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Things that go bump in the night
By ella | February 25, 2005
I have never been very good at being ‘home alone’. Which is all the more ironic as I married a man who is effectively a travelling salesman. No wait. He is categorically NOT a travelling salesman (is that what I am supposed to say, sweetie?). He is something very important and he just happens to travel as well. Yes, that’s right.
Anyway, he is away pretty much every week.
Which is also why I moan a lot about having to raise my children, because most of the time I feel like I am doing it alone.
I’ve always been a bit spooked at night. If I hear any noise that can’t be explained, I have to get up to investigate even though it is invariably one of the dogs or a toy falling off a precarious perch. And if I’m on my own, I’m completely paranoid. As a teenager we lived in a large, rambling old house which creaked and groaned like an old man’s knees. If my parents were away overnight I would stay up all night in the kitchen with the lights and music on really low to stop an intruder. INSTEAD OF HAVING WILD PARTIES. What was I thinking?
So, bearing in mind that I have been here only a couple of weeks, we are having lunch today when I think I should put the heating on as it is cold here at the moment. So cold that I’ve been thinking about breaking out my thermal vests, I’m THAT sexy. When I walk to the front door, I see a man peering through the door as if the doorbell hadn’t been answered and he was just kind of checking to see that no-one was home. We made eye contact as only you can through squiggly glass and assuming I hadn’t heard the doorbell (which I absolutely would of course, when having lunch with two screaming, bratty toddlers) I went to answer the door.
As soon as he saw me, he ran. Well actually he walked in that very fast way so that you look like you are walking when actually you are running. It absolutely doesn’t draw any attention to yourself. No sirree. Ever the concerned, involved citizen I made a mental note of his physical description and resumed lunch.
While putting out the refuse this afternoon, an extremely dodgy looking man came up our driveway. My first thought was this place is like a village for crime rejects, but he turned out to be a plain clothes policeman. A neighbour down the lane by our house was burgled this morning and he was asking if we had seen anything suspicious. Well, yes I had. Feeling very proud of myself I gave the detailed description of the man who had been at our door.
He won’t be caught of course. Burglars never are. Actually that’s not quite true. We were burgled at a previous house when we popped out for twenty minutes to the grocery store. Because the house was so well protected, the burglar had only managed to get in through a tiny pane of glass in the front door. Finding no alternative escape route once he was in the house either, he could only take what would fit back through the tiny pane of glass. I took some solace and even a slight amount of pleasure in this thought. All my large music equipment was safe. He must have been cursing when he realised there was such a huge amount of valuable stuff that he couldn’t take. All the same he managed a fair old swoop and despite detailed descriptions and serial numbers of the items he did take, they were never seen again. We even went down to the local (legal) cash-for-second-hand-items shop, fully expecting to see half the contents of our house there. Months passed and then out of the blue we had a letter from the Local Constabulary informing us that the man had been sent down for a few years. He had confessed to burgling our house and one in two of every other building in our street (not all at the same time either) in return for a more lenient jail sentence. Wait. So he confesses to more crimes and gets less time in jail? You gotta love English law. Where the hell is the sense in that? So in the end, they sort of caught him for our burglary, but if he hadn’t been trying to strike a deal they wouldn’t have. And by that time my need for justice, and dare I say it, revenge, was long gone. I was denied even the pleasure of that. Pah.
So now I am home alone with two small children and two pathetic dogs that would roll over on their backs for a burglar if he offered to tickle their tummies, when a man has been earlier eyeing up our property, potentially as a burglary target.
And so tonight, when I so need some quality sleep, I shan’t be sleeping at all.
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