The usual summer afternoon rains have freshly fallen on a leafy Joburg suburb and the droplets still plop off the jacaranda blossoms when some twenty-something girls get out of their car with a salad for a potluck dinner. The Rodean school girls and occasional boyfriend gathered in the downstairs living room of an older home chat about old times, about new things and future plans. Some go to Oxford, others go to the University of Cape Town or Witswatersrand, others are trying to get the largest cell phone network in Africa to fund a promotional Rasta bus tour across the continent before the World Cup. Most of them divide their time between South Africa and somewhere else. That somewhere else is usually England. Towards the end of the party a small group breaks away to chat in a bedroom while a larger group lingers in the living room. Sam, a big blond-haired boyfriend, walks into the kitchen to discover a black body squeezing through a foot-wide gap in the security bars of a flowerbed level, kitchen window. The top of the head slips through the bars and disappears into the night with three purses before he can reach it. The police are called, parents are called, bank cards are cancelled, cell phone SIM cards are deactivated. “It’s happened before, but it is such a bother you know, because all my phone numbers and addresses are in there. And the keys of my car,” a blond haired girl with ivory-pale skin explains as she calls her mother. Later she points out the tiny window that the thief slipped in and out of while everyone was talking about Asians dominating the engineering departments of Canadian universities. The Rasta bus girl, who is actually half Finnish and has a father that attended Harvard, shakes her head. “Yah, can you believe it? You know, to know that you will have to get out that when there is a huge group just in the other room. It is crazy.”

The burglary doesn’t shock so much because it is a burglary. After all, these things have happened before, Davina’s BMW was stolen only a year after she got mugged on the five minute suburban stroll from the luxury shopping center to her family’s home. It’s mostly robbers, but you never know. “The amateurs you must be careful about, because they are so nervous that they will just shoot you. Just give them what they want because it’s not worth it,” Davina advises. The shock is the proximity and desperation. Exclamations of “and the space in the bars is so small!” abound. There seems to be an incredulous admiration for the culprit’s reckless courage accompanied by a lesser, more disquieting marvel at the mere coincidence of catching the thief in action. Sam just happened to walk into the kitchen to fetch something when he saw the burglar flee. Without coincidence no one would have noticed a thing. Without a gap in the window bars a little bigger than all the rest the burglar wouldn’t have climbed in. An attention to detail.

The shock, such as it is, completely dissolves when Davina uncomfortably changes the subject to say her farewells. She has a history paper to write before she gets back to Greyfriar’s at Oxford in two days, her flight to Heathrow leaves tomorrow night and she hasn’t packed. “I didn’t mean to be rude, but it’s not like I needed to be there,” she explains later. Genuine Sam with his square chin and eternal grin offers to walk Davina to her car. “These are the moments Sam excels at,” Anna, the hostess of the night, chuckles aside good-naturedly. The droplets linger on the jacaranda leaves when Sam walks Davina out and in the pleasantly cool, humid summer night I cannot help but wonder if someone lurks behind a thick, dark trunk.