots of attention. She was a wonderful daughter. If I think now that I’d like to phone her, I can’t. I can’t contact her. I can’t see her. As mother and daughter we were so close a unit even after she’d moved to Johannesburg that whenever I’d bump into friends in the shopping mall or somewhere, they’d never say ‘Hello, June’, they’d just say ‘How’s Reeva?’ Our bond was so strong that long after she moved away to pursue her modelling career, she still needed me. I lived for her. I was so proud of her. We talked about anything and everything. I miss her terribly, every moment of every day.

I find an old letter Reeva wrote to me when she was seventeen. She used to come and help me at the spaza shop, an informal convenience store I ran for fifteen years up at the racecourse where Barry had his horses. On this occasion a friend ‘needed’ her and she felt bad about leaving me to work alone in the shop.
Remember the day I went to
Cinderella
– I cried and I cried because you weren’t there and you were all I ever depended on + it’s scary, even now, as an adult, to walk alone
, she wrote back in May 2001.
OK, maybe I’m a “mommy’s girl” like dad always says, but SO WHAT!!! – I like it + I like you… love you. There’s nothing wrong with that, right? Neh, I don’t think so! I just know, deep down inside, that without you, I would be nothing + no one – NO ONE – would be there to pick up the pieces… I love you with all my life and my entire being… Reeves.

Ever since the events of 14 February 2013, I wake up every night at 3 a.m. with my head full of her and vivid snatches of dreams about her. Barry and I both wake up crying. It’s hard, you know. As soon as you stir from sleep, your brain goes in that direction. It’s set in my body clock now. Three o’clock, I wake up. I wonder, is that because that’s the time it happened? I hear Barry sitting outside on the porch. I know he’s smoking and that tears are streaming down his cheeks. We speak in the depths of night – because we both get down from it, experiencing different moods at different times, and that’s not easy on a relationship either – and I ask Barry, What is the worst part for you? He says he keeps going over those minutes she was locked behind the toilet door. He imagines her begging for her life. He agonises over what was going through her mind: Where is anyone? Who is going to save me? She never in her life would be thinking he’s going to kill her. She wouldn’t be thinking of guns and violence aimed at her by her own boyfriend, the man she called her Boo.

That’s our nightmare. Both of us are haunted by the same nightmare. The vision of Reeva suffering this terrible trauma. Her terror and helplessness. Her yells for help piercing the silent night air. From the day she was born we protected her, but from this we couldn’t protect her. Why couldn’t I have warned her that this person could be capable of such hideous violence? Because he shot her not just once, but bang, bang, bang, bang with 9mm bullets, until she was dead. How could she, who was so alert to the ill treatment of innocent women, end up with a person who could aim a gun towards another human being and shoot her dead?

Oscar’s story I don’t believe. It seems to me he did not look for her when he says he thought he heard intruders. Not one of his actions suggests he felt protective towards her. A lot of people have guns in South Africa and everyone knows, bottom line, you never ever shoot if you have not checked where your own people are: never, ever, ever. I work out in my own mind what I think happened. They had a fight, a horrible argument, and she fled to the bathroom with her mobile and locked the door. It was 3 a.m. She was dressed in shorts and a top. Her clothes were packed, ready to leave. I think he may have shot once and then he had to go on and kill her because she would have been able to tell the world what really happened, what he’s really like. Why did he point a gun at a locked door? Why did he have so many guns in the first place? It’s a simple fact, if he didn’t have a gun, she’d be alive today. You know how many of the neighbours heard the screams – blood-curdling screams, one lady said,
blood-curdling screams for help
, and her window was open, her balcony door was open, and she was a neighbour living close by.

