Law and order

Why must things keep happening?

Sure, fill your house with books.

Read to your infants, toddlers, primary-aged children, your fingertip following the words. Get them a library card at the earliest opportunity. Place a torch beside their beds so they can read under the covers.

Model reading to them: lie on the sofa with a split-open bag of corn chips on your chest, crunching while you turn the pages. Let the dog lick the seasoning from your fingers, because you aren’t getting up. Your kids will learn that the usual rules don’t apply when a book is THIS GOOD.

Repeat to them that books throw open the windows of the mind. Okay, maybe not David Walliams, but all the other ones. Hunt down all the titles that made you happy as a kid: The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark, Stig of the Dump, every Enid Blyton about postwar boarding schools in stately homes, and gnomes; range your own childhood books on the lowest shelves, including the random jumble sale ones which turned out to be good, and those so disintegrated you’ve packed them in a Ziploc bag.

Tell them the stories of the writers and places behind the books: Dickens’ father and the debtors’ prison, Enid Blyton not liking her own children, that in reality, Roald Dahl was a total git, and how the barn in Charlotte’s Web is a real place in Maine.

Invest in anything by Usborne, because an Usborne book is the only reason you passed Sixth Form Chemistry. Tell your children if they ever ask for a book, you will clear a path for them to read it.

You’ll raise a family of readers, certainly. Eventually you’ll find yourself standing on the dock, waving a handkerchief as your bookish child sets sail for waters unknown. As a glinting expanse of ocean opens up between you and them, you'll realise you’re no longer the captain of their imaginative destiny. They are. You helped made this happen with your mania, your zeal, your determination.

Just don’t come crying to me when they bring home Mein Kampf.

---

Look, it’s not that bad. But when your 13-year-old is reading Dostoevsky, part of you can’t help but panic. At her age, you were reading Upper Fourth at Malory Towers, which remains your idea of a stone-cold classic. But there she is, her beautiful fingers (“Like a pianist,” her uncle said, wonderingly, when she was just a few weeks old) turning the pages — such a relentless typeface! Such gloomy, disturbing material! What long, involved NAMES, with so many Vs! — while sitting in bed with the cat.

Is this why she’s started painting her nails black? Because her idea of a hero, murders people?

“You know, if you want to read the classics, you could start with something more fun,” I tell her. I’m trying to be casual but can hear a wheedling note of concern in my voice. “Like Jane Austen.”

She snorts. “Jane Austen is just people sitting around in houses talking about going to other people’s houses,” she says.

Oh, of course I’m in awe and can’t stop telling anyone who’ll listen what my daughter is presently choosing to read. Part of me wants to show off, really. It’s been a hard winter and I’m drowning. I need some kind of win, something to comfort myself with; to prove that everything is fine, actually.

But mostly I want to establish whether this is just normal teenage behaviour. Are all the kids doing this, these days? Are existential Russian novels a BookTok craze? She was 12 merely five minutes ago, but now has more serious taste than I do, even though I’ve been reading 40 years longer than she has. Admittedly, I spent the nineties inhaling celebrity magazines, and we’ve all lost a decade to the Mail Online. Have I been wasting my time?

Mostly the friends I tell are startled. None of them have read Dostoevsky. All of them have meant to, but somehow never got around to it. In fact, only one person in my survey had actually read one of his novels, in Russian, but gave up after two chapters. Dostoevsky is a fucking windbag.

“Have you read Crime and Punishment?” our daughter asked my husband last week, on their way to late night at the library.

“No,” he said, no doubt driving in that relaxed way he does. “But I’ve seen the TV series they made out of it.”

There was a brief silence before Maddie said, “That’s Law & Order, Dad.”

---

This week I learned that the limit of human tolerance for an imperfect situation is eight minutes.

Eight minutes! When Nelson Mandela did 27 years!

I was making dinner for me and the kids in my Kmart apron, when a strangely uneven-sounding bell started going off. It was stuttering, I guess, but loud enough to be startling. It was coming from inside the house.

My heart began to thud as it always does when one’s first thought is, fire! But it wasn’t coming from the ceiling alarms. I tracked it down to the front door, near which is an ancient, unused keypad from a dormant security system.

This system is so old, the phone number on the panel doesn’t have enough digits. Its tiny lights have never worked. We’ve never activated it because between me and the dog, this house is fully monitored and always defended. But now it was lit up like a Christmas tree, little red lights flickering all over. Naturally I punched a bunch of them in no particular order, and the alarm ripped into head-splitting life.

My GOD! The peals of intense, discordant, clamorous noise! It smashed through the house like a drumkit thrown down the stairs! It was like being front row at a Stockhausen concert! They must have played this stuff at Guantanamo! My heart rate shot up, my hair stood on end, my pupils were like pinpricks. I started to turn in a panicky little circle, unable to think because of the relentless blasting of horns. The dog went bananas, and the cat arched her back and skidded diagonally across the room.

I kept punching the keypad, and the alarm unit on the outside of the house — unnoticed and lifeless for these past nine years — blazed into action, throbbing with a white light and squealing into the street. So now it was as loud outside as inside, screeching to passersby that there were intruders, burglars, malcontents at our place when in fact the only unusual aspect of the evening was a bus parked half a block away, inviting locals to VOTE GUY NUNNS FOR COUNCIL.

Great - so now I was socially embarrassed, as well as panicked.

