After reading the two volumes of Helen Garner’s diaries, I was intrigued as to the identity of the dramatis personae – ‘V’ in particular. He’s so thinly disguised that I was driven to re-read the ‘novel’ he published in 1998. Now where did I shelve it? A thorough search yielded nothing so I concluded that I’d lent it – which, as you know, is to give it away.
Not thorough enough: I’d neglected the pile on the floor near my writing table going on a fortnight and there it was – at the bottom.
In light of what one gleans from Volume II of the diaries, I couldn’t just read V’s 1998 book but must study it – and took until yesterday to complete the task. It’s more a dissertation than a novel and includes a disparaging assessment of the underlying assumptions of depth-psychology (dreams and other phenomena being inherently meaningful, and so on) which Ms Garner had taken on board as plausible. Coincidence is one of the dividing lines in such analyses.
Last night I went to bed, dog-tired after table tennis. As a rule, I sleep soundly but have been restless this past week. A flash of light woke me from what had been a deep sleep. Was my neighbour attending to some important business in her spare room across the shared driveway? I checked my phone; it was 1:36 am. Best ignore it if I wasn’t to be tossing and turning for an hour or more. I couldn’t help but listen. There was someone in the driveway. Had my neighbour a reason to be out there? She sometimes does stuff in her backyard but this was close at hand.
I fumbled around for a pair of shorts – just in case. I crept to my writing table in the room at the front of the house. I hadn’t been dreamin’: there was a bright light from the driveway. I stared out and could determine that the light was heading toward the street from the locked roller door at the end of the driveway – heading toward me but at least in the preferred direction overall. Whoever it is has taken my ladder, I could see.
But I didn’t leave the ladder out. The wall around the front of my single-fronted cottage is low enough for a ladder to be seen over it but higher than permits of a head to poke above. The ladder appeared at the locked front gate. Glad I put on those shorts! This was getting serious. I couldn’t see the person who must be moving that ladder but knew it was time to act. I’d deadlocked the front door and security screen prior to going to table tennis and had neglected to unlock them prior to going to bed.
Only since reading Helen Garner’s account of a conversation with a fireman had I adopted the practice of unlocking the deadlocks prior to going to bed: he had told her that many people who perish in house fires are found at the deadlocked entrance to their home. I didn’t have my keys so I couldn’t quickly open the front door and say Boo! to scare the intruder away so I pounded down the polished timber hallway and grabbed the phone. Maybe that would scare him (or her)?
Where’s the tennis racquet? No time to lose. The bright light was now shining down the hallway through the security mesh and frosted glass door as I returned to the front room, stood behind the glass of the (locked) French Doors that open onto the narrow courtyard between the wall and house and took a photo. No flash. Bugger. The ladder retreated. I saw it slide up on top of a van with a yellow roofrack, the same van as had been parked outside my house one afternoon a few days earlier. I managed to get the flash on and took another series of pics of that van.
The van moved slowly up the street and stopped. After a minute or so, it turned and went past my house into the night.
I was in a cold sweat from fear. I put on intruder fighting clothes, found the tennis racquet and the torch then went to get new batteries. Wrong size. I made a hot coffee and dipped a couple of biscuits (not at the same time, but one after the other).
I put on the back verandah lights just in case there was to be an attack from behind. I sat in a lounge chair that I only ever use to throw my table tennis bag onto. For some unknown reason the bag was in the kitchen so I didn’t damage the bat or balls.
I dozed off for a few minutes and went on like this for an hour or more. Then I took my phone, tennis racquet and torch to the toilet. While indisposed, the back verandah lights went out. Holy crap!
What chance both bulbs had gone at the same moment? Had the intruder returned and turned off my power at the smart meter box in the driveway? I tried the other lights. No power. Now I was beyond frightened so called triple-zero.
I’d never phoned triple-zero until calling on behalf of a companion who’d cracked her head on the ablutions block floor of the Lane Cove Caravan Park in March 2020 and then had some weird medical event in the September. Each time the triple-zero service had been first rate. It was again when the female operator took my details and put me through to the Police. The fellow stayed on the phone as he advised how near or far the attending officer with dog was.
I stood in the front room.
“Ah,” I said, “he’s coming up the road now. I can see his headlights reflected in the houses down the street.”
“That’s not him. He’s not in your street yet.”
“Well, there’s a very bright light so something’s going on down there.”
“Wait a minute, let me see. Yes, you’re correct”, said the fellow from the Police emergency service, “it’s an emergency SA Power unit. There’s been damage to electricity equipment, as it happens, and that’s the cause of the power outage.”
I was in the dark apart from the torch and the phone at my ear. I remembered how they do it on the TV cop shows and stuck the torch in my mouth while I unlocked the front door and security screen to go to the gate and talk to the policeman with the big dog.
He took the details and accompanied me down the driveway to see if there was anything to deal with.
All good.
I lay down on the bed but kept my clothes on. It was 3.33 am. I dozed off but was awakened by the sound of a vehicle moving slowly down the street – or up it. After getting up to check 3 or 4 times on perceived movements I was quite awake. Finally, in the early dawn I fell asleep and was in the deepest level – beyond the REM dreaming stage I expect, when the phone rang at 8:30 am.
‘Twas my sister. I let it go. But it might be important. So I forced myself out of bed, brushed my teeth and returned the call.
It turned out that when I’d put the phone in my tracksuit pants to talk to the cop at the front gate at 3:13 am I’d inadvertently pocket-dialled her husband and they’d listened to the conversation. She was phoning to see if I was okay after the break-in. I wished she’d sent a text but.
And it turns out I was right about the ladder: the intruder had not stolen mine but brought his (or her) own.
