The Brand (14 page)

Lights flashed. The cameras snapped. TV
cameras zoomed on her and anchor-personnel stuck their microphones
in her face, demanding to know who the young man in an immaculate
Armani suit with her was. She told them that the 16-year-old boy
was a friend of hers whose dream she was making come true by
bringing him to the Oscars. He was one of the children at a charity
home in Brooklyn, New York, sponsored by her husband, Jason Kane,
who couldn’t make it to Los Angeles for the Oscars due to
commitments to Yankees activities. The live feed was instantly
broadcast to millions of television viewers around the world. As
intended by Brand Jo S’s PR people, the public was touched by that
act of generosity and humanity. That night, Joelyn Smith did the
public – a large section of whom adored this young woman who had
come from nowhere to become America’s darling – even more proud by
picking up an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in the Chris
Woodyard action-drama.

Later that night, Joelyn attended an
“after-party” at a nightclub that had been booked weeks in advance
and was closed to uninvited guests that evening. Joelyn got drunk
on premium quality alcohol and high on premium quality cocaine. In
the morning, she woke up in her hotel suite at the Beverley Hills
Hilton with sparse recollection of the previous night. It was
10.09am. She had a severe headache. She was hungry. But most of
all, she was alone on the bed and lonely in the hotel room
suite.

When she went to the bathroom, the suite came
alive with voices, and Joelyn discovered that five people who were
on her payroll were there with her. They had taken their
dangerously drunken boss the previous night from the after-party
venue and transported her in a black limousine to the Hilton. Upon
her specific instructions, they ordered room service now to bring
her breakfast and a bottle of Dom Perignon premium rosé. When the
food came, she banished all her people out of the suite. She gulped
down half a glass of the rosé and felt her body return to life. She
attacked the food ravenously and washed it down with the red wine.
When it was empty she picked up the phone and ordered room service
to bring another one.

When her husband arrived after 2pm, she had
just opened her third bottle and was standing with her back to the
door, pouring the rosé into a glass. Jason Kane stood at the door
and smiled. ‘Hey, beautiful.’

Joelyn’s heart skipped a beat with excitement
when she heard that voice. She spun around so quickly the action
made her dizzy. She staggered and both the bottle and glass, held
in each hand, slipped from her hand and crashed onto the floor. She
recovered quickly and jumped over the shattered mess to run to him,
but stopped dead in her tracks when she saw the look in his
face.

He was staring at her with a look changing
from curiosity to disdain. ‘You’re drunk.’

A fiercely embarrassed look covered her face.
‘Please don’t be angry with me. I was lonely…I...I…’ She choked on
her words and suddenly burst into tears.

He stepped forward and pulled her into his
arms. He pressed her head to his shoulder and gently stroked her
hair. ‘Ssh. Don’t cry. I’m here, baby.’

‘I missed you, Jason,’ she sobbed.

‘I’m here, baby. I’m here. Flew outta New
York as soon as I could. I’m here now. You don’t have to cry no
more.’

She pulled back from him and wiped the tears
from her face. ‘Do you know how much I love you?’ she asked in a
small, childish voice.

‘I do,’ he answered compassionately, taking
her small, soft hands inside his. ‘I love you too, baby, a
lot.’

She fell up against his big frame and hugged
him strongly. ‘Oh Jason! I’d die without you!’

They held each other like that for a while
until their bodies communicated the need for sexual gratification.
She dropped her hand down to his belt and unfastened it. She slid
down his body and pulled his pants down his legs. His penis dangled
in weak form between his legs. She took it in her mouth and it
awakened. She wet its head and stroked it with her tongue for a
while. Gradually it grew in size until it was standing at full
turgidity. She threw back her head and stared with amazed eyes at
the sheer strength and size of the thing. It was formidable when
erect. It was no longer the pathetic little worm it had been
moments ago. It was now a massive, thick slab of brown chocolate,
and it was all because of her skill…

She rose to her feet and pulled off her
blouse, exposing her naked breasts. He loved them. They were round,
firm and natural. ‘My pussy’s hot, wet and ready for you,’ she
invited him with naughty eyes.

