Reeva: A Mother's Story (13 page)

When they first met, Reeva contacted Abigail in London to tell her about him. As usual, the girls just picked up where they left off. They were very different in many ways, but they just fitted arm in arm even when they lived in different hemispheres. Abigail remembers a long message exchange via their computers one weekend in which Reeva said she’d met the most amazing guy. ‘Go and have a little stalk!’ she told Abigail.

‘She gives me his name and the first thing I see is that he’s younger than her,’ Abigail tells me. ‘Before I’d gone to London and she’d gone to Johannesburg, I’d told her to go to Johannesburg and find herself a nice man, not a boy. When I saw Warren’s age I messaged back asking why she had fallen for this boy? He was a few years younger than her. “You know what’s going to happen,” I typed. “You’re going to grow older and you’re going to outgrow each other. You’re going to break your heart and you’re going to be a mess.” She was like, “Oh, Abi, you’re always so sensible, how can you be such a dampener?” And I was saying, “I’m not being a dampener, I’m telling you how it’s most likely going to be.”’

Reeva and Warren were very happy and lived together for five or six years. She brought him home and Barry loved him. He could see he would look after her. Abigail met him, too, when she was flying out to London. Reeva spent the afternoon with her in Johannesburg airport while she waited to get the connecting flight to Heathrow and she brought Warren along. Abigail said she could see he was lovely and that they were great around each other. She could tell by the way he spoke to her that he treated her with respect.

For a long time Reeva and Warren lived happily with their two cats, Milk and Panther. They ran a fruit and vegetable company together that exported fresh produce to Saudi Arabia and Mauritius, and installed fresh produce inside Makro stores throughout South Africa. Reeva realised that modelling income could be good, but erratic, so she made sure she had income from other sources. Often, they’d be up at 3 a.m. going to the market, then they might both go to the gym together, and on to the office which was in Warren’s mother’s home. They worked hard and they enjoyed a fun social life, meeting up with friends in the evening, going to the cinema, enjoying the young buzz of the big city. Warren was away travelling a lot, but he loved coming home, because Reeva was a homemaker. ‘She made everything warm,’ he told me. ‘I’d walk in and everything was nice and warm.’ Reeva had lots of new friends from the modelling industry, but liked to stay close to her old PE friends, such as Kristin, who were so important to her. She once left a message for Kim and something in her intonation made Kim realise she was feeling a bit down. She called her straight away and said, ‘Coz, are you okay?’ Reeva said she was fed up with the fake people in Johannesburg, she missed her real friends.

Initially Kristin and Reeva lived in neighbouring complexes, but when Reeva moved to Warren’s house on the other side of town the two girls made sure they met up regularly. At least once a month they’d go and have tea and cake together for a one-to-one chat. There’s a chain in South Africa called Exclusive Books and the girls’ favourite thing to do was to go for what they called their Exclusive session – sharing their news and feelings about life with each other. Now Reeva’s gone, I love hearing from her friends about the fun and camaraderie they used to take for granted. ‘Typically we’d grab a pile of magazines and laugh and talk about boys,’ Kristin told me. ‘She’d have her favourite Red Cappuccino made from Rooibos tea and we both valued that time.’ Because Kristin is a bank worker, in Compliance, she had a good perspective on Reeva’s world, and vice versa. The girls in the modelling industry are tough on themselves and tough on each other. Other girls could be so bitchy that Reeva wouldn’t be praised on her achievements. From Kristin’s perspective in banking, she’d tell her what an amazing achievement things like her
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cover was. She’d say to her, ‘You’re only young once. You can look back one day and say, “Oh my word, I had such a good body!” Go for it.’ She supported it. Reeva did have some misgivings, she was conscious of the lads’ mag image, but Kristin would reassure her that it wasn’t as if she were posing nude!

