Part of the Pride (7 page)

Stan and Judy also rekindled my interest in animals. At the time I met Lisa I'd already found another African Grey Parrot, Rebecca, after J.R. died. I convinced the Schmidts that birds could make good pets and they bought a Macaw. Stan had to travel to karate tournaments overseas and the family would take me overseas—a first for me. As well as the karate tournaments, we would go to bird shows. I traveled all over the United States with them and back home in South Africa they took me to places I'd never been, such as Cape Town, the Kruger National Park, and Pilansberg National Park.

As with the baboon and heron incidents, my early encounters with wildlife in the bush gave no indication that I had any natural affinity whatsoever with creatures bigger than parrots and frogs. On one trip to a small game reserve with the Schmidt family,
I decided to take a walk in the bush by myself. I was enjoying the solitude and the sounds and smells of the veld, which made a nice change from suburbia.

Something rustled ahead of me. I froze. I could see the silhouette of a large mammal through the bushes. I heard what sounded like a lion's growl. I turned and ran.

Bushes whipped and scratched at my bare skin and my heart was pounding as I retraced my steps quick time, arms and legs pumping furiously. When I thought I'd covered a safe distance, I stopped and looked back, my chest heaving as I tried to calm my breathing. About a hundred meters away I saw a bull kudu—a large antelope—staring at me. He had covered about the same distance as me, in the opposite direction, after we had both scared the life out of each other.

On another solo hike I came across a dead heron in the shallows of a stream. Curious as ever, I decided I would examine the bird to find out how it had died. I pulled on a wing and it pulled back. Alarmed, I took a step backwards. It must still be alive, I thought, although once again it was lying motionless. Cautiously, I stepped forward and grabbed the wing again. It started to pull back so I tugged harder. I screamed when the crocodile's head broke the surface of the water and it reclaimed, once and for all, the bird it had just killed.

As my own wildness calmed down, my collection of domestic animals started to grow again. A couple of years earlier I'd gone with a mate when he bought an anaconda.

At the time, Annabelle, as he named her, was less than a meter long. When I was sixteen he called me up one day and told me he was moving overseas and asked if I would take Annabelle. I hadn't seen either of them for a while and remembered Annabelle as a small snake. When I got to the guy's house it was a case of, “Anna-belle, my, how you've grown.” She was three meters long. Annabelle
had a big appetite and I found myself searching for a constant supply of chickens and rats.

I regained my reputation as the bird man and a procession of people started arriving with orphaned chicks, cats, and dogs. When the twins left home, Mom and I moved to a town house in Buccleuch north of Johannesburg. Mom and I were like passing ships as I was spending a lot of time with Lisa. I was also spending less time with Dino and David, but that was a good thing for my studies. Lisa was passionate about everything she did—dancing, studying, even fighting with me—but her passion for schoolwork rubbed off on me.

In standard nine, the year before matriculation when we graduated from high school, I went for an interview at Pretoria University. Part of the criteria for acceptance to vet school was your progress up to standard nine, and the interview.

I dressed in my smartest shirt and put on a tie and drove the Mini to Pretoria. Although I still wasn't old enough for a driving license, Mom had given up on me and had started letting me drive. It was about an hour's drive through what was then open farming country that separated Johannesburg and South Africa's capital city.

When I got to the university I had to wait, sitting with other nervous aspiring vets of my own age. When my name was called, I walked into the room and sat down in front of a panel of four faculty deans, three men and a woman.

“How important do you think your school results are to your suitability as a candidate for veterinary college?” one of the male deans asked me.

“I think people place too much emphasis on results,” I said. I wasn't being cheeky; I was just saying what I believed. “I don't think people place enough emphasis on a person's ability to work with animals. I think a lot of vets study for five or six years and then work six months in veterinary and discover they're not an animal person and this isn't for them. I really believe your entrance to vet science should involve a practical component so you can see how
students work with animals. Obviously study is important, but if you're passionate about what you do you are going to study and you are going to make a good vet.”

Well, I didn't get in. Clearly the correct answer should have been, “Yes, results are very important and I'm going to work my damnedest to get straight As.”

I also needed a B average in maths and science in my matriculation year, which I didn't get. I wasn't too shattered as I had enough marks to enroll in a Bachelor of Science (BSc), majoring in zoology. As the first years of zoology and veterinary science were quite similar, I knew I would be able to apply again for vet school in my second year.

I loved university life, but I didn't enjoy some of the subjects I had to study, such as chemistry and botany. Also, I worked out pretty soon that even though I was in South Africa, land of the big five and every big, interesting mammal in the world, I wouldn't be studying them. We spent a lot of time learning about sea molluscs and nematodes—worms—but not lions, hyenas, and elephants.

When the time came around for my second interview for Veterinary Science I found myself in front of the deans again. “So,” asked one of the deans, “how important do you think your university results are to your suitability as a candidate for veterinary school?”

I couldn't help myself. I gave the same answer again, about the importance of being able to relate to animals. This time the panel seemed quite receptive and nodded and smiled while I was talking. I thought that I'd waxed it, that I had passed. I didn't, and I was pissed off. I ended up dropping out of university altogether.

My brother-in-law had a good job selling real estate and he offered me a position. I thought, “Stuff university, I'm going to go out in the world, get rich, and buy my own game farm with my own animals.”