He placed his hands on her waist and
lifted her up. She giggled and wrapped her legs around his body.
She threw back her head as he sucked on her taut nipples. He kicked
his trousers off his feet and carried her to the bed. He placed her
down and she frantically pulled off her shorts and spread her legs
open. Her vagina was shaven smooth. Tattooed right above it in
black ink were the words:
JK’s Property
.

Jason frowned quizzically at her. ‘When did
you get it done?’

‘Day before yesterday. It’s my gift to
JK.’

He laughed out aloud in amusement. JK was her
nickname for his penis. He lowered himself to his knees before her
proffered fruit. He cupped her buttocks in his hands and buried his
head between her thighs. He took her vagina in his mouth and
stroked it vigorously with his mouth. He licked it and prodded
inside it with his tongue until she clasped his big head and
commanded him onto her. He clapped shut her thighs and sliced his
muscular rod into her cleft. He cut into her and she exploded in
cries of pleasure…

In March of 2012, Jansen Vermuelen finished
shooting the remaining episodes of her twice-weekly reality
programme for ESPN. Free from contractual obligations for the
moment, and unencumbered by romantic liaisons, she took a trip
alone to her motherland and stayed at her late father’s Sandhurst
mansion, where for a week she did some soul-searching and tried to
figure out her future with regards to the sport of tennis. Her
half-brother, Hudson Vermuelen, divided his time between the
Sandhurst mansion and his Sandton apartment, but for the first time
in five days of her visit he stayed with her at the Sandhurst house
before a business trip took him to Cape Town.

In Johannesburg, Jansen took her brother’s
Porsche Cayenne S Turbo and drove it to Heidelberg. Heidelberg is a
peri-urban area that lies to the south of Johannesburg. Gary
Speckman lived there with his partner. Speckman, a brutally honest
character with a controlled temper, had married young and produced
two children with a wife who incessantly berated his love of
tennis, continually reminding him that he was not cut out to be a
tennis star and actually applauding when at thirty-five he retired
from the game altogether and took up full-time employment at an
industrial firm in Liverpool, where he had been born in 1962.

For the following years he toiled for what he
regarded as a pittance, determined to put his two children, both
boys, at university. He had sacrificed his love of tennis for his
children’s future. By 2003, Speckman had saved enough money to send
his children to good universities in England, but his eldest son,
eighteen years old and having just sat for his A-level
examinations, stunned his parents into disbelief by going into
modeling and taking up residence with a 25-year-old man who was his
lover. Two years later, their second son, born in 1987, turned
eighteen and celebrated his birthday amongst a group of British
troops he was stationed with in a province of Afghanistan, after
being trained in military operations by the British army, which he
had joined at the age of sixteen. Two days after celebrating his
eighteenth birthday the boy died after a roadside bomb detonated
and sent the military van he was in with other soldiers flying into
the air and landing on its roof, after throwing mangled bodies all
around its immediate surroundings.

Speckman buried his child, wrote a
strongly-worded letter to then-Prime Minister Tony Blair giving him
a piece of his mind about both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
divorced his wife and left the United Kingdom for good – in that
order. With the money remaining after the divorce by mutual consent
from his wife of 21 years, Speckman went to South Africa and opened
a tennis academy in Johannesburg. A year later Ugly Joe Vermuelen,
the bad boy of South African business, hired Speckman to train his
daughter tennis. In 2010 Speckman had helped Jansen Vermuelen to
the US Open victory. In 2011 they had parted ways.

Speckman had taken his savings that had
accumulated over the years while training the young Vermuelen
talent and used some of the money to buy a mid-sized landholding in
Lanseria, where he kept horses and other animals. While it remained
a mystery to Jansen how her trainer of many years had taken care of
his sexual needs over all the years that they had maintained a
working relationship, in Lanseria he lived with a strong-boned
White South African woman with a badly spotted face he had met on a
dating site and with whom he shared a passion for country
living.

