The Wishing Tree Beside the Shore: The perfect feel good romance to escape with this summer!

by Jaimie Admans

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It was mine, wasn’t it? When Henrietta first went downhill, I tried to carry on alone, but every day got harder. She had always been the heart behind our business, and without her …’ He trails off and shakes his head, unable to finish the sentence. ‘She had to move because this is an assisted living facility. The residents here have nothing more serious than regular pensioner niggles, but none of them require round-the-clock care. At first I’d vowed to keep the strawberry patch going in her honour, but my broken heart was no longer in it. The weeds crept in and my back gave out. The chap who owned Seaview Heights before Steffan was a good sort. He could see I was struggling and he offered to buy it as a garden area for the residents. A good price that allowed me to pay for Henrietta’s long-term care. It was good, in a way. Saying goodbye to the past to pay for the future she needed.’

  I’m captivated as he talks. ‘Maybe everything happens for a reason …’

  ‘You’re just like Ryan.’ He pats my hand. ‘Always looking on the bright side and saying things like that.’

  Why does that make me smile so much?

  ‘You two young folks just let me know what you need me to do.’

  ‘We need to get this online. We need to get people talking about it. A petition is one thing, but petitions are outdated now. We need a social media campaign – people from all around the world seeing our sycamore tree and sharing it and caring about it.’

  We sit there in silence for a moment as he thinks about it. I’ve not seen anyone else sit by him, and I’m not sure if he’s glad of the company or surprised by my intrusion.

  ‘It was always flyers when we were running the strawberry patch … Every summer in the weeks before we opened, we’d get thousands printed out and pop one through every letterbox in Lemmon Cove and the surrounding areas. And the local shops all displayed them in their windows. Kids used to take a handful with a punnet of strawberries and distribute them.’

  I go to tell him flyers are a bit outdated now, but I think about it for a moment. Flyers could be a good idea. Everything in this tiny village is outdated, and to find people connected to the tree, it’s the locals we need to target.

  I thank him as I get up and walk back down to the group. ‘Godfrey’s suggested flyers, and I think that’s a brilliant idea. Sending something out into the community. Something tangible. No one carves trees anymore because we know it can introduce pathogens and kill them, so I’m guessing the people we need to target will be closer to your generation than ours.’ I gesture between the residents and me and Ryan. ‘They might not be up on technology and social media, so flyers might be a good way to go. Through every door around the area. If nothing else, it will let people know what’s going on. And we need to create social media accounts for the tree with a memorable username and a profile photo.’

  ‘Gno—’ Mr Barley starts to say.

  ‘No depraved gnomes,’ I add quickly.

  I glance at the one he’s painting … Who knew gnomes could do that with a seed dibber? And who knew Boris Johnson could bend like that?

  ‘Just a nice photo of the tree, maybe with you lot standing underneath it. The tree can tweet about each carving and cross-post to its other accounts on Facebook and Instagram and wherever else young people are posting these days.’

  ‘Myspace!’ Mr Barley shouts. ‘Tinder!’

  Tonya, clearly the only one of the group who knows what Tinder is, tries to muffle her giggles.

  ‘Er, Fee …’ Ryan says. ‘It might be alive, but I don’t think the tree is quite sentient enough to run its own social media accounts.’

  I roll my eyes at him but I can’t help laughing. ‘We tweet on its behalf, obviously. One carving a day. We could take pictures and ask people to make up the stories behind them. Don’t you ever find messages written inside second-hand books and think about who wrote them and who they were intended for? I used to love coming here and imagining who all these people were and what the carvings meant. This is the sort of thing people would love if we shared it. Actually, imagination might be an even more important part. Something as big and old as this has had an unfathomable life. It’s living history. It bears traces of lives gone by. Tattoos of the thousands of moments it’s witnessed.’

  ‘This place was a hotbed for smugglers back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some of those marks could’ve been carved by pirates or bandits amidst all sorts of maritime mayhem. I remember learning about that in school and coming here on the way home and imagining all the people over the years who could’ve left a mark. Tweeting about stuff like this could get kids’ imaginations running wild.’ Ryan always had a way of making my ideas seem better than they are, and I’m grinning at him and he’s grinning back at me, and no one’s said anything for a good few minutes.

  ‘You’ve already got the right idea.’ I tear my eyes away from Ryan and turn back to the residents. ‘You’re sharing daily photos and trying to entertain people and get people interacting on your Facebook page, but we need to shift the focus to the tree and away from handmade gnomes doing surprisingly supple and mildly concerning acts of nature.’

  They all look forlorn, so I quickly add, ‘You can keep the gnomes as well, but maybe you could take photographs of them beside the tree to keep that at the forefront and not just showcase Mr Barley’s impressive talent with a paintbrush and the Kama Sutra of garden ornaments.’

