the_siobhan | A story of coincidence and chance

It occured to me that I hardly ever tell this story. I think because I'm still scratching my head over it, 15 years later.

When I lived with my ex (the good one) we had a roommate. Actually we had a few on and off, but he was the one who lived there almost the entire time I did. He seemed like a nice enough guy, but he had his own friends and we didn't interact much socially. When we were home he mostly stayed in his room.

Anyway, I had been living there for about four years when X and I staggered home from the pub one night and walked into the living room to find CDs scattered all over the living room floor and the CD player and VCR were missing. We flipped -- as you do -- and called the cops.

A few minutes later one of our neighbours came to the door to tell us the roommate was at his place hiding out. He re-emerged when the cops showed up. The police took a short report, promised they'd be back during the day and left.

The story we got from the roommate was that he had been in his bedroom and heard thumping coming from upstairs. (The bedrooms were in the basement.) He assumed it was us home early, but after a while he started wondering why me were making so much noise. So he went upstairs and the main floor was freezing. He walked to the front door, realized it was open and went to close it -- and interrupted two guys who were walking up the stairs.

He then slammed the door and ran downstairs to his room. And hid. After about an hour, he went out the back door and over to our neighbour's place, where he called the cops. Our neighbour reported seeing a strange car in the parking lot out back, but he'd thought nothing of it until roommate had showed up at his door.

OK, so we'd had a break-in. It happens. We were insured, so we'd be able to replace the things that were missing.

I get home from work the next day, and the X is really upset. The cop had come over to get the full report from roommate, and according to X, roommate had been really evasive, refusing to answer questions and constantly getting up and leaving the room. The whole thing left a bad taste in X's mouth and the first time he speculated that roommate had had something to do with the break-in.

I agreed that the behaviour was weird, but I could think of a few reasons why a man might be a little hostile or weirded out around cops. And I'm always really reluctant to convict somebody without some pretty convincing evidence. So we agreed to just let it rest for now. Still, the suspicion didn't exactly go away.

This is where it gets weird and a bit complicated.

The X and I had a routine, every Sunday his best friend would come over and they would do Manly things, what I can only imagine. And best friend's girlfriend and I would do our favourite thing, which was hitting the closest pub and shit-talking until the beer ran out.

Our favourite pub for this purpose had a bunch of things going for it. It was walking distance. It was open on Sundays. (This was the dark ages, need I remind you.) It had Guinness on tap. And the waiter T was a friend of ours, who would often sit and shoot the shit on quiet nights. Which was most weekends, because nobody in this town drank on Sundays.

So one night I was explaining the circumstances of the break-in when T came to sit down with us. And I put forth the concept that X had floated repeatedly - that roommate might have been involved in some way.

Now T knew roommate way better than we did. Hung out with him on occasion. T's partner was a co-worker and a good friend of roommate. And as soon as T heard the theory, he was absolutely adamant. No way. Just not possible. Couldn't happen, Roommate was Not Like That.

OK, I knew T as a very forthright person and if he said roommate was not capable, then that was valuable input. It wasn't that I trusted T more than my own judgement, it was that I had been listening to X for so long that didn't know what to think and T assuaged my fears. I put it out of my head.

And forgot about it.

Fast-forward about six months.

I was home one day with X when the phone rang. X picked it up. I specifically remember this because X got a very odd look on his face, and the converstion made me come over and wait to see what was going on.

He finally put down the phone and looked at me.

"That was T."

T was not supposed to be home. It was a weekend, and both T and his partner had been making plans to go out of town. Plans they had talked about a lot in public. Plans that had been cancelled at the very last minute.

And so T had just chanced to be home when he heard a noise in his kitchen and had walked into the room to find roommate halfway through the window.

He called us the second roommate left, so we were waiting when roommate got home. It had been a joke, he explained. An elabourate practical joke. He had stolen some het pr0n that X had lying around, and he had planned to switch it with the gay pr0n that T and his partner had in their house. A prank. Completely harmless.

And rather bloody unlikely.

Roommate moved out shortly after that.