The Quiet Company

We do not sell fear.

Fear comes pre-installed.

It is in the dog beginning at half past two,
the gate that sighs before it opens,
the WhatsApp voice note that says,
Guys, just be careful,
as if careful were a suburb
with a wall around it.

We sell peace of mind.

That is our phrase.
It arrives laminated,
with a smiling family behind a very expensive gate.
Peace of mind, on debit order.
Peace of mind, with a free remote.
Peace of mind, monitored twenty-four hours a day
by someone whose name you will never need to know.

The app is very thoughtful.
Once a month it asks,
Are you still enjoying your peace of mind?
There are two buttons:
Not now
and Remind me tomorrow.

It has never had to answer that question.

Look, nobody wants trouble.
Nobody wants a child awake at a sound
that may be a branch,
or may be the world remembering
it has teeth.

So we install the beams.
We put the little blue light beside the bed.
We teach the house to flinch
before its people do.

And if the alarm rings,
we send a man in a dark vehicle
through streets designed to be difficult to enter.
He arrives with his radio talking to itself,
with a weapon kept professionally out of sight,
with forms for the incident,
with a life waiting somewhere past the boom.

We do not ask what made the night nervous.
That is not the product.

The product is the feeling
that your side of the fence
has been promoted to a country.

You have your flag: the estate logo.
Your border force: a gate that reads number plates.
Your foreign policy: no tailgating.
Your anthem: the generator coughing back to life.

We call it a community.

It is a lovely word.
It has flowers in it.
It has a committee and a Christmas market
and a rule about washing on balconies.
It does not mention the person at the gate
standing through the Highveld afternoon
while we argue about the colour of the paving.

Peace of mind.

It is not that we do not care.
We care very much.
We care about response times.
We care about camera angles.
We care about the clean, bright square
where the app says your perimeter is secure.

Outside the square,
the map continues being a map.

There are roads it does not brighten.
There are houses it does not learn by name.
There are people for whom a panic button
is not a sleek red icon
but a hand lifted in the dark
because somebody must see.

[The keypad chirps.]

It asks me to choose:
Dismiss
or Escalate.

I keep my finger above Dismiss.

I have been trained not to call it separation.
We call it coverage.
We call it layered defence.
We call it a better night's sleep.

You cannot fix a country with a keypad.
You can teach each room
to pay for the next.

It comes with an app,
two complimentary remotes,
and a technician who says,
There you go,
you can sleep easy now.

[He looks at the keypad.]

Can you?

Can you sleep easy
when the only peace you can imagine
needs somebody else to remain
on the other side of the light?

Peace of mind.

What a small, clean name
for a country cut into rooms.