Betrayed (7 page)

The new school we found for her didn't offer any sporting activities, but Tracey could continue her sports through the sports club. We hoped that the smaller classes and the removal of the pressure of school sports might do the trick. A huge hurdle in Tracey's eyes was overcome when her old school's sporting body agreed that she could still play in the school softball league.

After a few months at the new school, she seemed to be much less harr
ied and stressed, but still spent a lot of time alone in her room with her music.
Many a time she would tell Buddy or me that she had no friends and was lonely. Neither of us could help her. She had always been popular but now it seemed that she was holding herself back from her friends to spend time alone.

For her sixteenth birthday we gave Tracey a motorbike. She had been motor
bike crazy since we took her for a short ride on one when she was a toddler.
I want a bike, bike, bike; it had been a constant refrain in the intervening year
s.
The bike wasn't new and its engine wasn't particularly quiet, but it was all
we could afford. Tracey was elated.

The motorbike was to give her many happy hours. She would ride when
ever she could, often asking if we needed anything from the shops just so
she had an excuse to go out on it. She loved the freedom it gave her, and
she loved the sound of its engine, even though it wasn't a patch on the
gruff, throaty roar of a large bike.

And that was how she met Peter. On her way to school one mild morning in September, her bike started belching black smoke. It backfired a few
times. And then it died. Nothing Tracey tried to kick-start it back to life had
any effect. She didn't have a cell phone so she was stranded until a tall,
thin man dressed all in black stopped to help. He took off his helmet to re
veal gentle, blue-green eyes and mousy blonde hair with a hint of a curl.

“Need some help, I see,” he said with a smile. “My name's Peter. Let's see if I can get this thing going again for you.”

Being a bit of a bike-lover himself, he knew a thing or two about what ailed them, so he managed to get it started and hopped onto his own bike to follow her to school and make sure she got there safely.

It was love at first sight. Soon she and Peter were in contact with each other almost every day. If Peter wasn't phoning Tracey, she was phoning
him. Most nights we would hear the dogs barking and the sound of running feet as she rushed to open the garden gate for him.

“Hi, I'm just on my way home from work and popped in to say hello,” he would say, sticking his head around the lounge door to chat to Buddy and me for a few minutes before disappearing to talk to Tracey.

At first our daughter seemed to be much happier. She was at a new school and she had found a special friend in Peter. When we heard her laughter, we knew that they had been together. But both of them were
concerned about the ten-year age gap, so the relationship was on and off from the start. If it wasn't Peter, it would be Tracey saying that they shouldn't see each other for a while, but these splits never lasted long. When they were separated, Tracey would go out with her other friends but talk about Peter all the time.

As a family we were feeling more positive about Tracey's frame of mind and we hoped her troubles were behind her. Little by little, like drops of rain over a parched landscape, her smile had returned. She was still not her old self, but it was a relief to see her so much better than she had been for the past nine months.

But this upturn wasn't to last. One night, about seven months after she met
Peter, he was visiting and we were all waiting for her to come home. I was annoyed that she hadn't told anyone she would be home late. It was dark and getting cold. I was worried that she had had an accident. The weekend before she had lied to me, saying she had been late home because her bike had broken down when in fact she had been with friends. She also told me she had lost her bike licence and asked for money to get a new one, but I found it easily when I looked in her room. We had a minor row about the importance of honesty and letting people know if you were going to be late, so they didn't worry. I also confronted her about using drugs. She denied it.

“You've already lied to me, so how can I believe you?” I retorted.

“So have me tested, then,” she snapped, sticking out her chin.

Now, just three days later, she was late again without letting anyone know where she was. We all breathed a sigh of relief when we heard the throb of
her motorbike coming up the driveway. She growled a cursory greeting wit
hout looking up, then pushed past me. I could taste the anger at the back of my throat.

“Where are your manners?” I shouted. “I thought we agreed you'd let me
know where you are and if you're going to be late.”

She barely looked at me, refusing to answer, which goaded me further.

“I'm sick to death of your behaviour,” I said, my voice raised. “I can't live
with your mood swings and filthy temper any more. You know something? I
don't even know how I can love you so much when I dislike you so intensely.”

“I'd better go,” said Peter, his eyes wide.

“Sit down and shut up,” I yelled. He sat down meekly next to my mother.

“Come on, Carol, calm down. Let's talk about this quietly,” my mother
intervened.

Sick with frustration and anger, worn out by all the recent problems with Tracey and guilt-ridden that I didn't seem to be able to help her, I turned on my mother too.

“Stay out of this, I'm sick of you always defending her!”

Tracey glared at me as though I had two heads. Then suddenly she was screaming at me, her mouth wide, her eyes dark. All hell broke loose and I shrieked at her to get out. Fizzing with resentment and sullen defiance, she stomped through the back door. I could hear her sobbing in the garden. Peter made a move to go to her, but I told him to leave her be. I was shaken and heartbroken that our relationship had reached this new low. My eyes
prickled with tears and I went to my bedroom to lie awake most of the
night.

In the early hours of the morning, I heard the back door open and foot
steps coming towards my bedroom. Bedraggled, dirty and cold, Tracey
padded softly to my side and gently kissed me.

“I'm sorry, Mom,” she said. I hugged her close for a moment or two.

“Get some sleep before you go to school, Trace. We can talk about
everything this afternoon.”

Later that morning the school headmistress phoned me at the office to ask why Tracey wasn't at school. She had left for school at the normal time,
so alarm bells started ringing. I phoned home, a few friends, her extra-science
teacher, with whom she had a good relationship. I thought Tracey might
have confided in her about what was troubling her. No one knew where she was.

