Armed response ... eventually

We were having after-dinner coffee with friends when my husband’s cellphone rang at eighteen minutes past ten. The signal was bad and he had trouble hearing what the caller was saying. “Is that ADT?” he asked, and my heart sank. The alarm had gone off, they said. The dinner party came to an abrupt end as we said a hurried goodbye, climbed into the car and headed back down Corlett Drive to who knows what.

We arrived at 10.32pm to be greeted by two ADT guards, each with a bakkie. The alarm was still wailing. My husband opened the front security gate to let them in and we waited in the street, ready to duck behind one of the bakkies should shots be fired. My husband took a look through the front gate and already it was clear that the house had been broken into: the bedroom door, which we had locked before leaving, was open, the light in the dressing room was on and our cupboard doors were wide open.

After the guards told us that there was no sign of any of the intruders, we went inside. “Oh Sarah, they’ve got your laptop,” was the first thing my husband said. The bag in which I kept it was abandoned on the living room floor. I said a four letter word to myself, which I thought was justified given that I’d paid over $2 000 for my Macbook less than two months before, and it was not insured. (It had been insured, but because I extended my stay in South Africa at the last minute and then didn’t arrange for extended cover, the policy lapsed. I fully acknowledge that I was daring fate to klap me.)

The dressing room and bedroom looked as though a bomb had hit them. Bags and drawers had been upended and emptied everywhere. Clearly, my assumption that my laptop was well hidden was waaay off the mark. Apart from my laptop and my brother’s old Fujitsu Siemens, which we were borrowing to surf the net, they also managed to get a digital camera, jewellery and a Kruger Rand.

I’d hidden my wallet just before we went out, reasoning that I didn’t want to lose my credit cards and passport should we be hijacked. It was a sheer miracle that they didn’t find it.

My immediate response was teariness and anger, but by the time the police showed up, I was philosophical. It could have been so much worse. Only a week before, two of my aunts, my uncle and his 90-year-old mother were held up at gunpoint at their home in Parkmore. At least this lot ransacked our things while we were out.

They’d managed to get in by climbing on a table on the deck and then yanking out a burglar bar in a fan light, chucking the discarded bar into the pool; presumably the smallest guy then got in and then kicked out a couple of bars in a window to allow the rest access. There was evidence that they’d managed to get into our property via a neighbour’s garage roof.

The police were reasonably friendly – the woman was very sweet, telling us that another woman had been held up at gunpoint with her two young children in the same street earlier in the evening. She added that the Zimbabweans were the most violent criminals, and she thought they committed a lot of crime. And the laws that required you to ask somebody’s permission to search him or her hampered their work.

My husband was appalled, however, when he went through the statement written out by the other inspector and queried the term “butler bars”. It was burglar bars, he said. The fact that a police inspector could not spell a word of profound significance to the work he did gave him no faith at all, he said. Overall, we agreed, the ADT guys were much more impressive. “What a good thing we had ADT”, we thought.

That was, of course, until our neighbour from across the street knocked on our door. The alarm had started ringing at about 10, he said. When, ten minutes later, with no sign of armed response in sight, he saw a remarkably athletic man jumping down our three-metre wall and running down the street, he decided to call ADT.

Remember that ADT called us at eighteen minutes past ten. That’s nearly twenty minutes after the alarm first went off, according to our neighbour. So when we finally reached our house to let in the guards at 10.32 pm, it was way, way too late. Out possessions were long gone. But that’s ok. Things are just things, after all. (I’ve already gritted my teeth and used more than a month’s rent to buy another laptop.)

Here’s the thing that really bothers me, though. Every minute I was in my house during my visit to South Africa, I wore my panic button religiously. Call it a modern-day amulet, but I fervently believed that, should I ever find myself in a nasty situation, I’d be rescued.

And now I know I was wrong. If, God forbid, I had been attacked in my own home and I’d pressed that panic button, the guards might show up, eventually, and then they’d stand outside my front gate and scratch their arses and say “Eish, the wall is too high”, while I was being beaten or raped inside. And for this “service” people pay R500 a month!

I’m uploading this as I sit in my local library in Sydney. I don’t wear a panic button here, but then, happily, it seems I don’t need one.

I can’t say I am sorry to be back.