Chapter 2: Operation Annex

“But there’s no point listening to it quietly,” I explained to Dad. “It’s rock, it’s supposed to be loud or it’s a waste of time. Do you have to sit right under the floor?” Lils and I were just enjoying a classic rock playlist in my room. Or we had been, until we’d been interrupted.

“It’s the living room under the floor Jaz,” he pointed out, “where the TV is, and the sofas and chairs for sitting quietly watching it.”

“Well that’s not our fault is it?” I pointed out back. “We didn’t design this house did we? In fact we didn’t even give me this room.”

“It’s the second largest bedroom,” he fobbed me off as usual, “and no you’re not having mine. Parents are supposed to have the main bedroom with the ensuite, not daughters. Why can’t you play your music in Lily’s room?”

I gave Lily a secret nudge with my toe.

“My room’s too small,” she said. She’d tipped her head down a bit so she was looking through her eyelashes, like we’d practiced. “It doesn’t sound right.”

“It’d be like trying to have a concert in a cardboard box,” I added.

“Well there isn’t anywhere else,” he argued, “can’t you use earphones?”

“It’s like being all on your own, in earphones,” Lils sighed.

Dad looked at her and sighed too. “Well turn it down a bit then.” He gave up and went back downstairs.

Ten minutes later he was back: “All I can hear is ‘boom boom boom’!” he said with his head round the door. We’d changed into pyjamas and were lying on the bed in them, so he wasn’t coming all the way in.

“We turned it down,” I lied.

“Well turn it down more, or I’ll turn off the router,” he threatened.

“Oh!!” Lily wailed and clutched me. We were quite close together anyway, as the bed isn’t that big. “What about our accounts?”

“We have to be online to have friends,” I picked it up, “as you plonked us out here in the middle of nowhere.”

“You have to be online to stage a live AC/DC concert above the living room!” he wagged a finger at us. He was wavering a bit though, because I’d put my arm round Lils.

“There’s the annex,” I said, “then you wouldn’t have ‘boom boom boom’.” The house is made from an old barn, and across what used to be the little farmyard is another converted barn but smaller, that the previous owner used to let out for holidays.

“That’s my office.”

“You never use it though, you always work in the dining room or on the sofa. It’s perfect, you’d hardly hear but you’d know we were there.”

He was stuck. “Well you can use it during the day, if you must, and evening, but sleep here in the house. If anything happens during the night I want to be within reach.”

“Thanks,” I zapped him with a smile and Lils did too, “it just needs some proper speakers really.”

Brian

I have to admit I can concentrate better during the day, without two teenage girls and their bustle and music and chatter. And I can listen to my opera and classical music without complaints. And perhaps at fifteen it’s not a bad thing for Jaz to practice some independence, while being just across the yard and with new batteries in the smoke alarms.

They’d wanted to establish themselves, naturally enough - it’s a kind of playing house perhaps - so I’ve got them the big speakers they wanted and left them to it. They still eat with me and go to and fro, and now I’m actually pleased to hear the booming beat filtering faintly across. It’s a development stage it seems to me, accompanied by taking over the washing and cooking - all part of girls’ beginning to blossom.

Of course I should have known that Jaz would push the boundaries. The night came when I was really tired, they were going to come back in after I’d gone to bed early, and they didn’t. But they were back for showers and breakfast in the morning, at least, and I couldn’t be too hard on them for ‘nodding off on the sofa and just staggering up to the bedroom’.

Then it happened again, and again, and gradually I’ve accepted the inevitable. If I didn’t want wilful daughters I shouldn’t have married a wilful wife. Little by little they took ‘stuff’ over, including sheets, quilt, clothes, until they’d moved in.

And to be fair the independence seems to have brought Lily more to life. She wears a cheeky grin quite often now, flaunting her elfin body with clothing that’s on the skimpy side, even for being in private. It’s not how she used to be at all - she used to do everything to hide it in the baggiest clothes she could find.