Every woman, at some point in her life, probably wonders what she would do if she caught an intruder in her home. You know, those nights alone, when you relish having the place to yourself. You might take a long bath, watch a film or burrow into the sofa with a good book. Then it comes time to switch off the lights and snuggle into bed. You hear a strange noise and your imagination runs rampant on your nerves. You check and re-check the locks, windows, closet, bed, bath tub, sink…Yes, some of you, even CEO’s of your own companies, can be this irrational. You may even imagine what you would do if someone broke in. Would you scream, hide, chase the intruder with a baseball bat, puke, sneak out the window and run to the neighbours? Pee your pants and cry? How would you handle such a terrifying situation?
Recently, having just returned from a three week holiday home in Canada, and on hiatus from work, I was camped at my Mum’s small one bedroom apartment overlooking the water. Her verandah juts out over lush, overgrown, shrubby bush land, a seemingly impossible place for anyone to navigate without a machete, and certainly not in pitch black darkness. For this reason Mum had been fairly slack about locking the verandah door at night.
My boyfriend, Tim, had been over and the three of us had shared a meal before Mum and I settled in for the night. She was exhausted and went to bed early. I stayed up surfing the net looking for jobs, before going to shower just before 11pm. I left my laptop, wallet and jewelry on the dining table facing the glass verandah doors. Due to some unexplainable intuition I locked the front door next to the bathroom before showering. Afterward I slipped through the well-lit apartment wrapped in a towel and, while rummaging around the dark bedroom searching for PJs and bruising my shins, heard a thump from above as though someone upstairs had knocked something over. Only there was no floor above us, just the landlord’s verandah, and they were asleep. I thought this was odd since I had never heard sounds from above in the two years Mum had resided there owing to the thick stone separating her unit from the main house. I kept rummaging…and bruising.
Shortly thereafter I heard a clicking noise from the kitchen. I stopped rummaging long enough to ponder the noise, but shrugged it off as the clicking of the refrigerator. Then there was a loud ‘POP!’ The distinct sound of the verandah door popping open that I’d heard countless times during previous visits. I stood up straight, frowning, and peered out the bedroom door to the kitchen. I could see a man’s leg highlighted by the white running shoe on his foot reflected from the dark glass in the oven door.
Disbelief prompted me to step into the bedroom doorway and I locked eyes with the intruder, a skinny young man wearing a grey beanie, black hooded sweatshirt, black jogging pants and white gloves. He was frozen in mid step toward the jack pot on the dining table and his wide eyes looked back at me in surprise. Mum slept soundly behind me and what can only be described as the need to protect my family prompted me to yell in a strong, masculine voice (or what I would hope to be masculine)…
“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?! GET THE FUCK OUT OF OUR HOUSE!”
The sound of my voice must have shocked him into action because in one smooth movement he turned and gracefully leapt onto the verandah railing before gliding down into the night and out of sight. I was left gawking in my towel as Mum, roused by my yelling, jumped out of bed proclaiming like Lion out of the Wizard of Oz, “Let me at ‘im, let me at ‘im”. Okay no, it was more like high pitched, “Who was it?! Where is he?! On the verandah?! What?! Are you okay?!” in a rapid fire of maternal questioning, before running out to the verandah and screaming out into the blackness “You cocksucker! I’m calling the police!” Now, my Mum is no redneck, she’s a petite woman with delicate features and the kindest heart, but I learned from a young age not to mess with her. I’m pretty sure between the two of us we could have taken on the skinny runt had he chosen to stick around.
Mum immediately called the police who, shockingly, arrived within minutes, but due to the dense brush and darkness, not shockingly, couldn’t find our intruder. He had left a flashlight at the bottom of the outside stairs leading up to the drive and they collected it for fingerprinting. Forensics arrived the next day to look for DNA, but so far we haven’t heard of any progression in the case.
What’s odd is the fact that my heart didn’t leap in my chest. I didn’t faint, scream, puke, freeze, pee my pants and cry or cower under the bed. I faced my fear head on. According to Wikipedia, women are more likely to flee from a stressful situation and men are more likely to fight. I realize now that there is no way to gage what reaction anyone will have to danger since there are certain factors that influenced my reaction, but that I had no control over.
Firstly, when I saw the intruder I was standing between him and my Mother in the bed behind me. My immediate reaction was to protect her, but what if I had been alone? Would I still have gone into fight mode? Secondly, the intruder wasn’t a large, intimidating man. He was slight, not overly tall and he was just as shocked to see me as I was to see him. He even looked mildly afraid and humiliated. I have to pose the question that, had he looked like Mike Tyson during the infamous Tyson vs. Holyfield match, would I have stood my ground?
My Mum, friends and family maintain that I’m a hero in their eyes, but I don’t feel like a hero. It seems there are too many uncontrollable variables in this type of situation to dictate how a person would react. I feel like I got lucky and that my intuition to lock the front door before showering means that the evening could have played out differently. Think about it, if the front door had been unlocked, perhaps the intruder would have tried that point of entry first. Meaning I could have still been in the bathroom tweezing my nose hairs when he entered the house. Okay, for the record, I don’t tweeze my nose hairs. Gross! If I had come out and caught him then, he may have felt trapped and therefore tried to attack me in his effort to exit through the front door. Who’s to say that had he tried to attack me I would have fought back? Maybe I would have gotten scared, locked myself in the bathroom, peed my pants...towel…and cried?
The point is we don’t know how we handle a situation until it happens so there’s no point wasting time considering it. All we can do is try to make our homes safe. That means locking doors and keeping outside areas well-lit. Had the verandah door been locked my ‘heroism’ would never have occurred because he probably would have tried the door and, seeing it locked, moved on to the next house.
Moral of the story: Billy don’t be a hero. Lock the freakin’ doors!
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