Page 53 of The Wishing Tree Beside the Shor
‘None of this would be happening without you.’ His lips press into my neck as he speaks, brushing against my skin, and I let my elbows press into his back too, warm through his vest top, and it’s a good job my hands are dirty or I’d not be able to stop myself sliding them over his muscular shoulders.
His lips find my neck again and his arms get even tighter when my knees go weak, and I can feel his smile against my skin, doing nothing to improve the situation.
Getting headbutted by a sheep is one thing, but Ryan Sullivan’s lips on my neck was definitelynoton my agenda during this trip.
Chapter 12
It’s a couple of days later, and between us, Ryan and I are laying the fabric down on the paths between plants, and so far there’s been a lot of shouting of the Chuckle Brothers infamous quote when moving something long, a lot of giggling, and probably not enough weed fabric laying. The Seaview Heights residents are all occupied. Ellis has come back again and has taken over sign-making from Mr Barley and is painting signs that advertise the strawberry patch, Alys is making up words you can have in Scrabble on a game with her friend through her phone after correctly identifying a garlic mincer this morning, and Mr Barley has moved on from garden gnomes and is now making a Boris Johnson scarecrow to keep the birds away.
‘I don’t know why he insists on them always being naked,’ Tonya muses in the middle of setting up for the arrival of her grandson to film the campaign video. ‘We had an argument this morning over it being inappropriate with children visiting the patch, and he reluctantly agreed to put lingerie on it. I don’t understand why. Have youeverseen Boris Johnson in lingerie?’
‘I’m glad I’ve got cataracts,’ Morys says.
‘The gnomes were bad enough, but now he’s thinking of having the whole political party as scarecrows too.’
‘Not much different from the actual government then.’ Ryan gives me a wink.
‘Oh no, now he’s making a sign for the scarecrow telling the birds to do something unspeakable with their own beaks!’ Tonya rushes off towards his workstation, waving her fist and yelling, ‘For heaven’s sake, there could bechildrenhere!’
My phone beeps with a message and I let go of my half of the weed-proof fabric roll to look at it.
‘Oh my God, Ry, listen to this,’ I say as I read the message. ‘The mum of that boy from Cheryl’s class has sent me an email. It wasn’t just that he was conceived here. They’d been trying for a baby for over two years, and they’d had tests and seen specialists, but no doctor could pinpoint the problem. One day they were walking their dog along the coastal path and they made a wish on a sycamore seed for a child, and then she says they both got a tingling feeling at the back of their necks andknewthat they should, y’know, do the deed there and then.’
‘It’s the dog I feel sorry for. I bet he didn’t know where to look.’
In what could have been a dignified and emotional moment, I let out an ugly snort of laughter, and Ryan grins at me. He was always abnormally proud of making me laugh at inopportune moments.
I’m trying to frown at him but it isn’t helping. ‘And it worked. She did a test a couple of weeks later and it was positive.’
He raises an eyebrow. ‘It’s a nice story, but it’s just coincidence. The tree didn’tgivethem a baby.’
‘I know. It might be a special old tree, but no tree can dothat. They believe it did – that’s what matters. People believe in magic when they see this tree. That’s something everyone needs in this difficult world. That childlike wonder … That belief that when you throw a sycamore seed from the clifftop, in the long seconds it takes to spiral down, youbelievea wish is going to come true – something that we’re all too old to believe in anymore.’
‘I’m not too old to believe in magic!’ Cynthia shouts from where she’s taken over arranging our marketing materials into organised piles.
A little while later, a fifty-something couple come into the strawberry patch holding hands. ‘We met through the tree. Can we share our story?’
Tonya is immediately on hand with a notebook and pen. Ryan and I are still fiddling around with weed-proof fabric and setting out paths. We’ve reached quite near to the entrance by now so we listen too.
‘When I was nineteen, I was being a big show-off and I fell out of the tree and broke my arm,’ the man says. ‘We met in the fracture clinic at the hospital.’
‘And I was eighteen,’ the woman continues. ‘My younger sister wanted to make a wish but there were no sycamore seeds on the ground so I climbed up to get her one, and when I jumped back out, I misjudged it and broke my ankle.’
I hold my finger out towards Ryan, jokingly scolding him. ‘This is why I keep telling you to be careful.’
He closes his hand around my pointing finger and folds it down gently. ‘You always did take better care of me than I took of myself.’
Instead of letting go like I expected, he lets our joined hands swing between us, jiggling mine around like he’s trying to get my attention even though he’s already got it. He doesn’t seem to want anything. He’s just sort of playing with our joined hands, and even though we’re both dirty from the digging and definitely shouldn’t be holding hands, I don’t attempt to extract my fingers.
‘While I was sitting in the waiting room at the hospital, this one—’ the woman juts her thumb towards her husband ‘—gorgeous lad with a broken arm that he was, sat down next to me, and started talking. And we both realised we’d had almost the exact same accident. Such a coincidence.’
‘We had a good chat in the waiting room, but that was it, we were called to our separate appointments. I’d been hoping to catch her on the way out, but she was in a wheelchair because of the ankle and her parents had wheeled her away before I came out – they thought I might be a bad influence, what with our penchant for falling out of trees. It had felt like serendipity that we’d both fallen out of the same tree, and I couldn’t stop thinking about her.’
‘I couldn’t stop thinking about him either. I was feeling sorry for myself and he’d made me laugh and forget about the ankle for a while. I’d been trying to delay leaving because I was hoping to catch him again too, but my parents were having none of it and rushed out of there.’
‘And then, like fate was playing a hand itself, when we went back two weeks later for our follow-up appointments while the injuries were still healing, lo and behold, there she was again.’
‘My uncle had taken me to the appointment instead of my parents that time, and he was quite happy to wait while we had a coffee in the hospital cafeteria.’
