Reeva: A Mother's Story (7 page)

In the weeks leading up to the trial, the African National Congress Women’s League ladies phoned me and said, ‘June, what do you need? Transport? Money for flights? Accommodation?’ They swept in and organised everything for me. Jacqui Mofokeng, she could change the world! She’s a wonderful, empathetic woman. She said it was the wish of the ANCWL, together with the South African Progressive Women’s Movement, to help me attend court so that I could get some closure. She convinced me that I would feel stronger by the day if I could witness the trial and see justice at work. I told them I’d stayed previously in a comfortable guest house in the university area which I liked because it’s small, a beautiful private house, and the owners are so sensitive and caring. A hotel is not private; it’s impersonal and I didn’t want to be on public display away from the courtroom as well. I wanted to stay somewhere away from the circus, somewhere I could be myself. The ANCWL ladies investigated the guest house. They approved it and they booked it for me. They also sorted out my flight from Port Elizabeth and organised a car which Jennifer was to drive as she was going to accompany me to court in Barry’s absence.

And I have been so grateful for their support on every level. People said, ‘What’s this with the ANC Women’s League? Is it political?’ It’s not political. They support me like a friend. They’re like sisters to me. They removed all the anxieties about costs, and travel, and our general wellbeing. They wanted to come and visit Barry here at home while I was away in Pretoria and check he was well. Shoki Tshabalala, head of Social Development in Gauteng, promised to monitor our welfare. They were concerned about the effects of the trial on us. We are ordinary people with no resources to fund the many logistical and administrative repercussions of this tragedy. We have no experience of the law and legal procedures, but we are guided by Dup and words cannot do justice to the selfless and generous support he and his wife Truia have given us. They are incredible people.

We arrived in Pretoria on the evening of 2 March after a ninety-minute flight, Dup, Truia, Jennifer and myself. Pretoria is a very pleasant city, but I would not be driving through its jacaranda-lined suburbs, walking on its pavements dressed up in clothes suitable for a courtroom, were it not for the loss of my daughter. I had to try so hard not to cry because she was the reason I was there – but she was not there. I felt that acute sense of absence most when I went to Johannesburg or Pretoria. I’d only ever flown to Johannesburg to stay with Reeva. It was all horrific, but I had to be there for Reeva. People respected that. They said wonderful things to me. ‘You’re so strong,’ they said. But I wasn’t and I’m not. I’ve already collapsed a few times. It’s as if I’m in purgatory. Sometimes I’m feel as if I’m going mad with it all. I had to consult a counsellor. I ended up crying and crying, but until the trial was over, I was determined to hold it in.

We printed a beautiful photograph of Reeva with her dates, 1983–2013, to pin on our jacket lapels and stick on the back of our court passes. That way Reeva would come to court with us every day. I had to think through what clothes I could wear to be respectful of the judge and the court – a smart black blazer, crisp white shirt and black trousers. I would wear the pearl necklace that Reeva saved up her pocket money and bought for me from her teacher’s jewellery shop when she was twelve and an amethyst ring I gave her for her twenty-seventh birthday.

We went for one day, as Dup had suggested before the proceedings began. Monday 3 March was a miserable, rainy day. During the fifteen-minute drive from the guest house to the modern red-brick and stone High Court building in Madiba Street, I had to steel myself to attend this necessary judicial process on Reeva’s behalf. My stomach was in knots. My heart was beating too quickly. I felt terribly on edge. The pouring rain had not deterred the media, who had encamped along the pavements flanking the High Court entrance to bring their audiences up-to-the-minute coverage of ‘the Trial of the Century’. I walked through the tunnel of photographers and cameramen just trying to look where I was going and not trip over the tangle of cables that lay across the pavement. My steps through the gate and down towards the door that would lead us to Court Room GD confirmed the finality of my daughter’s tragic end, leading me to the official process that would bring the man responsible for her death to justice – we hoped. It was difficult to bear, especially with the media frenzy on top of that. I hadn’t anticipated the noise and claustrophobic presence of cameras, lenses, reporters, microphones, generators whirring on the pavements, people shouting: ‘June, how are you feeling?’ ‘June, over here!’ They were shouting my first name. It seemed so rude. I was on show. If I broke down or cried, everyone was watching me.

