I am normally at home on Mondays, but this particular week I was in Belfast. My two sons returned from school to an empty house.
Five o'clock found me nosing through our gateway. At the end of the drive leading to the old school that is our home, I saw a plastic drum with coats draped over it. I could hear them laughing in the house.
I went into the old shed where I have my office and turned on my computer. Now I could hear laughing, mingled, if I wasn't mistaken, with squealing.
I went to see. My younger 14 year old, muffled in heavy coats, lay on the steps, while my older 17 year old was raining shots down on him from a Winchester rifle. I could hear metal ricocheting off concrete.
"What is that?" I said, for I'd never seen the gun before.
My elder son looked up, an appalled expression on his face, then turned and bolted into the house. His younger brother, swathed in several coats, wasn't able to get up quickly enough to follow. He had to answer.
"A BB gun," he said. "It's like an air rifle but shoots these." He found one on the step and showed me. It was a copper ball bearing and it looked lethal.
"And why was he firing at you?"
"To see if I could feel the pellets. And I could," he added, proudly. "Even through these coats I felt them."
My elder son reappeared, having stashed his gun, and for the next 15 minutes I demanded the weapon (which I gathered he and his brother had spent the previous six months saving to buy). But my sons refused to hand it over. Short of ransacking the house, which I thought was beneath my dignity, I had only one option left.
"I'm going to tell your mother."
"No, don't tell her," said my younger son. "Let it be a secret between the three Gébler men."
"I can't."
"You can."
I then said something so incredibly pompous that I can hardly bear to repeat it.
"Look," I said, "as you'll discover when you're married, couples shouldn't have secrets. I have to tell her."
This produced gales of laughter. Both boys held up their left thumbs and dropped the palm of the other hand over the end to make a "T."
"What does that mean?"
"Pussy whipped, Mr Pussy Whipped," they shouted.
At that point the phone rang. It was my neighbour, a detective in the Northern Ireland police service.
"Hello," he said, in a hesitant tone. He had something unpleasant to say. "Listen, yesterday my son was in the garden and we thought a hornet bit him he'd such a huge welt, but then I found this BB slug. It could only have come from your place. I telephoned and got your oldest boy and he said there was no BB gun on your property. I thought you should know."
"Thank you very much," I said.
As I put the phone down my wife got home. A family conference was convened. It turned out that the previous day, while the parents were out, my younger son had fired at the wooden statue in the middle of the vegetable patch. One of his pellets had missed, gone through the hedge behind and hit our neighbour's son as he played.
"We're going to apologise, now," said my wife, and we all trooped next door. In Ireland, there's a strict protocol concerning entrances and rooms used, and for this visit the form was to go to the front door and then into the parlour.
Once here, the detective stood on one side of the fireplace, the Gébler family on the other. My two sons fiddled with their pockets, tumbling sweet papers and other bits of schoolboy debris on to the floor. They were still in their school uniforms. A film reference sprung to mind: the scene in the headmaster's office in Kes before the boys are beaten for smoking.
"Go on," said my wife.
They confessed and apologised. Our neighbour mentioned a local woman whose arm was broken by a BB pellet, and the imminent prosecution for actual bodily harm of the lad who shot her.
"Don't worry," my wife said, "I know how dangerous they are. I'm confiscating the gun; they won't be seeing it again," and with that we left and sloped off down the neighbour's drive.
"Can't we keep it and use it under supervision?" said my elder son, adding that it would be a waste to throw the gun away after paying so much for it.
"Don't be ridiculous," I heard myself saying, "you know your mother doesn't like them." In unison my sons brought their right palms down on their left thumbs, making the same sign they'd made earlier.
"What's that mean?" my wife asked.
As she dislikes the phrase almost as much as she dislikes guns, I didn't have to think, the words just came out.
"It's a school thing. It means loser, or something."
"Yeah, Dad."
"Oh," she said. She was dubious but she knew a wall when she saw one. We walked home in silence.
