The theatre of burglary has its standard conjugation. The first act is of confusion. You unlock the front door as usual, enter your home as usual, but something inside is unusual. It may be an item of clothing draped across a chair, a door always shut, left open. Your mind races through the reasonable options: a friend or relative has been here. But then you enter the bedroom and find a whirlwind of disorder: clothes everywhere, drawers out, upside down and emptied on the floor.
Now you understand – or rather your mind understands, but your heart does not: disbelief is the second act. This is your home, and yet this chaos is unrecognisable. Surely there is some mistake, this is only like your home: somehow you have turned left instead of right, ended up here not at your true address. You are tempted to leave again, lock the door, then unlock it, enter, as if retracing your path could undo everything you see. You feel like a child confronted by a novel and frightening situation; if you cover your eyes it may disappear.
The third act is of shock and outrage. This is your home, and somebody, some stranger, has been here. And not just been here as a visitor or friend would: as you survey the professional rifling of every drawer and every cupboard, you realise that they have been through everything. They have fingered your entire life – nothing was sacred. Things you have kept hidden away from the rest of the world for years have suddenly been dragged into the light, perused, discarded; things even you had chosen to forget about have been rudely dug up, their newly disinterred corpses lying scattered about your home.
This growing sense of violation beings to burn deeper. You have an almost physical disgust at the idea of others – strangers, criminals – fondling your most intimate possessions. In the face of this accomplished act you feel impotent, as if you had watched it happen, mute and helpless like a bound and gagged victim. You realise how you had taken your home for granted as a safe space, almost part of yourself and your self-image. Now that world has been broken open, turned into a public rather than private domain. Your easy assumptions about that impregnable core of being, that inner sanctum, have been shattered. Your world has shrunk down to your bare body; you have lost your protective social carapace.
But if the burglary of your home has cracked open a box of doubts and troubles, at least like Pandora’s it offers too a tiny compensation. As you wander distraught through the wreckage of the rooms that were once individual and differentiated, but which now have sunk beneath the general detritus of the robbery, you find yourself drawing up a mental inventory of losses. Is this gone or simply buried? Where did you put that? But more importantly, you find yourself rushing to check on the presence or absence of certain items, the ones you really care about. As you do so, you realise that the loss of your colour TV or hi-fi or money is a mere inconvenience. What matters above all else are your letters, your diaries, the irreplaceable pictures of those dear to you. Burglaries take much from you, but if they impart this knowledge, they can give much too.
(17.11.89)
