At 20, Marc Brew was the sole survivor of a terrible crash that killed his fellow dancers. Paralysed from the chest down, he had to learn to live in a new, uncharted reality
Marc Brew was sitting in the back seat of a car on a motorway near Johannesburg, telling jokes and laughing with his friends, when a pickup came hurtling down the wrong side of the road towards them. “Out of nowhere, I just remember seeing this white flash,” says Brew, who was 20 at the time. The truck, which he later found out had a drunk driver at the wheel, drove straight into the car he was in. The crash killed everyone else in the vehicle.
Nine months previously, Brew had moved from Australia to South Africa to join the Pact ballet company, based in Pretoria. That Saturday, he had attended his usual morning dance classes, before he and his friend Joanne, another member of the company, set off with her brother, Simon, and Simon’s fiancee’s brother, Toby, towards a game reserve where they had planned to go bush walking. When the truck hit, “it was like time froze”, Brew, now 48, recalls. “I remember my ears were ringing really loud, like I’d been at a concert.”