Aggressive pounding on the front door wakes me. Not yet fully conscious, I spill out of bed, grab my dressing gown, and plonk downstairs. Vanilla ambles after me with her tail gently wagging.
It’s an Amazon delivery. The woman gives me a funny look as she hands me the box. I groggily mumble something at her. Vanilla pants behind me.
Coffee is required. The clock on the oven reads ten thirty-two. That means it’s eleven thirty-two. I’ll make an excuse. Say my internet was down.
Perhaps a fry-up will help, or hair of the dog, but that’s never worked for me before. Isn’t there something about raw egg? When I was in Germany, they tried to persuade me that pickled herring was a miracle cure. If I had any, I’d give it a go.
I plod upstairs to my home office with Vanilla padding behind me. She settles on her bed as I splay a pair of scissors and slice open the Amazon box. The contents are remarkably tightly packed, like a babushka. One little box after another emerges from the grandmother box. I lay them out on my desk, my bemusement increasing. Ten wireless doorbells stare back, as though their appearance was foretold by electronic gods. I check the grandmother box. It’s not a mistake. My name is on it.
“What the fuck?” I say. I have no memory of making this purchase. I retie my dressing gown, hoping that it wasn’t this loose when I opened the door for the delivery woman, then sit in my chair and check my purchase history on my phone. Ten wireless doorbells were indeed bought. There is also a sinister clue: the order was made in the wee hours last night, at eleven fifty-eight to be precise. Amazon Prime does deliver.
Abruptly, Vanilla sits up and barks, making me jump. Again and again, my ancient Labrador barks. “Vanilla!” I bellow, but to no avail. There aren’t any soft furnishings in my home office, so the dog-shouts have a particularly harsh edge. She must have forgotten that I’m still at the desk.
I stand and retie my dressing gown again. The barks are rhythmic, as though she’s asking where I am or trying to let me know where she is. It’s a worried, canine version of Marco Polo. I take a couple of steps towards her and when I come into view, she jolts in surprise. She sniffs a few times to confirm it’s me, then relaxes and thumps her tail onto her bed a few times. I kneel and run my hand over the top of her head.
Ten wireless doorbells. What on earth?
I drag my memory back. It feels like pulling my fingers through sticky bread dough. Jemma and I had had a fight, the same fight we’ve been having for weeks. I don’t take things seriously, she says. I’m an adult child, she says. But this time was different because she also said … something? I remember my fury. I remember thinking that she was right and how dare she.
Vanilla nudges me with her nose. I resume petting her.
More flashes return. At some point, I locked myself here, in the home office. Jemma wants to make it a spare room again so that we can have guests stay over. She thinks I should work at the kitchen table like her friend Alyssa, but that wasn’t what the fight was about. Jemma was shouting at me from outside the door. My doughy fingers can’t grasp about what. I remember going to the filing cabinet and taking out a bottle of Jack and a never-washed glass. The fruity, woody aroma was immediately comforting. I poured myself a few fingers and knocked them back. I poured myself another few fingers. I remember that my mind was somehow buzzing and numb at the same time. I remember hearing the bedroom door slam.
Apparently, I then went online to order ten wireless doorbells. Like a normal person.
Vanilla nudges me again. “Alright,” I say, “we’ll go for a walk.”
The minute we’re out the door, Vanilla poos on the pavement. At least she waited until we were out of the house. I prepare the flimsy plastic bag. As I lean down to pick up the warm pile, something comes back. The fight began because Jemma had accused me of being rude to her after barging into the home office without knocking. Later, in Jack Daniel’s glow, I thought it would be a great joke if I ordered a huge number or wireless doorbells.
***
I take the day off work. I simply cannot muster the motivation to do my job. I have an almost overwhelming urge to squeeze next to Vanilla, sprawling over the edge of her bed, and spend the day dozing with her on the floor of the home office. Thinking about it, it’s better for everyone if I don’t even try to work. This, I tell myself. What I tell my colleagues is that I’ve been fighting with my internet service provider all morning. That they’ve promised to fix the problem by tomorrow. That I’m very sorry.
I think I might get fired but I struggle to care.
I do something for the first time in my life: I read the instructions. In order to install the doorbells, I will need some equipment. Double-sided tape is an option, but if there is any in the house, I haven’t the foggiest where Jemma might keep it. Additionally, I feel I can use my unexpected free time to learn to use a drill. I’m a capable adult. I cannot continue asserting that I am a capable adult without learning to use a drill.
I go in search of where Jemma keeps the tools.
