The evening after my last day of primary school, a stranger walked through our living room. Dad had just returned from two weeks offshore, and the buzz and crackle of his beard trimmer came so loud from the bathroom that Mum and I didn’t hear the front door. We only noticed the stranger when he walked by us on the sofa, without so much as a glance in our direction.
Our cul-de-sac was quiet and safe, so we never locked the doors, and because the living room extended from the front of the bungalow to the back, one could pass straight through the house via a single room. The man, whose features were so unremarkable that we could recall nothing about him afterwards, did exactly that.
“What in the…” Mum said, as the man turned the handle of the back door and strode outside, leaving it open behind him. Her chamomile, cloudy with the powder from a sleeping pill, sloshed on the table as she put it down. She rushed to both doors and locked them. “Gosh, sweetie, are you okay?”
I was fine and said so.
“Oh, sweetie. Oh no.” Mum came back and rubbed my shoulders, planting kisses on my forehead as I squirmed and complained. “Oh, you poor thing. How could this happen?”
Mum picked up the phone and called the police. As her voice rose and quivered, the buzzing stopped. Dad stepped shirtless from the bathroom with a towel over his shoulders, and scratched at the thinning hair around his crown. The left side of his beard was neatly trimmed; the right was still wild with two weeks of unchecked growth. There had been a time when, after Dad trimmed his beard, Mum would run her fingers over his stubble and they would scuttle hand-in-hand into the bedroom. Now, each time Dad returned from the rig, Mum would meet his arrival with increasing apathy, taking herself on long walks while Dad hunched over the dining table with his dog-eared book of SAS survival tips.
“But what do you mean it’s not a police matter?” Mum said, clutching the handset to her cheek.
“What’s going on?” Dad said, and Mum gestured for him to be quiet. Dad turned instead to me. It was the first time he’d looked at me since he’d got home, and in the pressure of that moment I froze and my jaw hung slack.
“But you can’t just walk into someone’s house,” Mum said.
…
“So what are we supposed to do then?”
…
“Okay,” Mum sighed. “I guess we’ll just have to, won’t we.” She hung up.
“What’s going on?” Dad said again. His lips were red and chapped from a fortnight of relentless North Sea squalls.
Mum told him about the stranger, while Dad rubbed at the neat side of his beard. Then she recounted her conversation with the operator, and how they’d told her that trespass alone is not a criminal matter. There must be intent for it to be a crime.
“Is this a joke?” Dad said, looking again at me, and then at Mum. “This is a joke you’re playing.”
“Do you think I’d be pranking the police?”
Dad wiped at his face with the towel, although he was already dry, then went and stared through the window by the back door. There was nothing to see in the darkness.
“Why didn’t you say something?” he said, turning back to Mum.
“I just called the police.”
“But what are you calling them for? Why didn’t you shout? I could have done something.”
“Done what?” Her eyes descended over his torso, from his sagging shoulders to those sad rings of hair around his nipples, then down to his waist where his flesh collected like sand in a damp sack. “What could you possibly have done?”
Dad chewed his lip, sawing off dry bits of skin between his incisors. Then he threw his towel to the floor. “I’m going to deal with this.”
***
The next morning, I did keepie uppies on the drive with a scuffed football, while Dad sat alert on a white plastic chair by the door, fingering at his bald patch then flattening his hair back over it. I would occasionally glance in his direction to see if he was watching me, but all he did was scowl at the neighbours as they mowed their front lawns. Mum, meanwhile, brought him mug after mug of milky tea and nagged at him to finish his beard. Usually, he would shave it the moment he got home, then maintain it at Mum’s preferred length until he returned to the rig. After the intrusion, however, he insisted on keeping watch at the door, and renounced his duties to sleep and hygiene.
By afternoon, I was bored of my football, and Dad said it was too dangerous for me to venture beyond the drive, so I slumped on the sofa and watched TV. Dad, who had brought in his tool kit from the garage, busied himself with the front door: opening it, closing it, opening it again, turning the key and inspecting the lock.