And Reeva would compliment Kristin. ‘She didn’t hold everyone up to the crazy expectations of her industry,’ she told me. ‘She could see beauty in average people. She was a really, really good friend.’ The girls loved going to the Jewish area of Johannesburg. They often talked about getting a mezuzah – a scroll inscribed with Hebrew verses that is traditionally fixed to the door of Jewish homes. They loved to visit a particular store in the Jewish shopping centre to get things for baking. They both loved to bake and eat cake. Kristin says Reeva was always up for going out to have cake together. On rare occasions, if she had a big job coming up, she’d say she couldn’t, but she wasn’t uptight about eating. One time Kristin called her after she’d had a minor car accident, just a fender bender, to tell her what happened and say she was going to get checked out at the hospital. Reeva insisted on coming to sit with her in the waiting room. ‘I told her that it wasn’t necessary, but she came anyway and sat with me for several hours. That’s the kind of friend she was,’ she says. ‘Another time, I was moving flats within a complex and she literally turned up and helped me move all my belongings, bag by bag.’

Kristin and Reeva never spoke about returning to Port Elizabeth. She thinks it may have initially been her plan to move back one day, but she had found her own life in Johannesburg with Warren. If anywhere, she thinks she would have eventually moved to Cape Town: ‘We’d say ideally we wouldn’t want to raise children in Johannesburg.’

Reeva loved Cape Town. It was where her beloved grandpa lived and home to her cousin Kim, her childhood comrade, to whom she had grown close again as a grown woman. Twice, Reeva stayed for prolonged periods with Kim. She travelled there for a month, first, in 2011 to see if there was a market for her in the Cape modelling scene. She was accompanying Warren, who was opening up a branch of his Freshmart produce stores inside the Makro store in Montague Gardens, and they were due to stay in a guest house with Warren’s appointed branch manager and assistant. Reeva, however, was quickly on the phone to ask if she could come and stay with Kim because the guest-house shower was dirty and the room smelled. Kim’s son Jason had moved out to stay with his girlfriend so they had an extra room and Reeva ended up staying a month. She craved the warmth and bustle of family life. She’d ask Kim what was for supper each night so that she could help shop and cook and make it a special occasion. She’d asked when they were going to visit Lyn – Kim’s mum, her aunt – and then suggest they go over that afternoon. She’d enquire how often Kim saw her sister Sharon and work out a plan. Kim says she gave off irresistible energy. Dion, Kim’s husband, loved it when Reeva was in the house because all he heard was laughing. There was such happiness in the house. She joked, she baked, she gave so much. She had an amazing influence on the whole family.

Reeva next came back for six months, flying to and from Johannesburg, dipping her toe in the modelling market in Cape Town and again helping Warren out. ‘She was like an angel in everything she gifted us,’ says Kim, who is so grateful to the difference Reeva made to her teenagers’ lives. Reeva loved catching up with Kim and Dion, but she sensed the children needed her more, so she made a point of connecting with Gypsy and Rain. She took bonding with them very seriously. She would sit by the pool and tan with them, spend quality time chatting about the ups and downs they were experiencing as teenagers, making popcorn, watching films, giving them advice, just laughing and giggling. She’d write ‘I love my family [insert smiley face]’ on the kitchen board and put up different inspirational quotes each day. Dion and Kim would go out to dinner and when they came home late they’d be careful not to wake up Reeva. She had become the mother of their house too! When she came in from work, she’d walk in and call out ‘Helloooo?’ And this became a thing after she went back to Johannesburg. Everyone would walk in and say ‘Hellooooo?’

Reeva had a particularly special bond with Gypsy, who was having a troubled time as a teenager. She did so much for her, largely by making it clear that she was always there for her. One day Gypsy was due to do a five-kilometre walk with her school and she insisted Reeva accompany her, so this twenty-eight-year-old woman climbed in the van and went to school for the day. Gypsy’s whole grade were in awe of this beautiful, friendly model and that, in turn, made Gypsy feel special. That was typical Reeva. She was so righteous, so ready to help other people. She was there to take on everything for everyone. Family was more important to her than anything else.

