My father is lying at the bottom of the Albert Canal, near Hasselt. It might as well be a river as a canal, it’s so much wider than what is conjured by the word “canal” in the UK. Not that that matters to my father, seeing as he’s dead. One supposes he might prefer to be resting near the more picturesque parts—near Smeermaas perhaps—but as fate would have it, he has settled a stone’s throw from the industrial zone, where the view rather disappoints in comparison to the rest of the canal route. His death, as deaths go, was a little disappointing, too: a sudden hemorrhage in the brain, causing him to topple into the water whilst taking a pleasant night stroll along the towpath; he was dead before he could even drown. He would have preferred a demise with more substance and flair.

TEN

I wake with my heart thumping, utterly disoriented, to a shrill, earsplitting beeping that’s extraordinarily loud. I fumble for the bedside lamp switch and fail to find it, then give up and leap out of bed to switch on the ceiling light and grab my dressing gown. By now my brain has identified the cacophony: it’s a smoke alarm, one downstairs from the sound of it. I’m sure it’s coming from the ground floor. I can’t smell anything, though. I slam on the hallway light and take the stairs two at a time in my bare feet. There’s no mistaking the source of the unceasing screech: the unassuming round white alarm clinging to the ceiling of the kitchen. The objectionable din it’s emitting isn’t helping me think clearly, but I can’t smell smoke, or gas, and I can see from a glance that all the hobs are off. Certainly there’s no visible signs of a fire. My only focus now is turning the bloody thing off.