I wake. There is a terrific noise somewhere in the house. It’s a chaotic, terrifying sound, of shouting and breaking. Now Nellie wakes up.
‘What is it, Frank?’
‘Don’t move. I will go down. Just don’t move. I’m calling security.’
The phone is dead. I hit the button by the bed which sets off the alarm, but that is dead too. I run to the sitting room. Lindiwe is tied up and two men are fastening Lucinda’s wrists behind her with cable ties. She is sobbing gently.
The men turn to me. ‘Good evening,’ I say.
You must engage them. I remember someone saying that: You must speak to them. I am not frightened; a torrent of anger is drowning out all fear. I would kill them if I could. There is a presumption and an entitlement to these people here in my house that incenses me. I walk towards them.
‘Stay still.’
One man holds up a machete and makes a chopping gesture to suggest what could happen to me. The second man produces a gun.
‘We must talk,’ I say. ‘You can take what you want. The car, money, credit cards, anything, I will show you. But please don’t hurt anybody.’
‘If you lie to me I kill you,’ he says.
I know that in many robberies the intruders choose to kill the witnesses because the police make so few arrests. Survivors can cause trouble. There is even a belief that some robbers take revenge by raping any women present.
I can’t see them clearly in the gloom. It is the gloom in which horrors traditionally take place, as if there are particles in the air presaging something frightful.
‘You must give to us every-ting: money, keys, credit cards with pin code and your car. If you do that you can live.’
I detect a Congolese accent.
‘Vous êtes congolais? ’ I say. ‘Du DRC? ’
‘Vous parlez français? ’
‘Mais oui. Bien sûr. J’étais quelquefois a Kinshasa. Je peux vous aider.’
He hits me on the side of my head with his hand. It’s a warning. He thinks I am up to something. He smells of liquor. The other man points his gun at me. Still I am not afraid.
‘This is my daughter. She has a child. I will give you whatever you want, but you must leave my daughter and the others. If you want to take me in the car to get the money that is okay.’
‘Take your clothe off,’ the man with the gun says to Lucinda.
The second man is not happy about this proposal. He shouts at his colleague, waving his hand towards the door. He turns to me:
‘You get everything you ’ave, like you ’ave said. Bring it all here in this room. No cell phone. This man come wif you. Or we kill your daughter and you also.’
I lead the man with the machete all around the house. I tell him that my wife is in bed. Au lit, I say. We enter. Be calm. Nellie asks if I have Isaac. I don’t. The man with the machete waves at Nellie – go out. I tell Nellie that she must go to the sitting room.
‘Try to stay calm, darling. I will handle this.’
She is wearing my dressing gown.
I give the man our cell phones and wallets and all the credit cards. I go with him to my study where I open the safe and take out the money. There is about two thousand pounds. Then I write down the pin numbers on a piece of paper. We have four credit and debit cards. I take off my watch and give it to him. I give him our two iPads and a laptop. I am stumbling through a nightmare.
My phone and the laptop are traceable.
‘Je peux vous aider,’ I say.
‘Comment tu fais ça? ’
‘On peut faire un plan. Je peux retirer beaucoup plus d’argent de ma banque en Angleterre. Mais ça dépend d’une chose, si vous êtes d’accord. Ma famille doit être libérée d’abord.’
In fact it is impossible for me to get cash from my bank in the middle of the night but I am hoping to keep him interested after they have taken everything, so that they don’t kill us.
We come back into the living room and place the phones and laptops and money and watch on a table. As the first man inspects what we have brought, I see Isaac coming down the steps, holding his teddy bear to his face.
Isaac says, ‘Hello, Grandpa.’
The gunman turns, startled. He fires at Isaac but misses. Nellie runs towards Isaac.
‘Hello, Grandma,’ he says, as Nellie grabs him, her back to the gunman.
They are going to kill both of them. I move towards the man with the gun.
Now I hear a voice, screaming. There is another man in the room: he has a dense black beard: ‘Ek is Retief. I am Retief,’ he shouts. ‘You people are dead.’
Oh God, it is Jaco. He fires at least five shots, hitting both of the men in quick succession as they turn towards him. The noise of automatic gunfire in close proximity is appalling – a staccato promise of death, each deadly shot producing the same, lethal, report. Jaco shoots the two men again as they lie bleeding. One of the men is bubbling audibly from a wound in his throat. Jaco kicks him in the face – two teeth hang from his broken mouth. Jaco is in a frenzy. To my inexpert eyes the intruders look as though they are already dead. There is a terrible amount of blood, not just on the floor or the sofas but also on the walls.
Now Bertil comes to the front door. ‘I heard gunshots,’ he says. Nellie rushes to him. But Bertil may have had a few drinks; it takes him a while to understand what has happened. I ask him to go back to Vanessa’s parents’ house and to call the security and the police from there. He goes off.
‘Jaco, thank God for you. You came just in time,’ I say.
‘No, only a pleasure, Oom.’
I have no idea what he is doing here. I am shaking and disoriented. In my confusion I think Jaco must have appointed himself our guardian angel. He is still holding his gun.
‘Ja, I am sorry, Oom, I have been sleeping in your pool house for a few days while you was away.’
I hug my cousin for the first and last time. I have to sit down. My legs have become loose, like a puppet’s, like Pinocchio’s.
Isaac is serene. Perhaps he thinks we have been playing a game. But the rest of us – apart from Jaco – are trembling, shocked and horrified. Only Jaco is inured to the horror; he is drunk and elated. My legs won’t respond. I want to be sick. I throw up into a waste-paper basket. Lucinda is sitting, still tied, her eyes fixed lifelessly on the near distance. She is silent now. Lindiwe has freed herself and comes to help me struggle to my feet. I get some scissors from the kitchen and cut Lucinda’s cable ties. Lucinda is silent. I think that she will always blame me in some way for this cataclysm, this horror. But she says under her breath, ‘I’m all right, Daddy.’
Nellie and I hug her as if to bring her back to life; Isaac, not wanting to be left out, joins in. All around us there are bloody fragments of bone and even a small section of hair and skin flung onto a sofa; the floor where the two men lie in a grotesque intimacy is awash with blood. A mohair Swazi carpet is soaked. Who knew that a human being harboured so much blood?
Even in this appalling nightmare, Lindiwe tries to help Lucinda. She brings water and three Lemon Cream biscuits, and Lucinda eats them all as though she is hypnotised.
‘Don’t cry,’ Isaac says. ‘Can I have a Lemon Cream?’
Contained within Isaac’s innocent concern is a message: it is that I will never see my beloved country again.