Thread by @HairyLeggdHarpy

The True Story of My Encounter With Thieves: The One Who Didn’t Get Away.

A thread.

When I was in my early twenties I took a year out to go and do some volunteer work in Africa.

I lived in a small house in a forest and I shared it with my housemate; a warm, friendly Yorkshire lass who worked as a volunteer midwife in the local hospital. Let’s call her ‘Anne’.

Anne had been provided with a bicycle to get her to work. It was a red ladies’ shopper, a rather distinctive colour and model of bike in a country where almost all other bikes appeared to be ancient black vintage bone-rattlers.

Each day I would walk to my place of work up the forest path, and Anne would cycle down the path to the hospital where she worked.

But one night, Anne’s red bike was stolen from our porch. And that was that.

Not much anyone can do about a stolen bike really. I think we reported it to the police, and we asked our neighbours to keep an eye open for it, but we knew it was long gone.
We heard nothing about it after that.

Days passed.

A few weeks later, maybe three, Anne and I had to make a shopping trip to buy groceries . We walked down to the bottom of our road and started waiting for the bus to take us to the nearest town.

Well.
We waited for blooming hours, and no bus came. So we eventually decided to hitch a lift, which was probably a more popular form of transportation anyway. Open-back pickup trucks frequently stopped for people to hitch a ride, and they were often full of passengers.

And before long one stopped for us. We got in the back of the truck, joining a small handful of other hitchers. This particular truck generously made lots of stops, taking on new passengers every few miles with their various loads of chickens, goats, vegetables.

About 20 miles after we boarded the truck, the driver stopped so that some more passengers could board.
They got themselves on and heaved their belongings onto the back.

Their belongings.

Bikes.

A red bike.
A red, ladies shopper bike.
Very distinctive.

I want you to imagine for a moment, if you will, two redheaded, freckled mzungu women, sitting on their bottoms on the dusty floor of a pickup truck with several locals, vegetables, chickens, and the red bike that had been nicked from our porch several weeks prior.

Two women, looking at each other. And at the red bike. And at each other again. And side-eyeing to the men who had just boarded into the truck with us and the bikes.
And then back to each other again.

I can’t remember exactly how our whispered conversation in the back of that truck went. The precise words are lost to the mists of time.
But there was definitely
“is that...?”
“No way”
“Can’t be”
“It is.”
“You sure?”
“Yep. That’s it”
“Don’t stare”
“What the…”
“What do we DO?!”

This is not a situation anyone can really prepare you for.

So we sat in the back of that truck with the chickens, vegetables, Anne’s stolen red bike, in the likely company of the thieves who had stolen it from us, all of us travelling merrily towards the town where Anne and I had intended to buy sausages that afternoon for a treat.

And at some point, the truck stopped again. A nice leisurely roadside stop before arriving at the town, a stop to stretch legs and buy mangoes.
Anne and I got out.

I approached the driver.

Again, I want you to imagine me trying to explain this peculiar sequence of events to the pickup driver, whilst a ginger midwife kept her eye on the bikes in the back and prepared herself to run interference in case I was rumbled in my ploy.

Me: “Ahem. Excuse me, sir? Sorry to bother you. We’re passengers in the back of your truck, thanks for picking us up by the way, very kind. The thing is, we had our bike stolen a while back. And, er, the thief and our bike are now in the back of your truck with us.”

“Yes, right now. There. And I'm really sorry to ask, but...is there any chance, any at all, that you might be able to take us directly to a police station so we can sort this all out? We hate to ask, but we’d rather not confront the chaps who have our bike you see...”

Something like that.
The driver’s face had an expression probably something like yours right now.

And then, the man sitting quietly in the passenger seat leaned over.

“Hello Madam. I might be able to help you. I am the Assistant Chief of Police. He picked me up a while back. Show me the bike.”

So we did.
We showed him the red bike.

And the chaps who had got in with Anne’s stolen red bike? They did turn out to be the thieves.

We know this for a fact, because we had to appear as witnesses in the subsequent court case.

Because, as chance would have it, the fella who had stolen the bike?
It transpired that he was actually an escaped convict from the nearest prison.
To which he was promptly returned.

And that’s pretty much the end of the story, which is entirely true, and there exists some archived court record in a small Southern African country that can attest to the truth of it all.

I believe this weird experience has provided a valuable life lesson for me, and I’m happy to share it with you.

When you are feeling really hard done to, like you can’t catch single solitary break, like you’re the unluckiest person in the world?

I want you to think about this.

Are you as unlucky as a convict who successfully escapes from prison, successfully steals a bike, successfully transports it miles from the crime scene, carefully waits three weeks for the dust to settle, cautiously decides it’s safe to transport that bike to sell on, and then...

...of all the thousands of trucks travelling up and down the country, and all the days, and all the journeys, manages to choose The One Truck that happens to contain the very people you nicked the bike from, with an assistant chief of police sitting upfront for good measure.

Probably not.

Because THAT’S unlucky.

Postscript.
I’m anonymous here on twitter. And the likelihood of ‘Anne’ (not her real name) seeing this thread is admittedly very remote. We lost touch before I left that country and haven’t heard from each other since. Decades have passed.

But on the extremely remote off-chance that she ever finds this thread, she will instantly know who I am. So ‘Anne’, if you do, please don’t out my name. I thought this story of ours was too good not to share, and I’ve gambled that you won’t see it and I’ll preserve my anonymity.

Anne probably won’t ever see it. I’m not that unlucky.

But you never know.

End.