Haloman
by Tao Yuan
The week my father grew a new body part, the Tetteh family (all eight of us) were living in a narrow brick house on a narrow brick street, at the end of Wrexham that is mostly tarmac. Outside, the house was brick; inside, it was terminally clogged with mover’s boxes and baby bottles, to which each of the six children had in turn made a spirited contribution. Pius and Theo (that’s me) had graduated to the grown-up table; the kiddie table still seated Maria Maria, Leah Maria, Friday Efua Maria and Marie Antoinette. We lived like a bouncy castle, inflating inside a submarine.
Mum (Bronwen) and Dad (George) still looked young, though with that mildly upsetting mix of features that makes people think “you’re too young to look that way.” Dad had precisely three long, cartoon hairs combed across an unwrinkled dome of forehead, while Mum had advanced quickly and serenely from having one smooth, dainty chin to having three. Our hatchback had a previous owner’s Star Wars decals atomically welded to the rear, and packs of Pampers stuffed in places that made the dashboard lights come on.
The day the transformation began, it was a black Welsh pre-dawn outside, and Dad was in the good corridor (the one with fewer boxes) with a bin held over his head, being a basketball hoop for me to practise on.
Donk, went the beach ball, sadly, on Dad’s head (the beach ball was being a basketball).
“Dad,” I complained, “you mustn’t stand so still. It’s like you’re not human. It creeps me out.”
“Right, Theo,” he promised, making a note. He was a criminal defence barrister, with a thorny case, and his mind worked like a fridge. The chaos and distraction in our outer lives were the byproduct of its exchange mechanism, keeping the working insides cool, orderly and lit by the little lamp. His Theo/Sports help notes now read:
Basketball hoops shd avoid:
-Excessive movement.
-Exc. stillness.
-Swearing.
-Out of Frosties for breakfast.
-Stupid face.
Once again, Dad held the wastepaper basket over his head and swayed.
Donk.
“That hurt, that time,” he said, hopefully. “Maybe that’s good? Maybe you gave it some spin?”
My frustration emerged in prehistoric noises.
“Dad, do you understand that, if they laugh at me on the court, I won’t be Theo anymore? I’ll be It. It can’t play.”
“I’m sorry, son. But I was terrible at sports, too. I survived—”
“No, Dad, you escaped. From Ghana to a posh school in Britain where you could do flower-arranging and accordion lessons instead. Then you had six kids and couldn’t afford to send us there. This is it for me. There’s nowhere to escape to.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, rubbing his donked head. He gathered my face up into a bunch, all in one place, to kiss it. “We’ll try again tonight. I have to go to work, now.”
“Oh, you mean: you have to escape?”
He shuffled to the door, where Mum handed him his thermos. I heard him tell her, “something something Theo mumble,” in a guilty voice.
“Well, George,” yawned Mum (who was Welsh, and understood the bitterness of life), “that’s the trouble with being emotionally intelligent parents. You have emotionally intelligent children, and then they don’t let you get away with anything. If I could have it all again, I’d beat them with an exhaust pipe.”
***
Dad’s client was at Chester Crown Court, in a cell that smelled of socks.
The client was called Mr. Cribben, and he’d taught chemistry at our school (Sacred Heart) since about 1648. The enigmatic wit of primaeval schoolboy civilizations had named him The Big Boon.
Since a few months ago, this Big Boon, whose tweed collar was perennially in the first Narnian shimmerings of a dandruff winter, had stood accused of an inappropriate friendship with Selena Silver: the glitter-and-shadow-eyed, slow-blinking school beauty, then seventeen. Worse, they claimed that he’d passed Selena the answers to the London International Level chemistry exam, a qualification he’d helped to found. She’d sold them for several thousand pounds and a Burberry gift card.
“It’s the parents’ fault for giving her a porn star name, poor child,” sympathized Mum. “Marie Antoinette, take those crayons out of your nose.”
When the scandal broke, the exam board voided the chemistry results for the entire school. It looked like my brother Pius now only had four good L.I.L.s, while the tossers at Prince Henry’s still had five. You can imagine how the parents took it. At one point, Cribben had a police guard. He was being held, theoretically for mental health evaluation, but truthfully for his own safety.
“Mr. Cribben, are you sure I can’t persuade you to take the easy way?” said Dad. “We can agree on almost all the prosecution’s claims. You took Miss Silver on a weekend to Harrogate, where you addressed her (‘plaintively’) as Madge, and prevailed on her to wear your deceased wife’s Barbour coat. Then you took her to your cottage and asked her to choose a selection of Delft porcelain to inherit following your death.” (Dad continued the facts gently, as if apologizing for knowing them. He did the same thing with our school reports.) “No one accuses you of touching the girl; you’ve shown exemplary contrition for all the above, and if you plead guilty you won’t get much worse than early retirement. Sir, please, why are you digging your heels in about the last point?”
The Big Boon flicked the end of his nose, which was the size and shape of a melancholy battleship.
“Well, sir, you see, sir, in admitting the affective attachment, I shouldn’t very well like it to be thought… that is, I shouldn’t like to give the impression… to countenance the opinion, that I had given dear Madge—”
“Selena.”
“—Miss Silver, anything in the way of material for the exams. That is what they refuse to let drop, is it not?”
“Are you sure you never even hinted—”
“Hinted!” The Big Boon was a large man with large mental bones. It was harder to imagine him hinting than to imagine a coal barge doing a pirouette.
“Please, sir: my exam process is secure,” he insisted. “I type out the questions on my typewriter, in my kitchen, before bedtime. Then, after my cocoa, I take them from the carriage and lock them inside the dresser drawer, exactly as I have done every exam season since autumn 1971. Lastly, I hide the key under my mattress. No one sees them until I deliver them with my own hand to the L.I.L. office.”
“You’re sure you never left them sitting there, on the typewriter?”
“Mr. Tetteh, I am a good teacher. At least, I think I am. At least, I make good chemists. And they deserve the chance to be recognized as such, by fair examination. My questions are sacred. No one’s ever seen them. Not even…”
The real Madge, he meant. Dad rubbed his chin, and then he rubbed his head, and kept rubbing until The Big Boon was obliged to say,
“Are you quite alright, Mr. Tetteh?”
“Feeling a bit funny on top today, for some reason. My son hit me with a ball.”
“Theodore, isn’t it? Is he any good?”
“They laugh at him. I don’t know how to make them stop.”
“Ah,” said the Big Boon. “Well, if you ever find out, do let me know, eh?”
***
Half an hour later, Dad traipsed to Mr. Justice Saltire’s chambers with the prosecutor. Judge Saltire was on a big projector screen, pulled down across oak panels, wearing ski goggles. He was in Verbier; though, if he continued at his present speed, it seemed he would soon be out of it.
“We’re not contesting the rest,” Dad told them. “It would save everyone a lot of time if the prosecution would drop the charge of conspiracy-to-theft. There cannot be conspiracy-to-theft without a thief. And you’re not charging Miss Silver with anything, are you, Counsel? Either put your victim in the dock with my client, or confess to everyone that there’s no case to answer.”
“What’s that on your head, Tetteh?” shouted the judge, over an invigorating rush of wind.
“It’s a wig, my lord.”
“We sometimes wear them when we’re at work,” observed the sly old prosecutor.
“Not that, damn you both. Coming up through your wig.”
