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.

Here is the coda. The wall was opened, the cable stripped out and made safe, everything replastered. That evening my daughter announced Mr. Elbow was leaving — 'he's finished' — and asked if we could wave at the stairs. We waved at the stairs.

She's seven now. When I bring him up she looks at me politely, like I've invented him. Maybe I should be relieved. Mostly I hope he's finished wherever he went next.