'Ello 'Ello

The police turned up this morning. And in bigger numbers this time.

The knock came early. I wasn’t quite fully dressed, but the blue ones were in no mood to wait for sartorial adjustments.

The last time I had a policeman appear at my door he came on his own. His tone was conversational, almost convivial. Not so this time. The four burly lumps of Sydney’s finest crowding my narrow doorway this morning wanted help with their enquiries and looked as if they knew how to get it. I had a mental image of being whisked away into a Kafkaesque nightmare of waterboards and devilishly ingenious things with tweezers.

But this is Australia not Orwell’s Oceania so they were quickly disarmed with the news that Karen Anderson did not live here. Miss Anderson is, in fact, completely unknown to me despite the fact that she’s been giving my little terraced house as her address to all and sundry. Strictly speaking the (now fugitive) Karen has given her address as an apartment within my house. Apartment number 319, would you believe. A neat trick getting that many apartments into my two bedroom Victorian.

The lone policeman from the prior visit was searching for a gentleman with a similarly confused domicile. Presumably that individual was an accomplice of master-criminal Anderson. The pair are doubtless hatching intricate plots at this very moment, impervious to statute behind a vast web of assumed addresses.

It would seem that somewhere in Surry Hills (perhaps a parallel Surry Hills, “Surrey Hills” perchance?) there is building on a “Belvoir Street”, bearing my number. This parallel Number 5 is a significant edifice of many flats (a disturbingly high proportion of which house wanton criminals). The evidence for this parallel world is mounting. Aside from head-scratching constables, meter-readers and pizza delivery boys there’s been a steady stream of bemused individuals standing in front of my house with faces of bewilderment, often shouting into a mobile phone:

“No. I’m standing at number 5 now and it’s definitely not an apartment block. It’s a house.”

It would appear that the parallel world has a link to our telephone network.

This of course would all be harmless (if occasionally irritating) fun, were it not for the first incident of this nature. Nearly a year ago, when I first moved in I was woken at 2 or 3 am by frantic activity at my door. The first people I knew of to be misdirected here. I will never know if that ambulance crew ever found the people who called it.