THE PRESS REPORTED BREATHLESSLY on our return to Britain, how we dashed to Chelsy’s off-campus flat in Leeds, where she lived with two girls, whom I trusted, and who, more important, trusted me, and how I snuck into their flat disguised in a hoodie and baseball cap, giving her flatmates a laugh, and how I loved pretending to be a university student, going for pizza and hanging out in pubs, even wondering if I’d made the
right choice in skipping university—not one word of which was true.
I went to Chels’s Leeds flat twice. I barely knew her flatmates.
And I never once regretted my decision to skip university.
But the press was getting worse. They were now just peddling fantasies, phantasms, while physically stalking and harassing me and everyone in my inner circle. Chels told me that paps had been following her to and from lectures—she asked me to do something about it.
I told her I’d try. I told her how sorry I was.
When she was back in Cape Town she phoned me and said people were tailing her everywhere and it was driving her crazy. She couldn’t imagine how they always knew where she was and where she’d be. She was freaking out. I talked it over with Marko, who advised me to ask Chels’s brother to check the underside of the car.
Sure enough: tracking device.
Marko and I were able to tell her brother exactly what to check for, and where, because it had happened to so many other people around me.
Chels said again that she just wasn’t sure if she was up for this. A lifetime of being stalked?
What could I say?
I’d miss her, so much. But I completely understood her desire for freedom.
If I had a choice, I wouldn’t want this life either.
