Nonetheless, the wind was fierce, gnashing at our cheeks as we walked west, the waves thudding angrily against the track’s new rocky defences. There were lots of other families walking the footpath but I noticed that, unlike mine, the dads in those families did not periodically shout ‘KEEP AWAY FROM THE EDGE’ as they strolled beside the steep drop to the beach.
‘Have you been to get your bad tooth looked at yet?’ my mum asked me.
‘KEEP AWAY FROM THE EDGE!’ said my dad.
‘I was thinking that bamboo I gave you might be best planted on the far side of the garden – the same side as the oil tank,’ said my mum.
‘KEEP AWAY FROM THE EDGE!’ said my dad.
‘Mick, stop saying, “KEEP AWAY FROM THE EDGE!”’ said my mum. ‘We’re miles away from it.’
‘YOU’RE NOT. LOOK AT TOM. TOM, STOP DOING THAT. YOU COULD FALL IN AND DIE.’
During the drive back to my house my dad asked if I had used my new headtorch yet, a present he’d bought me for Christmas but had delivered to me several weeks early because he was so excited about it. I admitted that I hadn’t and apologised. ‘WHAT?’ he said. ‘I CAN’T BELIEVE IT. USE YOUR HEADTORCH. AND WHAT’S THIS YOUR MUM TOLD ME ABOUT YOU TURNING DOWN THE CHANCE TO GO ON BREAKFAST TELLY?’ I told him I had no interest in ever being on telly, detailing another couple of opportunities I’d turned down in the last six months. ‘I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU. YOU’RE UNFOOOKINGBELIEVABLE. YOU’LL BE BACK WORKING IN TESCO IF YOU’RE NOT CAREFUL.’ The rest of the evening passed quietly, in contrast to the previous time my parents had stayed when, in his sleep at 3 a.m., my dad had shouted, ‘THEY LET ME OUT SOMETIMES, YOU KNOW.’ The next morning he got up early, threw some more cooked meat at the cats and packed the car, ready for the long journey back to Nottinghamshire. My mum checked my dad had not erroneously put any of my possessions in their suitcase, such as the four clean pillowcases he took last time. I felt much as I always do when I’ve seen my parents: tired, ready for a quiet sit-down, but sad to see them go and wishing I saw them more frequently. ‘WOFFAL!’ said my dad, which was the acronym version of ‘WATCH OUT FOR FOOKWITS AND LOONIES!’ that he’d become fond of using lately. ‘WEAR THAT HEADTORCH!’ he added as he and my mum walked to the car. I promised I would and tried to remember where I’d put it. I asked him if his black toenail had fallen off yet and he said it hadn’t. When they arrived home five hours later, the wooden head was on the ground in front of the door.
My dad’s black toenail finally fell off about four weeks later. Over the phone, my mum told me that it had dislodged in the swimming pool changing room, upon which my dad had proudly shown it to all the regulars. ‘Was this before or after his swim?’ I asked. ‘Before, fortunately,’ my mum said. I asked her where the toenail was now and she began to repeat the question to my dad, who was upstairs.
‘IS THAT TOM? TELL HIM TO WOFFAL,’ I heard my dad shout.
‘I don’t need to tell him. I’m sure he can hear you. He wants to know where the toenail is,’ said my mum.
‘IT’S ON A SHELF UP HERE IN MY OFFICE,’ said my dad.
‘Why?’ said my mum.
‘I WANT TO KEEP IT AND GET IT FRAMED. IT CAN BE A MEMENTOE. MEMENTOE! DO YOU GET IT?’ said my dad.
‘Yes,’ said my mum.
My mum told me she had some other, bigger news: they had solved the mystery of why the wooden head kept falling on the ground. ‘You will never guess,’ she said, and she was right. I had turned all the facts over in my head numerous times, and even the most logical conclusions I had drawn – that the head contained the reincarnated spirit of an Egyptian demon from the year 11 BC, for example – seemed wildly improbable.