“Leave it, Michael. You don’t know what you’re doing.” Mum was stacking pillows on the sofa, trying to engage me in a game that we used to call Snuggle Fortress. “Let’s just keep the doors locked and hope he doesn’t come back. Maybe he just got the wrong house.”
Dad didn’t respond. Instead, he unfurled his tape measure, using a blunt pencil to mark the dimensions of the door on the inside cover of his SAS book. Then he grunted and gave the handle a tug with his spanner.
“Come look at this,” he said, beckoning me over. Amid the boredom of that afternoon, Dad’s sudden interest in locksmithing was a welcome diversion. Mum looked bereft as I deserted her fortress, and she reclined into an impromptu nap.
“A child could kick that through,” Dad said, pointing at the metal bolt that slotted into a bore in the doorframe.
“Come stand out here.” He pointed just outside the door. “And get your shoes on.”
Dad took Mum’s key from the sideboard and put it in the pocket of his jeans. Then he joined me outside and closed the door, locking it with his own key.
“Go on then,” he said.
I looked at him, knowing what he meant but suspecting a trap.
“Give it a good kick.”
“Dad…”
“Lad your age, all cooped up. Must be dying to let off a bit of steam.”
“But…”
“Go on, give it some welly!”
So I gave the door a non-committal jab with my toe.
“You can do better than that.”
So I kicked again.
“Harder!”
Mum issued a barely audible complaint from inside.
“Don’t mind her, lad. Harder!”
So I kicked harder, and I kept on kicking, looking up at Dad every few kicks and drinking in his eager smile. The door thumped and rattled under my assault, but didn’t give way.
“That’s the spirit, lad.”
“Everything okay down there?” called an elderly neighbour from up the street. Dad waved him away and motioned for me to continue.
“Michael, what the hell?” Mum’s voice came through the door, clearer now.
“Stand back, love,” Dad said, although by this point I was beginning to tire, and it was obvious that the door was not going to yield.
“Alright, out the way.” Dad brushed me aside. He stepped back and steadied himself, before lifting his right leg and aiming the sole of his shoe below the handle.
The door swung open with a plaintive crack, and Dad toppled through the gap, landing on all fours across the doormat. Ignoring Mum’s curses, Dad raised up to his haunches and poked at the splinters of wood around the broken borehole, muttering the word “cowboys” over and over between tuts and hisses.
Having made his point, Dad did not repeat this exercise with the back door. Instead, he opened the sideboard and rummaged about for a minute or two, before pulling out a green trifold leaflet.
“Yes… that’s the one.”
He unfolded the leaflet. A strip of photos showed a man (former burglar, now a Home Security Consultant) failing to crowbar his way through a door. In the final image, the man held up his hands in a pantomime shrug.
“Yes… yes!” Dad gave the leaflet an excited rap with his knuckle, then picked up the phone and dialled the number on the back.
***
None of us slept that night. The company couldn’t fit the doors until the next day, so Dad had me keep watch at the back door, while he sat on a chair guarding the front, with the SAS book open on his lap. At the hoot of an owl, or the gentle hum of a car passing at the top of the street, he would spring to attention and flit between the front door and the window, only settling again when the apparent threat had subsided. Whenever he shifted his weight and braced his feet against the busted door, the noise would haul Mum from beneath her fog of temazepam, and I would hear her in the bedroom, moaning and thumping on the pillow.
The hours passed slowly and my legs ached, but I didn’t mind. Every fifteen minutes, Dad would press me for a full report of my observations, and this became a kind of game, inventing new details to satisfy him when he refused to accept my “all clear”. Across four successive reports, Dad nodded gravely as I recounted the movements of a leaf that edged across the patio with the breeze.
“A leaf is a leaf until it’s not,” he said, stroking the thick side of his beard. “Keep up the good work, lad.”
When daytime came, Dad gave me the morning off and kept himself alert with a continuous flow of strong, black tea while four men in green polo shirts installed the new doors. The doors had a faux-wood finish and impregnable multi-point locking systems, and the men kept having to shoo Dad out of the way as he lingered around the doors, marvelling at the hooks and rollers that danced into action when he wrenched the handles up and down.
