Then there’s Helen doing some very cool super sleuthing – at the Takapuna fleamarkets she sees her entire CD collection and her stereo, calls the police with a description. If I don’t reach the state of dropping exhausted into bed – if I try just lying there – I have panic attacks where my limbs feel like elephantine mitts, huge and useless, my breathing goes all wonky and all air seemed siphoned through the eye of a needle, as if I don’t deserve that air. Even before we learn it was **** who burgled us.Ī detective calls and you’re shown a range of guys to ID the guy you saw on Jervois Road creeping past the BPĭrifting off to sleep becomes a whole thing. I get all the extensions possible for my thesis. Then there’s the wobbly months where Jessica and I struggle to get along – struggle with everything. There’s the vodka you drink on Christmas as you cry all day and explain it on the phone to people and fucking cry some more. There’s the not wanting to sleep in your home anymore so decamping to a friend’s – Jessica carting her PC’s hard drive as the only copy of my thesis. There’s the initial shock –the Christmas Day of tears and calling the police who come and take fingerprints off windowsills and everything else, examine the vegetation outside the bathroom window for shoe prints. The shock, though, morphs through time into many things. Stereo lifted and all of Helen’s CD collection. In the hallway, the telephone cord snaking into Jessica’s bedroom cut, too. Olympus camera stolen off my dresser – the only thing I had of any value. My bag tipped over the end of my bed as I slept. Bathroom window lock spun across the floorboards 2cm-thick metal snapped like a wishbone.
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He knew Helen was away and he hoped I’d be home alone that night. Glances over my shoulder.The tall guy creeping in my footsteps had disappeared. I threaded my house keys through my fingertips and kept side-eyeing him, until I reached Wallace Street and turned down.
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I passed the BP station, crossed the road. “India might be dodgy!” We couldn’t imagine Herne Bay as dodgy. “Be careful, hon!” we told her before she left. My third flatmate, Helen, was in India for three weeks with her boyfriend. “You’re welcome to sleep over or I can drive you home now.” Jessica chose the lift home. “Stay, too! You can have the couch.” “Nah, it’s okay, it’s a 10-minute walk home.” My flatmate, Jessica, had a spookily similar offer after attending midnight mass on the North Shore with a friend.
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Dinner at a friend’s, with my sister who was staying over. We didn’t know **** took jobs like this to scope potential victims.Ĭhristmas Eve, I was up the road on Islington Street. Our landlady contracted to get her driveway redone – garish brick tiles the colour of sunburnt white girls. We got in a weekly fruit-and-vege box.ĭecember 1995 was hot. Unframed art adorned our walls, not posters. At Wallace Street, I flatted with two incredibly smart, sassy women I met while at uni. Wallace Street was different: grown-up compared to my first flat (a converted public office at Three Lamps where cockroaches scuttled, the boorish guys threw three-day-long parties and I had to kick randos out of my bedroom when I got home).
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I’d been in a few flats before Wallace Street, Herne Bay, the 1910s bungalow where **** snapped the metal bathroom lock and stole in. We’d do anything to protect and also hold each other accountable. Was it you who broke the bathroom sink at SPQR bonking? Okay, you did, at least serve him the shit box wine not the precious Lindauer we drained the flat account to procure. Usually, the most drama occurs around housework, boys, behaviour: Where’s the Draino – someone’s hair clogged the shower? Who rudely had people over to watch Blade Runner at 2am? Don’t invite that loser over for sex! Okay, if you must, here’s some condoms, don’t screw loudly. Young women from, say, 18 up, move out and share crumbling villas or converted commercial spaces in a dance called flatting. It’s more the story of women and all those microaggressions and macroaggressions that can still drive us today.
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**** being the serial rapist and murderer who’d targeted me. In Stockholm, mid-2020, contemplating moving back to Aotearoa, the very first thing I did was google if **** was still in prison. A novelist on being targeted by one of New Zealand's worst sexual offenders.