Page 29 of The Wishing Tree Beside the Shor
I yelp in surprise again when Baaabra Streisand jumps out at me.
‘I think your sheep has finally murdered someone,’ I call out to Ryan while backing away slowly in case I’m her next intended victim.
‘Side-splittingly hilarious,’ he calls back without looking up.
‘Seriously, Ry, she’s got red all round her mouth. You should see this in case it’s something to worry about.’ Rabies? Eating rodents from the bushes? I shudder at the idea of what might be lurking in those brambles.
He puts his phone down and walks up the path towards me.
‘Hello,ewe.’ He rubs her head and gets the sheep between his legs and bends over to look at her face, quite happy to stick his fingers into her mouth to examine her. ‘What haveewebeen up to?’
‘You kept the sheep solely for the ewe puns, didn’t you?’
‘It may have been a deciding factor.’ He laughs while poking around in her mouth. ‘Well, it’s not blood. It’s …’ He eventually removes a bit of greenery from between her teeth and holds it up.
‘Is that the …’
‘… Munched hull and stem of a strawberry?’ His lip curls up as he looks at it, and quickly throws it into the bushes and bends to wipe his hand on the grass.
‘All right, who’s been feeding strawberries to the sheep?’ He addresses the group of residents. ‘Fruit messes with her digestion – you know that. If this is because you want more fertiliser for the hydrangeas …’
No one owns up. There’s a longer chorus ofit wasn’t me’s than that song by Shaggy.
Baaabra chooses that moment to slip away from between Ryan’s knees and tangle herself back into the bramble bush she came out of.
‘So where did she get a …’ He meets my eyes and realisation dawns on us both at the same moment and we turn in the direction of the sheep’s snuffling.
‘We’re standing on a strawberry patch.’ His eyes light up and his whole face follows. ‘Fee! We’re standing on a strawberry patch!’
‘And strawberries grow in the shade of other plants.’ I feel his excitement spreading to me too. ‘Does this mean …’
‘Ithasto! Some of the plants must still be living! Morys?’ He dodges around me as he runs up and takes the walking stick from the old man, currently sitting on the flowerbed wall and painting a cardboard sign that says “May peas be with you.” ‘All right if I borrow this a minute?’
He comes back with the walking stick, shoos Baaabra back towards the tree, and starts whacking at the brambles.
‘Here, let me.’ My arm presses against his as I get close to him and my fingers cover his hand and take the walking stick out of his grasp. Instead of whacking at the spiky bushes, I insert the walking stick at roughly the spot where Baaabra emerged and use it to gently prise apart the thorny branches until there’s a gap and we can see a bit of the ground.
‘Look at the serrated edge of that leaf. That’s a strawberry leaf.’
He shuffles closer and ducks his head until it’s practically leaning against mine so he can see what I’m seeing. I don’t think standing at this proximity to Ryan is doing my cardiac health any good, so I pull the walking stick out and ram it in a couple of inches over, using the leverage to gently part the bush so we can see what’s living underneath it.
Or uncovering a nest of adders, knowing my luck.
‘Look,’ I say as the walking stick pushes the thorns aside and a ray of sunlight shines down into the bush. ‘That is unmistakably a strawberry.’
Once again, Ryan ducks so near that his head is almost on my shoulder. He’s so close that his breath makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up as we both look down at the crown of green leaves with a red berry standing tall above them, a little white at the edges where it isn’t ripe yet.
‘And look, it’s got runners coming from it …’ he whispers, like speaking at normal volume will break the spell and frighten it away.
‘… Which means there are probably more.’ I finish the sentence for him.
‘And that’s nowhere near where Baaabra was just now …’
The possibility hangs in the air. Could there really be a lotmorestrawberry plants still alive in the undergrowth?
Tonya, Alys, and Ffion have come down to see what we’re doing, and Ryan takes the walking stick out of my hand and the three women stand with me and watch as he walks a few paces down the pathway, chooses a spot in the bushes and jabs the walking stick in and carefully wriggles open a gap in the brambles.
‘There’s another one. And I might be able to …’ He crouches down and slinks a hand into the bush, wincing as thorns catch his skin, before returning with a strawberry held between his fingers. ‘Look at this!’
