Abrie and Riana had lived with us for three months, but that night they had left their keys at home. What does it mean?
It means nothing.
Our captors hadn’t hurried, despite my mothers pleas. Two pack up our most expensive possessions (we can hear them wrapping and taping things), while the third watches the hostages, his grey fat nosed gun trained on us. They had also ignored my mothers pleas to use the bathroom, and she was growing desperate. Only our hands were tied but we were instructed to keep still. Our heads were still covered (I could see out the bottom of mine, I occasionally glimpsed guns and passing leg), although my mother, growing a little too brave, shook hers off at one point and she got a firm reprimand. She was praying loudly, and it was pissing our watcher off.
“Mom.. please pray softer” I whispered to her.
For my part, I feel finely tuned in to my surroundings. I can hear everything in super stereo, including the blood moving through my veins and my own breathing. I can hear my skin scraping against my bounds as I twist my wrist the little amount I can, to try to keep the blood flowing. I have been numb for a while, and numbness is turning to pain. It occurs to me that I have experience in this, and my mother does not.
“Keep your hands moving mum”
“Shut Up! Sleep!” , our captor says.
I know they plan to kill us, and instead of this realization driving me to panic, it calms me. I am no longer sniveling. There is nothing more to be done I realize. The situation is, as it is. What is terrifying is waiting and wondering when the moment will arrive. Will I hear a click, or will I not know the moment I go from alive to dead? They will shoot us in the head of course. Who will they kill first?
Please let it be me so that I dont have to hear my mother die. Afterwards I will remember this thought as being a selfish one.
My head covering is cream calico, and I closely examine the fibres. I have nothing else. I focus and concentrate on a dark thread in front of me with everything I have. I try to think of nothing.
“Please don’t come home” I mutter to myself, and to my mother, to show her that I share her thoughts.
“I don’t know where my dog is” my mother says in a small voice, “I haven’t heard her bark since this started”
Our captor does not say a word, but I hear him move in his chair.
She is speaking about Toffee, her miniature Dashund.
My mothers baby parrot is in the room, out of her cage, on her perch. Even though the room is quiet, she flies across it now… we both hear the swoosh of her wings as she searches for safe landing. I hear a swatting noise and it is quiet. He must have swatted the bird as she tried to land on my mother.
“my poor baby bird” I hear my mother say, her voice sad and small again, all aggression gone.
I can feel a rage building within me and I fight to surpress it. My mother started off strong for the both of us. Now its my turn.
I hear a distant cars engine, and the dread in my stomach twists like a python. Abrie and Riana are home with the babies.
I can hear from the voices that all three of our captors are now in the room. They are talking in agitated tones. They can see the headlights at the gate, but why does the car not come in? They have indeed.. been “interrupted”.
A cellphone rings. I recognize the tone immediately as my mothers. I act instinctively.
“I will answer that. Let me answer that”, I say.
“You will tell them to go away!” a voice hisses back.
Someone pulls the cover off my head, and the cellphone is shoved in my face, preceeded only by the pistol he is holding, which is held close to my nose. My hands are bound, so he has to press the answer button and hold the phone to my face. He holds his face closely to mine, so that he is able to hear both sides of the call.
In a completely normal and friendly voice I say :
“Hello?”
“Hello Sue! Its Riana here! “ (I can hear she is laughing)… “Abrie and I can’t believe we could be so stupid, but we left our keys behind tonight! Please can you come to the gate and let us in?”
“I am sorry Riana. Tonight is not a good night to visit. Please can you come back in the morning?” I have the voice of a store attendant at closing time.
“Sue?” there is no recognition, only puzzlement.
“I am sorry Riana, I have to go now.. goodbye”
I look at my captor (whose face incidently, in my memory is no more than a grey featureless blot), to indicate that he can end the call. He does.
“I am sorry. I did my best”
I am speaking to my mother, to try to indicate that I had attempted a warning.. first by answering her phone, which might seem unusual, and then by talking to our housemates as if they were visiting strangers. The phone wrangler does not get my meaning and thinks I attempt to reassure him, and gives me a cursory nod.
The phone rings again.. almost immediately.. and once more it is shoved in my face, along with the gun.
“Sue.. It’s Abrie.” He sounds annoyed, and at that moment my heart stops beating. I feel as if the moment is happening in slow motion. The child on the bicycle is in the road and the car is coming.. I can’t reach them. I can’t reach them.
I try to use my sing song happy voice again, but its not coming out right this time. I sound serious. My words come out slowly and deliberately.
“Abrie. Tonight is a bad night to visit. I cannot let you in. Its too late for a visit. You need to come back in the morning”
“Sue? We are not visiting! We live there! My kids are tired and we need to sleep! You need to let us in!”
“Abrie. You need to hear what I am saying. You cant come in. Please come back tomorrow”
“Where is your mother?”
He is still sounding annoyed.. and I can feel a rage of my own rising, at his lack of understanding, that I am unable to communicate more effectively… as I talk again my voice shakes a little and although I correct it on a glare from my captor, I hope he heard it. I talk slowly. I keep repeating myself, I cant think of any other plan besides the one I have settled on.