As much as we had misgivings about her being in Johannesburg, she seemed very sorted and structured about her life there. Whenever she came home to visit us, especially for Christmas, we knew what to expect. She’d go straight to check the fridge, which was never clean. One year she fired the girl who worked in the house because she didn’t clean between the tiles on the floor. She liked everything to be clean and in order. She was a neat freak before she even went to Johannesburg. She’d get irritated by me and Barry in our senile state, you know. I used to say, ‘One day you’ll realise…’ but she’d say, ‘No, I’ll never be like that.’ When she travelled back to Johannesburg, she left a long list of chores that Barry had to do and I had to do on a daily basis. That’s how she was. Her wardrobe, her drawers, everything was immaculately tidy. That’s why when I saw her jeans lying on the floor in Oscar’s bedroom – that fact came up in the trial – her friends and I all knew they’d been moved for sure: because she would
never
leave them on the floor. She was tidy to the extreme, OCD big time. There was something wrong about those clothes allegedly found strewn on the floor. Her friends said the same. She was always impeccably tidy. I keep trying to find sense in what happened that night and I think she tried to be like that for him, polished and perfect in her own way, and I think she just irritated him. Because he liked to be the one in control and she wouldn’t like to be told what to do or how to be.

She had her own pride and her own dignity about how she carried herself. This extended to me. She didn’t like me having a drink when she was younger. She’d say to me, ‘Mommy, we’re going home now. You’re not looking good.’ She didn’t drink much at all herself. She liked to be in control. I would have liked her sometimes not to be that controlled. For me, a glass of wine is a relaxation. You don’t have to be drunk. It’s just about chatting and talking rubbish and switching off after a hard day’s work.

Three Months With Oscar

Christmas 2012 was the first Reeva did not spend with us in twenty-nine years. In October, she sent us a message to say she wanted to treat the two of us to a weekend with her in Kuzuku Lodge in the Addo Elephant National Park, an amazing conservation reserve for elephants, buffalo and black rhino with beautiful colonies of gannets and penguins. It’s a special place, but I realised immediately that this was to prepare us for her not coming home for Christmas because she had never missed one year ever. She asked me to break the news gently to Barry. As it turned out, she gave us a wonderful time in Addo – game drives, lovely dinner parties in the evening, just the three of us. Perfect.

She had split up with Warren after five or six years and had been seeing Francois Hougaard, the Springbok rugby union player, and he was phoning her often during the weekend. They were close but Reeva said she had decided they should just be friends. She genuinely liked him, I know, but having recently come out of a long-term relationship she didn’t want to jump into anything too quickly and she didn’t want to be part of a celebrity stable. She was twenty-nine and she wanted someone to settle down with in good time. She was looking for a soul mate and Francois was five years younger. Another boy! She’d never discussed with me about wanting to have babies, but I believe she was starting to think that way. We all get to that stage. When I asked about him, she said, ‘Mama, Francois is very style-conscious. He puts a lot of thought into the way he dresses. He has about twenty different watches and matches his shoes very carefully…’ And she didn’t want that kind of person. Lots of girls run after those kind of guys, but Reeva was at heart a simple, home-loving kind of girl. She didn’t want to run with a pack. And once she’d made up her mind, that would be that. Girls who are pretty learn early on not to tolerate nonsense because they often attract the wrong kind of guy. When
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asked her to name her favourite spot on Earth for their ‘Introducing Reeva’ feature, she’d replied: ‘On a hammock in my grandpa’s back garden in Cape Town. I can’t go there any more because he’s no longer with us, but I dream about that place every day.’ The red-carpet life came with her work as a model; it was not what she wanted in the long term.

Oscar had seen Reeva somewhere and asked a mutual friend to introduce them. They met over lunch on 4 November 2012, through Justin Divaris, the chief executive officer of Daytona Group which distributes McLaren cars, at a racing event at the Kyalami grand prix circuit in Gauteng. At this event Reeva laughingly agreed to accompany Oscar that evening to the South African Sports Awards 2012 because he did not have a date. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing for her, although it turned out he had long set his eyes on her. A friend rang the next day and pointed me towards coverage of the event on YouTube. I looked it up and saw her on the red carpet as his guest at the ceremony, which was held at the Sandton Convention Centre. They looked very sparky, very amused to be in each other’s company at such short notice. She was wearing an elegant pale pink halter-neck fringed dress with her long blonde hair held back in a simple chic ponytail. I was thinking, who is this man? I called to ask her if this was a new special friend. She said no, she’d just accepted his invitation as a friend. The day after the event, she really didn’t seem to appreciate the public speculation that came from them being seen together.