My father has a small yellow box which he keeps on the mantlepiece, tied up with a piece of yellow ribbon. A man in his office woos him weekly with the little gifts his Chinese wife gives him. Last week he gave my father a gold-plated plastic plate. The week before it was jewellry box, engraved with a horse-drawn chariot, on which stands Confucius. Is it working? I ask. My father looks confused. We want to know whether he’s been invited to the cinema yet. He promises it is nothing like that. Although, he says, a look of something dawning passing across his features, I do bump into him at the pub a lot.

 

This yellow box is a curious new addition to the evolutionary spectrum which he errected last year on the mantelpiece – a garden rock through to a small bust of Goethe, via a wooden egg, a chunk of lapis lazuli, a magnetic orb and five horrendously inferior clay busts hand-crafted back in our primary school days. The small yellow box has sat to the right of Geothe ever since I got back from Cambridge; no-one speaks of it. Perhaps, I think, it contains a secret. This is what I’m missing out on when I am away learning things, family secrets are made and put in yellow boxes and never talked of again. So today I opened it.

 

In it is a small chirping cricket sitting on a deck chair. It is solar powered, my father said proudly, when I asked. He opens it, and quickly closes it. For some reason it does not stop chirping until he taps the lid of the box gently. Shhh now, he says quietly. He opens it again. This time the chirping is a little quieter, slower, almost slurry. It sounds drunk, L says. I think maybe the batteries are dying. No, my father says, adamantly, it needs more sunlight. From the underside of the tiny tiny deckchair he pulls a tangle of wires. He brandishes it proudly, and holds it to the bulb of a lamp, having removed the shade. 

 

It is dying, C wails later, make it stop! My father sits before the open yellow box and watches with a morbid fascination. I don’t have the heart to tell him it is battery powered. I know, he says, I want to see what happens. Chirrrp chirrp chirrp, the cricket says feebly. Mami rolls her eyes. Chirp chirp. Chirp. Chr. My father sighs massively and lowers the lid. He’s gone, he says.

 

I would like to believe that this is all part of the same midlife crisis which inspired him to shave off his moustache when I was fifteen, and moved him today to demand a ticket to see Steeleye Span. (But you hate them, Mami told him, bewildered, do you remember, you made me get out of the car when All Around My Hat came on.) Otherwise he really is mad.