Let me tell you what's happened and hopefully someone will have an explanation:
I woke up yesterday morning, right?, and went out to grab my 'first of the day' ciggie but my packet wasn't in the usual place, right by the kettle. I knew I'd left a freshly opened packet there before I went to bed and thought "Gosh, Keith is annoying." so I hunted around a bit and couldn't find it ... so went to my bag to get another packet. None there, despite knowing there should be. "Bloody Keith!" I thought. So I hunted out where I'd put old duty frees I'd got on my travels when I couldn't buy my usual brand and it turned out I didn't like the substitute but, being thrifty, put them aside for emergencies like this one. All gone!
I was so cross with Keith. Normally he doesn't play these stupid passive aggressive games so all the time I was tearing our place apart, looking everywhere for where he'd hidden them, I wondered what was wrong with him and if he'd actually lost his mind somewhere along the way and I hadn't noticed.
But then I found them, all hidden under pillows on the sofa, with old newspapers folded tightly around them like a badly wrapped present. "When did Keith become this bizarre?" I thought!
So I had cigarettes, although not the open packet I'd left by the kettle. Never found that one.
When Keith got home last night, "I don't find you funny!" I scolded him the second he walked through the door. He had no idea what I was talking about. Swore blind, in fact, that he hadn't touched any of my cigarettes, and said that he'd noticed the open packet by the kettle and counted them (I've promised to cut down to 20 a day) before he left and very definitely left the packet right where it was, not wanting me to know he'd counted as he was planning to count them when he got home.
I believed him. We've been married a very long time and I know he's not good at lying and so doesn't do it often. In fact, the only time I've known him to lie to me is when I've asked him to put up shelves and he comes up with blustering reasons for why it can't be done! Wall studs won't take it or something else equally ridiculous!
And that's when I remembered something very mysterious had also happened a fortnight ago when, before going to bed, I'd dumped the clothes I'd been wearing that day into the wash basket. The following morning, I'd gone to the laundry basket to grab those clothes to wash them, only they weren't there. I thought "Maybe Keith put on a load before leaving." only he hadn't. I hunted for them high and low, but they weren't anywhere ... and they haven't turned up since. Thought it was odd but didn't make anything more of it.
But then came this missing cigarettes saga!
Two counts of weirdness in two weeks? We've had stuff go missing before, but only when we've had a substitute maid - no names - and whenever I've later mentioned the loss to Our Beth, the very next day the missing objects magically reappear and we don't ask any more questions.
But Beth is in the Philippines at the moment, so for the past fortnight Keith and I are the only people who've been in the house. Also, our place is right up high, and there's no way into our apartment except through the front door.
Mysterious, right?
Hunting for an explanation, I sent Keith out to test the front door just in case it wasn't shutting properly. It was fine. Then we wondered if maybe Beth gave her keys to someone else, but decided she wouldn't because she's not like that. Also, as Keith pointed out, the apartment was full of yuan left over from our China trip all lying right out in the open, so any thief worth his/her salt would surely have taken that instead.
And, as he also pointed out, why would a stranger steal only two items of dirty clothes - black trousers and black top - from a laundry basket when there were ever so many similar items clean, ironed and hanging in the wardrobe, and then come back later to steal a packet of cigarettes ... as well as rummaging through drawers and handbags to find and then tightly gift-wrap and hide half a dozen packets of cigarettes.
OK, I'm forced to concede it's very unlikely thief behavior.
Nonetheless, I wasn't giving up this Strange Stranger notion lightly so made Keith go into the storage space in the roof to check there wasn't a sleeping bag or something else to indicate we had Strange Stranger living here uninvited. Nothing, except a lot of bags and boxes of truly lovely stuff I'd forgotten I'd bought during our years in HK, and all stacked in ways that meant getting up into there was impossible.
"You're sleepwalking!" Keith accused me! "You're doing this yourself!"
"You don't suddenly start sleepwalking at our age." I retorted. "It's much more likely you're trying to send me mad using The Gaslight Method!"
"I wouldn't try The Gaslight Method on you! You're too strong-minded and opinionated! It only works on NICE people who are willing to surrender their views to accommodate other people's."
And then I recalled a variation on "The Gaslight Method" - let's call it The Lord-Bull Variation in honour of the folks involved - and how a professor friend of ours was once driven into a nervous breakdown by a student she'd failed, who got revenge by breaking into her house every couple of days to move a single item from one part of a room to another or else to remove something negligible and worthless, like the knob on the TV set or the rubber bits in all her taps. Nothing in itself even worth mentioning, but it all accumulated and, after eight months of this unexplained weird 'haunting', she had to be carted away in a strait jacket, which was when the student began to boast about how he'd driven her insane and we all knew how it was done.
I toyed with the idea someone was playing a Lord-Bull game on us before realising we have no one in our lives who'd feel the need to do it. Besides, it all came back to the stumbling block: how was this person getting in?
So that's how things currently stand. Something very strange and mysterious is definitely afoot and I would LOVE an explanation.
Any ideas?
Apart from this one, obviously! I really don't want to go there! No siree!
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