Dad patted his head over. There seemed to be something hard and a little warm lifting his wig, like a pen caught between the fibres of a jumper.
“Go and see a doctor, Tetteh. That’s an order. Don’t need chaps keeling over in my courtroom.”
“Yes, my lord… What about the case?”
“Hmph. You applying to dismiss?”
“The motion’s on your desk, sir.”
“What about you? Tobacco fingers?” (His Lordship was addressing the prosecutor.) “Is your sex tart going to take the stand?”
“Er… yes, my lord, Miss Silver will testify.”
“Gonna say the nose man did it?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Alright, then. No dismissal. Chips fall where they may, et cetera. Can’t talk now, going into an avalanche. I’ll hear the case on Monday.”
***
After work, Dad went to the doctor. He rolled up his sleeves (though no one asked him to) and sat on the edge of the plastic-covered bed. His friend the doctor frowned, because he’d almost made it through the day without changing the plastic.
“If he’d written the exams on a computer,” Dad told him, aloud, “I’d say she’d broken into it, no problem. She’s a savvy teenager, and even I can guess the poor chap’s password.”
“Madge1, eh?” said the doctor, massaging Dad’s scalp.
“But he didn’t use a password: he worked by typewriter. He says he never left the pages on the carriage, and, frankly, I believe him. Here’s a man who hand copies five pages of Bradshaw’s timetables to make a rail trip to Harrogate, because he’s afraid to lose the book. He’s cautious. Precise. No, there’s something not right, here. I’ve got to see the crime scene again.”
“Hmm,” said the doctor, turning on brighter lights and squinting at Dad’s hair.
“What’s wrong, Pete? Is it cancer?”
“No, not cancer. You know how I can tell?”
The doctor took a reflex hammer and swiped, as if at a fly, above Dad’s head. Something went bong.
“There. You see? Cancer doesn’t go bong. It’s hard. Almost metallic. I’d call it an idiopathic epicranial cyclotrophism.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you’ve got a circle on your head and I don’t know why. If you ask me, it’s a bona fide, honest-to-God halo. Like an angel in a Christmas play.”
“A halo?” Dad felt around blindly. “What… why? I don’t have time for that. I’ve got a client! I’ve got to stand up in court and be taken seriously. What am I supposed to do? Can’t you take it off?”
“Well, I can send you to the surgeon, see what he says, but… Meanwhile, in your place, I’d take the opportunity to say a few wise-sounding things. You’ve always been a decent, mild, impotent sort of man. I’m not religious myself, but people might listen to you for a change. In my legal opinion, you might make the world a better place.”
“In my medical opinion: ha.” He looked at his watch. “Oh, damn.”
***
I was still in the driveway when Dad came home, clutching my beach ball—the same accusatory way I clutched my pillow when I couldn’t sleep and felt inspired to discuss it. Dad shoved the car door open.
“Come on. I know, I know, I promised. Come on.”
There was no chance of practising any basketball now—it was about to get dark. He just wanted the company.
I got in silently. The thing on his head was fully extruded now: a flat ring, wide as a homburg hat, orbiting the blank space above his head like an invisible Saturn. It was golden, untextured, supported on a slender pillar—almost as if it came from a simpler universe, a place without scratches and wear. And yet, somehow, it didn’t make his shabby clothes look shabbier.
“They laugh at you again today?” asked Dad.
I nodded.
“How many hoops did you make?”
I held up my fingers in a zero.
“That many, huh?”
“Captain didn’t let me play.”
Dad tried to stay upbeat, for my sake.
“Don’t worry, son. We’ll fix this for you. Somehow.”
“No you won’t, Dad. They’ve all seen me, now.”
We drove to The Big Boon’s house, a village bungalow backing onto a ploughed field. Dad had visited it eleven times since the case began. The neighbour was nice and wrinkly: Mrs. Khan. She was waiting with steaming tea and Walker’s shortbread, but Dad fell straight to searching the kitchen a twelfth time, jiggling old drawers that didn’t fit.
“You two going trick-or-treating later?” asked Mrs. Khan, noticing the thing on his head.
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s going dressed as a dad.”
The famous Imperial typewriter had its own place at the kitchen table, sitting on a tartan cloth. The dresser drawer was two feet directly behind it. The Big Boon wouldn’t even have needed to get up to lock the exam papers away.
“Did you ever see him bring the girl here?” asked Dad.
“Only her silhouette,” said Mrs. Khan. “Three times, maybe four. But, you know, once they were inside, I’d hear that Joan Sutherland singing on the record player. Just the way it was when Mrs. Cribben was alive. Oh, I loved to hear that music again—so shoot me! Then he’d drive her back to her friend’s house, and come back, and I’d hear the record player again. Longer, the second time. With the lights off.”
On the third shelf of the dresser (it was awkwardly high), there was a collection of blue and white porcelain—vases, lidded urns, tiles—all piled together, in a space apart. The Delft china for Selena. Dad shook his head at it.
“What on earth were you thinking, Cribben? What painful delusion—what teenager would want this?”
“Oh, but the china was her idea, Mr. Tetteh,” said Mrs. Khan.
“What?”
“He didn’t offer it her—she asked. Saw some things she liked. They cleared a space on that shelf, there, and put it all in one place, so she could find it again. You know. For after.”
“Do you know what it was?” asked Dad, squinting up at the porcelain (it was very high on the dresser). “The first thing she liked? What’s this?” He’d found a blue and white porcelain box, punctured on top with holes. Like an oblong pepper shaker: a fat thing in Duplo instead of Lego. It was very delicately painted.
“That’s a flower brick. I’ll show you—”
“Please don’t touch anything! It could be evidence.”
“Oh. Well, you put the flower stems in those holes. Then you fill the brick with water. It holds them up in rows: makes a nice display, you see?”
“So that one up there—it’s on its side? With the holes facing forward, instead of up?”
“Well, I suppose so. She wasn’t exactly careful with the stuff, you know. Just piled it on. Shame. Mr. Cribben was very proud of some of it. He went to Europe once, for a vase. Got a little badge for his walking stick. Learned to say ‘hello’ in Dutch. He was very proud.”
We returned to the car, no further forward. I felt a cruel satisfaction that Dad, having chosen his project over mine, had made no progress.
“So?” I asked. It was dusk. The hedgerows were bright on top and dark underneath, with a ruddy autumn burn turning the berries to garnets. “Learn anything about Selena?”
Dad never told me the name of the girl, of course. The papers called her “A”. But everyone at school knew. I said her name the way we all did: “Selena”, with the middle syllable an octave higher than the others.
“Son,” said Dad, “I know you don’t mean much by it, but I don’t ever want you to use a person’s name like that. Like it’s a joke.”
“She’s a—” I began, defensively. I was going to say “skank”, because that’s what we said at school. I swerved and said “smink” instead, whatever that was.
“If she could hear the way you’re all talking about her, do you think she’d be less likely, or more likely, to go on doing bad things?”
The red-gold light was bouncing off the thing on his head, and his words stung me. The truth was, Selena was the whole reason I’d started playing basketball, back when things were normal. She was a cheerleader for the real players. I wanted her to notice me—blink at me. Slowly.
But apparently, I was less noticeable than an old Irishman with a big nose. So now I trained hard and spoke harshly.
“Don’t talk to me as if you’re perfect,” I said. Then I waited for the inevitable: the soft words, the gentle prodding, the unending annoying niggle of reasonableness that was Dad.