In 2012, Jansen Vermuelen had returned to
South Africa to ask Gary Speckman to train her again. ‘I don’t want
to call it a miracle, but my wrist has fully healed. I’ve been
going to the Middle East, where a doctor practicing medieval
medicine used acupuncture on the wrist. My doctor in America was
impressed when he scanned my hand for signs of internal damage and
found them to be fully operational.

As if he hadn’t heard her request, Speckman
asked her a question, ‘What’re you doing here? I’ve seen you on
that show that’s on ESPN.’

‘The episodes are shot weeks before. We just
wrapped up shooting the last episodes, so…’ She shrugged
expressively and her voice trailed off.

A moment of pregnant silence followed. It was
broken by the entrance into the room of two dogs, a huge Great Dane
and a tiny Dachshund. They charged into the room and leapt onto
Speckman’s lap, fighting for his attention. He shooed them away and
the Great Dane lay down dejectedly beside him on the couch. The
smaller dog remained on his lap, resting its tiny head on his left
knee and gazing curiously at Jansen.

‘Cute,’ remarked Jansen with a lovely smile
at the dog.

The Dachshund barked.

Speckman stroked its head with a pensive look
in his eyes. He was not, to be strictly honest, a man given to many
words. In his other life, he would have been quite a prophetic
philosopher, but Fate had decided otherwise.

Jansen, not conscious of those hidden
qualities of the man, asked him the most important question of her
visit. ‘Will you train me?’

As stated before, Mr. Gareth Speckman was an
honest man, sometimes to the point of brutality. He said, ‘I will
have to think about it.’

‘What’s that mean, Gary?’ A worried
expression was on her face.

‘It means I’m in a relationship with Sheila,
and I’ve decided I like her very much. On the other hand, I decided
a long time ago that tennis was the dream I wanted to live. Those
two situations make it extremely difficult for me to choose between
the woman I love and a childish dream. I need some time to think
about it.’

‘I understand,’ said Jansen. ‘And I am sorry
for putting you in a difficult position. It’s just that I’ve been
with you for a long time and I can never trust myself with anybody
else to train me. But that shouldn’t force you to make a decision
you don’t want. I will understand if you can’t commit yourself to
training me. I just want you to know that.’

‘Okay,’ Speckman said simply.

Celebrity couples are more often than not
usually rich, famous, fabulous, beautiful and glamorous. Their
stupendous wealth enables them to live in fabulously luxurious and
opulent multi-million dollar homes, often with electrifyingly
breathtaking views. Mr. and Mrs. Smith Kane bought together a house
in Beverley Hills and called it their married home. The house had
seven bedrooms, eight full bathrooms, a tile roof, a sparkling
swimming pool, and various other amenities synonymous with homes of
the wealthy. Jason lived and plied his trade mostly in New York,
while his wife, who had decided to keep her last name for branding
purposes, lived and worked in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, the
couple’s staggering wealth enabled them to juggle their schedules –
with the assistance of paid servants, naturally – to accommodate
time for seeing and being with each other.

Between March and April, Joelyn Smith,
ex-Vermuelen, née Smit, officially Kane, was involved in the making
of a film financed in large part by Warner Bros. The action
thriller, shot on location in Dallas, Texas, was set for a summer
release. In May, she was meant to be shooting scenes for a
different movie, a drama, but this project was delayed by bickering
between the involved studio executives. Joelyn focused her
attention on producing, via her JOY-LINE PICTURES film production
company, a movie based on a best-selling novel. The Academy Award
winner was twenty-seven, and her life was running on a hectic
schedule. She had agents, PAs and time managers to organize her
life. She had personal trainers, dieticians and trained chefs to
keep her figure in trim condition. She had brand managers and image
consultants to oversee the brand that was Joelyn Smith and
constantly work on its improvement.

Granted, Jason Kane, a baseball player
currently worth millions of dollars, also had various people in
charge of life. The people surrounding a sports star or a Hollywood
superstar often do not give a care about the star’s personal life.
That, coupled with the mere fact that either half of a celebrity
couple often has to work far apart from the other half, means that
there is no adequate time for two halves to be together as a
couple. Sex is a basic need that is found at the first group of
Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs.