‘Before you go anywhere,’ Dad took Mum’s teacup and placed it back on the tray. ‘We’ve got a surprise for you.’
‘I think you’re going to like it,’ she added, a happy pink flush in her cheeks.
It was exactly what they’d said when they told me Mum was pregnant with Jo. If she hadn’t been very vocal about going through the menopause several years ago, I would have been quite concerned.
‘Come on, this way.’ Dad stood up and beckoned me through to the conservatory. I followed as he opened the French doors and made his way down to the bottom of the garden.
‘Shoes on,’ Mum ordered as I made to follow in my bare feet. ‘It rained earlier and the grass is wet. I don’t want you catching your death on your first day home.’
‘It’s a thousand degrees out there now,’ I muttered but I did as I was told, going back to the kitchen for my trainers before following them outside. Ducking low under the washing line, I met them both at the bottom of the garden.
‘What do you think?’ Dad asked, gesturing to a new shed with an out-of-character flourish.
I looked at the shed. Mum looked at the shed. Dad looked at the shed.
‘It’s a shed,’ I stated.
‘It’s not a shed,’ Dad said with a stern look. He produced a shiny silver key from his pocket and waved it in front of my face. ‘Go on, open her up.’
Tired as I was, I took the key and offered them a wan smile in an attempt to show willing before I blocked up their Jacuzzi jets with half a bottle of Mum’s Badedas. There was an upside to your dad running a company that installs bathrooms and that upside was the massive soaking tub in their en suite that I’d been dreaming about for the duration of my overbooked, overnight flight, stuck in the middle seat of the middle row for eight very long hours.
I pushed open the flimsy door.
It was not a shed.
It was every item from my childhood bedroom, taken out of the house and painstakingly reconstructed in a damp, prefabricated structure at the bottom of my parents’ garden. Double bed, wardrobe, chest of drawers, Postman Pat beanbag and all.
‘I – I don’t get it,’ I stammered, looking back into the garden where my parents beamed back at me. How had they got my enormous knotted pine bedframe into this tiny space? ‘Why is all my stuff in here?’
‘You know your dad loves a project,’ Mum said, gazing up at my father with an expression I’d only ever seen in our house that time we all watched Memoirs of a Geisha. It was an uncomfortable evening and I didn’t care to be reminded of it. ‘He built this all by himself!’
‘Peter Mapplethorpe helped a bit,’ Dad corrected reluctantly.
‘Are they repeating Grand Designs again or something?’ I asked. I lingered in the doorway, key still in hand, so confused.
‘Yes but that’s not the point,’ Dad replied, gently but decisively shoving me inside. ‘What do you think?’
What did I think?
All my books were there on my bookcase, from Enid Blytons to my Sweet Valley Highs, via a few well-worn Virginia Andrews and a copy of Judy Blume’s Forever that had a spine so cracked only I could tell which book it was without looking at the cover. All my CDs were stacked up next to my boombox and a legion of cuddly toys stared at me from the top of the wardrobe. Even my beloved terracotta oil diffuser from the Body Shop was in there. I wrinkled my nose at the tiny bottle of Fuzzy Peach oil that stood sentry beside it. It was practically rancid at the time, God only knew what it would smell like now.
The whole thing was altogether too much for my jetlagged brain to handle, like I’d walked out of the garden and into 1997. Wait, was that what had happened? I wondered. What if this wasn’t some sort of bizarre art installation, ‘Child’s Bedroom in a Shed’, but actually a time machine Dad had built at the bottom of the garden? He did spend an awful lot of time by himself and he was very handy.
‘If you go through that door, there’s a bathroom,’ he explained, sliding past me and the pine wardrobe that matched my bed in both design and gargantuan proportions. ‘It’s small but perfectly formed, just like your mother.’