But for once in his life, Dad shut up.
***
The weekend came around. After church on Sunday, we were going to hit the basketball courts. At last, there was no getting out of it.
For the first time, before breakfast, Dad properly examined his new appendage, turning it this way and that in the bathroom mirror. I saw him try to tug it off. Buzz it gingerly with his shaver, just to see what he’d feel.
The church was by the school. It took ridiculously long to get there: two car trips in the hatchback, for the eight of us. It was a big, bland, suburban church with windows the shape of lightning bolts. Mum called it Starbase One. But Dad loved the music.
He said it reminded him of what the old-fashioned mission fathers had played in Ghana, on a farting old harmonium. Elgar-type stuff. Comforting visions of grey days and ivy and moss. Our priest found it old-fashioned—he liked to seize the microphone after a piece, and say, “wasn’t that nice;” but for Dad, it seemed to open a secret door and let him out of this mundane Britain back into the England he’d imagined, back before he’d crossed the sea.
People would always stare as the regiment of junior Tettehs took its places. This time, we encamped near a couple of regulars who’d decided to delay having children for career reasons (something they liked to tell fellow parishioners instead of “hello”). We were used to them shuffling away from us, lest Mum infect them with her excessive fertility.
But today, seeing Dad’s suspicious woolly hat bulging at all sides, others shuffled too. They muttered; but Dad just went on kneeling quietly beside me, listening to the choir sing.
“Dad?” I whispered. He didn’t flinch. I could feel his thoughts in a thick cloud around us. “Dad, what’s the deal? Are you a saint?”
“Of course not, son. You know Dad. He leaves the shower dirty for your Mum. He sometimes tinkles on the floor, because the bathroom’s too cold to sit down in.” He opened his eye a fraction and glanced at me, then continued. “Whenever I talk about John Cribben, I call him ‘my client’, so that people don’t mistake me for his friend.”
I felt as close and secret as if he’d mantled me under his coat.
“Then why? Why do you have that thing?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m supposed to remember just how much I’m not a saint. Or maybe I’m supposed to think, ‘the bad guys are treating me like an enemy, I may as well be one’. Or maybe it’s not even for me. Maybe I’m just a convenient ugly wall for God to Banksy. Maybe it’s for someone else’s benefit.”
My frustration was like a patch of skin rubbed but still itching. I longed for Dad to make time for me; and at last he had—he’d told me his secret thoughts—and I didn’t understand a word.
I turned to my phone for consolation. I’d had a pretty good basketball match, on Saturday. I’d nearly made a shot, and I’d hit the rim with another. A girl had given me her number. I’d given it a few rings while our family was busy faffing in the car park and, though she wasn’t answering yet, I was hopeful.
“Don’t text in church, love,” whispered Mum, seeing my fingers move suspiciously.
“I’m donating.”
“Lot of eggplants in that donation.”
“You’re hilarious.”
After Mass, the headmaster came up, wringing his hands. Dad’s defence of The Big Boon was embarrassing the school.
“You see, George, when a parent defends John, it looks dangerously like the school is defending him.”
“Headmaster,” said Dad (his hands still weaving a mask over his face), “when a human defends him, does it look dangerously like the human race is defending him?”
“The exam stuff’s nothing, anyway. People only care about the girl. Whatever you kill yourself proving in that courtroom, it’s not going to make him a good man, is it?”
“It might make him a good teacher.”
“Who cares about that?”
“He does, sir.”
Mum said, afterwards:
“Be careful of that man, George. He’s weak. Weak men will knife in you the back. Our children go to his school.”
We got back to the car and programmed the sat nav for the basketball courts, while the others got a lift home from a couple of friends. But then Dad turned his phone back on, and there were nine missed calls from Mrs. Khan.
***
Mrs. Khan was beside herself. She’d heard an explosion, a poltergeist, a football riot in the empty house: a sound like snow globes falling in a landslide.
We got inside, and she wasn’t exaggerating. The kitchen looked like one of those pictures of a Middle Eastern city after an explosion: white shards everywhere, and the dark round mouths of pipes. The dark bits turned out to be tankards, and the shards were fine china—everything had fallen off the dresser.
“What happened?” asked Dad. “Who did this, a cat?”
“I don’t think so,” said Mrs. Khan. “The police taped up the old cat flap.”
“This is a disaster. All that evidence. Did you see anyone lurking? What time did this happen?”
“About eleven.”
“In the evening?”
“No, morning.”
“Just now, then?”
I was sitting at the table, still on my phone. The whoosh of a departing text filled the silence.
“Who are you chatting to so intently?” asked Dad.
It wasn’t quite the moment, but I couldn’t help a hint of pride in my voice.
“It’s Selena.” There was a hungry silence, so I filled it. “She saw the end of my match, Dad. Before the big guys played. I talked to her! Just like Mum said I should. Well, Mum didn’t know I meant her, but still. I was nice, Dad. Like you said. She gave me her number.”
Dad was silent. I was afraid I’d done something taboo, like the time I told everyone he’d complained about a judge. But he only said, “Is she answering?”
“She will. I nearly made a basket, Dad.”
Mrs. Khan put a hand on my shoulder.
“You know, Theo, sometimes these young girls, they give you a number that’s not really theirs—”
“It is her, though. It is! I rang her a couple of times as we were going into church, and it went to her voicemail. ‘Hi, it’s Selena, leave a message’. Look, I’ll prove it.”
I pressed “call”. The number rang on speaker: an embarrassing, mocking, acne-faced beep, and it kept ringing. Nothing happened. When the call dropped, I swallowed and tried again. Dad smiled painfully.
But then there was a buzz: strikingly loud, and coming from inside the room.
Mrs. Khan jumped and patted her heart. It was coming from inside the pile of china debris.
“Keep calling!” commanded Dad, jumping up and sifting through the shards. The buzz was coming from an oblong box with holes and feet: the flower brick. It was chipped, but not destroyed.
“It’s heavy!” cried Dad. “Do these things open?”
“I think so, so you can clean the inside…” said Mrs. Khan.
Dad jiggled the flower brick, and found that the lid with holes slid out. Bundled inside, tightly, was a phone, connected to a power bank. It was buzzing; but, just as my call went to voicemail, it stopped.
“That’s the phone you’re ringing, Theo,” said Dad. “Selena Silver’s phone. She gave you an old number. A number she doesn’t use anymore.”
“But… why?” I remembered the juddering bong of the ball on the hoop. “Was it because I missed, again?”
“Oh, son. Worry about that later. You say you rang while we were in church, is that right? At eleven?”
“Just before, yeah.”
“How many calls?”
“Um… six?”
Dad nodded, understanding. “That’s when the phone buzzed. It buzzed so much, the whole stack overbalanced and fell down.”
“But…” said Mrs. Khan, “it’s been weeks. Wouldn’t it have rung before now? I get those spam calls every day…”
“Yes, but they only try once!” said Dad. “There’s a hidden setting. Most phones let calls through even in silent mode if someone keeps on ringing and ringing. In case of emergencies.”
“How do you—”
“I knew a cat burglar who got caught out that way. Allegedly.”
He sat down at the desk, in front of the typewriter.
“Climb up there on the dresser, Theo. Put your eye level with that shelf, where the brick used to be. Can you see over my shoulder?”
I could see, quite clearly, the page on the typewriter. I said so.
“That’s why it was on its side. So the phone camera could see out of the holes. Selena must’ve set it to a timelapse, uploaded the photos to herself… That’s how she stole the answers. High five, son! You’ve done it—you’ve cracked the case!”
***
That week was the first time I saw my Dad in court. He was different. The thing on his head wasn’t comical anymore. It was fierce. He was fierce. It looked as if it was in full sunlight, even when the room was dark.
“Many of you are parents,” he told the jury, opening. “You look at John Cribben, and you swear to yourselves: you’d do anything to keep a man like that away from your children. You’d use any tool that came to hand to fend him off. Even the tool of glib justice. No one would blame you.
“But if you are parents, then you know, too, the cost of glib justice. Haven’t you ever punished your children, and haven’t they ever looked at you with some unquenchable ember of rightness in their eyes—and when you asked what was wrong, have they never said, ‘it doesn’t matter; you wouldn’t understand’? John Cribben stands before you like a child who has given up on justice, because justice has given up on him. You know his faults. You have seen him naked. You will have ample opportunity, if you wish, as citizens, as townspeople—as commenters online, what do I know!—to punish him for what he has done. But, please, as his jury, do not punish him for what he has not done. And he has not stolen.”
John Cribben bowed his head in the dock.
“Please, Mr. Tetteh,” he whispered, “I don’t deserve that kind of defence. No principles, please, no principles. Just facts.”
I could see the jurors beginning to shift like weakened pack ice. Dad hadn’t even started on the evidence. But the prosecutor lifted his chin and signalled the judge, and the judge called counsel to his chambers.
“It’s that thing on his head, you know,” remarked the old barrister with the stained fingers. “It’s influencing the jury, my lord. They can’t believe that anyone with a halo on his side could be in the wrong.”
The way he said it: Dad could tell he’d been keeping it in his pocket, safe, a long time.
“Are you proposing it as a principle of law,” replied Dad, “that it is indecent for one side to be too obviously right?”
“I must say, Tetteh,” said the judge, “it does seem rather un-English. Rather theatrical. This application of moral leverage. Can’t you get anyone else to make the defendant’s case?”
“No, my lord.”
“Why not?”
“I am his friend.”
The judge took off his wig and thought.
“No. I’m sorry, Tetteh. The prosecution’s right. It’s undue influence. An unspoken commentary on every question, no basis in fact. I shall replace this jury. Find your client new counsel. And you’d best get yourself a haircut, I fear. If you have other cases.”
***
Dad came home in silence. The defeat had been so sudden; the built-up energy had nowhere to go. It hung in the air like the last splodges in a jam jar.
Meanwhile, the headmaster had rung. He’d followed through. “Found places” for us kids at another school, to avoid “the appearance of a conflict of interest”. He hoped sincerely that we’d take them up, or else… something.
Still on the doorstep, Dad had to push down his feelings and join the combined arms family effort to pacify Mum.
“Oh George, I need to be angry! You’re always so reasonable, and I can’t be as reasonable as you, and I’m not even allowed to complain about that—not when you’ve got that damn fool lampshade on your head telling everyone ‘I told you so’. Just go away for a while. Alright? I’ll be sorry later, but now just go away.”
So, in wordless hollowness, he did. I got in the car with him, since no one else would. I was pretty sullen myself. All that time he’d wasted, and for what? So we just drove around in circles for an hour. In the end, we went to the church. I stayed outside, throwing my ball against the car park wall. At least at this new school, I wouldn’t be an It. Not till they saw me play, anyway.
Dad went to our pew and knelt. I didn’t see him again for twenty minutes, but he told me later how it was. A quiet evening; just the organist, footling around.
“Who was this all for, Lord?” said Dad, trying to match his heart to the slow, oceanic throb of the deep pipes. “Look at me. I’m a failed lawyer. I’m a failed dad. I’m beaten, wretched and bitter, and when people see your sign on my head, they’ll think you’re beaten, wretched and bitter too. Are you? Who was this for?”
Our priest slid into the pew, his suit making black fabric noises.
“Hello, Georges,” came his white, combed-over whisper. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you! How providential. Someone must be watching over us.”
“Can I help you, Father?”
“Well, Georges, it’s a pastoral matter.” (He always called Dad “Georges”. He thought we were from French Gabon and wanted to celebrate our diversity.) “An opportunity to do some good.”
“I can’t imagine—”
“A group of parishioners came to me after Mass on Sunday. They said they hadn’t felt quite welcome, Georges. Because of you.”
“Because of me?”
“Oh, not you personally, dear friend. But, look—there’s the matter of your large family, your kneeling and so on… nothing wrong with that, of course. But there’s nothing wrong with other, different ways, either. And some people, when they see the Tettehs here, feel a little criticized. Not ‘church-y’ enough. And with that… accoutrement of yours, I’m afraid that that criticism might, in some sense, threaten to start feeling official.”
“I…” Dad was too tired to argue. “Well, what do you propose, Father?”
“Some of us feel it would be best if the Tettehs didn’t come to the eleven o’clock Mass anymore, Georges. A lot of people come. It’s an outward-facing, pastoral Mass. Some of us—”
“Some of you, Father?”
“Me and the Holy Ghost, Georges. Listen, I know a Mass where you’ll feel much more at home. It’s in Latin. The 6 a.m. with young Father du Balai, in Parking Structure C.”
“6 a.m.? But the children…” Dad stroked a hymnbook like someone trying to coax a sparrow back to life. “Does the choir sing?”
“Oh, there’s no music in Parking Structure C, I’m afraid. It interferes with the traffic-calming jazz.” The priest wrung Dad’s hand with special warmth. “Well done, Georges. Be joyful! Church isn’t about looking glum, is it, now?”
***
Dad stumped outside, still muttering.
“But who was it all for?”
It was late afternoon, the kind of cuttingly beautiful end to a day—suddenly warm, but only where the red sun touches—that makes you think this is how I’ll remember these years, later. It was quiet, very quiet—an odd Tuesday in a suburban car park. The brick glowed like a hand around a lightbulb; there were twigs of young trees growing in fresh woodchips by the empty road; the beach ball echoed on the tarmac.
I threw the ball just as Dad came out—a bit too hard.
“Look out, Dad!” I yelled.
He raised his eyes to see it fly. He resigned himself, ready for more pain.
The ball rattled around the golden ring for a moment, then drained down onto his head.
Donk.
There was utter silence. It was as if the light and the thermals off the tarmac and the angles of the brick had all been laid since the beginning of time to make that shot possible. No one had seen it, no one would ever believe; and if they did believe, they wouldn’t know why they should care.
But we knew.
Dad stared for a long time. He could see only a crescent of ball-shaped shadow, wobbling, caught, above his head. Then he clutched me to his chest.
I clutched him back, as if it were our first day together, or our last. He broke into a simmer of laughter like a singing kettle, and said in my ear,
“I think you’re about to get pretty good at this, son.”
“Hell, yeah, Dad!”
Tao Yuan studied Latin, Greek and Theology at Cambridge. Fearing that his utility to society might still be too great, he withdrew to the rural Dordogne, where he now works as a writer, singer, organist and flower farmer. His best stories are to be found in the guestbooks of small holiday cottages strung along the Welsh border. They are free to read, if you can find them. There are orchids named after his father and grandfather, but he doubts there will be orchids named after him.
“Haloman” by Tao Yuan. Copyright © 2026 by Tao Yuan. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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The week my father grew a new body part, the Tetteh family (all eight of us) were living in a narrow brick house on a narrow brick street, at the end of Wrexham that is mostly tarmac. Outside, the house was brick; inside, it was terminally clogged with mover’s boxes and baby bottles, to which each of the six children had in turn made a spirited contribution. Pius and Theo (that’s me) had graduated to the grown-up table; the kiddie table still seated Maria Maria, Leah Maria, Friday Efua Maria and Marie Antoinette. We lived like a bouncy castle, inflating inside a submarine.
Mum (Bronwen) and Dad (George) still looked young, though with that mildly upsetting mix of features that makes people think “you’re too young to look that way.” Dad had precisely three long, cartoon hairs combed across an unwrinkled dome of forehead, while Mum had advanced quickly and serenely from having one smooth, dainty chin to having three. Our hatchback had a previous owner’s Star Wars decals atomically welded to the rear, and packs of Pampers stuffed in places that made the dashboard lights come on.
The day the transformation began, it was a black Welsh pre-dawn outside, and Dad was in the good corridor (the one with fewer boxes) with a bin held over his head, being a basketball hoop for me to practise on.
Donk, went the beach ball, sadly, on Dad’s head (the beach ball was being a basketball).
“Dad,” I complained, “you mustn’t stand so still. It’s like you’re not human. It creeps me out.”
“Right, Theo,” he promised, making a note. He was a criminal defence barrister, with a thorny case, and his mind worked like a fridge. The chaos and distraction in our outer lives were the byproduct of its exchange mechanism, keeping the working insides cool, orderly and lit by the little lamp. His Theo/Sports help notes now read:
Basketball hoops shd avoid:
-Excessive movement.
-Exc. stillness.
-Swearing.
-Out of Frosties for breakfast.
-Stupid face.
Once again, Dad held the wastepaper basket over his head and swayed.
Donk.
“That hurt, that time,” he said, hopefully. “Maybe that’s good? Maybe you gave it some spin?”
My frustration emerged in prehistoric noises.
“Dad, do you understand that, if they laugh at me on the court, I won’t be Theo anymore? I’ll be It. It can’t play.”
“I’m sorry, son. But I was terrible at sports, too. I survived—”
“No, Dad, you escaped. From Ghana to a posh school in Britain where you could do flower-arranging and accordion lessons instead. Then you had six kids and couldn’t afford to send us there. This is it for me. There’s nowhere to escape to.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, rubbing his donked head. He gathered my face up into a bunch, all in one place, to kiss it. “We’ll try again tonight. I have to go to work, now.”
“Oh, you mean: you have to escape?”
He shuffled to the door, where Mum handed him his thermos. I heard him tell her, “something something Theo mumble,” in a guilty voice.
“Well, George,” yawned Mum (who was Welsh, and understood the bitterness of life), “that’s the trouble with being emotionally intelligent parents. You have emotionally intelligent children, and then they don’t let you get away with anything. If I could have it all again, I’d beat them with an exhaust pipe.”
Dad’s client was at Chester Crown Court, in a cell that smelled of socks.
The client was called Mr. Cribben, and he’d taught chemistry at our school (Sacred Heart) since about 1648. The enigmatic wit of primaeval schoolboy civilizations had named him The Big Boon.
Since a few months ago, this Big Boon, whose tweed collar was perennially in the first Narnian shimmerings of a dandruff winter, had stood accused of an inappropriate friendship with Selena Silver: the glitter-and-shadow-eyed, slow-blinking school beauty, then seventeen. Worse, they claimed that he’d passed Selena the answers to the London International Level chemistry exam, a qualification he’d helped to found. She’d sold them for several thousand pounds and a Burberry gift card.
“It’s the parents’ fault for giving her a porn star name, poor child,” sympathized Mum. “Marie Antoinette, take those crayons out of your nose.”
When the scandal broke, the exam board voided the chemistry results for the entire school. It looked like my brother Pius now only had four good L.I.L.s, while the tossers at Prince Henry’s still had five. You can imagine how the parents took it. At one point, Cribben had a police guard. He was being held, theoretically for mental health evaluation, but truthfully for his own safety.
“Mr. Cribben, are you sure I can’t persuade you to take the easy way?” said Dad. “We can agree on almost all the prosecution’s claims. You took Miss Silver on a weekend to Harrogate, where you addressed her (‘plaintively’) as Madge, and prevailed on her to wear your deceased wife’s Barbour coat. Then you took her to your cottage and asked her to choose a selection of Delft porcelain to inherit following your death.” (Dad continued the facts gently, as if apologizing for knowing them. He did the same thing with our school reports.) “No one accuses you of touching the girl; you’ve shown exemplary contrition for all the above, and if you plead guilty you won’t get much worse than early retirement. Sir, please, why are you digging your heels in about the last point?”
The Big Boon flicked the end of his nose, which was the size and shape of a melancholy battleship.
“Well, sir, you see, sir, in admitting the affective attachment, I shouldn’t very well like it to be thought… that is, I shouldn’t like to give the impression… to countenance the opinion, that I had given dear Madge—”
“Selena.”
“—Miss Silver, anything in the way of material for the exams. That is what they refuse to let drop, is it not?”
“Are you sure you never even hinted—”
“Hinted!” The Big Boon was a large man with large mental bones. It was harder to imagine him hinting than to imagine a coal barge doing a pirouette.
“Please, sir: my exam process is secure,” he insisted. “I type out the questions on my typewriter, in my kitchen, before bedtime. Then, after my cocoa, I take them from the carriage and lock them inside the dresser drawer, exactly as I have done every exam season since autumn 1971. Lastly, I hide the key under my mattress. No one sees them until I deliver them with my own hand to the L.I.L. office.”
“You’re sure you never left them sitting there, on the typewriter?”
“Mr. Tetteh, I am a good teacher. At least, I think I am. At least, I make good chemists. And they deserve the chance to be recognized as such, by fair examination. My questions are sacred. No one’s ever seen them. Not even…”
The real Madge, he meant. Dad rubbed his chin, and then he rubbed his head, and kept rubbing until The Big Boon was obliged to say,
“Are you quite alright, Mr. Tetteh?”
“Feeling a bit funny on top today, for some reason. My son hit me with a ball.”
“Theodore, isn’t it? Is he any good?”
“They laugh at him. I don’t know how to make them stop.”
“Ah,” said the Big Boon. “Well, if you ever find out, do let me know, eh?”
Half an hour later, Dad traipsed to Mr. Justice Saltire’s chambers with the prosecutor. Judge Saltire was on a big projector screen, pulled down across oak panels, wearing ski goggles. He was in Verbier; though, if he continued at his present speed, it seemed he would soon be out of it.
“We’re not contesting the rest,” Dad told them. “It would save everyone a lot of time if the prosecution would drop the charge of conspiracy-to-theft. There cannot be conspiracy-to-theft without a thief. And you’re not charging Miss Silver with anything, are you, Counsel? Either put your victim in the dock with my client, or confess to everyone that there’s no case to answer.”
“What’s that on your head, Tetteh?” shouted the judge, over an invigorating rush of wind.
“It’s a wig, my lord.”
“We sometimes wear them when we’re at work,” observed the sly old prosecutor.
“Not that, damn you both. Coming up through your wig.”
