Page 66 of The Wishing Tree Beside the Shor
‘Every year.’ He laughs when I look at him in disbelief, his ice blue eyes twinkling up at me. ‘On behalf of the campsite, my assistant and I usually form a team and recreate the campsite in sand. A few tents, a couple of campervans, I did a real campfire one year but I used a bit too much kindling and they disqualified me for putting the safety of the other contestants at risk.’ He uses his hands to mime an explosion.
I can’t help laughing at how serious he is.
‘We came runner-up once, but my dream is to win. I want that trophy outside the main entrance to the campsite.’
‘Oh, how times have changed. Once upon a time, you wanted the world, Ry. Now you want to win a sandcastle competition.’
He finally looks up and meets my eyes. ‘I want to win a sandcastle competition withyou, Fee. I want to put that winner’s certificate up and remember our victory together every time I walk into my office.’
My knees go weak and I tell myself it’s just delayed response to the climb down, nothing more. ‘And if we don’t win?’
‘Not winning is not an option.’
‘We just walked past a bloke building an alligator out of sand! I think not winning is very much an option. Someone over there is practising sculpting wheels for a car!’
He ignores me. ‘The strawberries will go here. Oversized, of course. I was hoping they’d allow red powder paint and real leaves, but we’ll work with what we’ve got. Can you find some branches to represent the tree?’
There’s a row of stones at the top of the beach that are always covered with debris left by the tide, and I leave Ryan still figuring out the best place to put a moat, despite the fact that Seaview Heights doesn’t have a moat, and head up there, joining a few other partners doing the same thing.
‘A mermaid.’ One woman smiles at me with a shell in her hand.
‘Tree,’ I say, picking up a few twigs.
‘Don’t you just love Lemmon Cove?’
I give her a tight smile, and it takes me until I’m halfway back down the beach with a handful of twigs and some driftwood to stop and look around. The squares are filling up and when I glance back up the cliffside, there’s a steady stream of people making their way down.
Yes. Yes, I do.
This place is wonderfully, charmingly weird. I used to think it was a bad thing. My younger self was embarrassed by the quirkiness of Lemmon Cove, but now I think everyone needs this kind of enchanting chaos in their lives. Harrison and my colleagues in London will never understand what it’s like to feel part of a community like this. They will never know the joy of seeing people take sandcastles so seriously.
It’s ten o’clock when the klaxon sounds to start building, and Ry and I leap into action. He starts digging out the moat, while I start scraping sand into a bucket and upturning it into the area he’s marked out for the care home, but most of it misses and falls into the moat so he has to dig it out again. I don’t seem to have lost the knack I had years ago of knowing which tool Ryan needs before he has a chance to ask for it, and there’s much passing of spades and sculpting tools, most of which look like they belong on a cake-baking show and Alys will almost certainly want a photo of for “Guess the Gadget”.
We are a team of well-organised, master sandcastle builders who are clearly going to win.
A couple of hours later, my confidence is somewhat waning.
Ryan’s carving out windows from a block of sand that in no way resembles Seaview Heights, and I’ve got my hands around a vaguely boob-shaped strawberry that bears absolutely no likeness to the fruit at all. Any fruit, that is, not just strawberries. To be honest, they look like some kind of amoeba you’d expect scientists to find in a horror movie about alien life forms on Mars.
‘Ry, do you ever get the feeling this isn’t going very well?’
‘No, it’s going great.’ He sits back on his knees and surveys the mess in front of him. ‘That part where half the building has fallen into the moat isexactlywhat I had planned, and that flood from where you threw the bucket of seawater into anywherebutthe moat is just what we were going for. I’d say we’re right on target.’
I’m biting my fist in an attempt to contain my giggles. ‘I thought you said you do this every year!’
‘I …’ He pauses mid-sentence with his mouth open and his hands gesticulate as he tries to explain. ‘By “me” I meant “my company”, and by “do” I meant … supervise while my assistant does it because he’s good at this sort of thing, and I’m … not.’ He looks down at the sloppy sand with an expression of resignation. ‘As you can tell.’
The giggles get the better of me and I end up howling with laughter.
The tree looks like someone’s melted a reindeer. The twigs sticking out of the sand-trunk have a hint of “broken antler” about them, like someone’s put a chocolate reindeer in the oven.
I look around at the competition, who all seem to be faring much better than us. ‘Oh, look, that guy’s doing Mount Rushmore but with cats. Someone’s built the Pyramids in actual size.’
‘Actual size in a seven-by-seven metre square?’
‘You know what I mean. And now he’s sculpting Cleopatra to go with them.’
I meet Ryan’s eyes and we both burst into giggles again.