Now it’s a matter of trying to live without her. We both try and immerse ourselves in things we know she loved and things we know she would love to see us doing. She was in the middle of reading
The Book Thief
by Markus Zusak
when she died and we both read that to feel close to her. I have all her books in my bedroom. I have her white linen on the bed. It’s a comfort to know she once slept in it and that somehow her essence must still be there. I wear her clothes and jewellery – the little jacket with a furry hood, the embellished denim jacket, her guinea-fowl feather earrings, the little leather cuff with a horsehead clasp – and I spray myself with her Narciso Rodriguez perfume to drink in her presence. She had quite a collection of scents: more than forty perfumes, beautiful bottles of eau de toilette and lots of aromatic candles. She loved to create a calm and serene atmosphere in her room. We have her cook books – Nigella Lawson’s
How to Be a Domestic Goddess
and Mary Berry’s
Great British Bake Off.
She loved making banana bread once a week to take in to her friends in the model agency. And she loved Barry’s way with horses, so it’s wonderful he is now back working with horses at his new place in Fairview. She used to ride often before she fell from a horse and broke her back when she was twenty. After the accident, it was still natural for her to go and help at the stables, feeding horses, mucking out, pushing the wheelbarrow. She was a country girl at heart. As a young girl, if she knew Barry was going to have a winner, she’d go to lead his horses into the ring. She shared his excitement and kept cuttings of his victories. She was very proud of him.

I find myself thinking of her all the time, hearing her warm voice, her chatter, her mock admonishments. I wish I could see her throw back her head and laugh again. Whenever I do my hair, I hear her saying, ‘Don’t forget the back, Mama!’ because whenever I iron my hair straight I tend to miss out the back section, leaving little squiggles, and she was always so polished. I open the fridge and think how horrified she’d be by the state of it. The first thing she did whenever she visited us was go straight to the fridge and clear out all the things that had been hanging around in it for months. I usually wait until things walk out themselves. A song keeps playing on the radio and makes me cry. When I first hear the lyrics sung by Labrinth and Emeli Sandé –
Would you let me see beneath you’re beautiful? Would you let me see beneath you’re perfect?
– it reminds me so much of Reeva. I talk to Powder, her blue-point Siamese cat, and say ‘It’s Reeva’ and he cries. He’s fourteen now.

Barry and I gradually identify objects that we will treasure as mementos that Reeva gave us throughout her twenty-nine years. We take a second look at two paintings we’d had up for years on the kitchen wall. Reeva used to paint a lot in her early teens and when your child gives you some lovely coloured images on canvas you keep them, don’t you? We never understood these paintings. Now we see that they’re spooky. They seem prophetic. In the first one, she painted a man under a tree, holding his gun like a prized possession, and close to him is a beautiful dark-haired young girl in a white dress with angel wings, and a ladder going up to heaven. This is Reeva. She was naturally a wavy-haired brunette, just like the figure she painted. And the girl’s hands are over her mouth. She’s expressing horror, shock. She’s petrified.

Can you believe it? It’s almost as if she had a premonition.

The second painting comprises two canvases. The left-hand side one shows a figure crouched in fear in a small space, as Reeva may have been in the toilet cubicle when she was shot. Shortly after her death, there was an identical sketch of her in this position in the South African
Sunday Times
. The figure she painted even has marks on her legs where the bullets in real life grazed her and she has depicted one broken arm as well. How strange is that? Oscar’s first bullet went into her hip, a Black Talon bullet which exploded inside her. His second bullet went through her fingers and shattered her elbow, so her arm was completely lame. And the right-hand canvas, which she mounted next to the crouching figure as if they had to be interpreted together, is painted solid, blank, blood red – oblivion.

It is weird. Twice over, I think she had a premonition. They were painted for a reason. We’ve had the paintings around for years because of the cheery strong colours, but these are now gory and macabre for us. We never stopped to analyse the expression on the figure’s face, but now I see it’s Reeva, shocked, afraid, and utterly bewildered.

On 14 April 2013, Oscar is back in the news for getting bail set at one million rand. He is required to live at an undisclosed address, hand in his two South African passports and report twice a week to a police station in Pretoria.