Tracey had run away again, I was sure of it. I hurried home and went
through her room, but she had removed all her friends' telephone numbers from her phone book. I did find a softball programme that reminded me that Tracey had become good friends with the KwaZulu-Natal players. One of them worked for a company that had placed an advertisement in the
programme so I dialled the number and told her I thought Tracey may be
heading her way.

I filled in a missing person's report at the police station and the police put out a description of the runaway on the radio. There was a tense moment when a petrol station attendant along the N3 highway reported that a girl fitting Tracey's description had been seen in a grey Mercedes. The driver had heard Tracey's description over the radio and left his phone number at the filling station, so we made contact and arranged to meet in Harrismith. But it wasn't Tracey, so we turned the car round and headed for home again, still not knowing where she was.

The next morning her friend in Durban phoned to say Tracey had made contact and was on her way to her office. I phoned my sister Marsha and
her husband, who lived about 75 kilometres south of Durban, and asked
them to go there and take Tracey home with them. Tracey's face reflected a kaleidoscope of emotions when she saw them. At first there was fear. She looked frantically around for a place to run, then realised she had nowhere to go. There was hurt at her friend's betrayal. Finally, there was acceptance, even relief.

My mother and I left immediately to drive down to fetch Tracey from
Marsha's house. I was angry but relieved she was safe, not knowing whether to kill her or hug her. On the way home we wouldn't allow her out of our sight. If she wanted to go to the toilet, one of us accompanied her. If she wanted
a cold drink at a filling station, we went inside with her. During the whole
eight-hour journey home, Tracey was very quiet and withdrawn. She spoke
little and only when necessary. Yes. No. I don't know. A shaken head here,
a shrugged shoulder there. There was no unburdening of herself, no expla
nations.

Home again, I made an appointment with the psychologist. Tracey re
fused to talk about running away or about the night she had spent in a
township in Pietermaritzburg. She refused hypnosis again. There was a lot of talking, but Tracey did very little of it.

Although she rarely mentioned it, she had lost seven school friends in the previous year or so, killed in five separate car accidents.

She bottled her feelings about it, but her realisation that no one was invin
cible had coloured her outlook on life. She took the death of a fellow
softball player who was killed on her way home from practice particularly
hard.
She and Tracey had been chatting just before we left the sports
ground and it was hard to accept that death could loom over us all so silent and unnoticed, the axe fall so quickly and callously.

Eventually, the psychologist decided to refer Tracey to a psychiatrist who could prescribe sedatives or anti-depressants to help her deal with her problems. I clutched at the new ray of hope. Nothing else seemed to be working, perhaps this would be the answer.

He was a quiet man and Tracey took to him immediately. Slowly, inch by painful inch, she forced herself to stop running from the sadness and confront it. Perhaps his gentle questions touched something in her. Perhaps she had come to the realisation that she couldn't help herself. Perhaps the physical symptoms were getting worse. Whatever the reason, it was a major breakthrough.

Fumbling at first for the right words, she gradually unlocked the vault where her pain and fear were stored. She confided in him how she felt, explaining that she seemed to have no control over the urge to run, no control over her thoughts or actions.

“I'm so scared it eats me up,” she confessed. “I don't know what I'm
scared of or why, but it's so real. Suddenly I can't breathe and there are pain
s
in my chest, I feel dizzy, I feel physically sick. I don't know what I'm running from, I just have to run as far away as I can because somehow I feel my life
is in danger. But it doesn't help because the fear follows me. I can't outrun it.” She looked down at her hands, twisting in her lap.

“When the feeling of dread wears off, I feel so ashamed and embarrassed
by how I've been behaving. But when it starts again I have no control over it.”

He listened quietly without interrupting, letting her unburden herself. He
let a short silence hang in the air to make sure she was finished, then he
nodded and shifted in his chair.

“You're suffering from panic attacks,” he explained. “People who have panic attacks often have feelings of intense danger, even where there's no external threat. Like you, they feel they have to escape. It doesn't matter
whether these feelings are rational or not, at the time you feel powerless
against them. The good news is that panic disorder is treatable with medication and the right kind of psychotherapy.” He paused to let that sink in.

They talked and talked, as he gently encouraged her to reveal more
about her life and background, about the sadness and stress of the prev
ious couple of years.

“You've been through quite a lot,” he said at length. “I'm not surprised
that you're struggling to cope. Many of your friends have died. You had a
traumatic experience when you were five. More recently, there's the stress over the threat against you at the athletics meeting. That's a lot for a young girl to deal with.”

She didn't take her eyes off him, drinking in his words as if they could heal her pain.

“But the major problem,” he continued, “is that until now you haven't talked to anyone about things that you're afraid of or that worry you. You're obviously a strong and brave person, but you can't keep on pushing all this down, trying to handle everything on your own. You have to stop worrying about being a burden to people and always trying to protect your family.
That's what family is for, you know, to talk things through and share your
problems with. These people love you, Tracey. They care for you and they're there to help you. You have to start sharing your thoughts because bottling them up means all that stress and tension builds up inside you as if you're a great big pressure cooker. Eventually, the steam has to be released. It has
to go somewhere or you'll explode. That's why you're getting panic attacks.”

We learnt that her problems were the result of a chemical imbalance in the brain, so it wasn't something that Tracey could control with willpower or determination. It simply meant that levels of some feel-good brain chemicals were too low and levels of some toxic neurochemicals were too high. It
was a huge help – for both Tracey and the family – to understand something
of what was happening to her physiologically. The psychiatrist prescribed
medication to take care of that side of things, while Tracey continued to
see the psychologist to help with her emotional healing.