Kevin showed different faces to different people. He was living in a fragile world of make-believe that only added to the strain he was under. He had been completely open with Judith when he had asked to stay with her, but later he gave her no real indication of how bad he felt things were; he acted as if things were back on track. He was having financial problems, and had had to borrow money from Gary and Joao for the Mitterand trip to Cape Town. But he was perversely exacerbating the crisis - there were cheques owed him that he didn’t collect for weeks.
Kevin kept talking to Judith about their future as freelancers; he had story- and project-ideas that he was trying to sell. He was also trying to help Gary out of a deep funk. Gary was really depressed after the death of his mentor, Ken, and his relationship with his girlfriend was falling apart. Kevin spent a lot of time with him over that period, and he told Judith that Gary was desperate and that he feared he would do something to himself. Joao and I did not know about Gary’s crisis, but we suspected that Kevin was going through another bad drug patch.
Kevin was also avoiding speaking to his agency, Sygma. Their New York office had been trying to get hold of him for days. They had left messages on his pager, messages on the answering machine of a contact number he had given them, but he had not responded. They eventually asked me to contact Kevin: it was urgent as he had an assignment. I promised to try, but was not optimistic of finding him. I spread the word to Joao, Judith and others that Kevin should contact Sygma urgently, and then I left for Zaïre on my first significant assignment since being wounded in April, three months before. I was nervous about my physical readiness, but I needed to start earning money again. I was getting edgy as the weeks slipped by and the contract that
Newsweek
kept promising didn’t materialize. Soon I would discover that my unease about working for that magazine was well-founded: they did not offer even one day’s pay for the weeks in hospital or the months of recuperation. The last day they paid for was the one I had been shot on.
Kevin eventually made contact with Sygma and discovered that the agency had secured him a
Time Magazine
assignment to Mozambique. It was Nelson Mandela’s first state visit to another country as President, and a good peg on which to hang a Mozambican reconstruction story. It was a great assignment, the kind he wanted and that the Pulitzer had made possible.
He was to leave for Mozambique on 20 July. The night before, Kevin set three alarms to ensure that he woke up in time for the flight. But he wouldn’t get out of bed, even though the final alarm did wake him. He asked Judith to take him to the airport, saying his car was acting up and might not get him there. Judith had been on night shift and she was tired, but she did briefly consider taking him, knowing it was vital that he make that flight. But then she thought, ‘If he misses the assignment, it’s his problem,’ and said, ‘It’s your life Kevin, take a cab.’ Kevin eventually took his own car, but he was late and missed the flight. Fortunately, he managed to get on to a later flight and still made it to the Mozambican capital of Maputo the same day.
Kevin had confided to Judith that he was scared to go on the assignment. He was scared of fucking up. Looking back now, perhaps not getting up in time was a way of shifting the failure - if he failed to make the assignment, then he could not fail photographically. Kevin was heading for disaster.
When he arrived in Maputo, there were no hotel rooms available. Joao was already in Maputo, covering the Mandela trip for the AP, so Kevin hung out with him in his hotel room. While Joao souped the day’s film in the bathroom, Kevin told him and Gary anecdotes from his trip to New York. He’d enjoyed his visit, partied hard and been treated like royalty, he said. Sygma had promised to help him fulfil any ambitions he might have - almost any story he wanted to cover, they would swing a deal for him. The negs were processed and dry, and now Joao had to ‘file’. Kevin kept fingering his new cameras and he continued to entertain them with stories from New York as Joao got on with the tedious task of scanning and transmitting his pictures. Kevin seemed happy and Joao felt that he was over the worst.
The next day, Joao and Gary returned to Johannesburg, and Kevin headed north with
Time
correspondent Scott MacLeod. They spent six days with the UN forces, who were there to help ensure that the peace accord between the government and the Renamo rebels held. The night before he was due to return to South Africa, Kevin called Judith and promised to bring home a bag of the ‘LM’ prawns that Maputo was famous for. Kevin landed in Johannesburg late on Monday afternoon, 25 July.
He collected his pick-up from the airport parking lot and drove to Reedwaan’s flat in Yeoville. They had been close friends since meeting in 1990 when Reedwaan was production manager at the
Weekly Mail
and Kevin was picture editor. Kevin had stopped by because he hoped to score a hit, to smoke a white pipe, but Reedwaan had given up some time ago, and he was not interested in doing buttons again. Kevin seemed intense and broody, like something was on his mind, but Reedwaan thought it was the need for a fix. In late 1993 and in 1994, Kevin had started doing a pipe or two every day. Reedwaan knew that Kevin’s Mandrax addiction had reached an uncontrollable level: ‘It got worse and worse. Before, I would go and score. Then we’d go together. Then he was scoring on his own and that was it.’