“Now really,” Mum said, as the men began fixing security gates on either side of the doors, and thick steel bars over the new, triple-glazed windows.
“If a man can’t secure his home…” Dad trailed off.
Finally, the men in green polo shirts installed an intercom in the laundry cupboard, and fitted a heavy, metallic door so the cupboard could double as a panic room, barely big enough for two people to stand in. Dad gave them a cheery wave from the doorway as they left in their van.
“Top of the range, this,” Dad said, pressing various buttons on the intercom — except for a big red one — while flicking through the instruction manual and inspecting the small screen on the panel. “Motion sensor… super high res…” The feeds from the six cameras on all sides of the house could even be viewed on the TV screen.
“This is ridiculous,” said Mum, grabbing her summer jacket from the hook. “I need some fresh air.”
“Oh, no no no,” Dad said. “Not today you’re not.”
“What do you mean?”
“There were cars loitering last night. Shady folk trying to case the joint. I can’t have you leaving my sight.”
“Michael, don’t be daft.”
“We’re safe here. Suppose you got kidnapped and murdered or whatever. Leaving your child without a mother, just because you decided to risk it? What sort of a person would you be then?”
“Michael, what is wrong with you?”
Dad preempted her next move, ripping the phone from the wall and breaking the socket. “What kind of a man would I be, if I let you put this family in danger?”
Mum looked from one locked door to the other. Then she looked at me and I looked away. Dad had stashed the keys in his pockets, and short of braining him with a frying pan, there was nothing she could do but wait for Dad’s excitement to wear off.
***
By Monday, the right side of Dad’s beard was ratty and flecked with dandruff, and his half-moustache was constantly wet — either with tea, or with saliva from licking away the tea. Whenever I caught sight of his bald patch, it shone with grease from his unwashed hair.
The longer Dad went without sleep, the more vigorously he went about his defensive duties, marching around the living room carrying the broken handset like a baton, and making occasional sallies into the garden, timing them irregularly to catch the enemy off guard. Mum, meanwhile, was beyond sleeping pills. Having waited the night in vain for Dad to fall asleep, she spent the morning crashed on the sofa.
“It’s happening!” Dad yelled, bursting through the front door in retreat from his latest sally, then locking the door and both gates in a series of well-practiced movements. “Be ready!”
Mum half-woke, and was on the point of falling back asleep when the TV flicked on. Three of the neighbours, their geriatric features caricatured in fisheye, peered at us from the screen.
Dad waved me over, rushed into the cupboard and pressed a button on the intercom.
“What do you want?”
“Oh, hello, Michael. It’s Ron from up the road. I’ve got Sue and Geoff here,” Ron’s voice came in stereo from the intercom and the TV. “We were just concerned about all the to-ing and fro-ing and wanted to check everything was okay.”
“Everything is fine,” Dad said.
There was a pause. Mum straightened on the sofa and turned towards the door, then sank when she met Dad’s gaze.
“Yes, smashing,” Ron said, turkey neck wobbling as he nodded. “There was one thing though…”
Sue leaned into the camera, magnifying her forehead to absurd proportions.
“The cameras,” Sue barked.
“Yes,” said Ron, “we were just wondering… well, this is a quiet neighbourhood, you know, and…”
“It’s not right, Michael,” said Sue, craning her head so far that the TV became 32 inches of ear. “That one on the side of the house looks right over our fence.”
Dad considered this for a moment, then pressed the button again. “You are trespassing with intent. Please leave my property.”
Sue looked back at the two men. They shrugged.
“You intend to coerce me into removing my home’s security features, which would leave us vulnerable to invasion. That’s intent.”
“Michael, would you listen to yourself?” said Mum.
“This is your last warning,” Dad spoke into the intercom while glaring at Mum.
“Michael,” said Ron, “we can be neighbourly about this.”
“Five…” Dad held up his hand to me, fingers outstretched.
“Maybe, if you just…”
“Four…”
“If you keep the one on the front door…”
“Three…”
“But take down the others…”
“Two…”
“Then I think we can live with…”
“One…”
Dad took his finger off the microphone button, then pointed at the big red one. “Lad, press this.”
