Home life
Bump in the night
Alice Thomas Ellis
Why has Janet found our leaden statue of Our Lady of Victories lying broken on the kitchen floor? It was set well back in a small niche in a house-supporting wall about four feet thick and invulnerable to the usual domestic shocks — doors banging, feet pounding on the stairs etc. It would have taken something registering on the Richter scale to cause it to leap forward six inches and down six feet on to the tiles, and what is more it shared the niche with a china (Quiberon) statue of Our Lady as a child with her mother, St Anna, which stood nearer to the edge and is unharmed.
All was as usual when Janet got here, no strangers have called, and she heard no- thing — no sound of lead striking tile, which one would have thought would be noticeably audible. She was down here all the time and, anyway, all the time was only about five minutes from the moment she arrived until she discovered the pieces. What is more, the third thing in this niche is a small icon which leans against the side, 'Even I'm I'm not mad enough to fight Tyson.' and when Janet looked to see what was going on it was lying in the middle. Even if another person had been here he could not have wrought these depredations by acci- dent unless he was very tall and his ears stuck out to the extent that he could sweep things off supermarket shelves with them.
And no, the cats couldn't have done it. Puss walks up walls when the stars are bright with frost, but she never gets far up enough to do anything. Gravity being what it is she comes straight down again, and Cadders confines himself solely to knock- ing tins of cat food off a two-foot high shelf. Had the fridge top been clear, a very muscular and agile cat might have sat up there and reached out to the niche, but the fridge top is entirely covered with tin tea pots and a china boar, and they are undisturbed. Nor do I believe that any cat can climb up a sheer, shiny fridge. I think it can only have been devils, and I don't like it.
We've just noticed that while we've retrieved two heads, the top of Our Lady's hat and the hem of her garment, the Child's hand is still missing. Read some- thing else quietly while we go and look under the fridge...
Well, we've done that and we can't find it. We found a lot of fluff, some bits of newspaper left over from the time we used it to mop up the dishwasher overflow, some broken plate, a baby beetle and a hazelnut, but not the hand. Several staunch rationalists are maintaining that all phenomena have a natural cause; that the vibrations from the fridge could have worked the statue to the edge, to which I respond — horse-feathers. The fridge doesn't vibrate. It sits there silent and unmoving. Then, they say, it must have been the cat and I patiently take them to the scene and explain how it couldn't have been. It was Asmodeus, Leviathan, Be- hemoth, Isacaaron, Balaam, Gresil, Aman, or one of that mob. Offended by the air of sanctity pervading our kitchen they broke the statue out of spite. I find this a perfectly rational — nay, the only explanation. My hairdresser, who has just cut off what hair I had left after the previous cull, has a friend with a different problem. He has a holy stove. It will grill anything except bread, so he can't make toast. It holds that burning bread is sacrile- gious and turns itself off when he fancies something to go under the marmalade. You can believe me or not, as you will. I don't care.
And the breathing that we hear in the country isn't hedgehogs. It is something non-corporeal. I don't know what, but It isn't hedgehogs. And the people who talk in the night are not the people who talk in the day — not us. Nor are they devils. They leave things as they find them, and when an item gets broken it is down to the cat or one of us. What we have here is not a butter-fingers, and I'm just off to get some holy water and frighten it away.
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