We see pictures of Oscar partying. He’s drinking, flirting, photographed with an
FHM
model, he doesn’t seem like someone who has lost the love of his life. I have forgiven him. I have to – that’s my religion. It’s not healthy to carry evil thoughts about him because it will only destroy me, eat me up. But I can’t forget what he’s done. I hate what he’s done to my child, the girl I gave birth to, a child who never gave us any trouble, who worked hard at school and earned thirteen distinctions during her law studies at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth. She studied conscientiously for her Bachelor of Laws degree, then moved to Johannesburg and focused on her modelling as part of her strategy to become a person with a profile, so that she could return to a career in law as someone with a voice to speak out against violence against women in South Africa. Inside that beautiful girl was a heart of gold. She lit up a room. She loved people. I try hard to live up to the quotes that Reeva held dear. The last few thoughts she tweeted before her death give an indication of her loving, generous outlook:

Before you lift your pen or raise your voice to criticise, acknowledge peoples’ circumstances. You don’t know their strengths, their journey.
 

On 9 February, four days before she drove to Pretoria that last fateful time, she had tweeted:

I woke up this morning in a safe home. Not everyone did. Speak out about the rape of individuals in South Africa. RIP Annie Booysen #rape #crime #sayNO.

Reeva, like everyone in South Africa, had been deeply troubled by the barbaric rape and murder of teenager Anene Booysen ten days previously in Bredasdorp in the Western Cape. The seventeen-year-old, known as Annie, had been enjoying a happy evening out with friends. Walking home with a twenty-two-year-old man she had a crush on, she ended up being gang-raped, grotesquely disembowelled and left for dead at a construction site. It seems incomprehensible now that Reeva and Annie Booysen are twinned by fate in the public consciousness, two beautiful big-hearted young women killed by men they admired, two names jointly remembered in protests about violence against innocent women.

On 13 February, Reeva asked her 40,000 or so followers:

What do you have up your sleeve for your love tomorrow??? #getexcited #Valentine’sDay.
 

She loved making an occasion of Valentine’s Day. In 2012 she was staying in Cape Town with her cousin Kim. As usual, she wanted to make a big fuss of the day and went to a lot of trouble to make the table look nice, scattering tiny hearts on it. She was very thrifty; she could create a special atmosphere with very little, baking a cake or decorating lots of cupcakes. She insisted on inviting Kim’s parents, Mike and Lyn, Kim’s sister Sharon and Charlene, a friend of Kim’s whose husband was away. She couldn’t bear the idea of Charlene being alone. She loved gathering family and friends around her, organising everything. She always wanted people to be having a good time.

Also on 13 February 2013, she retweeted this plea from Lindiwe Suttle –

WEAR BLACK THIS FRIDAY IN SUPPORT AGAINST #RAPE AND WOMAN ABUSE #BLACK FRIDAY.
 

For three months I sleep with Reeva’s ashes in my bedroom cupboard. They are in a long wooden box with a sliding lid marked with a simple handwritten label: REEVA REBECCA STEENKAMP 19/02/2013. I want to feel she’s safe at home, close to us. I put Humphrey, her knitted doll, on top of the box of ashes because he was so important to her. She used to take him everywhere with her. One of Barry’s aunts made the little jacket that matched his cute dungarees and bow tie. He’s Humphrey Steenkamp. I remember the first time she went on an aeroplane alone, to Cape Town to stay with my parents, and I watched her board with Humphrey hanging out of the bag. Oh my word, I had tears in my eyes! I was just as apprehensive as she was because I didn’t understand how the plane stays up there by itself and then this most precious thing of mine was climbing up the steps to board the plane with her doll… I kept Humphrey. When Reeva had a baby I was going to give the baby Humphrey. Powder has chewed his feet a bit, but I know she’d find that amusing. He’s a cat that eats jerseys. She chose Powder from the litter because he was showing off to her, doing backward somersaults and funny manoeuvres, anything to grab her attention.