Chapter 5
The number rings six times before there is another click, another pause, and I’m not sure if we’ve been cut off.
“Hello?” Jess says into the silence.
A robotic female voice asks us to “Please leave a message after the tone.”
“Hi.” My wife shoots me an awkward look. “My name’s Jess, I just found an old phone with this number in it and I wanted to return it to the owner?”
Callum chooses this moment of distraction to lean over and grab two of his little sister’s last remaining chips.
Daisy’s voice is squeaky with outrage. “He stole!”
I point a finger at my son. “Callum, give Daisy her chips back please.”
He reluctantly drops them back onto her plate.
“Anyway,” Jess says, momentarily thrown. “Could you give me a call back if you get this?”
She stabs the red icon on her phone’s screen to end the call, sits back in her chair, and raises her plastic cup of Prosecco.
“Looks like I won our little bet, so I think I’ll put my feet up.” She gives me a triumphant grin. “Cheers.”
“Double or quits?”
“No chance. Anyway,” she says, “back to your secret room—we should get someone in to give us an estimate on the work. Not yet, but when we’re properly settled in.”
“What work?”
“Taking that wall out. Opening up the space will add another four feet in width so it will fit a double bed with ease.”
The thought of incurring more expense at the moment gives me a cold feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach.
“You think we should just get rid of it?”
“Of course.” She shrugs as if the answer is obvious. “Why wouldn’t we?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “It might be historical or something. It’s quirky. A bit different.”
She frowns. “A turret is quirky, Adam. A sauna cabin in the garden is quirky. A windowless top-floor room you can barely stand up in is just a waste of space.”
“Aren’t you even a little curious about the bits and pieces up there?”
“This house is full of bits and pieces—they’re everywhere you look.
There’s a toilet brush left behind in the little bathroom that would have to be carbon dated to figure out how old it is.
And some of the junk in the garage is older than all of us put together.
Are you suggesting we keep all of it for curiosity’s sake? All this random stuff?”
“Of course not,” I say. “Some bits are more interesting than others, that’s all.”
Leah gestures at me with a long chip on the end of her wooden fork. “Just because it’s old, Dad, it doesn’t make it interesting.”
“Sometimes it does.”
It was an exchange we’d had many times on holiday, when I’d insist on at least one day trip to the nearest castle as a historical interlude to the beach and the swimming pool.
Or as Leah tended to call it, “dragging us all around a pile of boring old stones.” They were not always the most popular days of the holiday but I hoped that maybe, maybe, a little bit of the history bug might rub off on my children.
Although there wasn’t much evidence of that yet.
“Or it just means no one’s got around to getting rid of it.” Leah puts her red-and-white Converse up on a cardboard box, leaning back. “Uh-oh. He’s got that look, Mum.”
“I know,” Jess says, offering one last piece of fish to the cat. “Don’t encourage him.”
I hold my hands out, palms up. “What look?”
“You know.” Leah dips another chip in brown sauce. “That look you always get when you’re taking things apart, or fixing them.”
“Feels like you two are ganging up on me.”
“You quite like it though, don’t you, Dad?”
“What?”
“The annex, the secret room, whatever you call it. You’ve always wanted a man cave, haven’t you?”
“I’m not sure it is a man cave.”
“What is it then?”
“Don’t know yet,” I say, reaching for one last chip. “But I’m going to find out.”