Page 30 of The Wishing Tree Beside the Shor
There’s a lot of green-to-white skin on the unripe fruit, obviously struggling to ripen with the lack of sunlight under the bramble bushes, but the possibility of them simply existing under all these weeds is phenomenal.
Ryan throws the walking stick to me, and I squeeze past the ladies and use it to part yet another area of thick-knitted brambles. ‘They’re here too!’
Ryan looks up and our eyes meet, his looking bright with excitement and I know the same look is reflected on my face. I’ve drifted down to stand next to him again, and his green and herby cologne like a mix of bamboo and eucalyptus is swirling around me, blending with the unripe berry scent as he rolls it in his fingers.
‘Ooh, I love strawberries,’ Alys says, jolting me out of the mind-swimming closeness to Ryan. ‘That reminds me, I’ve got an apple corer that I must take a photo of for “Guess the Gadget”.’
The randomness makes me giggle and I’m momentarily distracted from Ryan’s closeness until his arms slide around my waist and I freeze. At first I think he’s giving me a hug and my fingers twitch with the urge to slide them over his sun-warmed arms and squeeze, but thankfully I feel the heavy metal of the chain resting around my middle before I do anything stupid.
His hands are at my front, hooking the silver clasp onto one of the chain links. ‘Will you stay here while I run across to the campsite and get some tools? We’ll cut down these bushes and see what’s happening under there.’
‘Of course,’ I rasp, my mouth so dry that it feels like I’ve taken a mouthful of the sandy beach below.
His arms are gone from around me as quickly as they appeared, and the chain left in their place is weighty and cold through my T-shirt.
‘Back in a sec.’ He trips on the chain and I have to plant my feet wide apart to stay upright. He mumbles an apology and rights himself, nearly crashing headfirst into Godfrey, who’s hobbling down the path to see what’s going on.
He takes the strawberry as Ryan rushes off and holds it up, examining it like a cashier might examine a twenty-pound note for being a forgery.
‘He’s single, you know,’ Tonya sidles up to me.
‘Godfrey? He’s married to Henrietta, isn’t he?’
She smacks my arm lightly. ‘You know I meant Ryan.’
I laugh. ‘That’s very interesting information that is in no way, shape, or form relevant to me in any way whatsoever.’
Tonya’s hands shoot to her hips. ‘Isn’t it now?’
‘Isn’t nature amazing?’ Godfrey interrupts, barging through the middle of the ladies and saving me from what was undoubtedly going to be an awkward conversation about my love life, or lack thereof. ‘Look what happens when you leave the earth to get on with it. I never thought I’d see a strawberry growing in these parts again.’
‘They must’ve been there all along,’ Ffion says.
‘Strawberry plants don’t live that long. They pass their best after about five years and you have to replant. We did it several times over the course of running the patch.’
‘Yeah, but they send out runners that root into the soil and form new plants,’ I say. ‘You never dug up the old plants?’
Godfrey shakes his head.
‘Then potentially they could have carried on growing and producing young plants, which kept growing and producing more young plants. There could be enough of them to compete with the brambles and that’s why they’re still going.’
‘So this could be from the great-great-grandson of one of my plants.’ He bounces the strawberry in a shaky palm. ‘This strawberry could be my grandson.’
It seems like a serious moment and I try to bite back the laugh, but Alys lets out a giggle and it starts us all off, and as I stand there laughing with four old people about the possibility of a fruit being a long-lost relative, I feel the tightness that was in my chest loosening, and for just a moment, it feels like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.
The idea of strawberry plants still living under all this mess fills me with fizzing joy, and I’m bouncing on the balls of my feet, waiting for Ryan to get back and find out if there really are as many strawberry plants as there has the potential to be.
‘Hello? Fliss?’ My dad appears at the metal fence and pokes his head round nervously, holding up my laptop bag like it’s a shield.
Cynthia bolts up with such speed that you can almost see sparks as the Zimmer frame feet hit the ground. ‘Dennis!’
Dad looks taken aback as he stutters out a greeting and asks her how she is and how many years it’s been.
I purposely hang back, hiding behind Alys and pretending to be too absorbed in following the trail of strawberry runners to have noticed his arrival. I remember him talking about Cynthia. A friend from work, he’d called her. I remember Cheryl teasing him when I visited a few years ago, before he retired. Since then, he doesn’t really talk about anyone. I refuse to rescue him yet.
The three women look at me watching and sense that there’s something theretowatch, because all eyes swivel to where Cynthia has got her hand on my dad’s arm and is chattering away, and Dad has gone from looking uneasy to getting involved in the conversation and the sight makes the sun’s heat spread to my chest.
‘Dennis!’ Ryan comes rushing back in and nearly trips over the Zimmer frame.
