“The walnut will crack but the window won’t”

INSIDE all of us lies a secret history; the story of an immense journey told by our DNA — the biochemical molecule at the heart of the reproduction of all life.

From a simple saliva sample, scientists can now trace our early ancestry over many thousands of years and answer the fundamental question — where do we come from?

Since the discovery of its structure in 1953, scientists have pieced together the epic narrative of DNA.

So have I, reader. So. Have. I.

Christmas Eve 1985, my mother-in-law’s home.

18 members of my husband’s family are working off the opiate effects of an immodest lunch; we have drifted from the kitchen into to his parents’ sitting room and dropped, one by one, onto the nearest sofa like pheasants shot out of the sky.

My father-in-law, a man of few words, sits hidden behind the newspaper while opposite him, my mother-in-law, a woman of many, sits untypically still in an armchair, overcome by her culinary exertions. The rest of us lie flung across flowered upholstery in pin-drop silence.

All is calm.

Time passes thus for a minute. Then my husband leaps to his feet. Taking a few steps backwards away from the window, he swings a walnut under, then over his arm, eyeballing the window like cricketer Ian Botham sizing up the stumps.

“See this walnut?” he says, “well watch this trick. It’s amazing. I saw it at a party.”

There is a reluctant stirring of limbs: my father-in-law rustles his newspaper and my mother-in-law sits up straight. I stiffen, unsettled suddenly by thoughts of my husband in particular relation to the genetic marker for recklessness.

All watch as instructed; there is no cogent thought in the room, merely torpor.

Botham runs across the sitting room, hurling the walnut over his arm at the grade 11 listed, impossible-to-replace windows. There’s a deafening crack, then another rustling of newspaper, over which his father peers, saying “What in God’s name would make you do…”

Botham scrambles around on the floor for his walnut and raises it aloft for all to inspect, “Oh, he says, “the walnut hasn’t cracked.”

Torpor has wholly dissipated but time seems to be warping — we simply gape, transfixed, as he thuds towards the window again.

He draws his arm back again. “Watch,” he says, “no, no, trust me, the walnut will crack but the window won’t.”

“It’s science,” he grunts, hurling walnut.

There’s a second deafening crack, immediately followed by the distinctive sound of glass shattering. Botham folds in half and subsides onto the carpet, where he lies rolling from side to side, convulsed by terrified laughter.

We stare at the empty pane, through which icy winds now blow. “Shit,” he says, “that wasn’t meant to happen.”

May, 2013. My children have returned home from college. Roast chicken with all the trimmings has exerted soporific effect; all four recline on sofas in the conservatory. My husband is reading the newspaper, while I sit opposite him, eating a Mini-Magnum. All is calm.

My 26 year-old son leaps to his feet and vanishes through doorway into adjoining kitchen, where he picks up a large, empty cardboard box. He looks down at it, then up at the doorframe, like Rooney sizing up the goal. Taking a few paces backwards, he gallops towards the door, lamps the box through the open doorway, shouting, “and it’s a gooooooooal!”

Slicing through the air in the conservatory, it knocks into a lamp, which knocks sideways into a chair, which knocks forward into a table, decanting a vase of lilies onto my husband’s lap, newspaper, socks, shoes, sofa, rug, floorboards and dog.

Rooney folds in half and subsides onto the kitchen floor, where he lies rolling from side to side, laughing in terror. “Shit,” he says, “that wasn’t meant to happen.”

My husband says, “WHAT in God’s name would make you do that?”

“DNA,” I say, through a mouthful of chocolate, “Dfeckin, Nfeckin, A.”