The captor also whispers to me to tell him that my mother is sleeping.. reminding me that he can hear both sides of the call. He also gives the gun a wave in my face to underline the point.
“Mom is sleeping”
“What am I supposed to do Sue? What am I supposed to do with my tired kids??”
“You. Need. To . hear. What . I. am. Saying to you Abrie. You CANNOT visit tonight. You NEED TO COME BACK TOMORROW.”
I am sure I said it a third time. At the last I was sounding stern and angry.. and fuck.. by that point I was. How could he possibly not realize something was wrong? Why had the phone call dragged on as it had?
I pulled away from the phone, indicating to my captor to cancel the call. He did. I repeated again that I had done my best.
“I know you did your best sweetheart,” my mother said.
But instead of a calming of our captors, as a result of the car pulling away from the driveway and the locked gate, they grow increasingly agitated. They are talking in their own language, and we cannot understand them, but I get the general idea. The car has not moved. They are not leaving.
“Why don’t they leave???” I rage. “Could I have been any more clear??”
The armed men surge together out of the room, as a result of some sort of group decision reached.. we hear their voices move out into the yard. Mom realizes what this means before I do.
“They are out the room. I am going for the alarm” she says.
As she says it I realize she cant be stopped, and that she is not considering her own safety. She is hoping that sounding the alarm will be the action that gets the message through to the occupants of that car in the driveway.. to let them know to stop sulking about the goddamn locked gate.. and to fucking flee!
“I am going for it” she says and starts to move, shaking the towel off her head.
“I am coming with you, and then we are locking ourselves in the bathroom.. we need to run”
We know we have only moments. I shake the cloth off my head and my mother streaks ahead of me with surprising speed, presses the panic button in the hall with her shoulder and the alarm in the roof immediately screams. It is as loud as an air raid siren and as well as making a god awful noise, also sends a silent alarm to our emergency response team. I am right behind her and realizing in that moment, a crystal clear thought.. the large bathrooms key was not in the lock this morning… only the small bathroom locks. She is confused at my move but I steer her, pushing her with my body into the second bathroom on instinct.. locking the door behind us with my back turned towards the lock, my hands still tied behind me.
I have no doubt any stumble or delay would have seen us both dead, as seconds after I turn the key, I hear the smashing sounds of someone who has rushed back into the house, and is smashing up the alarm box with force, ripping it from the wall, in an attempt to stop the siren.
In the bathroom I help my bound mother to get her pants down and use the toilet, just in time. I am grateful now for that small little allowance to her dignity, not that it would have mattered either way to me.
While she is sitting on the toilet she tries to untie by hands with her mouth. It doesn’t work. The knots are too tight. We talk in hushed tones, not knowing who is still in the house, or what the situation is.
We sit in silence for what feels like minutes. Then, we hear a gunshot. We both break down, fearing the worst. But who? Abrie or Riana? There had only been one shot? I make my mother lie down on the bathroom floor with me to make ourselves a less useful target. I am certain they will come back for us and shoot through the door. In my mind, the killing had begun.
Moments later we heard a terrible screaming and yelling. A mans voice. Abrie? We couldn’t be sure.
My mother was sure our captors had now fled, and wanted to leave the bathroom. I wanted to stay where we were until the emergency services, which we knew would be alerted by the alarm, arrived. I persuade her to wait a little longer (her ties, by now had made her hands blue), and at that moment we heard the sounds of someone moving in the house… someone trying to be quiet… someone waiting for us to come out.
As we discovered later, they had hoped we would come out, as they had loaded the goods into my mothers car and could not figure out how to disable her car alarm to start it. They needed one of us and there is no way they would have left us alive, as they evening had already turned to murder. After we did not emerge they were forced to abandon the loot they could not carry on foot, and fled the premises.
The shot we had heard was Riana. Abrie, still not understanding the danger, thinking me drunk and confused, perhaps out with friends, had climbed over the gate to get to the groundskeepers house on the far side of the property to get the spare key. He had been intercepted by the three men, who had held him down on the lawn. Only then had the alarm mum set off sounded.. moments too late.
Riana, realizing the danger, but still on the other side of the locked gate, jumped into the car to escape with the two babies, both in the car in their car seats. She had to reverse first, and in her panic hit a tree, and in that pause, the look out guy, stationed behind some rubble on the outside of the fence, walked over to the car window and shot through it, hitting her in the head, executing her in front of her children, for the temerity of attempting to escape.
The other three released Abrie and fled on foot. The howls we heard were his discovery of his wife when he reached the car.
Thinking he might save her, he moved her into the passenger seat and sped to the nearest emergency room. She was dead on arrival.
We only discovered that news later, when we were freed from the bathroom by emergency services and Abrie called us from the hospital.
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tacit has made me spend a little time reflecting on my own childhood today. Here are four photographs that summarise quite a few of my memories of that time...
Since silkies don’t have usual feathers, they cannot fly at all, like some other chickens, so they are easily contained, and won’t venture very far if kept in the garden. And because of their docile nature, they make ideal pets for children. 
