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LATER DAD SAID, “LET’S TAKE A WALK. LUKE? You coming?”

We walked across the common, along the open grass, following a path through wide ancient trees and skinny white tree trunks and tangled brambles and bracken. Magpies bounced and flew away in a clearing where we found a bench. The bench leaned backwards and was sinking into the soft ground.

Dad nudged me. “What’s that boy’s name?”

“Sam,” said Luke. Dad rolled his eyes at him. He wasn’t supposed to answer.

“What’s wrong with him anyway?” said Luke.

Dad sighed. He shook his head. “It’s not that there’s something wrong with him; he just can’t see and hear. Is that right, Cally?”

I nodded.

Luke spun his Frisbee and ran after it. He threw it again towards a girl twirling round a low tree branch.

Dad folded his arms. We sat and watched an old man stoop and shuffle across the open space between the trees. Trees grew higher up out of a steep bank past the long summer grass. A long way off you could see the tops of banks and churches in town.

“Used to be a lake over there,” Dad said, pointing, “just beyond the trees. Swan Lake it was called. When I was a kid I used to take my model boat there. I made it myself.”

Dad laughed. “It sank. It’s probably still down there, rotting away. They closed the place down ages ago. I can’t remember why.”

He didn’t talk like this very often any more. I liked it. I leaned against him.

“There was a miniature steam train that used to run around the top.” He leaned over and pointed at the high trees. He laughed again. “Some of us kids didn’t have a penny between us, so we’d jump on the back when the driver wasn’t looking.”

He looked at me, smiled. “I used to make up stories about having my own train, and who I’d take with me to the places I wanted to see: mountains and waterfalls and lakes, the glaciers in Iceland.”

In my mind’s eye I could see him leaning from a train window, the rattling, thumping beat of wheels against the tracks.

“All kids make up stories, about all sorts of things. I think it’s just because they wish things were different.”

He nudged me. “I wish things were different too.”

And for a minute I thought if Dad wished things were different that meant he’d talk about Mum and remember her, and make it feel like she was here. And I was ready to say, OK, Dad, can we get the photos out and talk about Christmases and birthdays and holidays together and get your guitar and try and sing Mum’s songs so it wasn’t like she’d never been here at all?

And then Dad said, “But we’ve got to forget the past and making up silly stories. It’s all part of growing up.”

He sounded like Mrs Brooks so I didn’t listen. Maybe she’d told him what to say. Instead I watched Luke fling his Frisbee, closer and closer to the girl in the tree who was hanging upside down by her knees.

Dad went on. “So first job is to paint your bedroom. What colour do you want?”

Now the girl was going round and round the branch; her long brown hair flicked after her. Luke leaned on the tree.

“Pink, I suppose,” Dad said. “Girls like pink, don’t they?”

I kicked a pile of rabbit poo on a hump of grass by the bench. When you haven’t been speaking for a little while, even though the colour of your bedroom is normally really important, it just doesn’t seem to matter. I shrugged. I know he just wanted me to say something. Not anything that was really important though, not anything he didn’t want to hear. Actually, I didn’t like pink any more. You sort of grow out of it. I tried to imagine my bedroom any other colour but pink and the boring old book-page colour it was.

I watched the girl sit up on the branch, Luke climb up beside her. She pulled her hair band down round her neck, straightened her hair and put it on again.

“Are you still not speaking to me? After everything I just said?” Dad said.

Dad leaned back; we both leaned with the bench as it sank further. Dad stood up and found a stone to put under the bench leg where the concrete had crumbled.

“Must be all the rain we’ve been having. Worn it away. I should talk to the Council about that,” he muttered, looking around as if somebody might be nearby and he could tell them to fix the problem.

He sighed and looked at me. “You know, sooner or later you’re going to have to speak. How else are you going to get what you want?”