Dad patted his head over. There seemed to be something hard and a little warm lifting his wig, like a pen caught between the fibres of a jumper.
“Go and see a doctor, Tetteh. That’s an order. Don’t need chaps keeling over in my courtroom.”
“Yes, my lord… What about the case?”
“Hmph. You applying to dismiss?”
“The motion’s on your desk, sir.”
“What about you? Tobacco fingers?” (His Lordship was addressing the prosecutor.) “Is your sex tart going to take the stand?”
“Er… yes, my lord, Miss Silver will testify.”
“Gonna say the nose man did it?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Alright, then. No dismissal. Chips fall where they may, et cetera. Can’t talk now, going into an avalanche. I’ll hear the case on Monday.”
After work, Dad went to the doctor. He rolled up his sleeves (though no one asked him to) and sat on the edge of the plastic-covered bed. His friend the doctor frowned, because he’d almost made it through the day without changing the plastic.
“If he’d written the exams on a computer,” Dad told him, aloud, “I’d say she’d broken into it, no problem. She’s a savvy teenager, and even I can guess the poor chap’s password.”
“Madge1, eh?” said the doctor, massaging Dad’s scalp.
“But he didn’t use a password: he worked by typewriter. He says he never left the pages on the carriage, and, frankly, I believe him. Here’s a man who hand copies five pages of Bradshaw’s timetables to make a rail trip to Harrogate, because he’s afraid to lose the book. He’s cautious. Precise. No, there’s something not right, here. I’ve got to see the crime scene again.”
“Hmm,” said the doctor, turning on brighter lights and squinting at Dad’s hair.
“What’s wrong, Pete? Is it cancer?”
“No, not cancer. You know how I can tell?”
The doctor took a reflex hammer and swiped, as if at a fly, above Dad’s head. Something went bong.
“There. You see? Cancer doesn’t go bong. It’s hard. Almost metallic. I’d call it an idiopathic epicranial cyclotrophism.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you’ve got a circle on your head and I don’t know why. If you ask me, it’s a bona fide, honest-to-God halo. Like an angel in a Christmas play.”
“A halo?” Dad felt around blindly. “What… why? I don’t have time for that. I’ve got a client! I’ve got to stand up in court and be taken seriously. What am I supposed to do? Can’t you take it off?”
“Well, I can send you to the surgeon, see what he says, but… Meanwhile, in your place, I’d take the opportunity to say a few wise-sounding things. You’ve always been a decent, mild, impotent sort of man. I’m not religious myself, but people might listen to you for a change. In my legal opinion, you might make the world a better place.”
“In my medical opinion: ha.” He looked at his watch. “Oh, damn.”
I was still in the driveway when Dad came home, clutching my beach ball—the same accusatory way I clutched my pillow when I couldn’t sleep and felt inspired to discuss it. Dad shoved the car door open.
“Come on. I know, I know, I promised. Come on.”
There was no chance of practising any basketball now—it was about to get dark. He just wanted the company.
I got in silently. The thing on his head was fully extruded now: a flat ring, wide as a homburg hat, orbiting the blank space above his head like an invisible Saturn. It was golden, untextured, supported on a slender pillar—almost as if it came from a simpler universe, a place without scratches and wear. And yet, somehow, it didn’t make his shabby clothes look shabbier.
“They laugh at you again today?” asked Dad.
I nodded.
“How many hoops did you make?”
I held up my fingers in a zero.
“That many, huh?”
“Captain didn’t let me play.”
Dad tried to stay upbeat, for my sake.
“Don’t worry, son. We’ll fix this for you. Somehow.”
“No you won’t, Dad. They’ve all seen me, now.”
We drove to The Big Boon’s house, a village bungalow backing onto a ploughed field. Dad had visited it eleven times since the case began. The neighbour was nice and wrinkly: Mrs. Khan. She was waiting with steaming tea and Walker’s shortbread, but Dad fell straight to searching the kitchen a twelfth time, jiggling old drawers that didn’t fit.
“You two going trick-or-treating later?” asked Mrs. Khan, noticing the thing on his head.
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s going dressed as a dad.”
The famous Imperial typewriter had its own place at the kitchen table, sitting on a tartan cloth. The dresser drawer was two feet directly behind it. The Big Boon wouldn’t even have needed to get up to lock the exam papers away.
“Did you ever see him bring the girl here?” asked Dad.
“Only her silhouette,” said Mrs. Khan. “Three times, maybe four. But, you know, once they were inside, I’d hear that Joan Sutherland singing on the record player. Just the way it was when Mrs. Cribben was alive. Oh, I loved to hear that music again—so shoot me! Then he’d drive her back to her friend’s house, and come back, and I’d hear the record player again. Longer, the second time. With the lights off.”
On the third shelf of the dresser (it was awkwardly high), there was a collection of blue and white porcelain—vases, lidded urns, tiles—all piled together, in a space apart. The Delft china for Selena. Dad shook his head at it.
“What on earth were you thinking, Cribben? What painful delusion—what teenager would want this?”
“Oh, but the china was her idea, Mr. Tetteh,” said Mrs. Khan.
“What?”
“He didn’t offer it her—she asked. Saw some things she liked. They cleared a space on that shelf, there, and put it all in one place, so she could find it again. You know. For after.”
“Do you know what it was?” asked Dad, squinting up at the porcelain (it was very high on the dresser). “The first thing she liked? What’s this?” He’d found a blue and white porcelain box, punctured on top with holes. Like an oblong pepper shaker: a fat thing in Duplo instead of Lego. It was very delicately painted.
“That’s a flower brick. I’ll show you—”
“Please don’t touch anything! It could be evidence.”
“Oh. Well, you put the flower stems in those holes. Then you fill the brick with water. It holds them up in rows: makes a nice display, you see?”
“So that one up there—it’s on its side? With the holes facing forward, instead of up?”
“Well, I suppose so. She wasn’t exactly careful with the stuff, you know. Just piled it on. Shame. Mr. Cribben was very proud of some of it. He went to Europe once, for a vase. Got a little badge for his walking stick. Learned to say ‘hello’ in Dutch. He was very proud.”
We returned to the car, no further forward. I felt a cruel satisfaction that Dad, having chosen his project over mine, had made no progress.
“So?” I asked. It was dusk. The hedgerows were bright on top and dark underneath, with a ruddy autumn burn turning the berries to garnets. “Learn anything about Selena?”
Dad never told me the name of the girl, of course. The papers called her “A”. But everyone at school knew. I said her name the way we all did: “Selena”, with the middle syllable an octave higher than the others.
“Son,” said Dad, “I know you don’t mean much by it, but I don’t ever want you to use a person’s name like that. Like it’s a joke.”
“She’s a—” I began, defensively. I was going to say “skank”, because that’s what we said at school. I swerved and said “smink” instead, whatever that was.
“If she could hear the way you’re all talking about her, do you think she’d be less likely, or more likely, to go on doing bad things?”
The red-gold light was bouncing off the thing on his head, and his words stung me. The truth was, Selena was the whole reason I’d started playing basketball, back when things were normal. She was a cheerleader for the real players. I wanted her to notice me—blink at me. Slowly.
But apparently, I was less noticeable than an old Irishman with a big nose. So now I trained hard and spoke harshly.
“Don’t talk to me as if you’re perfect,” I said. Then I waited for the inevitable: the soft words, the gentle prodding, the unending annoying niggle of reasonableness that was Dad.
