My mother is chirping, like a small bird. I laugh. What a fun game. And when I run through the house to find her, there is a man in a balaclava with a knife to her throat. She is not chirping. She is screaming. The expectation of one thing when the opposite is true. And yet in my memory it is still a chirp, not a scream.
When I think about the robbery, even now, decades later, it is my toes that tingle. My ankles. I was four at the time. Or five. I do not remember. Time, what a slippery thing. My friend Hayley was over to play. Sometime after the chirping, the man with a knife to my mother’s throat told us to go upstairs to my room and not to open the door. I do not remember this happening but, when I reverse-engineer the events, I know it to be true. Until it’s not. Maybe it was my mum. Maybe my mum had told us to go to my room and not to come out. What I do remember is sitting on my bed. I remember a dollhouse at the foot of my bed, its white pointed roof. I remember thinking we had to jump from the dollhouse to the bed. We could not let our feet touch the floor. If we did, the burglar (Did I know he was a burglar then? The intruder? The man?) would be able to reach through my bedroom floor and grab our feet, our ankles, his arms stretching up through the ceiling above him. We could not let our feet touch the carpet.