  ‘Ooh, maybe I can expand my horizons into other garden decorations. We’ve got some concrete snails somewhere that would make excellent—’

  ‘Let’s turn this into capturing the imagination of local children and move away from where Mr Barley wants to put his snails,’ Ryan says.

  The idea of children’s imagination sets me off thinking again. ‘Hey, you can draw.’

  ‘I haven’t for a long while.’

  I cock my head to the side. Ryan was always creative and artistic. He loved working the soil of Sullivan’s Seeds, digging and growing and experimenting with new and unusual plants, and hated the bookkeeping and financial side of the job. ‘You could draw a sycamore leaf and we could print loads out …’

  ‘We could give them to children to colour in,’ Alys suggests.

  ‘Exactly!’ I feel buoyant by how much they’re embracing the idea. ‘The possibilities are endless. We could laminate them and get thousands of sycamore leaves circulating with our website address printed on the back. We could ask locals to display them in windows so everyone visiting the area will see them and wonder what’s going on. We could ask kids to draw their own sycamore trees and display them somewhere. Kids love getting involved with things like this.’

  ‘Children are our future,’ Tonya cries and starts warbling “Greatest Love of All” popularised by Whitney Houston.

  ‘Can we carve “HELP” in the ground so anyone flying over can see it? I’ve always wanted to do that,’ Morys muses.

  ‘I don’t think that’s … Actually, that’s not a bad idea. One of us could run down to the beach every morning …’ I glance at Ryan because, honestly, there’s only one person capable of tackling that hike and it’s not me. ‘We could write something in the sand so anyone walking along the coastal path would see it. Does anyone have a drone?’

  ‘My grandson does!’ Tonya stops singing. ‘He’s always making a nuisance of himself with it.’

  ‘It could be a great campaign video if we wrote “save our sycamore” in the sand and filmed the tide gradually washing it away with the tree in the background. It would make a great video clip to upload to our new YouTube channel.’

  I look up at Ryan and his eyes are warm and smiley. The group’s chatter fades away and something hovers in the air between us, so tangible that I think I’d feel it if I swiped my hand towards him.

  He blinks and takes a step backwards. ‘I’ll take some photographs.’

  ‘I’ll make a start on the website and social media accounts.’

  That look again. It’s like once my eyes lock on to
his, it’s impossible to tear my gaze away, like a thread is pulling me to him.

  ‘Fee …’ His tongue wets his lips, which shifts my gaze from his eyes to his mouth, and memories of Ryan’s mouth are not a good thing.

  I shake myself and spin around so I’m facing the residents again. ‘Let’s do this! Let’s save this tree!’

  I punch a fist into the air and they all do the same and then clutch at their shoulders with grunts of pain.

  I wonder if Harrison would let me claim muscle ache gel on expenses?

  Chapter 8

  ‘Domain name, anyone?’ I ask loudly.

  ‘Gno—’

  ‘Not gnomesdonaughtythings.com, Mr Barley,’ I say quickly.

  ‘Beach Battle-axes and, er, Battle-gents,’ Tonya suggests, her voice trailing off before she’s finished the sentence. ‘What’s the male equivalent of a battle-axe? I’ll ask online and see if anyone knows.’

  ‘Seaside Sycamore Tree?’ Alys suggests.

  ‘Ooh, that’s good.’ I do a quick google on my phone. ‘It’s available.’

  ‘I like it,’ Ryan calls up from where he’s taking photos of various parts of the trunk.

  ‘Seaside-sycamore-tree.com. All in favour?’ I ask, and I’m greeted with a chorus of “ayes”.

  A few clicks and I’ve paid a year’s fee for the website and set up a blog. I defiantly ignore Harrison’s angry face in my head. He is going to be thrilled when he discovers this protest has now got a website that it didn’t have before I came here.

  ‘Do you want to borrow my laptop?’ Ryan calls over without looking up. He’s still taking photographs by the tree, and Baaabra Streisand has unravelled a bit of her lead and mooched into the brambles for some fresh shoots to munch.

  ‘I’m going to ring my dad and ask him to bring mine down here,’ I say, watching as Cynthia edges closer with interest. ‘He doesn’t seem to get out much nowadays and it’ll be a good excuse to get him here. He can’t refuse a request from his second favourite daughter.’

  ‘Aww, you couldn’t be anyone’s second favourite anything, Fee,’ Ryan says without looking up.

  The sun gets inexplicably hotter. Well, something does. If I moved, there would probably be singed patches of grass underneath my feet.

  Baaabra Streisand is rustling around in the bushes when I get off the phone to my dad, who reluctantly agreed, and the residents have started drafting out slogans and campaign mottos, and Mr Barley’s got a gnome who’s baring its bum and is painting “seaside-sycamore-tree.com” on its bare bum cheeks, and no one has the heart to tell him that that is not child-friendly advertising.

  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 have ewe been 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 of it 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 …’

  ‘It has to! 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 lot more strawberry 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!’

  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 i
n 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.’