I am working in my office shed when my wife texts, ordering me to sit in the house in case the alarm service engineer turns up. I obey, in the hope of finally being freed from torment.
The burglar alarm has been going off at random moments: sometimes at four in the morning, sometimes at two in the afternoon. It can happen on consecutive nights, or it may stay quiet for a week.
The noise is not the alarm actually going off – it’s just some kind of warning chirp. But it’s loud enough to wake you up, and to make it stop you have to go down to the hall and type in a four-digit code. Every time, some kind of explanation would flit across its glowing screen – but it always went dark before I could read the whole thing.
“I can’t live like this,” I would always say as I came back to bed. But it turned out I could: this has been going on since February. The chirps are random enough, and infrequent enough, to think that every time might be the last. By degrees we went mad.
The engineer arrives in the middle of lunch. He is wearing a uniform and carrying a toolkit.
“Thank God you’ve come,” I say, my mouth still full. We show him the box in the hall and try to explain.
“It can happen at any time, day or night,” my wife says.
“The panel says something about a fault,” I say. “Bedroom, panic, then it goes dark.”
“I’ll just take a look at the fault log,” the engineer says.
My wife and I return to the kitchen table, but lunch now feels over. The engineer comes in.
“I’ve examined the unit’s fault log, and unfortunately it thinks it’s 2009,” he says. He has a bushy beard and speaks in the stilted cadences of a BBC Open University lecturer.
“That is unfortunate,” my wife says.
“So I’ve reset that,” says the engineer. “And I’ll now move on to the next diagnostic level.” When he goes back into the hall, my wife turns to me.
“Don’t leave me alone with him,” she says.
A sequence of different distress chirps sounds. In between each, the engineer leans his head into the room and raises his eyebrows.
“No,” my wife says. “Not that one.”
Finally, we hear it: two shrill notes, followed by a pause and a third low note. My wife screams. “That’s it,” I say. “Bedroom panic something.”
“Right,” says the engineer. “That is normally associated with a low battery in an unwired sensor.”
“It says panic and bedroom on the thing,” I say.
“And I will check that for you in due course,” he says. “But I have here a list of all the sensors in the house, and only three are unwired.”
“Where did you get that list?” my wife says.
“So, one on your kitchen window. One on the kitchen door, and one for the conservatory.”
“We don’t have a conservatory,” I say.
“I’ve already made a note of that here,” he says. “Now we just need to locate the radio base unit.”
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“I don’t know what that means,” my wife says.
“And here it is,” he says, reaching above the door of the cupboard to remove the unit’s cover. “And that is telling me nothing at the moment.”
“Oh good,” my wife says.
“No problem, just bear with me while I reset the timer on the control panel,” he says. After, he leaves the room, my wife and I observe a moment’s silence.
“I have to work,” I say.
“Stay where you are,” she says.
Half a dozen other possible faults are eliminated, and narrated. This includes my theory that something is amiss with the bedroom panic button.
“I’ve checked that for you now,” the engineer says. “And there are no problems there.”
“That was what the thing said, though,” I say.
“By the process of elimination, that leaves us with a low battery situation,” he says.
“I couldn’t tell you when they were last changed,” my wife says.
“Five years ago,” he says.
He’s right: when he removes the batteries they each have a date from 2019 written on the side in felt tip.
“I have zero memory of that,” I say.
The low batteries, he tells us, would account for the randomness of the alarm’s chirp: the base unit only checks in with the sensors periodically, and they are only sometimes too weak to respond.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” my wife says. “Sorry to sound like morons.”
“Defiant morons,” I say.
“One more thing,” my wife says. “Can you show us how to turn it on?”