Page 9 of The Wishing Tree Beside the Shor
Ryan’s untangled himself from the chain and is standing awkwardly at the edge of the people around the bench, shifting from one foot to the other like he used to when he was nervous.
He goes to say something, but the woman with pink hair plonks herself down next to me, not caring about the bird poo in the slightest. ‘Ooh, I like your hair.’ She reaches out to twirl a bit of the blue hair that’s sticking out from the knot at the back of my head. ‘Blue always comes out green for me.’
I can’t take my eyes off Ryan. The intense sunshine is making his forehead prickle with sweat, and we’re just sort of staring at each other in a daze. He used to sweat when he was nervous too. But it’s obviously just the sun – it’s not like he’d be nervous about seeing me again. He’sgorgeousand I’m a sheep-poo-ridden disaster.Hedidn’t humiliate himself and run away fifteen years ago.Hehasn’t spent fifteen years thinking about me and subconsciously comparing every other relationship to what he had with me.
‘People say I’m too old for bright-coloured hair,’ Tonya is carrying on without waiting for an answer. ‘But I’m not having any of that. Age is nothing but a number, isn’t that right? I go into town to get it done every few weeks – the brighter the better to pee off the haters.’ She does something with her fingers that’s either a peace sign or some kind of gang overlord symbol.
Ryan’s chewing his lip and trying not to laugh, his eyes not leaving mine as I blink up at him, the sun stinging my eyes and making them water.
‘I can’t believe you’re here, Fee. I never thought I’d see you again,’ he says when Tonya stops talking about the various hair colours she’d had recently.
He takes a step closer, like he’s going to bend down to hug me, and I’m all of a dither. Do I get up and risk putting my bare foot down on this sheep-poo-covered ground? What about the bird poo I’ve probably sat in? I’m going to have to furtively make sure that hasn’t left any marks behind.
‘No!’ The woman returns with my now-clean shoe and a kneeling pad, which she throws onto the ground and kneels on in one swift movement, lifting my leg and slipping the shoe back onto my foot like it’s a glass slipper and I’m some sort of poo-ridden Cinderella.
‘Do you two know each other?’ Tonya looks between me and Ryan.
‘We used to work together,’ I say.
‘She was my greatest friend,’ Ryan says at the exact same moment.
‘I was?’ I say before I can think about it.
‘Good as new.’ The woman with the shoe declares before Ryan has a chance to answer, sitting back on her knees and looking satisfied with her work.
She gets up and she and Morys get their hands on my elbows and pull me to my feet, and the momentum propels me headfirst into Ryan.
His arms come up to steady me, wrapping tightly around my shoulders and pulling me to him, and I realise it’s a hug. He’s hugging me. Ryan’s hugs were always a force to be reckoned with, and the surrealness of this situation makes my brain sputter to a halt and hug him back, my hands rubbing over the smooth curves of well-defined shoulder muscles and a strong back through his grey T-shirt. I breathe in his still so familiar scent, a mix of sea air and some kind of earthy cologne.
‘Oh my God, Fee,’ he murmurs in my ear, the sound so low that I’m not sure if I’ve heard it or felt it. ‘You look amazing. I’ve missed you.’
I have to bite down on my lip to stop tears prickling at my eyes.He’smissedme? At first, I missed him like half of my body had been ripped away. When I moved away, I didn’t know what to do with myself without him. I looked at his number in my phone so many times and wondered what it would be like if I pressed dial. But I never did. I couldn’t after the kiss.
I croak out something that hopefully bears a resemblance to ‘Missed you too.’
It must have been intelligible because his arms tighten around me, squeezing me as tightly as you’d imagine such muscular arms could squeeze and rocking us from one foot to the other, just like he used to.
I lose track of time as we stand there, still lost in the weirdness of this situation, of the chance encounter in exactly the same spot I last saw him. I can’t compute that he still lives here or that when I laughed at the idea of protestors chained to trees, it washimall along. And I’m still half-certain that this is all a hallucination brought on by heatstroke or overexposure to the tang of prunes that Morys is now funnelling into his mouth.
Ryan’s arms get impossibly tighter. ‘My Fee,’ he murmurs, making my legs feel decidedly weak. ‘I don’t believe it. I don’tbelieveit … And I appear to have accidentally turned into Victor Meldrew.’
It makes me laugh out loud and disentangle myself from him so I can take a step back on knocking knees. I blink up at him as he holds a hand up to shield his face from the sun, grey-blue eyes smarting in the light, a wide nose, and dark stubble covering his jaw. Pale lips that are so full you’d think he’d had something done to them, but they’ve always been naturally like that, the kind of lips that are impossible to look away from, and even though I’dneverrepeat it, that familiar urge to kiss him tingles again, apparently not deterred by the fact he’s undoubtedly married by now.
‘Of all the protests in all the world, you walk into mine.’ His voice sounds as shaky as I feel, and it buoys my confidence that maybe heisa little bit nervous too.
‘Yours?’
‘Well, ours. I’m just helping these folks out. Can you imagine what kind of heartless, soulless company would want to put a hotel here?’
I gulp, and suddenly remember we’re not alone and take a further step backwards to put a bit of space between me and Ryan.
‘It’s our only outside space,’ Tonya says. ‘We know it’s a tad overgrown, but we still come out here to sit on the benches, and some of us do the flowerbeds …’ She gestures to the knee-height red bricks that form the walls of square flowerbeds, although they’re at least seventy-five per cent weeds now. ‘A lot of us chose this place solely for the view.’
It’s a huge area, big enough for the most luxurious of hotels, but there’s nowhere you could put a building without completely cutting off Seaview Heights. The land is overgrown, and it gets worse further away from the care home. Up here, it’s trampled and worn down around the row of rickety old benches on either side of the entrance, but the rest of the ground is lost to brambles and gorse bushes creeping in from the surrounding fields. Some of them have reached such heights that I have to lookupat them, and there are a variety of self-sown wild trees rambling away.
‘A hotel would block their view completely,’ Ryan says. ‘They’d have walls outside their windows. I can’t stand by and let that happen.’
‘So you … chained yourself to the tree?’ I nod towards the solid steel chain, still lying on the path where he discarded it, brambles on either side looking like they’ve been hacked away and are already making a resurgence.
