Close shave

I BELIEVE my life was in danger recently.  Virtual races and challenges have taken the globe by storm due to the coronavirus pandemic, and I’m participating in a 300km challenge, initiated by my sister in Denmark. I try to walk approximately 5km daily. I decided to walk around 4pm. A few metres before I got home, I noticed a man in front of me, covering himself from the head with a dirty blanket. He appeared to be a vagrant. At some point, he stopped to adjust his blanket, and I felt as if he had looked at me as he did so. He dragged his blanket further down, such that it covered his upper face, then he wrapped his purple scarf around his face. Alarm bells started ringing in my head. I was asking myself if he was trying to hide his face in preparation to strike.  Then I thought, maybe I need to stop watching On the Case with Paula Zahn and all the Investigation Discovery programmes making me see danger everywhere, even when people are just trying to protect themselves from the cold weather. It doesn’t help that I work in the media, where the primary focus on the bad and the ugly is enough to get one unhinged.  I also reminded myself that profiling of any kind was unfair. Not everyone who appears down on their luck should be viewed as a thug and potential threat.

The man appeared to have somewhat slowed down after noticing me. I decided to pick up pace, he did too, but not enough to overtake me. I saw another man walking behind us, and felt a surge of relief that my tail would surely not pounce on me with another person in the vicinity. But that man appeared to be in a hurry and soon outpaced us. The man I believe was following me switched to the same side I was walking, and seemed determined not to overtake me. I felt, or imagined, his eyes boring into my back, and was relieved when I got to our complex. Sadly, load-shedding was underway and the electrical gate to our complex wouldn’t open. I was, however, sure the man would just walk on by, seeing I was now home. As I stood by the gate, something made me turn back, and there he was, all covered up by his blanket and purple scarf, with only the eyes showing. He was standing about five metres away from me, gazing at me. Then calmly, from behind his blanket, he tilted his head to sweep his eyes up and and down the road, probably checking if there was any person nearby. I checked too, and there was absolutely no one within sight. It was eerily quiet. Then out of nowhere, a car pulled into the driveway and stopped by the gate, intending to also get into the complex. As soon as the man saw I wasn’t alone anymore, he whispered, "I'll see you, neh?" and walked away.

 Days after the incident, I saw the man begging at an intersection

I was pretty shaken up when someone inside the complex opened the gate for the black car. I got in and just stood there gazing at it until it parked outside a house. I wondered whether to go after the occupants and say thank you for showing up when you did, and kiss their feet. Their arrival probably saved me from something catastrophic. Gender-based violence is at an all-time high in South Africa, and I could easily have become a statistic. Maybe not, but I believe we should always trust our instincts. When someone’s presence destabilises your spirit, don’t second-guess yourself.  We might want to be good sports who see the best in everyone, but there is no space for such toxic positivity in the world we live in. You need to constantly look over your shoulder because there is almost danger lurking in the shadows, especially for women. Not everyone we encounter has our best interests at heart. It is a depressing way to live.

 When I got inside the house, I was so relieved to see my children, and be back to safety. My daughter asked, “How was your walk, mummy?” I told her my walk was bad because I met a bad man along the way. In her innocence, she asked if I had taken a picture. When I said no, she ran and took a sheet of black paper and a felt pen, and asked me to draw him.

I told two of my friends about the encounter, and they all encouraged me to find a walking buddy. Unfortunately, I don’t have one. At the beginning of my walk, two ladies overtook me and they were chatting away. I remember feeling a wave of sadness for a brief moment, wishing I had someone to occasionally walk with. I don’t really mind my own company, and walking alone gives me the rare opportunity to reflect on my life and line my thoughts. Still, it would be great to have someone to call on when I need some company during my walk.

Today I woke up feeling ballsy and determined to walk again. It was cold and   windy, so I wore my warm clothes and got out of the gate, I looked up and down the road, and noticed there weren’t any walkers or pedestrians in sight. Everyone seemed to have developed cold feet due to the wintry weather. Seeing the road so quiet creeped me out as I remembered the unwelcome encounter from yesterday. With my tail neatly tucked between my legs, I went back into the house. He won.

My fall from grace to tar

Yesterday evening brought a better understanding to the adage “the bigger they are, the harder they fall’. I had cancelled my daily jogging plans because my fitness partner, who also serves as my husband, came home a bit late from work. It wasn’t completely dark, so he insisted that we jog and I complied.