‘Your dad caught Casper from next door throwing it at the door.’
‘But . . . how?’
‘He kind of scoops it up with his paw then flicks it at the handle. I think he just wants to be let in.’
My mum and dad’s neighbours’ cat, who is all white and named Casper after the famous friendly animated ghost, had been a regular visitor to their house for years. Between 2012 and 2014 he was never happier than with the tongue of my parents’ previous cat, Floyd, deep inside his ear. After Floyd was killed by a car in the autumn of the latter year, Casper began a new love affair with George, a ginger and white stray I had rescued from the mean lanes of Devon then donated to my parents. Casper and George, who bears a startling resemblance to the Belgian international midfielder Kevin De Bruyne, sleep with their limbs entwined at least once every day and gambol about my mum and dad’s garden, playwrestling and chasing one another up trees. Both of them have been neutered, but my mum has walked into upstairs rooms on several occasions to find George taking Casper roughly from behind. Casper is the heavier cat, but it is George who plays the dominant role in their relationship. Casper knows how to be assertive too, though. Before he started asking to be let in by throwing the wooden head at the door he had already worked out how to bang the brass knocker on the door with his paw.
It wasn’t until the beginning of summer that I next visited my mum and dad. The wooden head was on the flagstones near the porch’s entrance when I arrived, its mean, furrowed face staring up at a heavy sky. I took my shoes off but chose not to leave them in the porch beneath the head’s perch. I entered the living room and found Casper sitting upright on the sofa, not unlike a small human. Missing only a remote control and a can of Tennent’s Extra, his pose was one that brought to mind the term ‘catspreading’. He gave me the most casual of glances then continued to watch rolling news. Not finding any sign of my parents in the house, I put my shoes back on and wandered down to their new wildlife pond, which had come on in leaps and bounds since last year. Broad-bodied chaser dragonflies flitted about above the water’s shiny surface, and a little egret belted by overhead. ‘I’M GOING TO GET A SWAN FOR IT,’ my dad had announced when drawing up plans for the pond. ‘Where from?’ I’d asked. ‘I BET YOU CAN GET THEM OFF THE INTERNET,’ he’d replied. He had abandoned this plan, but moorhens, ducks, water beetles, frogs and newts had already arrived on or around the water, of their own volition. My parents had worked tirelessly to transform the space from the remains of an old pigsty into what it was now, my mum referring to their efforts as ‘pondering’. I noticed too that the plants my dad had appropriated from my own pond were thriving.
My pond is a fraction of the size of my mum and dad’s but was full of life in the summers of 2014 and 2015. At the start of this particular spring, the following year, it had become somewhat weed-choked and I’d begun to de-weed it but not got all that far by the time my mum and dad last visited me in March: the one time I’d seen them between now and our Christmas outing to Dawlish. My dad had dipped an arm in to take some specimens for his pond then got a little carried away for the next fifteen minutes. I’d left him to it, said bye and gone off for a walk on Dartmoor. Two hours later a photo popped through onto my phone from my mum, showing my dad in the middle of my pond, topless, up to his waist in water. I returned home to find the pond entirely clear of weed and algae. Tired and keen to relax and refresh myself with a hot bath after my long walk, I thought about what a kind gesture this had been from my dad. The feeling of gratitude lasted all the way to the bathroom, which, upon entering, I discovered now boasted much of the former contents of my pond, and subsequently took me over an hour to clean.
Despite visiting a couple of nearby large bodies of water with a jam jar in an attempt to restock it, my pond had been a bit bland and sleepy since then, so I was excited to see all the buzzing activity in my mum and dad’s. Casper and George had now joined me to watch the hubbub. As they began to do cat kung fu on the water’s edge, I tiptoed out onto a small rocky promontory in an attempt to see a water beetle.
‘DON’T FALL IN!’ said my dad, arriving behind me and almost causing me to fall in.
We walked back up to the house, past a bed full of thriving spinach, a riot of stoned-looking bees on a giant scabious, the stump of