The kids thundered downstairs, wanting to know what was going on. By now I was on a chair holding a dessert bowl over the source of the noise: a siren built high into the wall of the hallway. It muffled maybe ten percent of it and wasn’t what you’d call a long-term solution.

“RING YOUR FATHER!” I shouted at Maddie. He was at conference drinks, possibly with the Minister for Infrastructure, so that wasn’t an immediate solution either. Maddie, who turns out to be cool in a crisis, handed me the lawn-mowing earmuffs. She and George found their own noise-cancelling headphones, at which point George lost interest in the drama and vanished back upstairs.

At this point, I could calm my raging nervous system enough to come up with a plan, and my plan was to snip every wire to every sensor in the house. There were five of these, ranged discreetly in various downstairs places. I ripped their plastic faces off and attacked the first one with the dull edge of an ordinary knife.

It didn’t help. The motherboards (green with goldy bits) wouldn’t budge. I had to get down, rummage around in the sewing basket, and find scissors. These did not have rubber handles.

“You CAN’T do THAT!” Maddie shouted, as I pulled the first sensor off the wall and pinched four or five tiny, coloured wires in my fingers. “You’ll ELECTROCUTE YOURSELF!”

“THEY’RE LOW VOLTAGE!” I shouted back. Honestly, I didn’t know if they were. I might well be thrown across the room in a blue flash of electricity. All I wanted was for it to stop, and I was willing to take a dumb risk. HERE LIES LEAH MCFALL, my headstone might read, WHO DIED DOING HER BEST. WHICH, LET’S FACE IT, WAS NOWHERE NEAR ENOUGH.

My scissors bit through the wiring.

Nothing happened.

I skittered around the house dragging a chair and did the same again and again. Nothing. The siren wailed on. I took the damned scissors and smacked the damned keypad off the wall, angrily snipping through the red and black wires feeding the tiny lightshow still pulsing in my hand. I looked at Maddie and she looked at me.

The siren kept wailing.

At this point Maddie fell into hysterics, and so did I. “IT’S STILL GOING!” I shouted. I felt lightheaded and sounded like I’d swallowed helium. I ran outside, looked up at the flashing electronic box, and ran inside again. I still had the ripped-off control pad in my hand.

I tried ringing the outdated number stickered to the plastic, written in cursive alongside the name BRIAN. Brian, who was possibly long retired or maybe even dead. I typed in the name of the defunct security company and what do you know? There was a lovely 0800 number, which I telephoned, to no response.

By this point there had been 20 unendurable minutes of headbanging noise pulsing through my skull and rattling my teeth and bones. Naturally, then, in my heightened, adrenalized state, I did the sensible thing. I rang 111.

“111 emergency,” said the despatcher, evenly. “Do you require fire, ambulance or police?”

“Well,” I said, trying to keep it together, “Fire, I think, but not the emergency line. It’s not urgent.”

“I’ll keep on the line and put you through,” she said, and the next thing you know I’m talking to the EMERGENCY DESPATCHER OF THE FIRE SERVICE, who I specifically said I didn’t wish to speak to, who isn’t thrilled about my call, which is not about a threat to life.

“I didn’t know who else to ring,” I bleat. “I thought you’d know about alarms.”

He told me to ring the security company listed on the control panel and an uncharitable part of my personality thought, “No shit.” Then he wouldn’t let me get off the line. He wanted to log every detail of my call so that if, in the event I was ringing from a smoking ruin and later found barbecued like a suckling pig, the fire service could cover its ass.

Suddenly, as extravagantly as it had begun, the alarm went dead.

“It’s stopped,” I said to the despatcher.

“It’s stopped?”

I nodded my head in wonder. Nothingness filled my ears. It probably filled his ears as well. The silence was a cruel joke, evidence of my lack of skill at life and managing a household.

“Thank you for your patience,” I said, and ended the call — a recording of which is possibly being used now for training purposes (How to Handle a Halfwit).

The kids came back, pulling off their headphones. Then the phone rang. It was a lovely man from the 0800 security service. I’d dialled the wrong company, but this being Wellington, HE KNEW BRIAN.

I begged him to tell me what had happened. He told me the strong possibility was that the battery had finally run down in our hard-wired security system, tripping the siren. I needed to locate the control box, usually in the loft, and disconnect the battery from the power supply. Until then, he said, there was every chance the alarm might go off again.

“I snipped every wire I could find,” I told him. “I used sewing scissors.” I told him I now had a box of useless sensor units and a hole where the keypad had been.

“I’ve heard worse,” he said, and offered to come round the next day to sort out the still-flashing exterior unit. He also said that most home alarms are primed to blast only for eight minutes, because eight minutes is usually how long it takes to annoy the neighbours. This means we all have roughly seven minutes of freedom to be ourselves at the office, at home, in a restaurant or shopping, before everybody else decides they’ve had enough and we must reign our impulses in.

If it goes off again, he said, and it still might, even with the power disconnected, just ring me back and I’ll come round — though he would have to charge a late call-out fee.

My husband would eventually come home and disconnect the battery but before then, the kids and I ate our dried-out dinner with earmuffs beside our plates. It was unsettling, knowing our house could turn on us at any time; that I couldn’t take my bra off for the evening, or sleep in a T shirt and rumpty knickers.

It also meant we were vulnerable to the unexpected, our defences down, our wires cut asunder. Any old mucker might come in off the street (GUY NUNNS FOR COUNCIL). Life might get unpredictable; perhaps even more interesting.

I put my matching pyjamas on that night, in case our perimeters were breached.