Mr. Elbow Knew About the Wall

My daughter's invisible friend arrived the week we moved in, and his name — she was four, and firm about it — was Mr. Elbow. He lived, she said, in the stairs. Not under. In.

Mr. Elbow was mostly unremarkable as these companions go: he liked jam, disapproved of our doormat, told her jokes she couldn't repeat because 'they're his.' We played along, charmed, until the Saturday I got out the drill to mount a coat rack on the stair wall, and my daughter went rigid in a way no four-year-old should and said Mr. Elbow says NOT THERE, the wall is angry there.

I want it on record that I am the sort of man who drills anyway. What stopped me was purely that she started to cry — silent, scared crying, nothing like a tantrum — with her hand flat against the plaster like she was holding it shut.

I hired an electrician the following week for unrelated kitchen work and asked him, half-joking, to scan the stair wall. He found the cable in about ninety seconds: a live, unsheathed feed from some cowboy renovation decades back, run diagonally where no regulation allows a cable to be, at exactly coat-rack height. Not earthed. He said the word 'fatal' twice and photographed it for his own records, and then he asked how I'd known to check a wall nobody sane would suspect, and I heard myself say 'my daughter's imaginary friend' in front of a tradesman with my whole chest.