Chase Your Shadow (13 page)

What became crushingly apparent to Pistorius as he followed the reactions on the internet was that people’s shock and horror gave way very soon to a macabre form of gloating. Heartbreakingly for him, the impulse to kick the carcass of the fallen hero was most belligerent in the country in which he was born.

Within twenty-four hours of the shooting advertisers had removed from South African streets the numerous billboards with his picture on them promoting Nike and other big brands. ‘A bullet in the chamber’ had been the unfortunate caption under the ad used by Nike, who raced to suspend their worldwide contract with him. More compelling evidence of how far he had sunk in the estimation of his compatriots was the statistical information provided by a Cape Town
company hired to analyze popular perceptions of South Africa for the national tourism board. By tracking millions of Twitter messages it found that a week after the shooting opinion in the world at large was fairly evenly divided, but in South Africa a clear majority was against him, refusing to believe Reeva’s death had been a mistake.

His family blamed the press. Like Pistorius and his lawyers, they wondered why they kept using the hurtful, loaded word ‘killing’ all the time? Why not call what happened a ‘tragedy’, a word on which everyone could agree? The answer lay, he and the rest of the Pistorius clan believed, in a calculated cynicism.

Pistorius knew about media manipulation; he had been successfully manipulating them for years. He knew that in order to build market share many media bosses believed they had to give the public what they wanted. As attuned to the public mood as the advertisers who paid their bills, that was what – often by an unconscious process – they did, and in this case they needed little time to deduce that their task was to reinforce the anti-Pistorius consensus. Just as before they had always striven to feed the public’s desire to see him as a hero, now they set about digging up evidence to support a refashioned and equally unreal understanding of him not as saint, but as demon.

The picture the public wanted duly emerged. They learned from the media that far from the perfect, courtly gent he had always been assumed to be, Pistorius was in fact rude and bad-tempered; he had an unhinged edge to his character, swore violently and flew easily into a rage; he was a wild and promiscuous rabble-rouser, but at the same time perversely possessive of the women who fell into his clutches. Some reports, nourished by a police spokeswoman’s statement that there had been ‘previous incidents of a domestic nature at his place’, even claimed he had left a trail of abusive relationships behind him.

The mother of one ex-girlfriend fueled this novel allegation when she posted a message saying how relieved she had been when her daughter broke up with him, for she had known him to be a reckless lunatic. Trish Taylor, the mother of a recent ex-girlfriend called Samantha Taylor, who would turn state witness against him in the trial, wrote on her Facebook page, ‘I am so glad that Sammy is safe and sound and out of the clutches of that man – there were a few occasions where things could have gone wrong with her and his gun during the time they dated.’

The impulse of the news media to follow the public mood rather than fly in the face of it was revealed by their general failure to give anything like the same visibility to a string of messages posted by an earlier girlfriend by the name of Jenna Edkins. On February 15, the day after the shooting, she wrote on Twitter, first, ‘I would just like to say I have dated Oscar on and off for 5 YEARS, NOT ONCE has he EVER lifted a finger to me, made me fear for my life.’ Then, in response to a storm of hate-filled responses, she wrote, ‘All I am saying is let him speak, let his side be heard without jumping to conclusions . . . Love and thoughts to Reeva’s family.’ After which she added, ‘You all have my family’s love and support
#
loveandsupportforoscar.’ And finally, ‘People must stop jumping on the bandwagon with such hurtful allegations. Os is the loving, amazing inspirational person we know him to be.’

But the bandwagon was rolling and in the general cacophony her messages barely received an airing either in the South African media or abroad. Of far greater interest was a
New York Times
magazine profile headlined ‘The Fast Life Of Oscar Pistorius’, to which few in South Africa had paid much attention when it was published a year earlier. Now it was being quoted everywhere. The piece, published in 2012, prior to the London Olympics and Paralympics, was balanced
and largely complimentary. But selective reading provided useful ammunition for the new Pistorius-bashing battalions.

