The most peculiar thing

Well maybe not the most peculiar thing ever, but odd all the same.

The other night I was sitting here in my front room. The lights from the two anglepoise-type lamps were focussed on two of the pictures on the walls. It was late. My daughter had arrived home from her father's and was watching a movie upstairs with the best friend she's had ever since they were both dots and with whom she's planning on visiting California during their gap years.

(The friend is very organised; the daughter less so. The two of them arrived earlier in convoy with three others to whom I seem to have become a spare mother. There were many many hugs and you'd have thought they'd been away for a hundred years instead of two days. It was lovely.)

So they're upstairs watching Hairspray, snoodled up together in a duvet on the futon. I don't know where the cats are.

I am minding my own business.

Suddenly there's a bang - a loud one. It is so loud it echoes. It is the sort of noise a wok would make if it was knocked off the top of the stove with a pile of baking trays onto a hard floor by a cat being somewhere and doing something it wasn't supposed to, only louder and more echoey.

I am down the hallway and into the kitchen quite quickly. There is nothing on the floor and no sign of cats.

So if it's not the cats knocking the wok off the stove, it must be the lightbulb over the washbasin in the bathroom which fails every now and again loudly while I'm in the toilet not quite believing that a bulb blowing out can make that much noise. This is a lightbulb tested to the limits of its endurance by being left on 24/7 by a daughter who doesn't yet seem to have realised that there's no need for illumination in a room she is no longer in. The fact that I'm not in the toilet when I hear this particular bang temporarily fails to register.

When I go upstairs to check, the bathroom light is still on. I turn it off.

I go back down to the front room and finish checking my emails. I write half of one to somebody asking if I'd be interested in doing some research, and then there's another bang. Not quite so loud this time, and therefore more easily ignored.

I am obviously imagining things.

The following morning, when I go into the sitting room to clear up last night's mugs and put them into the dishwasher, everything feels somehow different and wrong.

The sun shines into that room early in the day at this time of year through a floor-to-ceiling double-glazed window that begs to be a pair of narrow old-fashioned French doors leading into the garden but isn't yet. It's divided into two, horizontally, halfway down its length. The top half opens, while the bottom half just sits there.

This morning, the bottom half has become frosted. The sunlight, instead of streaming through as it normally does, is fragmented. There are unfamiliar shadows on the white walls and I can't see the path outside.

It is the most peculiar thing.

The pane on the inside of the room is intact. The outer one has a mussel-shell sized hole in it and, around the hole, the glass is crazed all the way to all of its edges.