Even before I flew to Pretoria, I had had to adapt to this new lack of privacy. Regardless how I might try to go about my daily business and errands quietly, everyone recognises me. I’ve been in their sitting rooms on the TV coverage. People think they know me. Most of them want to hug me. And you can’t refuse love, can you? It shows they care. Or worse, they stop me and
think
they know me… from somewhere, but where? Can I hang on a minute while they work it out? I say quietly, ‘I’m Reeva’s mum.’

Present tense. I will always be Reeva’s mum.

As I took my seat on the right-hand side of the front row bench that has been reserved with a placard for the Steenkamp family (the other side was reserved for the Pistorius clan), I knew what happened over the forecast three weeks would be difficult to sit through, but I took comfort from the fact that it would be a necessary evil that would help determine the truth of what happened to my child. It was so important I was there. It was important for
him
to know that I was there, that Reeva’s mother, who gave birth to her and loved her, was there for her. This wasn’t about the ‘slain model’ of the headlines. This wasn’t about ‘Oscar Pistorius’s girlfriend’. This was, is, about my child, my beautiful daughter – the most wonderful, perfect child who meant everything to me. I really, really loved her. Barry as well. We were besotted with her.

From the minute she was born, I thought she was just beautiful.

Early Years

Reeva was born on 19 August 1983, at Greenpoint Hospital in Cape Town. It was eighteen years since I’d given birth to Simone and I was overcome with emotion, revelling in the glowing feeling that comes with producing an adorable little newborn baby. The midwives put her in the cot next to my bed and I couldn’t take my eyes off her: the most perfect, beautiful child in the world. Friends came to see us in hospital and I remember hearing them whisper as they left the ward, ‘Did you hear June say how beautiful she is?’ They thought this was funny because my baby girl had one eye still closed and she was all purple and wrinkly, but she was everything that I needed to feel fulfilled: a precious baby who had dropped from heaven. I was so thankful to count all her fingers and toes. After Barry and I married in 1981, I became pregnant but suffered an ectopic pregnancy. The experience was emotionally distressing and I was gently advised that, even after a period of recovery, I had a reduced chance of conceiving again. Then I caught toxoplasmosis, a parasitic disease, from the cats. The doctor prescribed me drugs to treat it on the assumption that I wasn’t pregnant, because the drugs can put an unborn child at risk. I didn’t realise I was in the very early stages of pregnancy… Can you imagine? Although I was overjoyed to be expecting, I worried to the day she was born that my baby would be blind, deaf or deformed in some way. I would put my hands on my tummy and just will this baby to grow healthily. I cherished her even before she was born. It was a very stressful period of time. And then this perfect little baby arrived. I wanted to call her Rebecca. When Barry came into the maternity ward he said he’d thought of a beautiful name for her: Reeva. A name from the Bible. So she was christened Reeva Rebecca Steenkamp.

Barry and I had been married for two years before Reeva came along. I was thirty-six, nearly thirty-seven; he was forty. We’d both been married before and had one child apiece: Simone, who I gave birth to when I was eighteen and still living with my first husband Tony in Blackburn, Lancashire, and Adam, from Barry’s first marriage, who now lives in England. After two years of marriage, we were overjoyed to have a child together, we really were. Reeva made us a little family unit. Barry came to collect us from hospital in the Combi van. Just so that we felt like a complete family, he brought all my dogs. I looked out and honestly you could hardly see Barry for dogs. We carried Reeva home in a carrycot, a contented baby. Those early months felt very blessed. I couldn’t wait for her to wake up in the morning and start rocking her little cot. Barry was the same. Simone, too, couldn’t stop picking her up to cuddle her. We were all just mesmerised by her.

In 1983 Barry and I were running the Burliegh Equitation Centre in the middle of Table View, a west coast suburb of Cape Town. We had 160 horses in livery and a little restaurant on site, which I ran. We used to stage show jumping events and organise hunting meets. It was a very sociable world and we are both gregarious people. Reeva came everywhere with us. We never left her. If we went out for supper, she came with us. She was part of our busy, sociable life. She was under the table in her cot in the restaurant two days after she was born. We lived in accommodation right in the middle of the centre. When you live with animals, you spend most of the time outside. We never had much money but there was no shortage of love and contentment. Our farm home was modest but cosy, with pictures of horses on the walls and lots of people in and out. With all the noise and bustle, Reeva could sleep on a clothes line.