But for once in his life, Dad shut up.
The weekend came around. After church on Sunday, we were going to hit the basketball courts. At last, there was no getting out of it.
For the first time, before breakfast, Dad properly examined his new appendage, turning it this way and that in the bathroom mirror. I saw him try to tug it off. Buzz it gingerly with his shaver, just to see what he’d feel.
The church was by the school. It took ridiculously long to get there: two car trips in the hatchback, for the eight of us. It was a big, bland, suburban church with windows the shape of lightning bolts. Mum called it Starbase One. But Dad loved the music.
He said it reminded him of what the old-fashioned mission fathers had played in Ghana, on a farting old harmonium. Elgar-type stuff. Comforting visions of grey days and ivy and moss. Our priest found it old-fashioned—he liked to seize the microphone after a piece, and say, “wasn’t that nice;” but for Dad, it seemed to open a secret door and let him out of this mundane Britain back into the England he’d imagined, back before he’d crossed the sea.
People would always stare as the regiment of junior Tettehs took its places. This time, we encamped near a couple of regulars who’d decided to delay having children for career reasons (something they liked to tell fellow parishioners instead of “hello”). We were used to them shuffling away from us, lest Mum infect them with her excessive fertility.
But today, seeing Dad’s suspicious woolly hat bulging at all sides, others shuffled too. They muttered; but Dad just went on kneeling quietly beside me, listening to the choir sing.
“Dad?” I whispered. He didn’t flinch. I could feel his thoughts in a thick cloud around us. “Dad, what’s the deal? Are you a saint?”
“Of course not, son. You know Dad. He leaves the shower dirty for your Mum. He sometimes tinkles on the floor, because the bathroom’s too cold to sit down in.” He opened his eye a fraction and glanced at me, then continued. “Whenever I talk about John Cribben, I call him ‘my client’, so that people don’t mistake me for his friend.”
I felt as close and secret as if he’d mantled me under his coat.
“Then why? Why do you have that thing?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m supposed to remember just how much I’m not a saint. Or maybe I’m supposed to think, ‘the bad guys are treating me like an enemy, I may as well be one’. Or maybe it’s not even for me. Maybe I’m just a convenient ugly wall for God to Banksy. Maybe it’s for someone else’s benefit.”
My frustration was like a patch of skin rubbed but still itching. I longed for Dad to make time for me; and at last he had—he’d told me his secret thoughts—and I didn’t understand a word.
I turned to my phone for consolation. I’d had a pretty good basketball match, on Saturday. I’d nearly made a shot, and I’d hit the rim with another. A girl had given me her number. I’d given it a few rings while our family was busy faffing in the car park and, though she wasn’t answering yet, I was hopeful.
“Don’t text in church, love,” whispered Mum, seeing my fingers move suspiciously.
“I’m donating.”
“Lot of eggplants in that donation.”
“You’re hilarious.”
After Mass, the headmaster came up, wringing his hands. Dad’s defence of The Big Boon was embarrassing the school.
“You see, George, when a parent defends John, it looks dangerously like the school is defending him.”
“Headmaster,” said Dad (his hands still weaving a mask over his face), “when a human defends him, does it look dangerously like the human race is defending him?”
“The exam stuff’s nothing, anyway. People only care about the girl. Whatever you kill yourself proving in that courtroom, it’s not going to make him a good man, is it?”
“It might make him a good teacher.”
“Who cares about that?”
“He does, sir.”
Mum said, afterwards:
“Be careful of that man, George. He’s weak. Weak men will knife in you the back. Our children go to his school.”
We got back to the car and programmed the sat nav for the basketball courts, while the others got a lift home from a couple of friends. But then Dad turned his phone back on, and there were nine missed calls from Mrs. Khan.
Mrs. Khan was beside herself. She’d heard an explosion, a poltergeist, a football riot in the empty house: a sound like snow globes falling in a landslide.
We got inside, and she wasn’t exaggerating. The kitchen looked like one of those pictures of a Middle Eastern city after an explosion: white shards everywhere, and the dark round mouths of pipes. The dark bits turned out to be tankards, and the shards were fine china—everything had fallen off the dresser.
“What happened?” asked Dad. “Who did this, a cat?”
“I don’t think so,” said Mrs. Khan. “The police taped up the old cat flap.”
“This is a disaster. All that evidence. Did you see anyone lurking? What time did this happen?”
“About eleven.”
“In the evening?”
“No, morning.”
“Just now, then?”
I was sitting at the table, still on my phone. The whoosh of a departing text filled the silence.
“Who are you chatting to so intently?” asked Dad.
It wasn’t quite the moment, but I couldn’t help a hint of pride in my voice.
“It’s Selena.” There was a hungry silence, so I filled it. “She saw the end of my match, Dad. Before the big guys played. I talked to her! Just like Mum said I should. Well, Mum didn’t know I meant her, but still. I was nice, Dad. Like you said. She gave me her number.”
Dad was silent. I was afraid I’d done something taboo, like the time I told everyone he’d complained about a judge. But he only said, “Is she answering?”
“She will. I nearly made a basket, Dad.”
Mrs. Khan put a hand on my shoulder.
“You know, Theo, sometimes these young girls, they give you a number that’s not really theirs—”
“It is her, though. It is! I rang her a couple of times as we were going into church, and it went to her voicemail. ‘Hi, it’s Selena, leave a message’. Look, I’ll prove it.”
I pressed “call”. The number rang on speaker: an embarrassing, mocking, acne-faced beep, and it kept ringing. Nothing happened. When the call dropped, I swallowed and tried again. Dad smiled painfully.
But then there was a buzz: strikingly loud, and coming from inside the room.
Mrs. Khan jumped and patted her heart. It was coming from inside the pile of china debris.
“Keep calling!” commanded Dad, jumping up and sifting through the shards. The buzz was coming from an oblong box with holes and feet: the flower brick. It was chipped, but not destroyed.
“It’s heavy!” cried Dad. “Do these things open?”
“I think so, so you can clean the inside…” said Mrs. Khan.
Dad jiggled the flower brick, and found that the lid with holes slid out. Bundled inside, tightly, was a phone, connected to a power bank. It was buzzing; but, just as my call went to voicemail, it stopped.
“That’s the phone you’re ringing, Theo,” said Dad. “Selena Silver’s phone. She gave you an old number. A number she doesn’t use anymore.”
“But… why?” I remembered the juddering bong of the ball on the hoop. “Was it because I missed, again?”
“Oh, son. Worry about that later. You say you rang while we were in church, is that right? At eleven?”
“Just before, yeah.”
“How many calls?”
“Um… six?”
Dad nodded, understanding. “That’s when the phone buzzed. It buzzed so much, the whole stack overbalanced and fell down.”
“But…” said Mrs. Khan, “it’s been weeks. Wouldn’t it have rung before now? I get those spam calls every day…”
“Yes, but they only try once!” said Dad. “There’s a hidden setting. Most phones let calls through even in silent mode if someone keeps on ringing and ringing. In case of emergencies.”
“How do you—”
“I knew a cat burglar who got caught out that way. Allegedly.”
He sat down at the desk, in front of the typewriter.
“Climb up there on the dresser, Theo. Put your eye level with that shelf, where the brick used to be. Can you see over my shoulder?”
I could see, quite clearly, the page on the typewriter. I said so.