My first instinct is to check under the sink, which immediately seems silly when I see what is under the sink. Upstairs in the bedroom, I poke around in the cupboards I rarely open, but no tools are to be found there. Vanilla begins her rhythmic barking from the office. I go to her where I am identified by sniff and my presence is celebrated by tail thumping. It’s clear she should come with me, so I move slowly towards the door to make sure she knows I’m going somewhere. She lumbers onto her paws and follows me. Back in the bedroom, I dare to venture into the forbidden drawer. It contains is underwear, boxes of the pill, and two threateningly large vibrators. I look at Vanilla. She pants happily as if to say: “I won’t say anything, don’t worry.”
I go to the top of the stairs feeling deflated, out of options. I’m about to give up and watch a Michael Bay film, when my eyes wander up towards the occult door in the ceiling. Yes, the loft, her secret space, another place I’m not allowed to go. It takes a fair bit of prodding and twisting to navigate the mystical workings of the hatch. The stairs unexpectedly lurch down and unfold themselves. I fling myself out of the way. Vanilla barks and dances around me. “It’s not a game,” I say.
The loft is pristinely neat. I can see why Jemma doesn’t want me up here. A wide array of tools wait patiently on shelves, or hang off hooks. Everything is carefully labelled, and everything clearly has its place. I promise myself that when I’m done, I won’t intentionally put things back in the wrong place. The neatness bothers me, though. If someone with OCD needs everything to be just so, I’m the opposite. When things are just so, I feel a brain itch. I develop an unbearable need to make everything messy.
Vanilla barks from somewhere near the bottom of the ladder. Impulsively, I shout “I’m up here, Vanilla!” She keeps barking.
I grab the drill (because I don’t know what an impact driver is, and it sounds scary) and climb down before I lose control of my impulse to release chaos. Vanilla sniffs me, wags her tail and I rub her head.
The first doorbell, I install outside my office. I’m delighted with my new toy. Pew pew, brrrm brrm, I pull the trigger like a gunslinging cowboy. Things seem to go well as I plough holes into the wall. I follow the instructions I can remember, but the bell still ends up at a wonky angle. I love it but I know Jemma will hate the lack of precision. I shove the chime gadget into a plug in my office and lose half an hour experimenting with all the possible sounds.
It takes me most of the afternoon to install another five doorbells on the bedroom, upstairs and downstairs bathrooms, the kitchen, and the living room. Vanilla shadows me, flopping down nearby whenever I stop to bludgeon another doorbell into a wall. She snoozes happily through my drilling, swearing, and repeated thanking of my lucky stars I’ve not hit a wire, water pipe, or some hidden object in the walls. The bathrooms are a mistake. There’s nowhere to plug in the ringers, so I just prop them symbolically against the toilets. It’s the thought that counts.
After completing the sixth bell, I sit, leaning against the wall, and reflect that I have achieved the great distinction of not demolishing the house. I am proud of myself. Chalky dust and a hot, metallic sharpness fill my nose. It occurs to me that I should hoover, but my mind skitters off. I bought too many doorbells. Was it a special offer? It was fun choosing a different chime for each room, though. It’s going to be so cool to ring a doorbell anywhere in the house and Jemma will know exactly where I am. Like sonar. Except for the bathrooms.
With the sun setting, I decide I’ve earned a break, so I make popcorn and set up to watch Ambulance in my office. I wanted to see it in the cinema when it came out, but Jemma wasn’t interested.
Vanilla’s paws twitch in her dream.
Despite my desire for full immersion, I need to know when Jemma gets home, so I have the sound fairly low. This is certainly not how Bay wanted his films to be experienced. Bullets flying, cars crashing, Jake Gyllenhaal doing his thing. I can’t quite feel the adrenaline pumping with the muted audio, but the magic of Bay’s action romp does suck me in.
***
At the edge of my awareness, I think I hear the front door open. I pause the film and there is suddenly silence. I begin to doubt I actually heard Jemma coming home. It could just have been a sound on the film. But I’m pretty sure she’s home. There is something about the silence which seems unimpressed. I wonder if she’s seen one or more of my slightly skew doorbells, or smelt the aftermath of my DIY.
Oh shit, I didn’t put the drill away. It’s just sitting by the front door where I left it. I’m really going to be in the doghouse.
I decide I better go downstairs instead of hiding in the office. Jemma is sitting at the kitchen table. She doesn’t say anything when I walk in. She doesn’t even look at me.