At the time, Pistorius thought he had done a good job of getting the
New York Times
journalist on his side; only in retrospect did he see that he had tried a little too hard, opened up a little too much. He had allowed the reporter into his life in a way that had now backfired on him. Pistorius had picked up the journalist in his car at Johannesburg airport and driven him to his home at speeds that might have landed him in jail in the United States; he had taken him along to watch him fire guns at a shooting range; he had confided in him about the difficulty he had falling asleep. Those snippets had now been cherry-picked by other newspapers and transformed into evidence that he was a maniacally fast driver and a half-crazed, irresponsible gun nut.

Yet he could not deny there was some truth to the charges. Speed was his thing, he was young, his friend the luxury car dealer Justin Divaris sometimes lent him some of the fastest cars on the market. Driving at night from a club or a restaurant in Johannesburg back home to Pretoria on a practically empty four-lane highway, or out on the straight, flat roads of the South African bush, the temptation was too great. He could not resist putting his foot right down and driving at 140, 150, 160 mph. And he did so without fear of paying any penalties. Fame had given him a sense of entitlement. Matthew Syed, a journalist for
The Times
of London who competed for Great Britain at table tennis in two Olympic Games, spent three days with him in 2007. Syed wrote afterwards that Pistorius had been ‘charming and likeable’ but when they got into his car he seemed to become another person. ‘He drove at double the speed limit while talking on his mobile phone, which surprised me even more,’ Syed wrote. ‘When I nervously asked why he wasn’t worried about the police, he said: “They wouldn’t want to touch me.” ’

As for guns, they were a passion – or rather, had been a passion. He never wanted to hold one in his hand again.

Before, guns had been ever-present in his life. His father loved guns; so did his uncles and his grandfather on the Pistorius side of the family. The Afrikaners had conquered the southern tip of Africa with guns. They were proud of that heritage, the Pistorius clan. It was part of who they were. They were not going to give up the tradition now that things had changed in their country and their people were not the bosses anymore. Besides, he had enjoyed guns. They were beautiful mechanical devices, nice to handle, thrilling to fire. When stressed or sleepless, both of which he was frequently, there was no more cleansing release than going to the shooting range to pump bullets with unerring accuracy into a distant target. One day in 2011 he had been so pleased with himself after a shoot at the range that he posted on Twitter, ‘Had a 96% headshot over 300 m from 50 shots! Bam!’

A more secret pleasure that he shared with some aficionados was shooting dumdum bullets at watermelons and watching them explode like the heads of the villains in PlayStation games, another pastime he enjoyed.

Pistorius winced at the recollection, but it was not, he felt, as if he had been a crazy, gun-toting loner, as the papers were seeking to portray him now. It was not crazy at all to go about armed in a country where the general perception was that crime was out of control. Like so many others, he saw a justification in carrying a gun with him every time he left his home.

Yet he never felt entirely safe. Among the details from the
New York Times
story that the South African press were omitting to mention was one that shed light on what would be his central contention when the trial began – namely, that he lived in a permanent state of anxiety at the prospect of coming under attack, especially at night. He had told
the
New York Times
journalist that the security alarm had gone off in his house the night before he had met him and that he had responded in a panic, grabbing the gun by the side of his bed and tiptoeing fearfully down the stairs.

In another context, the reporter had signalled what a nice guy Pistorius was by noting how ‘shockingly unperturbed’ he had been in trying everyday situations, such as waiting far too long for a car to pick him up at the airport. His sense of entitlement had its limits: in similar circumstances, the
New York Times
reporter wrote, prima donna American athletes would have blown a fuse.

Retelling that kind of story was not high on the media agenda now. The chief imperative seemed to be to flesh out the image of Pistorius as a criminal monster, and much of the press in South Africa, where there are next to no prohibitions on what is published about impending court cases, delivered. A cascade of articles appeared under headlines such as ‘Not Everyone Surprised By Oscar’s Fall From Grace’ and ‘Fast Cars, Hot Temper, Guns: Finding The Real Oscar Pistorius’. Information spilled out about the pistols he owned, licenses he had applied for to acquire assault rifles and shotguns, more late-night runs to shooting ranges, complete with pictures, and the fascination generally of the male members of his family with lethal weaponry. After it emerged later that between them he, his father, two of his uncles and his grandfather owned fifty-five guns, a South African comedian joked on stage, not entirely in jest, that the Pistoriuses were an ‘armed militia’ and a menace to the state.

