Darren Scott’s Suitcase

I don’t know if Darren Scott really did invent the Suitcase. I haven’t thought of Suitcases in a long time, but now that I have, they’re a whooshing Proustian flashback to Johannesburg and the media world of the early 2000s: a shot of Jack Daniels in one glass, a shot of passion fruit cordial in another. You down the Jack, followed as rapidly as you like by the passion fruit, although I personally favoured a softly-softly approach of moistening my lips first with a hummingbird-sip of the passion fruit, then the dirty business of the Jack, then half of the rest of the passion fruit. You couldn’t have the whole passion fruit, because if you were drinking them with, for instance, Darren Scott, that amount of sugar in a single evening would be very bad for your health.

The legend was that Darren Scott invented the Suitcase one night at the original News Café in Randburg. I asked him about it a few times, while we were drinking Suitcases. Once he proudly confirmed it. Once he bemusedly denied it. Once he mocked me for even asking, and we started insulting each other about different things entirely. That was Darren Scott, and that was also the experience of drinking Suitcases.

Darren and I were never precisely friends but I liked being around him. He looked and dressed like that chirpy guy from the IT department at your husband’s work who everyone agrees could have been a comedian if he wanted, and that was part of his success, and also it was who he was, but also it was a deep camouflage. He had a streak of something like genius that sometimes found its perfect medium of expression, but not always, and he had a related streak of the self-destructive. That’s always a pity, but without them, he would actually have been that chirpy guy from the IT department, which would have been a bigger pity.

I didn’t know him as a radio personality – I met him through the sports chat shows he produced on M-Net that made sport in the 2000s feel so much more fun than it feels now: Extra Cover and Boots & All and the much missed, much beloved, genuinely funny and irreverent Super Saturday, with Neil Andrews and Mike Haysman and Jeremy Fredericks. Darren had me on Super Saturday several times, at a time when no one else would have me on their shows, including the occasion Dan Nicholl and I launched the official Potchefstroom bid to host the Olympic Games. Afterwards he told me that I jiggled my foot too much and that I lacked the common touch.

I don’t know if Darren Scott invented the Suitcase but there are perilously few people left in this world to whom legends still cling, and who so perfectly recall a moment in time, with all its good and bad, so I offer this story. In the early 2000s the television lifestyle show Top Billing invited me to a weekend away in a private game lodge in the Sabi Sands. That was the sort of thing that happened in the early 2000s. A number of other people were present: I remember PJ Powers and Makahya Ntini and Kuli Roberts and Gareth Cliff and Marius Roberts and Gladiator Ice, who was the blonde gladiator from Gladiators. It was, I may have mentioned, the early 2000s, and this was a very particular slice of it. Darren Scott was also there.

It hadn’t yet occurred to the managers of this game lodge what a mistake it had been to provide an open bar for the weekend, but the thought must have dawned by the time we went that first evening for a game drive into lion country. The attendees were spread over several vehicles. On ours, Darren and Gladiator Ice were on the back bench, and I was somewhere near the front. Darren had a half-full bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand and a half-full bottle of passion fruit in the other. “Glasses are just middlemen,” he said.

In certain moods, Darren brought a great effulgence of energy, of laughter, of life to any gathering, and while I wouldn’t say the noise and hooting and carry-on from the back seat was always louder than from everyone else, I would say it went on longer, and without flagging.

The game guide had never seen anything quite like it. “If we’re not quiet, we won’t see any wildlife,” he said for the fourth time, almost tearfully.

“I think the wildlife is on the vehicle already,” said Gareth.

We chugged our way through the majesty of the wild, a small uncivilized pocket of laughing bad behaviour, until eventually, somehow, the ruckus ended. There was a sudden silence, into which flooded the sounds of the bush and the cough and growl of the engine as we jounced and clattered in the forlorn pursuit of that which had long since fled before us or hidden in the long grass.

“I’ve never seen nothing on a drive before,” said the game guide in a broken voice.

Half an hour or so later we arrived back at the lodge and piled out and looked to the back seat, where Gladiator Ice sat in untroubled isolation, sipping, I want to remember, a Bacardi Breezer.

“Where’s Darren?” we said.

“He got out,” she said.

“What do you mean, he got out?”

“He was quite agile.”

“Off a moving vehicle? In lion country?”

“Maybe he needed the toilet.”

It was the hour of sundowners and all around us the bush was coming to life with the padding of predators and the frightened scuttle of their prey. I looked at the lodge manager and I could see he was thinking about whether it was really true that all publicity is good publicity, and whether or not he relished the idea of telling the story for the rest of his life of how he had Darren Scott over for the weekend and let him get eaten.

Other vehicles were summoned and we went in search of the lost Scott. A great deal of conversation was taken up with enthusiastic debate over your best survival method on the veld. “You should lie down and play dead,” someone suggested, but then we couldn’t remember if that worked for lions or if it was only when you’re being attacked by a bear. What if you were being attacked by a bear and a lion at the same time? Either way, we couldn’t imagine Darren lying down and playing dead. Darren was pretty fearless, in a cocky, not always wise sort of way. We started speculating about how fast he could run.

It was already dark when we found him illuminated in the beam of a torch, six feet off the ground, wedged in the V of an acacia tree. He was asleep, but one hand tightly clutched an empty of bottle of Jack, and the other an empty bottle of passion fruit cordial. We shouted and threw stones at him but he did not stir. Finally one of the game guides, nervously leaving the vehicle in the dark, started pulling on his foot to wake him up. Darren was like a jungle cat himself. From deep sleep he snapped awake, just long enough to kick the game guide in the face and shout, “No one’s taking my Suitcase!”