“That’s why it was on its side. So the phone camera could see out of the holes. Selena must’ve set it to a timelapse, uploaded the photos to herself… That’s how she stole the answers. High five, son! You’ve done it—you’ve cracked the case!”
That week was the first time I saw my Dad in court. He was different. The thing on his head wasn’t comical anymore. It was fierce. He was fierce. It looked as if it was in full sunlight, even when the room was dark.
“Many of you are parents,” he told the jury, opening. “You look at John Cribben, and you swear to yourselves: you’d do anything to keep a man like that away from your children. You’d use any tool that came to hand to fend him off. Even the tool of glib justice. No one would blame you.
“But if you are parents, then you know, too, the cost of glib justice. Haven’t you ever punished your children, and haven’t they ever looked at you with some unquenchable ember of rightness in their eyes—and when you asked what was wrong, have they never said, ‘it doesn’t matter; you wouldn’t understand’? John Cribben stands before you like a child who has given up on justice, because justice has given up on him. You know his faults. You have seen him naked. You will have ample opportunity, if you wish, as citizens, as townspeople—as commenters online, what do I know!—to punish him for what he has done. But, please, as his jury, do not punish him for what he has not done. And he has not stolen.”
John Cribben bowed his head in the dock.
“Please, Mr. Tetteh,” he whispered, “I don’t deserve that kind of defence. No principles, please, no principles. Just facts.”
I could see the jurors beginning to shift like weakened pack ice. Dad hadn’t even started on the evidence. But the prosecutor lifted his chin and signalled the judge, and the judge called counsel to his chambers.
“It’s that thing on his head, you know,” remarked the old barrister with the stained fingers. “It’s influencing the jury, my lord. They can’t believe that anyone with a halo on his side could be in the wrong.”
The way he said it: Dad could tell he’d been keeping it in his pocket, safe, a long time.
“Are you proposing it as a principle of law,” replied Dad, “that it is indecent for one side to be too obviously right?”
“I must say, Tetteh,” said the judge, “it does seem rather un-English. Rather theatrical. This application of moral leverage. Can’t you get anyone else to make the defendant’s case?”
“No, my lord.”
“Why not?”
“I am his friend.”
The judge took off his wig and thought.
“No. I’m sorry, Tetteh. The prosecution’s right. It’s undue influence. An unspoken commentary on every question, no basis in fact. I shall replace this jury. Find your client new counsel. And you’d best get yourself a haircut, I fear. If you have other cases.”
Dad came home in silence. The defeat had been so sudden; the built-up energy had nowhere to go. It hung in the air like the last splodges in a jam jar.
Meanwhile, the headmaster had rung. He’d followed through. “Found places” for us kids at another school, to avoid “the appearance of a conflict of interest”. He hoped sincerely that we’d take them up, or else… something.
Still on the doorstep, Dad had to push down his feelings and join the combined arms family effort to pacify Mum.
“Oh George, I need to be angry! You’re always so reasonable, and I can’t be as reasonable as you, and I’m not even allowed to complain about that—not when you’ve got that damn fool lampshade on your head telling everyone ‘I told you so’. Just go away for a while. Alright? I’ll be sorry later, but now just go away.”
So, in wordless hollowness, he did. I got in the car with him, since no one else would. I was pretty sullen myself. All that time he’d wasted, and for what? So we just drove around in circles for an hour. In the end, we went to the church. I stayed outside, throwing my ball against the car park wall. At least at this new school, I wouldn’t be an It. Not till they saw me play, anyway.
Dad went to our pew and knelt. I didn’t see him again for twenty minutes, but he told me later how it was. A quiet evening; just the organist, footling around.
“Who was this all for, Lord?” said Dad, trying to match his heart to the slow, oceanic throb of the deep pipes. “Look at me. I’m a failed lawyer. I’m a failed dad. I’m beaten, wretched and bitter, and when people see your sign on my head, they’ll think you’re beaten, wretched and bitter too. Are you? Who was this for?”
Our priest slid into the pew, his suit making black fabric noises.
“Hello, Georges,” came his white, combed-over whisper. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you! How providential. Someone must be watching over us.”
“Can I help you, Father?”
“Well, Georges, it’s a pastoral matter.” (He always called Dad “Georges”. He thought we were from French Gabon and wanted to celebrate our diversity.) “An opportunity to do some good.”
“I can’t imagine—”
“A group of parishioners came to me after Mass on Sunday. They said they hadn’t felt quite welcome, Georges. Because of you.”
“Because of me?”
“Oh, not you personally, dear friend. But, look—there’s the matter of your large family, your kneeling and so on… nothing wrong with that, of course. But there’s nothing wrong with other, different ways, either. And some people, when they see the Tettehs here, feel a little criticized. Not ‘church-y’ enough. And with that… accoutrement of yours, I’m afraid that that criticism might, in some sense, threaten to start feeling official.”
“I…” Dad was too tired to argue. “Well, what do you propose, Father?”
“Some of us feel it would be best if the Tettehs didn’t come to the eleven o’clock Mass anymore, Georges. A lot of people come. It’s an outward-facing, pastoral Mass. Some of us—”
“Some of you, Father?”
“Me and the Holy Ghost, Georges. Listen, I know a Mass where you’ll feel much more at home. It’s in Latin. The 6 a.m. with young Father du Balai, in Parking Structure C.”
“6 a.m.? But the children…” Dad stroked a hymnbook like someone trying to coax a sparrow back to life. “Does the choir sing?”
“Oh, there’s no music in Parking Structure C, I’m afraid. It interferes with the traffic-calming jazz.” The priest wrung Dad’s hand with special warmth. “Well done, Georges. Be joyful! Church isn’t about looking glum, is it, now?”
Dad stumped outside, still muttering.
“But who was it all for?”
It was late afternoon, the kind of cuttingly beautiful end to a day—suddenly warm, but only where the red sun touches—that makes you think this is how I’ll remember these years, later. It was quiet, very quiet—an odd Tuesday in a suburban car park. The brick glowed like a hand around a lightbulb; there were twigs of young trees growing in fresh woodchips by the empty road; the beach ball echoed on the tarmac.
I threw the ball just as Dad came out—a bit too hard.
“Look out, Dad!” I yelled.
He raised his eyes to see it fly. He resigned himself, ready for more pain.
The ball rattled around the golden ring for a moment, then drained down onto his head.
Donk.
There was utter silence. It was as if the light and the thermals off the tarmac and the angles of the brick had all been laid since the beginning of time to make that shot possible. No one had seen it, no one would ever believe; and if they did believe, they wouldn’t know why they should care.
But we knew.
Dad stared for a long time. He could see only a crescent of ball-shaped shadow, wobbling, caught, above his head. Then he clutched me to his chest.
I clutched him back, as if it were our first day together, or our last. He broke into a simmer of laughter like a singing kettle, and said in my ear,
“I think you’re about to get pretty good at this, son.”
“Hell, yeah, Dad!”
Tao Yuan studied Latin, Greek and Theology at Cambridge. Fearing that his utility to society might still be too great, he withdrew to the rural Dordogne, where he now works as a writer, singer, organist and flower farmer. His best stories are to be found in the guestbooks of small holiday cottages strung along the Welsh border. They are free to read, if you can find them. There are orchids named after his father and grandfather, but he doubts there will be orchids named after him.
“Haloman” by Tao Yuan. Copyright © 2026 by Tao Yuan. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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