“Sweetie, no,” said Mum. “Don’t touch that.”
I hesitated, so Dad took my finger in his calloused, wind-beaten paw and placed it on the button. “Go on, lad. Don’t let me down.”
I looked at Mum again. She would understand, I thought. If she just let Dad see this thing through, she would understand that he was doing all of this for her.
“Sweetie,” she said.
I pressed the button.
For a moment, nothing seemed to happen. Then the neighbours covered their ears and groaned. Retreating up the drive, Ron lost his balance and stumbled. Geoff caught him and broke the worst of his fall, but vomited on his back. Sue had already motored ahead, past the fence and out of sight.
“What on earth?” Mum said, staring at the TV, then turning to me. “What did you do?”
Dad beamed down at me. His eyes were moist with pride, but his smile was so toothy and strained that it unnerved me.
“The neighbours. What did you do?” Mum was standing now, gesturing at the TV.
Geoff helped Ron to his feet and they both hobbled up the street, Ron dripping half-digested crumpet from his shirt tail.
“Non-lethal deterrent,” said Dad. “Sonic technology. The absolute pinnacle of—”
“Michael, you can’t…”
“The beauty of it is, you can’t hear it inside. It’s fully insulated, so we’ll always be safe.”
“Michael, please. This has to—”
“Now we know that when that madman comes back, we’ll be ready.”
“Michael, I’m leaving.”
“We just need to sit tight, maintain a secure perimeter…”
“Michael, give me the key.”
“We should lie low for a bit. That Sue worked at Bletchley during the war. Probably knows a trick or two.” As Mum made towards him, Dad took a swift backwards step into the cupboard, pulled me along with him, and locked the heavy door with a clunk.
***
Dad’s mood was so expansive that it seemed too great for our laundry cupboard to contain. He hailed the cameras and their fifty megapixels. He saluted the microphones and their two-way audio. He extolled the infrared sensors, praised the motion-activated recording, eulogised the sonic technology. I could tell that he wanted to pace and pivot and gesticulate, but he was hemmed in by the towel-stacked shelves and the thrumming boiler, and quaked with an impossible, sleepless energy.
What I also became acutely aware of, during those uncountable hours in the panic room, was that he stank. Normally, one learns to tolerate an odour after a certain time has passed, but Dad’s claggy stench seemed to progress and evolve through stages, outdoing me at every turn.
“Do you see?” Dad said, bending forward and showing me the smooth oval on his crown. “It’s growing back.”
I said nothing as I looked at the bare patch of skin, which if anything seemed to have expanded since Friday.
“This whole time, it was a psychological thing,” he said, leaning back on the washing machine. “And all it took was this.” He gave the intercom a satisfied pat. “Safety. Security. That’s what it’s all about, lad.”
And he wasn’t done yet. For what seemed like hours, Dad expounded on his plans for future security features. He would tear down the wooden fence and build an impenetrable wall, adopt a pack of alsatians to patrol the perimeter, install radio jamming equipment to scramble hostile communications. He would supplement the non-lethal deterrent with a water cannon, line the walls with Kevlar, dig through the foundations of the house to build a subterranean nuclear bunker. He would empty the savings account, remortgage the house, leave his offshore job and turn the garden into a subsistence farm, so he could finance The Next Phase of Domestic Protection while dedicating himself entirely to our safety.
I could do nothing but nod, with my head bowed and my hands in my pockets. Nod and nod, until my neck grew sore.
“Can I go to bed now?”
“Bed? We’ve got work to do!”
“I’m tired—”
“Wait. Quiet.” Dad held up a hand and his eyes widened. “Do you hear that?”
I shook my head.
“Listen.”
I could just about hear the clinking of spoon on ceramic through the wall. Mum stirring her tea, the usual series of whirrs and taps.
“That devious woman,” he whispered. “That’s Morse code.”
Dad picked up his SAS book from atop the washing machine and opened it near the back. “Dah dah dah, dit dit dit dit.” He ran his finger over the dots and dashes. “That’s an O and… an H. Oh… Oh?”
But surely, I thought, she was just making tea.
