‘Are you challenging me?’ I say to my enemy. ‘Because I’m in a mood to accept’

Tim Dowling: I’ve killed my keyboard. Will the squirrel be next?

With a deadline looming and the morning fast evaporating, I am standing on a box in the cupboard where the washing machine is, looking for a can of plastic cleaning spray I bought two years ago.

“Ah-ha!” I say.

“What are you doing?” says my wife from the kitchen.

“Looking for this,” I say, holding up the can. “My computer keyboard is filthy.”

“Have you emailed that person?” she says.

“Not yet,” I say. “I’m just waiting to…”

“Did you sign the form I left out?”

“I’m a bit busy right now,” I say, holding up the can again as I walk across the garden to my office.

I’ve become obsessed with the telltale pattern of grime on my keyboard. I’m pretty certain a forensic expert could learn a lot from it. Even a layman can see that when it comes to selecting mandatory numbers for online passwords, I only ever choose three. In any case, I want the evidence gone.

I dab some cleaning fluid on a cloth and test it on an unimportant key (F5) which, after a little polishing, gleams like new. Soon I am attacking the whole keyboard, respraying its surface at intervals. As I scrub, new windows open and close on the screen in front of me. Pages of text fly past, and random music begins to play. I probably should have turned off the computer before I started, or at least taken the batteries out of the keyboard. But I’m nearly done.

Ten minutes later, my keyboard looks brand new. Finally, I feel able to engage with the day’s work.

I make a mistake while typing and back up to fix it. The mistake repeats itself. I delete the line and start again – this time with deliberation – making the identical mistake, but very slowly. I think: my brain is dying. I knew this day would come.

Then I realise I have simply damaged my keyboard, to the extent that certain keystrokes produce more than one character – specifically, the character on the key below the key I have hit. Once I carefully delete the extra letters, the line becomes coherent.

“I can’t work like this,” I say, although it has already become clear that, with practice, I can.

Something lands heavily on my shed roof and scrambles across it. It sounds heavy enough to be some kind of escaped wild cat. Whatever it is, it’s directly above my head, emitting a strangled screech punctuated by angry, rattling exhalations.

I stand up and open the shed door a crack, listening to the noise. Eventually I lean out and look up. A little head appears over the lip of the roof: it’s the squirrel, my enemy.

“What are you doing?” I say. The squirrel huffs, as if to say: you want some of this?

“Are you challenging me?” I say. “Because I’m in a mood to accept.” I have an urge to lunge at it, but I’m not entirely certain it would move. Instead, I slip sideways out the door, and back to the house.

“What are you looking at?” my wife says, finding me at the kitchen window half an hour later.

“He’s still up there,” I say.

“You can’t be frightened of a squirrel,” my wife says.

“It’s just hard to concentrate when he’s so pissed off,” I say.

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“Did you send that email yet?” she says.

“My keyboard is broken,” I say. “I cleaned it to death.”

“Buy a new one,” she says. “It’s a business expense.”

I return to my office to order a new keyboard. It takes me a long time to input my credit card number, because the numbers are interspersed with letters.

Two mornings later, I walk out to my shed with the new keyboard in its box. At my approach, the squirrel runs along the garden wall and on to the roof.

“I don’t have time for this,” I say. I sit down and type my computer password using a formula that is already second nature – a complex pattern of entries and deletions – only to discover that my old keyboard has fixed itself in the night.

“After two days?” I say. Above me, the squirrel huffs.