“Hmmm?”
“I wish you were here.”
She didn’t move her gaze from mine. “Be careful what you wish for. You might not be ready for it.”
* * *
“How doyou fancy helping me pull up a conifer this morning?”
I was the only one up apart from my dad, my body clock out of synch with reality. It was the one thing we had in common; we were both early risers. When I’d been little, before Marie, I would get out of bed early in the mornings, before the nanny, and slip downstairs for breakfast.
My father would already be down there, wearing his suit, reading the paper, grabbing a coffee before he headed into work, sometimes to leave us for several days while he had a case on or even just a heavy workload, which was most of the time. He would pour me a bowl of cereal and pass me a drink of juice, sometimes ruffle my hair, sometimes not depending on how rushed he was. I was only four.
We didn’t talk. I don’t think he knew how to talk to children. Or at least to me.
“You planted Seph over night?” It was too much to resist.
Dad chuckled. “It’s a good thing he takes all your digs as a sign of affection, else we’d have him in daily therapy.”
“You mean we don’t?” I grabbed a coffee from the machine. I was going to use the gym they’d had kitted out for us when we visited and for Mum and Dad to pretend to use, but digging up the conifer would be better.
Dad laughed, lines I hadn’t really noticed before visible round his eyes. “We can’t afford it!”
I followed him outside where a couple of spades were lay on the ground, a few ditches already dug next to the tree to try to loosen the roots. For what felt like forever, under a grey sky, we dug and loosened soil, occasionally lifting an axe to try to split the trunk.
Our words were in the way we moved around each other, the passing of a spade or a bottle of water, shared weight of our boots as we pivoted the spade to try to break the roots away from the soil.
By the time Mum was outside, bringing us more coffee, we’d pretty much decided we were beaten for the day. I was sweaty and scratched and I felt that I’d just done ten days training in one morning. Tomorrow we’d agreed we’d finish the job, unless Max and Jackson decided they were going to end it and take all the credit.
“When do you find out where you’re going?” My dad said as we sat down to drink our coffee.
I shrugged. “Next week I’d think. I’m wishing we were just doing longer in Africa though.”
He nodded. “That was always your favourite place. It was your mother’s too.”
I snapped my head round. He never spoke about her. It wasn’t because of Marie; when we’d been younger she encouraged us to talk about her, look at pictures, find out things about her so she stayed real in our head, although for me she became a story book character because my memories of her were so weak.
“She went to Africa?”
“Twice. Once to see her friends in Casablanca. Another time we went to Egypt to Cairo and the pyramids. We then took a cruise down the Nile.
“I never knew.”
He shrugged and I saw myself in the gesture. “Why would you? I never told you.”
The silence between us felt weighted.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” It was then the floodgates started to creak open, heavy and rusty, the first trickle of water with the words.
I didn’t think he would answer.
“I couldn’t talk about her, Callum. I felt guilty.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
He shook his head. “I know. I didn’t give her the tablets. Or tell her to take them. I tried to get her to see someone because I knew she wasn’t right but she refused. By the end, she didn’t speak to me.”
I hadn’t known that. I didn’t remember. “Why didn’t she speak to you? Because you worked too much?”
