Zephany. Joanne Jowell
was: if I’m feeling like this, just imagine what Miché must be feeling. So I contacted her after a couple of days and just said, ‘I love you, I’m here for you.’ I didn’t ask her anything, I just left it at that, and she contacted me when she needed to.
There was no one for me to discuss the case with. I prefer it that way. I don’t talk about someone else’s business because if that person wants to talk to me, they’ll come and talk to me. And that’s what Miché did.
MICHÉ:
I had left school that day with only my school bag, which I gave to my daddy at the Safe House. Marshionette got me toiletries and whatever else I needed to stay over, and we drove to Stellenbosch.
Marshionette lives in a very nice house, and they were all so welcoming and warm, her husband as well. We were settling in and I went to shower. Marshionette had my phone. When I came out, I told her, ‘I’d like to go sleep now, can I have my phone?’ But she didn’t want to give it to me. As nice as they all were there, I felt I just wanted to take my phone and call my boyfriend, or a friend, or anyone and say: ‘Come fetch me! Please! I don’t want to be in this drama.’ At that stage I felt, Gosh, I just want to go back to my life. This is nonsense. These people drag me into their situations and their troubled life. I don’t have time for this.
Marshionette said: ‘You can’t have your phone because an investigation is happening and there are possibilities … So that’s why we’re not giving it.’
Marshionette could always make me understand things. I remember she was sitting on her bed and I asked, ‘Then can you please at least just tell someone to bring me my clothes, my make-up, my hairdryer, my flat-iron – and my heels!’ And she did organise someone to go fetch those things.
At that time, I already had a sense like, Girl, you’re never going to be the same again. But how are you going to deal with this? That was my thing. How are you going to get through this? I looked at myself in the mirror and told myself that I resemble my father’s people, I don’t look like these others. There in her room, I asked Marshionette: ‘Do you think I really look like those people?’
‘You do look like those people. I’m just being honest. You wanted an answer – I do think you look like them.’
But for me, seeing is believing – and I didn’t, or wouldn’t, see it. I lay in bed and cried that night. I cried the whole night. I was like, I want my phone, I want to go home, I want my parents, my friends must be wondering where I am and what’s going on, the teachers must be so confused … I am so confused!
The next day was a Thursday. I got up and Marshionette made me breakfast. Then she showed me a headline in Die Burger that this baby might have been found. I promise you! The very next day! Up to this day we still don’t know who leaked the information; probably at the clinic or wherever they took the DNA test. The test results weren’t expected back until midday, and already the news was out. But I didn’t believe it. To me, that test had better be negative because I was going home to my family, home to my life.
We got dressed and went to the place where Leanna Goosen works – it’s a place for all the naughty boys, near Stellenbosch. On the way, Marshionette asked me: ‘What if this test is now positive? What would you do?’
‘I don’t know, I really don’t know. We have to see when we get there.’
We met Leanna there and we all sat in the office, waiting, waiting, 11 o’clock, 12 o’clock, waiting for this call to come through.
Leanna is the one who picked up the phone. And then, I don’t know why, but she started crying.
MARSHIONETTE:
From the minute we left the place of safety, even before that, Miché was just simply an adult.
I couldn’t understand how this child coped with what she was hearing, how she would take the facts, gather her thoughts, and just say, ‘Okay, let’s wait and see.’ We developed a very close relationship over the next while, and it always amazed me just how adult she was. The way Miché handled the whole situation was not like a seventeen-year-old child.
Almost immediately, we had a mother-daughter relationship, like in washing hair and blowdrying and everything. My sons were mad over this new big sister they had. From the minute Miché walked in, they just loved her. It felt like ages that Miché was with me. It was just about two weeks, but it seemed like ages. We had a ball together. And I finally had a daughter!
My main thing was to keep her away from the media and protect her identity because she was a minor. That’s where we got Ann Skelton in – she’s a lawyer for children’s rights, and Leanna arranged for her to be Miché’s lawyer, just to safeguard her so that her name is not all over the media. That’s also why we took her cell phone away – we didn’t want her on social media because we were scared that she’d be hurt by what people might say. But she challenged us for the cell phone, and in the end we gave it to her but we said she must block her Facebook account. Also, she had a boyfriend and she wanted to chat to him. So I gave her the phone just for an hour, to chat to the boyfriend and say that she’s okay.
The next day – Miché was with me the whole time, from after she was taken from school and first received the news – we were waiting for the DNA results. I can clearly remember we were sitting in Leanna’s office and eating. Sticky chicken wings and chips. Our nerves were down the drain and there Miché was, just sitting and smiling at us. I couldn’t stop eating because of the nerves. She seemed as calm as anything. And when she heard the results, she just said, ‘Well, now it’s out.’
MICHÉ:
When the call eventually came through, I sensed … Oh snap, it’s about to go down!
Colonel Barkhuizen was on the phone and Leanna was congratulating him, saying, ‘Well done, good job,’ and I was thinking, Dammit – this thing is probably positive.
Leanna was crying and she told me that she had really hoped it wasn’t going to be positive. Marshionette started crying too and she phoned her husband to say that I am that baby. I think the emotion was because they worked so long on this case, and now the product was sitting here right in front of them. They’d completed their mission.
Leanna said, ‘You are the baby. You are the Zephany Nurse baby.’
And inside me, everything went dark.
I don’t know what happened to me that day. It was like the world went black.
‘But what’s going to happen now?’
‘Well, they’ve arrested your mother …’
That’s when it hit me. I didn’t cry, but inside … to hear that the person you love, the person you call ‘Mommy’ every day, the only mommy you’ve ever known, is being arrested … That’s not a nice feeling. Only criminals get arrested! How do you bring those two together – your mother and a criminal? How do you make sense of it?
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