The Brand by M.N Providence

Author:M.N Providence
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: america, south africa, sex and shopping

Chapter 6

SOUTH AFRICA

In March of 2012, Jansen Vermuelen finished shooting the remaining episodes of her twice-weekly reality programme for ESPN. Free from contractual obligations for the moment, and unencumbered by romantic liaisons, she took a trip alone to her motherland and stayed at her late father’s Sandhurst mansion, where for a week she did some soul-searching and tried to figure out her future with regards to the sport of tennis. Her half-brother, Hudson Vermuelen, divided his time between the Sandhurst mansion and his Sandton apartment, but for the first time in five days of her visit he stayed with her at the Sandhurst house before a business trip took him to Cape Town.

In Johannesburg, Jansen took her brother’s Porsche Cayenne S Turbo and drove it to Heidelberg. Heidelberg is a peri-urban area that lies to the south of Johannesburg. Gary Speckman lived there with his partner. Speckman, a brutally honest character with a controlled temper, had married young and produced two children with a wife who incessantly berated his love of tennis, continually reminding him that he was not cut out to be a tennis star and actually applauding when at thirty-five he retired from the game altogether and took up full-time employment at an industrial firm in Liverpool, where he had been born in 1962.

For the following years he toiled for what he regarded as a pittance, determined to put his two children, both boys, at university. He had sacrificed his love of tennis for his children’s future. By 2003, Speckman had saved enough money to send his children to good universities in England, but his eldest son, eighteen years old and having just sat for his A-level examinations, stunned his parents into disbelief by going into modeling and taking up residence with a 25-year-old man who was his lover. Two years later, their second son, born in 1987, turned eighteen and celebrated his birthday amongst a group of British troops he was stationed with in a province of Afghanistan, after being trained in military operations by the British army, which he had joined at the age of sixteen. Two days after celebrating his eighteenth birthday the boy died after a roadside bomb detonated and sent the military van he was in with other soldiers flying into the air and landing on its roof, after throwing mangled bodies all around its immediate surroundings.

Speckman buried his child, wrote a strongly-worded letter to then-Prime Minister Tony Blair giving him a piece of his mind about both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, divorced his wife and left the United Kingdom for good – in that order. With the money remaining after the divorce by mutual consent from his wife of 21 years, Speckman went to South Africa and opened a tennis academy in Johannesburg. A year later Ugly Joe Vermuelen, the bad boy of South African business, hired Speckman to train his daughter tennis. In 2010 Speckman had helped Jansen Vermuelen to the US Open victory. In 2011 they had parted ways.

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