As I walk from my office shed to the kitchen, I find the tortoise chewing on a bit of depleted lawn outside the back door.
“What are you doing?” I say. “It’s not your time.”
In mid-December he gave up pacing round the kitchen table and took himself off to the laundry cupboard, where the underfloor heating runs out. He tucked himself into a cool spot next to the washing machine and didn’t move for about 60 days, missing the annual Christmas photo of him eating a Brussels sprout with a bow on his back. His choice.
I step into the kitchen, where my wife is wiping surfaces.
“Did you let the tortoise out on purpose?” I say. “Or did he escape?”
“On purpose,” she says. “He was underfoot.”
“OK,” I say. “It’s February.”
“I know,” she says. “We’ll have to keep an eye on him.”
She means I will have to keep an eye on him. But by the time I have made myself a coffee, he’s disappeared.
In the afternoon Alfie the plumber drops by to pump a chemical solution into our central heating system – a new and aggressive intervention.
“How’s it been?” he says, pulling out the shelves underneath the boiler.
“Last night I turned on the heat and nothing happened,” I say. “But then just as I was about to go to bed everything came on.”
“Huh,” he says.
“I can see that’s perplexing,” I say.
“No, it’s helpful,” he says.
The heating hasn’t worked for well over a month – radiators stay cold or suddenly go hot at random. The faulty pump was replaced, but the problem remained, and possibly worsened. It might be caused by some kind of blockage, but we have entered the realms of speculation.
I don’t mind so much now that the weather has turned warm, with the first blades of tulips knifing up through the soil. Still, I can see why the tortoise might take his chances outside, for a little consistency.
Alfie is confounded by our heating system, but also determined. It’s like having a paranormal investigator drop by on a regular basis, each time with a different theory about your ghost, and supplying fresh evidence: a crumbly newspaper clipping about a Victorian murder; a lock of hair found in an envelope behind the wall.
“If you could run the heat high for the next few days,” he says, “it’ll help the chemicals work better.”
“Can do,” I say.
“I’ll be back on Thursday with the machine,” he says. This machine, which is supposed to flush out our haunted pipes under high pressure, must be hired and is in high demand.
When Alfie leaves I turn the thermostat to 25C and go with my wife to feed our neighbour’s kittens. The only immediate evidence of animals is the mayhem: books pulled from shelves; cushions and cardboard boxes everywhere, the work of poltergeists.
“We were just here,” I say. “How could they do this much damage in four hours?”
“Hello!” my wife says. A small face peers out from one of the boxes, and another from behind the sofa. Two more rise over the rim of a basket, one black, one tabby. My wife claps her hands and all four kittens, and their mother, follow her over to where the cat food is kept.
“It’s warm in here,” I say.
“No it isn’t,” my wife. “It’s chilly.”
“I guess I can’t tell any more,” I say.
When we get back home I walk around the house feeling the radiators. They’re operating in an informal, alternating arrangement, like morse code: on on off off on off. If my central heating is trying to tell me something, it’s going to have to try harder. I go to the kitchen and place my palm against the front of the boiler. I can feel the new pump whirring, the transplanted heart of the mysteriously compromised system. It occurs to me I am paying for the heat, whether it reaches the radiators or not.
It’s after dark when I remember the tortoise. After a long search I find him wedged between a bench and a wall, partly obscured by ivy. This, I have learned over years, is what passes for contentment in tortoise circles. He hisses in protest as I lift him out.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s still too cold.”
On the way back to the house I look over the garden wall and there, in the dim light of next door’s conservatory, I can see eight little eyes watching my every move.
