I am in bed at 6.30am when the burglar alarm goes off. I know it’s not because someone is trying to break in – it’s the wrong noise. I sort of wish it was. It would mean that at least one thing in this house was working.
“How do we turn it off?” my wife shouts.
“There’s, like, a fob,” I say. “It was on my keychain, but then it fell off.”
“Oh good,” my wife says.
“There’s also a spare fob,” I say, climbing out of bed. “Somewhere.”
I should have realised that the central heating going wrong was just the start of a roughly five-year cycle of domestic calamity: next comes the burglar alarm, then the smoke alarms. Eventually the dryer catches fire, or something. Then it begins again.
The last time the burglar alarm went wrong was indeed five years ago, long enough to forget everything about how we dealt with the crisis at the time. I haven’t touched the alarm controls since. A year ago the yellow light on the front of the panel started blinking, and I ignored it.
The drawer where the spare fob should be contains only unlabelled keys, loose playing cards and passport photos that are no longer a true likeness of the applicant. The living room floor is ice cold under my bare feet. The noise of the alarm – two notes at an interval designed to drive anyone nearby insane – seems to be getting louder. As I continue to search, I begin swearing under my breath. Then over my breath. Then very loudly, to make myself heard above the alarm.
I am close to upending the drawer on the floor when the alarm suddenly stops. I find my wife standing by the control panel in her pyjamas.
“What did you do?” I say.
“I put in the four-digit code,” she says.
“Why didn’t you do that before?” I say.
“I just remembered it,” she says. “I don’t know why you’re so cross.”
“You don’t?” I say.
“No, I don’t,” she says. “I’m going back to bed.”
I am cross, I think, because I am cold, and have been cold for a long time. I am cross because I am up before dawn, and will be again. If memory serves, the burglar alarm will keep going off until I pay a man £300 to make it stop. Then he will show me – very patiently, perhaps three times – how to reset it myself, and I will forget it all before he has started his van.
While I am standing there, arms folded, jaw locked, something occurs to me.
“Just for your information,” I say to my wife as I re-enter the bedroom, “the spare fob is sitting at the bottom of the fuse box just above the alarm control panel, where I put it five years ago so I’d remember where to find it.”
“But you didn’t remember,” my wife says.
“Uh, yes I did,” I say. “Is Mike coming today?”
“I don’t know,” she says.
Mike is a very good plumber of very limited availability, from whom we are seeking a second opinion on our heating. But he’s on another job, and doesn’t know when he can drop round.
“Because today would be a really good …”
“I’ve texted him,” my wife says. “Don’t ask me again.”
Later that morning I’m in my office shed, warmed by a small heater turned up so high it’s making me sleepy, when my wife knocks on the door.
“Mike is here,” she says.
“Oh my God,” I say, leaping to my feet.
When I get to the kitchen, Mike the plumber is on my wife’s phone talking to Alfie the plumber, who reached the end of the road with our central heating a few weeks ago. Alfie is on speakerphone, listing everything he did that didn’t work.
“The pump is new,” he says. “I replaced the printed circuit board, and the system’s been power-flushed.”
My wife and I sit close by as Mike attaches alligator clips to different parts of the boiler and takes readings.
“It could be your canoe filter,” he says.
“Canoe filter?” I say.
“It’s just a little plastic part,” he says. “It’ll probably break when I take it out, but they’re only about nine quid.”
“Do you hear?” I say to my wife. “It’s the canoe filter!”
“It’s hard to be sure,” he says. “But I’ll bring one along next time I come.”
I think: next time?
After Mike leaves I go back to my office to look up pictures of canoe filters. That night, little plastic canoes float past me in my dreams, until the burglar alarm wakes me at 5am.