“I knew it. That Sue. She’s bugged the house somehow, and now your mum’s sending her signals from the inside.” He scratched at his half-beard, sending a flurry of dandruff into the air. “Three times, I heard it. Oh oh oh. But what could that mean?”
His bloodshot eyes came to rest on a cardboard box of Christmas decorations, golden tinsel spewing from the top. “That’s it. It’s backwards. Ho ho ho. The chimney, lad. How could I forget the chimney?”
He was about to open the door, then stopped and turned to me. “Follow my lead, lad.” He patted my head and ruffled my hair the way I used to like, but his hand was too firm and snagged against my scalp.
***
Mum was leaning against the kitchen counter, waiting for her tea to cool. She watched impassively as Dad went about the room like a demented basset hound, knocking jars and utensils aside as he looked behind toaster, kettle and microwave. He cast his gaze over every corner of the room, and shone his torch through every crack.
He went into the living room and motioned for us to follow. “In here. Now.”
Mum and I looked at each other. She went first and I followed. Dad closed the kitchen door behind us.
“Well?” Dad said to Mum, looming over her.
“Well what?”
“What’s she put you up to?”
“Who?”
“You know who.”
“Michael…”
“Tell me everything, and I’ll say no more about it.”
“Michael, I don’t know what you’re—”
“We’re onto you. The signals you’ve been sending to Sue.”
“Signals… what’s Sue got to do with anything?”
“Right. That’s it.” Dad turned to me. “Restrain her.”
For the first time since Dad had been home, Mum laughed. “He’s eleven.”
“Lad, you know what to do.”
I didn’t know what to do, so I made my best guess. I stood behind Mum. She let me take her hands and hold them together behind her. She squeezed my hand and I squeezed back.
“Good lad. Keep her there while I find something to secure her with.”
“Michael, Jesus…”
Dad raised a finger. “Not a word.” He went into the laundry cupboard, where we heard him opening boxes, throwing them aside and breathing heavily.
“Mum,” I whispered.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she said.
“Mum, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, sweetie. It’s not your fault.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Let’s just do as he says and not provoke him. He’ll wear himself out eventually.”
“But then what?”
Dad came back into the room holding the SAS book and a ball of string. “This’ll have to do.”
He pulled out a chair at the dining table. “Set her down here.”
I walked Mum towards the chair in an awkward lockstep, still gripping her hands. Mum sat, while Dad flattened the book open on the table at a page titled Hitches. He ran the string around the back post of the chair, then looped it back over itself while glancing at the book. He tried to pull the knot tight, but the string came loose and he had to start over.
“Could do with a brew, lad. And make yourself one too. We’ve a long night ahead.”
I had never made tea before, but had seen Mum do it enough times. I had to climb onto the counter to reach the last clean mugs at the back of the shelf. If I hadn’t gone up there, I wouldn’t have spotted Mum’s pill bottle on the shelf above.
***
When I carried the two mugs into the living room, sweat was trailing down Dad’s forehead, and the SAS book lay face-down on the floor. The knots around Mum’s wrists were thick and haphazard, and Dad was pulling them tight while Mum sat patiently, staring at the wall.
“That should hold her,” he said, straightening up and reaching for the mug I held out in my left hand. He fished out the teabag with his grimy fingers and dropped it on the table, then sniffed at the liquid and blew on it.
He took a sip and winced, and a sickly feeling rose in my stomach.
“Phwoar! That’s a proper brew, lad.”
I looked at my feet.
“Go on then,” Dad said, nodding at my mug. “It’ll put hairs on your chest.”
My hand shook as I lifted the mug to my lips. Even from the smallest sip, the liquid scalded the roof of my mouth, and I found the taste musty and bitter. I coughed and put the mug on the table, while Dad tutted and shook his head. “You’ve a few things to learn yet,” he said, before downing the rest of his tea with a grimace and a sigh.
He set down his empty mug, then went to the fireplace and twisted himself into the hollow. When he came back out, his face was grey with soot.
“Looks clear, for now at least. But don’t think we don’t know what you’re up to.”
Mum said nothing.
“No comment, eh? Sue’s done a real job on you.”
