Waking up with a gun at my head

should be keeping. I tell him I’ll be fine without it. He holds up the paper to read the number, and the gun swishes perilously close to my head. I jump back, startled, but more as a joke than anything else, and he immediately says, “sorry, sorry”, which I’m careful not to laugh at. It helps relieve the tedium in my own head.

Now, as the other two potter around gathering stuff of dubious value in a pile in the entrance hall, grey beanie tells me that he’ll feel bad tonight when he thinks back on this, and that he’d prefer not to have to do this. He uses phrases like “the black man”, “the white man”, and I feel like I’m in a 19th-century colonial pantomime. This government, he says, is no good, and that he, aged about 40 I would think, preferred “the old government”, because “bread cost two cents”. Whether this is some indirect pandering to my supposed white prejudice is not clear. But wait, there’s more.

I’m hustled back to the room, still without glasses, bound at the ankles, naked, but with my hands free because I had to make the call to the security company. I’m lying on the bed now, and grey beanie is going through the contents of my cupboard, onehanded, with his firearm in the other hand. He tells me he doesn’t like the EFF either, because, he says, “they want to kick whites out of the country”. “How can you have a country without whites?” he ventures, quite animated now, waving his gun around.

Whether this is intended as a joke or not, I’m careful not to be amused. I do the equivalent of the sort of shrug that someone with a firearm pointed at him would do, understated. I’ve become a good listener, albeit at gunpoint. I’ve long since decided that my best chance of survival lies in being a co-conspirator in this gross suburban melodrama. I play along, all the better to hasten the end, whatever that may be.

Grey beanie is going through my shoes, a meagre collection. I’m still on the bed. The other two are packing, but also interrupting themselves, darting into the room, nervously drawing the curtains aside. Apparently there is a security car outside. They sense they’re in danger. Grey beanie is distracted, though, and picks up a golf shoe, one of a pair I bought at a sale and which didn’t fit despite being a bargain. I’m immediately relieved that my real golf shoes are in the car (still mine for now, at any rate). He asks if they’re golf shoes, and I reply yes, and he asks what size they are. I say 8, and he’s delighted, one-handedly packing them into an empty shoebox lying in the cupboard. Relishing the small victory at hand, I cannot resist saying to him from the bed, “you can take those”, but he carries on regardless. I realise that a guy with a gun doesn’t really need irony — or a sense of humour.

I get hauled to the second bedroom now, and I tell them there’s a laptop in the cupboard. They seize on it, happy with the find, but one asks where the cable is. I tell him it’s upstairs in the cupboard. We may as well be an old married couple, for all the domesticity of the scene. It’s All in the Family meets Tarantino. Grey beanie’s attention is caught by a blue leather bag, very heavy, and he picks it up, enthused by the latest find. They’re my late dad’s bowling woods, I explain, and I give a bowling motion to illustrate my point. He doesn’t bother opening the bag. Flight overalls is going through the drawers of the desk. He finds the little rectangular box containing my late brother’s ashes, and proceeds to try to muscle the lid off the box. No guy, I tell him, it’s ashes, it’s a dead person. It is an odd thing to say, but subtlety left the house long ago. He doesn’t seem to understand, and it takes grey beanie’s intercession to get him to stop trying to manhandle the box open.

It’s getting late. They’ve been here at least an hour now, and frankly I’m just sick of them. The idea of going to the bank in the car seems to have been shelved, for now. There’s lots of tiptoeing up to the curtains, and drawing them aside to peek. It seems at least one security man is outside, maybe more. I’m hopped back to my bedroom, this time by flight overalls, of whom I haven’t formed a favourable impression, and who seems ultra surly, and ominously silent. I’m pushed back on the bed, and I think of

Arthur Koestler’s chilling portrayal of torture, Darkness at Noon, where Rubashov is hauled back and forth to the torture room, so that day and night merge into a seamless nightmare.

He puts the duvet over me, and I fear the worst now. I’m face down, and my heart is beating so hard I swear the bed is bouncing. I sense him fiddling with the plugs at the bedside table, and I wonder if he’s plugging in the iron. (Later I discover that he was only stealing my two-prong adapter, adding it to the spoils in the entrance hall.)

I’m certain I’m going to die. I vow that if I live, I’ll go to the airport, in pyjamas if necessary, and get on a plane to … anywhere. Worried about the bad karma such thinking may create, I vow instead to work for the poor. Forever. I’m trying anything.

I hear the cupboard drawers being opened and shut and I’m taking it one breath at a time. I’m listening for the gate to open, and for the car to start as grey beanie heads off for his “one thou”. But nothing. I’m sure they’re going to shoot me. After all, they have made no effort to hide their faces, perhaps for a reason.

I think of my life, hastily throwing a few “highlights” together. I picture being in the Amazon again, gliding in a shallow boat down a charcoal grey river in tropical Peru. I think of my late daughter, telling myself this could be the last that I think of her.

I try to fall asleep, gambling that the transition from sleep to death is but a small step. I think about my colleagues, and how shocked they’ll be. I dread becoming a nuisance — in my absence.

Now the house has gone quiet. Can the quiet be trusted? I’m still face down on the bed, covered head to toe by the duvet. I start counting, slowly, deliberately. I try to keep the numbers in my head, past 100, 200, and now I’m in the mid-500s, and still no noise in the house. I reach down to untie the rope around my ankles, loosening it, and then putting it back in case one of them returns and checks. But nothing. I count on, till 1,000. At 1,000 I leap from the bed, grabbing a towel as I go, and into the garden, with the intention of jumping over the front wall, and probably breaking something; that is if I don’t get caught in the electric fence. Strange that that would be a relief after what I’ve gone through.

Oh, and any offers for a pair of size-8 golf shoes?

I try to fall asleep, gambling that the transition from sleep to death is but a small step. I think about my colleagues, and how shocked they’ll be. I dread becoming a nuisance — in my absence