Horrors that lurk next door

Iremember when Amanda Berry went missing. I was in America and her picture was all over the telly, but as the days progressed the story developed a new, shadowy angle: why, was one missing white girl getting so much exposure, when all the girls of colour who seemingly fell off the earth barely got a mention?

But now Amanda has been found, one of three women rescued after being held captive for the last decade – chained up, broken down, raped, impregnated, and even beaten and starved into spontaneous abortion.

How, we wonder, did one lumpen little bus driver pull this off, quietly hiding his victims in plain sight in the middle of a city suburb for so long?

Yet there’s something else that makes my skull prickle, for buried in the newspaper reports is the fact that the women were each abducted when they accepted a lift from a stranger. Stupid, huh?

But you know, I once did the same.

I was 18 and furious with a boy, so I ran out of his house in Boksburg and kept going till I got to the highway. I was too mortified to call my folks because they loathed him (rightly so), but I had no money so I just kept walking towards Joburg.

A couple in a Merc stopped. Did I need help? Not at all, said I, because I knew all about stranger danger.

A black panel van pulled up and two greasy-looking blokes asked if I wanted a lift. Nope, I snapped, and hastily stomped away.

Then a Volksie bus clattered up next to me, and the chap inside wound down the window and asked if he could help. He had nice eyes, and a curious bust of Nelson Mandela on his dashboard, made even more curious because it was 1990 and the driver was white.

And you know what I did? I got in.

And you know what he did? He drove me all the way to my friend’s college residence, and gave me my train fare home.

“Please take care,” he said, before continuing his journey to the ANC offices to flog them boxes of plaster Madibas. I wonder what happened to him? And I wonder what happened to all the other missing girls, every other potential Natascha Kampusch, Jaycee Dugard, Elisabeth Fritzl, Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry…

How many other basements are there? How many other horrors lurk right next door?