He pushed the plate towards me. ‘Do you have a plan? One that doesn’t result in I don’t know, killing us all?’
‘I’m going to try Dad,’ I replied, still very certain the wish was the thing. It was time to zero in on Steven Baker like an off-brand Terminator. Age: sixty-five. Profession: retired lawyer and enthusiastic Wikipedia editor. Known weakness: Tia Maria, spy novels specifically set in and around World War Two and those sad films where a dog saves someone’s life then dies at the end. But what would he wish for? I had no idea. ‘He asked me to go for a walk with him the other day and I said no.’
‘You think your dad’s ultimate wish is to go for a walk with you?’ Manny scoffed. ‘Wow, someone rates herself.’
‘I think that’s a good way to find out what he might have wished for,’ I replied, flicking his ear as I stood up. ‘Can you help Mum get lunch ready while I’m out? She shouldn’t have to do all of this on her own.’
‘Sometimes I think feminism has gone too far,’ he warned. ‘But yes, I suppose I can help, if only to guard the pantry.’
‘We thank you for your service,’ I said before calling to my parents across the room. ‘Oi, Dad, I fancy a bit of fresh air. Do you want to go for a walk?’
My mother and my father stared at me. Mum’s Hobnob broke in half and disappeared into her tea as my dad leaned forward and squinted in my direction.
‘Who are you and what have you done with my daughter?’
‘Oh you card,’ I laughed, only sounding slightly hysterical. ‘I’ll go and get dressed. Be ready in ten?’
‘I don’t care if you’re a pod person, I’ll take it,’ he replied, slapping his hands on his thighs. ‘Care to join us, Emmanuel?’
Manny looked up from his comfortable position on the settee and pulled a face.
‘I’d rather carve out my spleen with a reindeer antler.’
‘Noted,’ Dad replied with a nod. ‘It’s just me and Gwen then.’
‘Father and daughter, out for a nice walk with no ulterior motives,’ I said brightly. ‘What could be more fun?’
‘Not blowing up the house?’ Manny suggested, earning a slap across the back of his legs as I skipped out of the living room and ran upstairs to get changed.
For as long as I could remember, I couldn’t wait to get away from Baslow.
Life in the village was stifling, you couldn’t so much as sneeze without everyone hearing about it. And if growing up under a village microscope wasn’t frustratingenough, nothing guaranteed radical unpopularity in secondary school like having a teacher for a mother. Who wants to go round to a teacher’s house after school? Who invites the teacher’s kid to a party? No one who’s planning to have fun at said party, that’s who. Add to that the trauma of being Cerys Baker’s little sister and you had the perfect cocktail of reasons a teenager might to want to escape. Six years older and a thousand times better than me at every last little thing on the face of the earth, there was evidence of Cerys’s accomplishments everywhere I turned. Her photo on the wall at school, her prizes lined up on the shelves at home. Not that Mum and Dad put pressure on me to outperform my sister (as if that was even possible), most of the time they were too busy with work or dealing with Manny to worry about what I was up to. He wasn’t a bad kid in the grand scheme of things, but he was certainly a self-described ‘handful’. And who could blame him? If I’d lost my dad and been abandoned by my mum, I imagine I’d indulge in a little under-the-slide-at-the-park cider-drinking myself, but existing somewhere in between Cerys and Manny meant dedicating my entire existence to keeping the peace. Getting out of the village seemed like the quickest route to finding something that was all mine and I couldn’t wait to cover the countryside with concrete, fill in all these wide-open spaces and lose myself in tall buildings and fast walkers.
‘What’s the plan?’ I asked, following my dad over the fence at the bottom of the garden. The low winter sun sparkled on the frozen fields before disappearing behind a bank of clouds, and for the first time I found myselfappreciating the comforting colour-palette of Baslow, all soft greens and warm browns. The limestone cottages and old oak trees, all gussied up with a little festive charm – a string of fairy lights here, a tasteful holly wreath there. It was beautiful, where I was from.
‘No plan,’ he replied, tapping his leg with the walking stick I’d watched him unwrap for the fourth time that morning. ‘I like to wander.’
‘Yes, but where to?’ I pressed. ‘You have to be wandering somewhere.’
‘Nowhere. Wherever I feel like. And when I’ve had enough, I turn around and come back home.’
This was confusing. My father was a man who had a back-up plan for his back-up plan. He did not waste a second of his time, billable or otherwise, yet here he was, meandering off into the fields with a big grin on his ruddy-cheeked face.
Unfortunately for him, I was very much my father’s daughter.
‘Seriously though, where are we going?’ I asked again. ‘Because if we’re going to be out longer than half an hour, I need to go back for snacks.’
Dad feigned a look of shock. ‘You mean you haven’t brought any?’
‘More snacks,’ I clarified as I pulled a Wine Gum out of my pocket and popped it into my mouth.
Across the fields, a few shafts of sunlight sliced through the clouds to paint Chatsworth House a gentle yellow-gold and beckoned us onward.
‘Let’s head that way,’ Dad said, flicking his stick at the stately home in the distance. I nodded in agreement, following as he took long, confident strides along thehard ground. ‘Nice to get out, isn’t it? Get some fresh air into your lungs.’
‘Very nice. The only fresh thing you’ll get in your lungs around mine is the scent of …’ I paused when I saw the look of dismay on his face, ‘… fine city living.’
‘That takes us to my next question. How are things going in the flat?’