The gag seemed less funny when the news broke, six weeks after Valentine’s Day, that Carl Pistorius had also been involved in a woman’s death. It had happened five years earlier, but charges had been quickly dropped, citing insufficient evidence. The incident barely made the news at the time, but following his younger brother’s arrest the state
reopened the case. Carl appeared in court on March 27, 2013 in relation to an accident in which a car he was driving crashed into a motorcycle, killing the woman on it. The charge was culpable homicide, the state’s accusation being that he had been driving negligently at the time of the collision. If found guilty he might have faced jail, but a magistrate ruled in Carl’s favor, determining that there was no proof that he had either seen the victim’s motorbike or could have avoided hitting it. Carl walked free.

But the damage had already been done, for the charges against Carl helped embellish negative perceptions of his famous brother, depicting him as belonging to a family genetically predisposed to trouble. To the stories about the guns and fast cars the South African press added some convincing allegations that he had a habit of partying with members of Johannesburg’s criminal underworld, that he hobnobbed with nightclub bouncers who sold their services as mafia enforcers. And so it went on. The image he had painstakingly constructed lay in ruins, replaced by that of a shamelessly self-engrossed superstar who placed no limits, legal or otherwise, on the fast life he led.

The police, eager to join battle in the court of public opinion, dug up for the press an incident from Pistorius’s past. In 2009 he had been arrested for assault and held overnight at the same Pretoria police station to which he would be first taken after shooting Reeva. The accusation was that he had slammed a door on a female guest called Casseby Taylor Memory at a twenty-first birthday party held at his home, injuring her leg. But it had also been reported that the woman, who was nineteen, had been drunk, and that he had denied assaulting her and had been cleared of all charges. This, it turned out, was the basis on which a police spokeswoman had said on the morning of the shooting that he had a history of ‘previous incidents’ of
domestic violence. No other charges of this kind were pressed against him, but while back in 2009, fresh from his triumphs at the previous year’s Beijing Games, the public had been predisposed to take his denial of wrongdoing at face value, now they were inclined towards the sinister possibility that he had taken advantage of his celebrity to escape the rap.

But there was little point in denying that he had a hot-headed streak in him and that he was prone to behavior that might be considered understandable in an adolescent but was rash to the point of imbecility in a well-known individual who needed to be attentive to his public image. It was not in dispute that, a few weeks before shooting Reeva, he had been at a fashionable Johannesburg restaurant called Tasha’s fiddling with a friend’s Glock pistol that he was hiding under the table. It was lunchtime and the restaurant was packed. The gun went off and a bullet ricocheted off the floor, brushing a friend’s leg. Realizing that someone could have been killed, but realizing too the damage to his reputation if the story got out, Pistorius was relieved when the friend who owned the gun offered to take the blame. As it happened, the restaurant owners, who would have been mortified to lose his custom, made light of the incident. But it would come back to haunt him when the prosecutor at the murder trial would cite it as yet another instance of his recklessness with guns.

Before, he reflected, people were prepared to believe the best of him; now they were primed to believe the worst. Those who wanted to believe he was guilty of murder were satisfied that they had found ample corroborating material. One, a well-known journalist, proposed that, far from being riven with regret, Pistorius’s true state of mind was, ‘Okay. Can we get this over with now, please? I’m Oscar Pistorius, the Blade Runner. Can we move on so I can get back to my running?’ The journalist set about expounding her theory – namely, that fame
had devoured him to such a degree that he believed himself to be above ordinary human rules; that he had licence to kill.

This, too, was the view of the state prosecutor, Gerrie Nel. Were the judge at his murder trial to share it, Pistorius would be found guilty of murder and go to jail. His response would be that, far from having behaved out of a sense of superior entitlement, he had acted, however recklessly and misguidedly, and however bitterly he regretted it now, out of a fear of crime shared by all ordinary South Africans. His defense would be that he lived in a country where to be paranoid was not only normal, but reasonable.