Dad picked up the broken handset from the sideboard and slapped it on the palm of his free hand as he paced up and down the room. He seemed to be looking for something to say. Some new line of interrogation that would blow the whole thing wide open.
“It was you all along, wasn’t it?” He stopped two feet away from Mum. “There was no man. You made the whole thing up, to test me. Didn’t you? You thought I wouldn’t know what to do. That you’d show me up in front of my son. Embarrass me.”
He laughed, then abruptly stopped. “But if there was no—” He turned to me. “You must have been in on it too. How—” He turned back to Mum, voice shaking. “I know you don’t love me, but… turning my own son against me?”
“Michael—”
“You think it’s not hard enough out there? Can you even imagine, just how dark it gets on a rig? The noise of it. And the smell. The diesel. And what it does to a man, spending every minute on high alert? And now the two of you bring that into my home?”
“Michael, whatever this is—”
“My own family.”
“Michael, please. I do love you. I do. But this is too much. Whatever this is, leave him out of it. Please.”
Dad picked up the string and crouched behind my chair.
“This is too much, Michael.” Mum began to strain against the knots.
“Don’t make this harder than it needs to be, lad.”
I placed my hands at the small of my back and offered them to Dad. He worked the string slowly around the chair, then I heard him shift his weight and sit on the floor. Earlier, when he tied Mum’s knots, he had done so with a kind of frenetic zeal, but now his movements seemed hesitant and listless, and his hands felt cold as they brushed over my wrist.
He yawned, then I heard him slap himself on the cheeks. He made another go at the knot, but his hands fell away, then nothing seemed to happen for a while.
Mum twisted herself to look at him, and the corner of her mouth twitched with something between excitement and concern. “I think he’s passed out,” she whispered.
I lifted my hands tentatively and the string dropped to the floor. Turning, I saw Dad with his head slumped between his knees.
“Oh… oh, sweetie. You didn’t, did you?”
I nodded.
“How many did you give him?”
I told her three, which was true, then shook Dad’s shoulder with my hand. He flopped sideways onto the floor and snorted, still asleep, with his cheek bulging against the carpet and his hair a wretched tangle.
“Oh gosh… look at the state of him.”
I squatted behind Mum’s chair and picked at the knots, but they were so tight and chaotic that I couldn’t find a way in. I had to fetch a pair of scissors from the kitchen to cut her out.
Mum raised her hands to my temples and I saw that her wrists were notched and red from the string. I let her kiss my forehead. Then she bent over Dad, her nose wrinkling from the smell, and slipped the keys from his pocket.
“Keep an eye on him. I’ll go and get help.” She put on her summer jacket over her nightclothes, and after some trial and error to match each key with its corresponding lock, she went out in her slippers, holding her jacket tight around her collar. “If he wakes, shout for me.”
Dad snored. In sleep, his odour seemed to work double-time. Even the open front door wasn’t enough to carry it away.
I went to the bathroom and threw some bottles, cans and appliances into a wash-bag. I took Mum’s sponge from the shower, soaked it under the tap and rubbed it with a bar of soap.
Back in the living room, I crouched beside Dad. Using one hand to lift his head, I pressed the sponge to each of his cheeks. The soapy water dripped over his face, collecting in grey teardrops that hung from his half-beard. I wiped until all the soot was gone, and rearranged his hair to cover his bald patch.
I sprayed him with deodorant from head to toe, until my eyes watered and my throat stung. For balance, I spritzed him all over with Mum’s best perfume.
Finally, I picked up the beard trimmer. I flicked it on and dabbed it at Dad’s jaw. It made a sweet crackle as it spat tiny bits of hair from its silver teeth. I pressed harder, gliding the trimmer down his jaw and over his chin as the hair fell away in matted clumps.
I took a step back and looked at my work. The carpet around Dad’s head was sodden with murky water and strewn with tufts of hair, but this would surely wash out. I waited for Mum to come back, anticipating that wonderstruck pause at the doorway as she saw Dad anew — the subtle notes of citrus cutting through that turpentine musk; his beard, trimmed to just the length she always liked.
I waited.