My Only Story. Deon Wiggett
one other customer. At the back, a television quietly blares some soccer. I am drinking white wine, because in my head it is still peak summer, even as a gust of dead leaves blows past the window.
From the corner of my eye, I see Mike enter the coffee shop. I have buried myself in a novel, because I do not want our meeting to be awkward. You know how it is weird when you are meeting someone and you make eye contact a few seconds too early? Immediately, you must both look away to stare intently at the first thing you spot, you at some balsamic vinegar, him at an occasional chair. It is awkward enough when it happens with a friend; when it is a stranger arriving for an awkward conversation …
When Mike reaches the table, I look up from my novel. I get up, say, ‘Hello, Mike,’ and try to shake his hand.
‘Hello, Deon,’ he says, briefly extending his hand, but it is not much of a handshake and I am not sure he used my name – I am kind of having to reconstruct our dialogue here.
He sits down at the table, or rather, his right-hand side sits down next to the table, and he crosses his legs, both in the direction of the door.
‘What would you like to drink?’ I ask.
‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘I’m okay for now.’
The waiter is heading for our table, but I shake my head at him while trying to say ‘aw shucks’ with my eyes. The waiter does not mind. He has barely got back to his soccer match when someone scores a goal.
Back at the wooden table, young Mike is being somewhere between passive-aggressive and just regular active-aggressive. ‘Say what you want to say,’ he says, ‘and then I’ll decide if I’m going to tell you anything.’
His distrust catches me off guard. I wanted to tell him about my investigation in quite a matter-of-fact way, but my heart is beating wildly and my wine glass is emptying rapidly and I do not know if I can get through to Mike.
On an inkling, I take a different tack. I decide not to hide my pain from him.
‘Let me tell you my history with Breytenbach,’ I say.
At the wooden table, I am done, and Mike is staring at me. It does not feel like empathy. It feels like scepticism and condescension.
I clearly remember what he says: ‘Well, first thing I have to say is that I have a very strong personality.’
I take this to mean: ‘Can you get a grip on yourself? We are not alike and our experiences are not alike and whatever happened is not all that bad.’
Thankfully, I have managed to secure more wine from the soccered waiter, so I take a huge gulp and bite my tongue, somehow both at the same time.
Out of everything I thought I might hear, none of it was this. At this moment, even though I am supposed to be, like, a reporter or something, I turn into someone who feels mocked about my trauma; someone who feels barely believed. This must be what women feel like.
I pause briefly on women and black people, neither of which are dubious conditions. That is why, in this story, you will find few of either.
In their place, we must welcome an all-star cast of white men. Do not be alarmed; with noble exceptions, I do not wheel them in for applause. They are the men who have tried to chisel a toxic crack through my life story and masculinity, and therefore these pages must teem with them. But I promise to keep us at a safe distance; these men have only been brought here to clean up their own vomit.
There are black people who are truly awful, in the same ratio as in the other groups. Your straight-or-gay-or-plus black or Arab psychopath enjoys a good raping as much as the next white or Latin guy. My culturally isolated, apartheid-era youth surrounded me with white Afrikaans men, so it is from their ranks that my bullfrog was always likely to come. Opportunity comes to those who are present.
Then there are the women, evenly spread across races and places, who crave without end the power of raping children’s penises and vaginas and mouths and anuses and hands. In my own life, though, I have only received kindness from women; I do not know the face of a female predator. They are similar but different to the male kind, and, even though I cannot speak with authority, one must look out painfully for them too.
All boys and girls are objects of desire for certain kinds of grown-ups. If we are to keep them safe, we cannot profile by race, gender or sexuality. Paedophiles come from no single group; they are a group apart.
Their targets come from no single group either, which means none of us are born equal. Being a male survivor still affords me the systemic privileges of being a man. My failure to write here about female survivors of sex abuse is not through a lack of solidarity. I really, deeply and truly am sorry for what you go through. I am not the one who can tell your story, but if you have your own bullfrog, I hope this story may mean something to you too.
Mike really is not a bad guy; he has just seen too much of Willem. He does want to help – I mean, clearly he does not want to be here, talking to me, but still, he came. He is full of bravado, but he is terrified of Willem; terrified of Willem’s revenge if he even finds out we have met for coffee, even though neither of us has had any.
‘So in the time that you knew Breytenbach,’ I say, but Mike shakes his head. He wants to help, but he does not trust me, and I am out of ways to convince him. This is hard for me too, and I was not expecting any of it to go like this.
Mike’s legs, which have wanted to walk out since the second they arrived, are finally joined by the rest of his body. We agree to exchange more messages, but I think we can both tell it will go nowhere. Mike does not like me, and I am beginning not to like Mike. I try to seem cheerful and confident, but I am not feeling it. Mike did not even want to have a glass of water with me.
I pay the bill and leave the little wooden table and the quietly deafening soccer match behind. As I get into the Uber, I am still fuming, but now mostly at myself. I should have stayed in control of my emotions. I made Mike think I am weak. It was my first big break, and I’ve blown it.
9
In my loft, the index cards have divided themselves into piles that could be neater. I have reduced Willem’s entire social-media history into data written in pencil on cards. The time he took those boys to Brazil? I can tell you when he went, and with whom, and who commented on Instagram, and also who did not, and whom he started tagging in posts, and whom he suddenly ceased to tag because maybe they had left his orbit after seeing more than they wanted to.
The Brazil information is noted down on an index card that should be in the Willem Breytenbach pile, which is right here on my desk. Except there is also a Willem Breytenbach pile on that little table of Riaan’s. I will get those and put them back with these, and then find the correct data point, after which I will have all the Brazilian information at my fingertips, just like a real detective.
Willem has his own stack, but the others are more nebulous. There is a stack for the other Breytenbachs. A stack for Willem’s colleagues and one for his friends. For people I remember being around him back then, and who will maybe help me to remember more, or alternatively will maybe phone Willem the instant I ask them. So I won’t ask them, not yet, but I must write each of their names on an index card anyway, so I do not forget about them. I will make a brief stack on Riaan’s little table where Willem’s half-stack no longer is, just until I figure out a plan for these people.
The index cards of suspected survivors make for dark reading. There are so many of them that they require tactful subdivision, and I am daunted and depressed at the scale of what I think he has done wrong in the past decade alone.
If the pattern holds, and these boys were raped by a psychopath, they would first have been prepared through sexual grooming. There are up to six stages, and it only turns sexual towards the end. The first four stages are deliberate manipulations designed to prepare a target for being raped and keeping quiet.
First, the paedophile selects the target. He is constantly searching, keeping an eye out, in particular, for vulnerable kids – ones who are isolated or troubled and susceptible to attention.