Australian House & Garden

The attempted break in

I’m scared. Petrified. This isn’t past the tense - something I’m looking back on. No. This is happening right now. This is pure raw fear. It’s dark. I’m completely alone. And I’ve got a shaking, sick to the stomach fear, a notebook and pencil for company.

Somebody has tried to break in. I can’t say exactly when. Large muddy footprints on the front veranda alerted me to the fact that something wasn’t quite right. Then I noticed the shed door had been forced open. So I went around and did a quick check of the house and found that the back window had been broken. Thank God the new windows had lived up to their promise of being extremely difficult to gain entry through (thank you Javier, a million times over). I could see that a brick had been thrown at it repeatedly. And yet still the vandal had been unable to gain access.

Now for the strange part. I can determine that whoever he was, he had tried to gain access through all the windows on one side of the house. And he had carefully removed the flyscreen from each window and leaned it up against the fence before attempting to smash the windows. How strange.

Even stranger, how does one attempt this feat under the pouring rain and not slip and fall on the twisted mountains of corrugated iron? And why does one go to all this trouble, gain access to the shed, and then take nothing? Which leads me to believe that he must be coming back.

I know the house is looking bad. It does look run down and I can’t even lock the gate because of the rubble. It does look vacant, derelict. And there is absolutely nothing worth taking. My furniture is sparse and there are just the old leftovers from my family’s move.

So I sit here in fear, waiting, wishing I’d never started this mess, wishing that I’d done the smart thing and just bought a small unit somewhere instead of this great expanse of a house. What if he is residing in my roof right now, awaiting the perfect opportunity to jump down the manhole for a midnight surprise? No, there will definitely be no sleep here tonight. Will there ever be sleep here again? Will I ever feel safe again? Will I ever be able to arrive home in the dark without fearing that somebody has got in? Oh wait, I do already. How I miss the days when there was eight of us sleeping under this roof.

So now I sit alone waiting the morning, when the glaziers will come and replace the window. I just had to be muscle woman, action woman, and insist that I’ll be fine to stay here alone tonight. What a stupid thing to do. Maybe everyone is right. Maybe this isn’t a one-woman solo task after all. This is going to be a long night. 
     Look what they did to my shed!

• Posted By: The Renovator at 10.34AM

• Add a comment

H&G Tools

Send to friend

Print

del.icio.us

digg it