I’m sitting in the garden with my Mum. The large trees in front of us are swaying and swishing peacefully.
My Mum loves sitting in our garden. And I’m glad she does – it assuages some of the guilt I feel about encouraging her to move up to the Midlands to be near us (she’s from Leeds, originally, but she’s a Southerner at heart – and she misses the South, specifically Surrey, terribly).
My mother’s asking me about any wild animals I’ve spotted in the garden, recently.
I tell her about the red deer I saw a couple of days before… which came right up to the back of the house and peered in at me, its ears pricked upwards like furry antennae, as I peered back amazed.
I then tell Mum about the rats in our bathroom. She looks understandably horrified. She gasps back the word ‘RATS?!?’ with great drama, in the manner of Lady Bracknell from The Importance of Being Earnest gasping ‘A HANDBAG?!?’
Now we get onto the subject of the rats’ flying rodent cousins… the BATS who live in the garden (are bats actually rodents? They should be). I tell Mum how these creatures begin dive-bombing you, the moment you step out onto the lawn after dusk.
‘Have you had any in the house recently?’ asks Mum.
‘No, they seem to have stopped coming in,’ I reply, unwittingly tempting the fates – or at least the garden bats – as I say it.
Five hours later, I’m sitting in the living room about to tuck into a Dennis Wheatley book my Mum has bought me from a second-hand bookshop in Chipping Campden.
Annie suddenly calls from upstairs on WhatsApp. ‘Dad! Come now! – in your room! Ba- Ba-!’ I can’t tell what she’s saying, or whether she’s laughing or crying. I drop my book and head up immediately.
As soon as I open my bedroom door, a black thing hurtles past my face at speed.
It’s a BAT!
My innate revulsion and phobia about all flying black creatures (bats, daddy longlegs, crows from The Omen, you name it) kicks in and I peer around the door… not entering the room, like the total coward I am.
Annie is cowering under the duvet cover. And Lizzie is crouching on the floor, her arms covering her head like someone in a nuclear bomb drill video from the 1980s.
‘What do I do! What do I do!’ shrills Lizzie, as the bat flits around the room, its tiny flying form somehow filling the whole space with swirling darkness.
I notice that all the windows are open. Lizzie, with great presence of mind and bravery, obviously opened them before getting into her nuclear bomb pose.
‘It’ll fly out eventually. Like last time!’ I say, hopefully. Last time we had a bat, it did fly out of the house eventually – after Lizzie (of course, Lizzie) opened the front door for it.
‘Just get out of there!’ I say to Lizzie and Annie, from behind the safety of the bedroom door. Obviously, I’m hoping they’ll come out… otherwise, I might be expected to go in…
I suddenly feel like the father in the movie Force Majeure. The one who instinctively leaps to save his mobile phone, not his family, when they’re all hit by an avalanche. Am I as bad as him? If he was caught in this bat scenario, would he be doing exactly the same as me? Cowering behind a door?
I really ought to go in, I think to myself. Before I’m required to do anything further, however, Lizzie suddenly announces:
‘It’s gone! It’s gone!’
I immediately leap into the room and dramatically shut all the windows, then give Lizzie and Annie my best it’s all right, everything’s under control expression.
They don’t look too impressed.
Shortly afterwards, I learn that Lizzie somehow managed (despite being in a nuclear bomb crouch the whole time) to film everything on her phone.
The bat – in all of its batty horror – has been caught flapping around on camera, with pristine, unflinching digital clarity.
You can hear me talking in this video. But obviously you can’t see me. Because I’m cowering behind the bedroom door.
‘Well done Dad, that was really brave of you,’ says Jake later, sarcastically, having watched the video.
‘Obviously Jake,’ I reply, ‘I didn’t want to open the bedroom door, in case the bat flew into your room!’
‘Sure, sure,’ sniggers Jake, not buying this for a moment.
Please don’t put the video on FaceBook, Lizzie! is all I can think afterwards.
Fortunately, she doesn’t.
P. D. Clifton 
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