Reedwaan and his wife Pippa were preparing to eat dinner, and they invited Kevin to join them. He said he would just go get his gear from the car. When he returned, he was ashen. He said, ‘Fuck, I’ve just made a big fuck-up. I’ve just fucked up completely, I’ve left my film behind on the plane.’ Reedwaan went with Kevin to his car to make sure the film had not fallen behind the seat or something, but all he could see was a roll of silver gaffer’s tape and a length of coiled green hosepipe on the floor in front of the passenger seat. He registered that this might be a suicide kit, but he rationalized that the tape could be for patching a camera bag and the hose in case he ran out of petrol.
Kevin and Reedwaan raced back to the airport, but the plane had already been moved to the hangers and cleaned. They spoke to several people, but no one was very helpful. After an hour, Kevin just let it slide, he gave up. ‘As if someone had deflated him,’ Reedwaan recalls.
He tried to buoy Kevin’s spirits up by saying that all was not lost; the film would turn up. On the drive home Kevin talked about how his life was spinning out of control and confessed that he was using more drugs. ‘All the doors I’ve opened since winning the Pulitzer are now slamming shut in my face. No one is going to want to use me because I’m unreliable.’ Kevin was getting more and more agitated, he then told Reedwaan that he was going to kill himself. He had thought about suicide so often that he had even planned how it would happen: he was going to do a skuif and then gas himself: ‘I’ve worked it out, you know, hosepipe in the car.’ Reedwaan said, ‘Oh, Kevin, come on.’
Kevin had spoken about suicide before and Reedwaan used to say, ‘Kevin, stop it, stop talking shit. What do you want to kill yourself for? You’ve got so much to live for. What about your daughter?’ Mentioning Megan was always the thing that pulled him back. Reedwaan later told me that he did not want to think about the possibility of Kevin killing himself, but he could feel the hosepipe under his feet.
Kevin had dinner with Reedwaan and Pippa. Before leaving, at around ten, Kevin pulled himself together enough to go home to Judith. He carefully divided the prawns he had brought, one half for Pippa and Reedwaan, and the other half for Judith. He was determined not to reveal that anything had gone wrong. There was no way he was going to show himself up in front of Judith.
The following day, Tuesday, Kevin came up with the idea of going to the dump where the airport took its garbage and paying the dozens of garbage-pickers to search for the missing film, but he never saw it through. Kevin called the
Time
Johannesburg office and said that he would drop the film off later.
That night, Kevin and Judith cooked the prawns according to her favourite recipe: the prawns were soaked in a marinade of garlic, periperi and beer, and then cooked until they were transformed from seethrough grey to a delicious pink. The normality of the meal belied Kevin’s underlying despair. Even though Kevin was sharing the house with Judith and had told her so much, he felt that he couldn’t tell her
about the film. Perhaps it was something to do with the distance she was maintaining between them, her wariness in not allowing him too close. But mostly, I think it was that he was ashamed - he had put her in the camp of the achieving disapprovers - and he could not tell her about yet another failure.
The next morning, Wednesday, 27 July, Kevin and Judith woke up late, near noon. They had an argument because Judith refused to let Kevin accompany her to a dinner party that evening. She told him that they were not a couple and he got angry. But they reached a compromise: he would have dinner with his parents and she would return early so that they could meet back home around midnight. Kevin said he was going to take his film to be processed and get his car fixed.
Judith returned home from doing errands at about 2.30 that afternoon, shortly before she was due at work, and was surprised to find Kevin there. He was even more startled at her arrival, saying he did not expect to see her there. He was completely different from the relaxed, calm man she had said goodbye to at noon: he was wearing his sunglasses and was extremely jittery. He was on edge, defensive, and seemed guilty that he had been surprised by her unexpected return. Saying that she would see him later, she went off to Reuters. She did not hear from Kevin again that day. After the dinner party, she came home, but he was not there. She tried to stay awake, but eventually fell asleep.