“I thought it would be funny,” I say. She doesn’t reply. I continue: “You know, now you can ring to let me know you’re outside a room. So I don’t get angry when you come in without knocking.” Still nothing. This is bad. “I’m sorry I made a mess, I’ll clean it up.” I turn to retrieve the drill, but can’t help leaking my frustration at her silence. “It was just a joke,” I say, pressing the kitchen doorbell. The tinny speaker blasts out the opening of Bach’s famous Toccata.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Jemma erupts. “This is so fucking juvenile. You’re a petulant baby.”
“Why are you always mean –“ I begin, but she cuts me off.
“Mean? Look what you did. How did you … tell me you didn’t take the day off for this.”
“It was just a joke, Jesus. It’s not like the sky is falling.”
“What did you tell your boss? ‘Sorry I’m not working today, it’s prank-your-girlfriend day at the horseshit factory –‘“
“Horseshit factory?”
“Because you’re full of horseshit! Is this really because – ”
Vanilla appears at the kitchen door and Jemma abandons what she was about to say. We’re both flabbergasted. Our gasts are flabbed. Vanilla always barks if she doesn’t know where we are. How did she know we were in the kitchen? She saunters over to Jemma, snuffles hello, has a sloppy drink of water, and flops down next to her bowl.
Before Vanilla arrived, I had my own frustrations bubbling in my throat ready to hurl at Jemma. But now, both of us have lost the thread. The air has been let out of our fight.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Yeah”, she says.
We stand in awkwardness.
Jemma moves first. She begins preparing dinner. Full of sheepishness, I set about clearing up my mess. I pick up the drill and return it to the loft, making sure it’s behind the ‘drill’ label. I ask Jemma where the vacuum cleaner is. She shows me, and then helps me understand how to take the cord out. Henry Hoovers are complicated. I clean up as much of the dust as I can. By the time I’m done, she’s put together a pasta with Tesco’s Finest sundried tomato and garlic sauce.
“Thanks,” I say as she bangs the plates onto the table.
“How was your day?” she asks.
“Good. Yours?”
“Awful, but let’s not talk about it.”
We eat in silence. Vanilla watches from her water bowl. She’s not moved since she flopped down. I can tell from her eyebrows that she knows something is wrong. I wonder what she sees. Sparks of angry human energy flying back and forth. Does she know we’re not talking to each other?
“Will you?” asks Jemma, when we’ve finished our eerie eating.
“Yes,” I say. And I do, I load the dishwasher. I even follow her rules about what goes on the top and what goes on the bottom. There’s a hand-drawn diagram, blue-tacked on the front, which I have never referenced before.
I am startled out of my skin by the ‘ding-dong’ I chose for the bedroom. I make an involuntary sound at the back of my throat, like the call of an enraged tropical bird. I can hear Jemma laughing upstairs.
Mistakes may have been made.
Vanilla ambles out of the room. A moment later I hear Jemma talking to her. “Good girl,” she says, “you’ve come to find me.”
I sneak up to the kitchen doorbell. Bach blares out of the tinny speaker, making me think that a cartoon Dracula will emerge from my fridge. Jemma tsks upstairs. “What are you doing?” she asks, as though she didn’t just do the same thing to me.
Vanilla comes trotting down the stairs with her ears up. She pants happily at me and potters around the kitchen. I’m at a loss. I watch her snuffle along the bottom of the cupboards, optimistically looking for scraps. No sound has penetrated Vanilla’s world for as long as we can remember, but these doorbells do? What a relief this could be for her. We can signal where we are, and she’ll not have sudden moments of worry.
“Jemma,” I call, “I think Vanilla can hear the chimes”.
She comes down the stairs and we stare at each other in astonishment. I bring my finger to my lips and point towards the living room. We tiptoe away from Vanilla and share a silent communication: would you like to? No, you go ahead. Well, you installed them. I don’t mind.
Pragmatic as always, and probably to prevent things getting heated, Jemma presses the living room doorbell. Absurd, elevator music blares out from the other side of the room. Jemma raises an eyebrow at me. I shrug. Vanilla pokes her head around the kitchen door.
“No way!” we say at the same time.
We spend the next hour running around the house, ringing doorbells and hiding. Vanilla loves the game of hide and dog-seek. She bursts in to find us, all licks and doggy breath and furry love.
As we tumble towards the bedroom for the umpteenth time, I become aware that Jemma and I are giggling like teenagers. We ring the bedroom doorbell and hide next to the bed. Vanilla bowls in. We squeal in delight. She barks joyfully. We carouse on the floor.