I didn’t go back to work properly until she was four. I wanted to spend every minute of the formative years with her. We had an open house. There was always a lot of fun going on with the young people who had horses with us. Claire, our next-door neighbour now in Greenbushes, was one of the girls on the farm. She was at school in Cape Town and she and her sister kept their horses with us. She used to come every Friday to our little farmhouse to sleep over with six or seven other girls. Michael and Lyn would drop off their daughters Kim and Sharon every weekend; they had their own room with us, and the cousins made quite a foursome with Adam and little Reeva.

I remember one day when I had to go out, I asked a lovely young girl called Michelle, who was studying for her final school year matriculation exams, to come and look after Reeva. She called on me only the other day, having dug out these sweet photographs of that day she spent babysitting. She’d been thinking about Reeva and suddenly remembered she had them somewhere. It was such a kind thing for her to do and I’ve put them all in a frame together to display at home. There are cute pictures – Reeva, aged two, smirking behind a pair of oversized sunglasses. Reeva sitting on the kitchen floor, covered in flour up to her ears, with the contents of a kitchen cupboard around her. Reeva, trying to eat toothpaste from one of twelve tubes I’d stored away after a bulk buy in Makro, the wholesale store. A real little character. Those were the days, hey?

At the age of two, she had her first pony and she was so proud to wear her little black riding jacket, tie and jodhpurs. She was best friends with a toddler called Melt, my friend Colleen Loebscher’s son. They were inseparable. We used to feed them together, bath them together. They used to play happily for hours, zooming around on matching little red plastic pedal tractors that we’d bought for them at the Co-op where all the farmers go to get feed for their animals. Later she had a red-and-white Pro BMX bike, constructed by my best male friend, Allen le Roux Thomas. Barry has many talents but he can’t put things like bikes together, so Allen assembled it for her. Reeva was so proud of it. We took a photo of her standing with her hand on her hip behind her new bike, looking very composed, as if she’d reached a new milestone of maturity. Poor Allen – he was to pass away just before his fiftieth birthday while riding his favourite horse, Beetlejuice, at Bloubergstrand. He simply dropped dead. That was terrible. He was so close to Reeva.

There were other interruptions to an idyllic childhood. When she was about five or six, Reeva had her tonsils taken out. My mother paid for the operation. We took Reeva home from hospital, put her to bed and gave her ice cream to soothe her throat as the nurses had suggested. She went to sleep and a few hours later woke up crying (thank goodness, because if she hadn’t woken up she would have died). I hurried to comfort her and she projectile-vomited blood everywhere. We rushed her back to hospital. A friend, who was an anaesthetist, was on duty and called a surgeon immediately to close up the wound. Something had gone wrong and she nearly bled to death. It turned out the surgeon who had operated on her had been going through a difficult time in his personal life and every one of the five girls he operated on that day had to go back into hospital to recover. We were both there for her, hovering over her hospital bed, very anxious about how she’d pull through. But she bounced back.

In 1990, at the age of seven, she went to her first show, the Western Province Horse Society Summer Show in the middle of the racecourse at the Cape Hunt and Polo Club on the cutest little skewbald pony, Pinto. She won seven rosettes, including a rosette for Best Walk. I don’t believe the rosettes were for her competence. A week beforehand, something had dropped on her fingernail and it had died and was about to fall off. She had all the judges enthralled with this wobbly fingernail. They were so taken up with her and her engaging character that they gave her all these rosettes. Her charisma, not her pony skills, won her the prizes.

After Pinto, she graduated to Ziggy Stardust. When Ziggy had a foal and couldn’t be ridden for a while, she moved on to sedate A-grade ponies – calm, well schooled and so ancient one died in the paddock of old age. We just wanted her to be safe. I went hunting every Sunday with lots of friends. We all had horses together. It was a happy, social scene. Reeva wasn’t as absolutely mad keen on horses as us, but she loved life at the yard, particularly following the vet around. One day we’d called him to attend a sick horse and she watched him inject the horse in the rump, her big blue eyes out on stalks. Just after the vet had left, we were looking for Reeva when we heard her screaming. Barry had all these plastic syringes and bits and pieces lying around the tack room and she’d taken one, filled it with I don’t know what, and squirted it up poor old Pinto’s bottom. She was playing the vet, and nearly got kicked by two hind hooves for her effort!