The evil slope

We hit the road. About 2km away from home, like Humpty Dumpty, I had a great fall. I have no recollection whatsoever of what caused the fall. All I remember is that as I ran downhill on a steep slope, I suddenly realised I was so going down after staggering for a few metres. I always told my husband that if I fell in a public place I’d just pretend to faint to cover my shame. When you eventually have as ugly a come-down as I did, theatrics won’t even cross your mind. I felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me and the pit of my stomach really hurt. Someone tried to scoop me off the ground, but I didn’t want anyone to touch me as it appeared to aggravate the pain. Without opening my eyes, I could tell a group of men had surrounded me and were fussing, fanning my face and pulling my body parts in all directions, with all good intentions. Bless their golden hearts, but first aid should be made compulsory in schools. If I had got a fracture I would have been in trouble because those men really had no idea how to handle an injured person, from the way it looked.

Needle to say, the jog was cancelled. I had an ugly gaping wound on my left elbow, which I had inadvertently used for support when I met the ground.  Within a few minutes, my arm had this searing pain and I thought I would collapse. I don’t remember ever feeling so much physical pain, maybe a year ago when the anesthetic wore off after the C-section to deliver my baby. When we got home, my husband cleaned and dressed the wound and I took a painkiller.

After the pain had somewhat subsided, I began to think deeply about this misadventure. I never jog by myself as a precautionary measure. There are stories about unsuspecting joggers getting attacked, and I felt safer running with my husband. Did you notice the past tense – felt? A certain percentage of idiotic African men think a full-figured woman’s body is made for sin, so walking alone in my tights elicits wolf whistles and lewd comments from depraved men and I deplore that.

For me, running together as a couple means we are a team. When my teammate isn’t in sparkling form on a certain day, I reduce my pace or walk with him. Anything, as long as I am by his side.

Jogging together is more than just about fitness and weight-management. It’s also about bonding, an opportunity to touch base in the fresh air, away from the kids. But evidently, different strokes for different folks. My husband is occasionally faster than I am because he doesn’t have hips, boobs and pumpkins to carry. So regardless of my pace, he just runs ahead of me like a cheetah on steroids. I’m sure sometimes not many people can tell we are actually running partners because of the geographical distance between us on the road. There are times when we have to cross busy roads, and if he’s ahead of me, he just runs across the road. I’ve had occasions when I just followed him blindly on the assumption that the road was clear, only to find myself almost getting hit by cars. I called him out on this before, that we are a team and have to look out for each other, so he can’t just run and cross roads at the risk of having me follow thinking the road is clear when it’s not. The most natural thing when you are running with someone is to want to catch up with your partner and you might overlook checking the roads. I realise how stupid this sounds. Road regulations stipulate that pedestrians must check left, right and left again before crossing the road. They don’t say husbands ought to do that for their wives. To each his own.Yesterday as I tumbled down, my husband didn’t even see it. I could see him sprint away as I struggled to find my balance. The one that proclaimed before God and man he would be there for me “to have and to hold” wasn’t there to catch me when I fell. He only realised there was a catastrophe after I screamed in agony, already on the ground. 

As they say, pride goes before a fall. I had to tell him that if he had been by my side, I would not have fallen. Isn’t that what marriage is all about? Catching your wife when she falls? I told him it could have well been a thug stabbing me with a knife and running off and he wouldn’t have been able to defend me. The fall left me really shaken. It was a nasty one and if I had fallen on sharp objects, like broken bottles peppering the road, or hit my head hard, I wouldn’t have been able to come back home to my babies the same.I’m not even being dramatic, I’m really rattled. Now I can’t even giggle or cough without feeling pain around my rib cage.  It will take me a while to feel bold enough to run, especially on that particular slope where it happened.

In retrospect, I think I was unfair to my husband. He has his own reasons for running. It’s not like we sat down and drafted some ground rules for jogging together and he flouted them.Maybe he wants to beat the clock, in which case he doesn’t have to be slow because I’m slow. The fact that I stop when he’s tired or out of form doesn’t mean he has to reciprocate.  Like in all painful things in life, there are lessons to be learned from this. The first one is that sometimes there’s absolutely no security in numbers. I should get used to looking out for Numero Uno, watch my step, look left, right and left again on busy roads, and take karate lessons in case I have to defend myself against the perverts that might want to go further than making cat calls. The other lesson is that there are absolutely beautiful people out there. The security guards that came to help me out might not have known exactly what to do to help, but they were there and tried what they could. Then there was a motorist that also stopped to check what had happened. He said he was sorry about my fall and added that I shouldn’t give up running. I don’t think I will give up completely. I will just slow down a bit, and run my own race without trying to catch up with anyone. I also think it’s better to use the stationary bike or skipping rope at home.

Sorry if I sounded like I was ranting, but it’s not every day that a grown woman just falls while chasing her husband down the road. It could also be the meds that I’m taking for the arm.