My wife and I are setting off on a weekend away; she’s driving. After about 20 minutes conversation flags, and I take my phone out of my pocket.
“Ow,” I say, examining my fingers.
“What’s happened?” my wife says.
“An attack of hot hand,” I say.
“Hot hand?” she says.
“The fingers of this hand get hot for no reason,” I say. “Actually just the thumb and forefinger.”
“Hot all the time?” she says.
“They’re not hot themselves,” I say. “They just make things I touch feel hot. Like my phone.”
“Maybe your phone is hot,” she says.
“Don’t you think I might have considered that?” I say. Actually I thought my phone was the problem for a week.
“You’ve never mentioned this,” my wife says.
“I’ve kept it from you,” I say.
“Why don’t you make an appointment?” she says.
“I’m not telling a doctor that two of my fingers make things seem hot sometimes.”
“Not so long ago you were complaining about your hand being cold,” she says.
She is wrong about this: it’s actually more than a decade since I suffered from cold mouse hand: whenever I worked at my computer for long periods, the hand using the mouse became unbearably cold. I found some fellow sufferers online, but it didn’t seem like a club I wanted to belong to.
When we are with friends later, my wife tells everyone about my hot hand. I should have remembered how little she is to be trusted with the details of a medical issue she finds amusing.
“It’s true,” she tells them. “He complained the whole way up.”
“What, your fingers feel hot?” asks one friend.
“No, they make the things I touch feel hot,” I say.
“Have you looked it up?” asks another friend.
“I don’t want to know what it is,” I say.
Our friend types my symptoms into her iPad, and shows me the results. I recognise some of the ailments from my cold mouse hand days: De Quervain’s syndrome, Raynaud’s …
“You should get it checked,” she says.
“It’s not even on my top 10 list of things wrong with me,” I say.
Back home on Sunday, I am decanting clothes into the washing machine when I hear a loud chirp.
“Have you fed the cat?” my wife says.
“No, I was just …” I stop at a second chirp.
“What’s wrong with you?” she says.
“Is that the smoke alarm?” I say.
“Is what the smoke alarm?” she says.
“That noise,” I say.
“Have you gone mad?” she says.
The chirps could be warning that the alarm’s back-up battery is dead, except I changed the battery recently. While I am staring up at the smoke alarm the chirp sounds again, from some distance away. I think: upstairs.
I pull the upstairs alarm off the ceiling. It is suspiciously hot to the touch, until I switch hands.
I hear the chirp again. Downstairs, I stand under the first alarm, until it chirps. I go into the living room, where my wife and the middle one are watching TV, holding the upstairs alarm in front of me like Yorick’s skull.
“I can’t tell which alarm needs a new battery.”
“Which one was going off?” says the middle one.
“They both were, I think,” I say. I hear the chirp again, directly above my head.
“And now this one,” I say, looking up. But the ceiling is blank: there is no alarm in this room.
I step into the hall and hear the chirp again, this time seemingly from upstairs. I go back to the living room.
“I don’t understand,” I say.
“What’s wrong with you?” says the middle one. The chirp goes off again, nearby.
“Where is that coming from?” I scream.
“From the one in your hand!” he shouts.
“But it’s not connected to anything!” I yell. I walk across the room and bury the alarm under a sofa cushion. Then I stand by the door with my arms folded. After a long and awkward silence, there is a muffed chirp from beneath the cushion.
“I knew he was going mad,” my wife says.
“I think I might have a battery in my office,” I say. When I go off to look I decide not to come back for a little while.