Kevin’s parents, Jimmy and Roma, had also waited in vain for him. They had arranged to meet for dinner at seven, but Kevin had warned his mother that he might be a bit late. By nine o’clock, Jimmy and Roma were annoyed, wondering if he was late or not going to come at all.
None of us would ever see Kevin alive again. He had parked his pick-up next to a bluegum tree in a park near the house he had grown up in, and had used the silver gaffer’s tape to attach the green garden hose to the exhaust pipe of the idling car. He slipped the hosepipe through the narrow opening at the top of the window and smoked a white pipe as he began to write a suicide note.
Early on Thursday morning, Joao was startled out of sleep by the
telephone ringing. ‘Mr Silva?’ Joao hesitated, waking up fast. ‘Yes?’ he answered. ‘Do you know a Kevin Carter?’ the voice asked.
Oh shit! What the fuck had he been up to now? Joao had a flashback to the time Kevin had been arrested for drinking and driving. Maybe he was in jail; and the caller’s voice had the ring of authority, perhaps a policeman. ‘Yes, what has he done?’ ‘He killed himself last night. The note is addressed to you, sir.’
Joao cradled the handset, not sure if he was still dreaming. Could it be possible? Now? Maybe it was a sick joke. He called Kathy, to ask if she had seen Kevin. She had not heard from Kevin in a while.
Next he called Judith. She was already awake. The tone of Joao’s voice alerted her that there was something wrong. She caught her breath. Joao said he had received a call that he thought might be a hoax - speaking in the subjunctive and the provisional, he was trying to remain cool. Joao said he would call Judith once he knew one way or the other. She had an overwhelming feeling that something terrible had indeed happened - she had had the feeling ever since she had woken in the early hours and Kevin had not yet come home. Finally Joao called the morgue to check. The attendant confirmed that they had a corpse they thought was Kevin Carter, and asked Joao to come to identify the body.
Joao and Viv picked up Gary and Kathy and made their way to the Johannesburg morgue. It was cold inside. They clustered at a small glass window and looked into a room where the deceased was wheeled for identification. A heavy, maroon curtain was drawn to reveal Kevin lying on a chrome tray. He was naked, covered only by a white sheet up to his waist. His face was gaunt, mouth wide open and his eyes closed. Kathy and Viv held each other, both crying audibly. Gary pressed his face against the concrete wall. Joao turned away from the window and went to stand outside, oblivious of the early morning traffic rumbling past. He stared up at the pale blue winter sky, tears running freely down his cheeks. On leaving, the morgue attendant handed Joao a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, sneakers and a suicide note that ran to several pages.
The next call Joao had to make was to me in Nairobi. I had just returned from Goma in the east of Zaïre. I was nowhere near fit enough to be covering a cholera epidemic that was killing tens of thousands of Rwandan Hutus as they fled Tutsi retribution. I had come down with a lung infection inside of a week and was recuperating in a hotel, planning to return to Zaïre as soon as I was well. Joao’s voice sounded flat and distant over the echoing phone line: ‘I’ve got bad news. Kevin killed himself.’ I was shocked for a few seconds, then I grew increasingly furious that Kevin had done this. I packed to return to South Africa, cursing Kevin as I threw my gear and clothes into the bags. Why the fuck had he done this now?
Back home, we tried to understand what had made him commit suicide. Why had he finally done it without calling any of us to talk him out of it as he had on previous occasions? His suicide note did not help much, really. It was a rambling, occasionally lucid, mix of regret, anger and hopelessness. The writing changed constantly, sometimes illegible: the effect of the Mandrax as well as the carbon monoxide which was gradually replacing the oxygen in the cab of his pick-up. The letter was addressed to his parents, to his best friends and to Ken. It was an angry letter - anger at Ken’s death, anger at his feelings of being let down by society at large, but mostly anger at himself. He wrote of drugs, how he had not wanted to become an addict, but that he had chosen that easy escape from the pain he felt. He knew that he needed more help than any of his friends or lovers could give. Sometimes, the writing allows one to imagine that perhaps he hoped to be interrupted. But in the end, the note posed more questions than it answered. He inexplicably itemized practical things he needed to do, like getting his own apartment, telephone and fax machine. He wrote of not giving in to suicide. ‘May help be at hand & the 9mm parabellum on my mind becomes a line I just won’t cross.’ Yet that resolve seems to have faded; at the age of 33, he was finally overcome by the perception of his own failings. ‘I have always had it all at my feet - but being me just fucks it up anyway.’