Oscar Pistorius, the famed footless runner, claims he, too, was paranoid about an intruder when he shot and killed his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp in the early hours of Valentine’s Day last year. After the tension of the moment dissolved, I looked with bewilderment at my hands holding the pot as if they were a stranger’s. Once, I even grabbed a cast-iron pot and lurked with it near the door until I realized the noise I’d heard was a branch scratching the roof, put in motion by a gust of wind.
Sometimes I went and huddled in the middle of the living room, the part of the house furthest from windows, as if I was anticipating a bomb blast other times I flicked my bedroom light rapidly on and off to send a Morse-like message to the would-be intruder to let him know I knew he was there. In the clarity of the following morning my decisions almost never made any sense. I never knew what to do, especially if I was alone. In the haze of half-wakefulness, I experienced this sense as an utter conviction: The certainty an intruder was there. I never saw him, only heard him, but for months afterwards, I would awaken with the sense somebody was on the roof again. A couple of years ago, a burglar climbed across my roof in suburban Johannesburg to get to a neighbor’s house.