I was quite happy for a while, but Lisa's brother-in-law, Mark, whom I got on well with, sat me down one day and said, “Kev, listen.
You can sell real estate any time in life if that's what you really want to do, but now's your chance to finish your university degree. You've got the brains to do it, but you need to apply yourself.”

He was right. If money was my motivator for selling houses and land—which it was—then that wasn't good enough. If you're a real estate agent who loves land, and gets passionate about selling it, then you'll be good at your job. I re-enrolled and eventually completed my BSc.

I finished two years of zoology, but by my third year I'd had enough of studying sea urchins and worms. It seemed one had to put years into this field before the lecturers would let you study an elephant or a lion or something interesting. Since I had no chance of applying for veterinary school again I decided to change my major to physiology and anatomy. Ironically, in second-year physiology I found myself working with the sorts of animals I thought I'd be studying in zoology. We studied vertebrates, everything from rats to baboons to owls, to learn about their skeletons and their musculature. It was fascinating and the lecturer was brilliant.

Mark, who had convinced me to go back to university, owned a gym in Morningside and he was developing a new concept that would suit my qualification. He had a well-founded theory that when someone knew they were going to hospital to have surgery then it would make sense to do some preconditioning on the musculature around the affected area in order to speed the process of rehabilitation after the operation, when the patient would return to the gym. It seemed like a good career choice for me. Animals would still be a part of my life, but I reasoned that as I hadn't needed to make money from my relationships with them as a kid, then I didn't need to make money from working with animals as an adult.

Although I had become great mates with Mark and everyone else in Lisa's family, no one was more surprised than me when our five-and-a-half-year relationship broke up. Lisa was like me, very headstrong, and while we parted as friends, and remain so today,
I think, we worked out that we couldn't spend the rest of our lives together. I finished university and had a promising job to go to, but with my love life in tatters I decided I needed a clean break and a change of scenery. Like a lot of South Africans, I decided I would leave my homeland and go and work and live in England. I left in December 1996, figuring that if I could survive a winter in Britain then I could survive anything.

THREE
 
Bond of Brothers

 

 

 

England was dire. I hated it.

I did some bar work and some work in a CD warehouse, which I soon discovered wasn't for me. Although I checked out a few of the local gyms, the only work they had on offer was personal training, which was something that did not interest me. It was dark when I woke up in the morning and pitch black in the afternoons. In between it was gray.

I was staying in a crummy little part of London near the Kensington Olympia tube station. I lived in a dark, dingy apartment that you had to walk downstairs from the street to access. When I went to look at the place, the first thing that struck me was the smell of damp. I ended up sharing a bedroom with two other guys, while in the room next to us were three or four Italian girls. There was only one bathroom and a small kitchen for all of us, and to get any space to myself I had to go outside into the cold. My share of the rent to live in this squalor was about eighty British pounds a week and this sapped up most of what I was earning. At first I thought I could get my head around living in London, in that place, but then
I realized it was simply horrific. I wanted out, but my South African mates in the UK urged me to hang in and wait for the summer, which they said would be glorious.

“I don't live my life waiting for summer. I live for now,” I told them. They were probably right about me having a change of heart if I waited until the comparatively warmer weather, but after two months I was broke and miserable, so I came home. It's funny how the decisions one makes can change one's life. If I had gone to England in the summer and found that I loved it, I might have stayed and found a job that I liked, but I would never have met Rodney Fuhr, a guy who was to play a huge part in my life.

Stepping out of the terminal at what was then still known as Jan Smuts International Airport, it was good to see the sun again and feel the warm humid cloak of Africa in the summer bringing me back to life. Many South Africans, including my brother, live abroad. Some leave Africa because of the crime problem in our country, which is bad, while others pursue better pay or a better future for their children. I suspect many of them miss Africa, problems and all, and would come back in a heartbeat if they could. I was happy to be home and it was nice to see a blue sky again after the weeks of drab gray and cold winter rain. I'd also taken the space we have in Africa for granted—having room to move and not having to live in other people's pockets was something to savor.

I went back to my job as an exercise physiologist at the gym and things started looking up. Mom had met another guy and moved out of the town house, so I had the place to myself. I had a new girlfriend, Michelle, and with the money I was making I bought my first motorcycle—a Kawasaki ZX7 Ninja superbike—and started riding a lot on the weekends, but I revisited my youth one day on the way to work by riding into a pool of spilled diesel while wearing only a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. I was covered in abrasions and ended up as one big walking scab. It was bloody painful.

Rodney Fuhr had come to the gym for some work on his knee
and I'm sure he wasn't happy about being lumped with me. Rodney is a guy who likes to know he is getting the best when he deals with people. As with my other clients, I started by interviewing Rodney about his knee problem, then weighing him, measuring his height, calculating his body fat, and assessing his fitness. He was five-eight, with graying, curly hair and a moustache, and olive-colored skin. For a man in his late fifties I thought he was in pretty good shape. He seemed a quietly spoken person, perhaps not comfortable around too many strangers, and he may have resented being lumped with a youngster like me, instead of the boss. We didn't talk much at all during his first few sessions, apart from what he was meant to be doing exercise-wise. During this time I developed an exercise regime for him and helped him work his knee and gradually strengthen the muscles around it. I did learn, however, that he was a successful businessman who owned the Supermart chain of clothing and general goods stores in South Africa.