Patrol, by Pat Edwards

The unmarked car moved slowly up the road, occasionally exposed by the flashes and streaks of multi-coloured  lights and illuminations. It drove to the end of the road, completed a very neat and quick manoeuvre in order to turn around,  before coming to a halt outside one particularly brightly-lit house on the terrace.

With just a knowing look to one another, the officers got out of the car, donned their headgear and proceeded towards the front door of number sixteen. The female officer pressed the door bell long and hard, and both officers scrutinised the street for signs of movement. There was none, save the intermittent and persistent flashing of lights everywhere. After what seemed an age, a teenage boy came to the door. “Alright?” he grunted with that tell-tale chin jerk perfected by the young. “Are your parents in?” asked the male officer. “Yeah, I'm pretty sure one of 'em's in” he responded, shouting for his siblings to fetch Mum or Dad, whichever they could locate. There was a slightly awkward silence as the two officers and the boy stood in the doorway, the boy inept at small talk and the officers unwilling to disclose their business with anyone but the boy's parents.

The male officer pulled what looked like some sort of meter reader from his jacket pocket, stepped back a little way into the front garden, and began adjusting the settings on the device. It began to buzz gently and emit other purring electronic sounds. The female officer shifted nervously. The boy strained to try to get a look at the gadget.

The boy's mother appeared from down the hallway, slightly irked at being disturbed and by the fact not one of her children seemed able to deal with whatever it was. “Can I help?” she asked. The officers clearly felt instinctively that the message they had to deliver would be better heard by both adults in the household. “Is your husband at home?” enquired the female officer. Now the woman of the house was even more irritated and, with a look of disdain, shouted up the stairs for her husband to come. She folded her arms sternly and remarked “Why you feel the need to disturb the pair of us beats me” before shouting her husband again, this time louder. He came running down the stairs. “Alright, alright, where's the fire?”

By the time the man arrived, the boy had removed himself from the scene, anticipating that his presence was no longer required. “So, what's this about?” said the man. The two officers eyed one another cautiously, as if knowing all too well what a shock this was going to be, and just how annoyed the couple were likely to get. The male officer initiated proceedings. “Are you aware that you are in contravention of the Illuminated Christmas Decorations Act 2015, sub-section D1 Domestic and Small Business, paragraph 7 Roofs, Gardens and Front Windows?”

At this the couple first looked utterly flummoxed, but this quickly turned to amusement and then to raucous laughter. “Ha ha, very funny. So which one of our neighbours has set you up to this then?” asked the man. “It'll be Gail and Frank, I'll bet you” grinned his wife. But the officers did not flinch and looked straight back at the couple without changing their serious expressions. “I'm afraid we often get this reaction Sir” said the woman officer. Her colleague continued “most households seem to be very unfamiliar with the legislation. It came onto the statute books earlier this year but I fear many home owners either claim to have had no warning or to have never heard of it. Of course, ignorance is no excuse and we are duty-bound to exercise our right to issue fines in accordance with our meter readings.”

“Your what?” laughed the woman. The male officer once again engaged his device which whirred and clicked until he was able to turn it for them to see. “Your Christmas lights are showing a reading of 118.6 and this is a category F breach of the code, which carries a £35 fine per twenty units and...” The officer was forced to trail off by howls of laughter from the pair, whose three children had all come to the door to find out what on earth was causing such a commotion.

“What's so funny Dad?” yelled one. “Why all the hilarity?” shouted the next. “Come on, let us in on the joke” urged the last. “These two pranksters are trying to tell us our Christmas lights are breaking some law or other and blah, blah something about breaching codes and being fined” explained Dad. With considerable difficulty, the female officer tried to get a word in edgeways, until finally she was able to make herself heard. “This really is no laughing matter, Sir. This is absolutely a very real and serious affair and something that we would ask you to attend to with immediate effect. You can escape the higher tariff fine if you are able to turn off the lights now, this very minute, or you can decide to continue displaying your lights after the cool-off period of one hour and incur the maximum penalty.”

The family looked at one another with an array of expressions ranging from amusement to anguish, and gave out feeble grunts and murmurs of disbelief mixed with mild panic. They were totally at a loss as to whether or not they had just been transported to another dimension, where reality was merging with fiction and everything they held dear was slipping away. The looks on the faces of the two officers and the device pointing out their transgression in cold, blue digital numbers, was just enough to convince them this was really happening.

The man walked slowly back into the depths of the house whilst the others stood in silence. Suddenly, all the bulbs, all the tubes of colour and sparkle ceased. The roof, the trees in the garden, the window frames and eaves fell into darkness and the male officer printed off an invoice from his device and presented it to the family. The door closed and the two officers returned to their car and drove slowly away.