Child's tooth found under floorboards

I can see the headline up above, forty years down the line.

Some foolish innocent will renovate this fallingdownheapofbrick and they will find a child's tooth, lodged in the roofspace between kitchen and cellar.

The moment they make that gruesome discovery, they'll scream Help! and start ripping apart this old house, splinter by nail, looking for bodies.

So I had better fess up now, and put it forever on the record.

I stuck on the video Harry Potter and the Flesh Eating Zombies and wandered off to shovel shit in the upstairs rooms. After ten minutes I have to put down the shovel because the entire house is rocking on its foundations, and reverberating with POOPYBRAINIHATEYOUYOUFATPIG!

By the time I get downstairs, Tiger is on the sofa red hot with fury swinging punches like a windmill at Shark. Shark, from a floor position, is flaming bright scarlet with outrage and trying to claw up Tiger's legs to rip her face off.

My ears are bleeding with the pain of the bansheeing, so I do the mature adult parental thing and start yelling. Really I would like to beat the pair of them senseless with the Muzzy French video box, which is the nearest thing to hand, but I believe that is called setting a bad example. Anyway, Tiger might grab it out my hands and bash me over the head with it.

Squirrel meanwhile is sat on the sofa in this war zone, staring straight at the TV screen with a puzzled frown like there is an irritating buzz, somewhere over there.

Now no-one is paying one bit of attention to me and my big weight of AUTHORITY I carry about this house, so I take the next step to demonstrate my responsible power and that is to march up to the zombie video, clip it shut and start yelling again.

Squirrel tuts, curls her upper lip and stares in disgust at me, like Is that it? I didn't get to see the flesh eating demon rip out Harry's heart. No, Squirrel, that is because death and mayhem is now in 3D surroundasound and is happening on a carpet in front of you. At which point I yell some more.

It is clear to me as controller and supreme ruler in this house that neither Tiger nor Shark is taking one bit of notice of AUTHORITY.

AUTHORITY will not get involved in this fight. AUTHORITY is righteous and does not take to slapping arses, even though she'd like to. AUTHORITY does not drag six tonnes of screaming kids apart either. Not unless one is holding knitting needles or scissors.

Anyway, AUTHORITY has learned that if she totally ignores screaming kids and reappears thirty seconds later they will be sitting quiet side-by-side on the sofa indivisible as cells and acting as if nothing ever happened. Passions come and go quick in this house.

Once AUTHORITY has ascertained there are no knitting needles, scissors, or other sharp weapons of war available, she turns on her heel to leave the room righteously shouting SORT IT OUT in big letters and with an extra large booming voice.

No sooner have I slammed the door shut than a deathly silence descends. The door flings wide open, and Tiger zips up the stairs quicker than a speeding atom round a Hadron Collider.

Then I hear only the rising shriek Mmuuuuummmmmyy! and I see Shark standing up, a startled look on her face, and with her hands clamped round her jaw like she's just been punched in the mouth.

In response to moments like this I have been saying the same three tender words for years and they are not Are you alright? They are Doctor?Ambulance?Hospital?

Shark opens her mouth with a stream of blood and squeals My tooth!

Standing in the kitchen with a pint of warm water ready to throw it at Shark's mouth, I foolishly attempt to catch the tooth which Tiger had knocked clean out of Shark's face. But I let the bloodied evidence slip from my fingers, where it bounced through the hole in the kitchen floorboards: the same hole I never saw before last summer and which I have to assume was drilled out by a late night partying mouse.

So, to the people who will renovate this house when I am dead because I never got around to it, know that this story explains the child's tooth you're going to find under the floorboards which form the roof of the cellar.

It can join the three dead bodies of the gas men.