Hideous, hideous, hideous

OPINION: I went to the dentist last week and had a bit of a drillin', walked out the door with my cellphone ringing, writes Sarah McCarthy in this week's Uptown Girl.

It was my cousin. "Aha," I thought. "She wants to help me sort out everything for the weekend, what with the whanau coming to stay and all the rest of it.

"Heya," I said breezily. Actually, I had painless for the aforementioned drillin' so I was more like "Thruinkf."

"The dentist wasn't as bad as I thought it would be so that's good!"

(Again it was more like "Ba fentshis wabna baravye for sova's gub.")

"Ah," she said. "Your mum's house has been broken into." The world stopped. I'd only dropped Mum off at the airport the day before. She'd been talking about the spate of burglaries around the place on the way. "It would be the worst thing," she told me. "It would ruin my home for me."

"Don't worry about it," I said.

So I got to Mum's and the door had been totally smashed in. The metal doorknob looked like something Salvador Dali would paint. I said the seven words you can't say on television, plus a few more that I invented and that, I can assure you, are really, really rude.

Then I cried. Mum's house is as a mum's house should be: a sanctuary. A place to go where the biscuit tin is always full — a biscuit tin with a mysteriously hard-to-open lid so you get the feeling of maternal bounty along with the maternal Sarah-do-you-really-need-that-biscuit all at the same time. Pictures dot the rooms, it always smells good and it is slowly filling up with precious memories of laughs around the kitchen table, wines in the living room, birthdays, Christmases, me in my wedding dress smoking a cigarette and listening to militant reggae. The good stuff.

And so I had to ring her and tell her. It was pretty yuck. Poor wee lady.

So the loser-robbers only took the telly and some other stuff. So they didn't leave too much of a mess.

And thank God she wasn't at home. But that memory, the memory of the violation of hearth and home, is imprinted on all the others like a stain on a new carpet. If I ever find out who did it, I will ruin them. And it will be hideous. Hideous.

(PS: The policeman person was cute, though. So that was nice. Silver lining, and all that.)

» Sarah McCarthy is a Southland Times staff member.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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