I wake up feeling refreshed and ready to face the day.
Okay, that’s a lie. I wake up with my spine bent in ways I didn’t know it could bend, having got about two hours of fitful sleep in total, while the “bed” slowly deflated underneath me. It’s now half the size it was when I threw a duvet onto it last night, and it’s ten o’clock, which is two hours later than the usual time I have to dash out of my flat and face the demoralising crush of rush hour on the tube.
I left my phone on Cheryl’s dressing table, and when I pick it up, there’s a text from Harrison telling me to do my best, and after I didn’t reply to that, there’s a voicemail telling me I’d better not be having a lie-in because I’ve got work to do.
I don’t think it counts as a lie-in if you’re still trying to get comfortable when the sun comes up. I send him a quick reply saying I’m purposely being late so as not to arouse suspicion, and can’t help wondering why he thinks I need reminding to do my best. Don’t I do my best every day?
Probably not, actually. Most days are a constant stream of reminding myself that pouring hot coffee down people’s necks is considered bad and hoping to get through the day relatively unscathed.
When I’ve had a shower, I throw on my best casual seaside visitor look of three-quarter-length trousers and a vest with lace roses on the straps. I need to look as un-businesslike as possible. Nothing can tip the protestors off about my real job.
Dad’s downstairs and he comes over to give me a hug. ‘You don’t look like you’re eating well enough.’
He forces me to sit at the kitchen table and puts a cup of tea and a slice of his homemade roasted peach pie in front of me.
I take this to mean that I look like I survive on shop-bought sandwiches and cereal for dinner every night, and that’s reflected in my wobbly waistline and complexion that would make a teenager cringe. But I’m not in work so I’m not making it worse by putting on make-up if I don’t have to. I’m just going to have to hope that the old folks’ eyesight is bad enough not to be able to make out every acne scar and red mark that may or may not erupt into a volcano-style spot.
Cheryl’s already gone to work. I know because she tripped over my feet where they were sticking over the edge of the “bed” as she got ready this morning, and I try to get Dad talking about what she said last night, but he constantly turns the conversation back to me and how I’m doing, and when I question him on the protest and who’s running it, he doesn’t know either.
It’s a ten-minute walk to the strawberry patch, and I try to persuade Dad to come with me, but he says something about needing to make a loaf of bread. It’s weird to step out of my dad’s house in the morning sunshine, like I’ve gone back in time fifteen years and I’m on my way to work at Sullivan’s Seeds. I did this every day for four years of my younger life, from the age of sixteen when I started to twenty when I left.
The sea air fills my lungs as I walk down the street, intermittent trees in dark green leaf for summer, birds pecking at red berries in the wild cherry trees that are interspersed with the hedgerows opposite, and I frighten off a flock of sparrows from a bird feeder as I walk past one of the neighbour’s gardens and out onto the main road. Even “main road” is a misleading term in these quiet Gower villages, as the cars are few and far between, and mostly full of families enjoying the summer holidays with bikes and colourful surfboards strapped to their roof racks as they head to the beaches further along the Welsh coastline.
The sycamore tree is on the horizon, a beacon visible for miles from its spot on the clifftop, overlooking the Lemmon Cove beach. Seaview Heights care home looms over the car park, and a big metal gate to the left lets me onto a wide cobblestone path that gently slopes towards the sea on the horizon, not giving any hint of the steep and rocky path that lies ahead. Only people with strong ankles and a high level of fitness attempt to reach the beautiful, unspoiled Lemmon Cove beach. The gate clangs as I close it behind me. There’s a slice of cardboard tied to it with “Save Our Garden” painted in big red letters, and someone’s attempted to draw a flower underneath it but it looks more like a cauliflower in the middle of a murder scene.
Ah ha, the campsite. To my left is a neatly cut hedgerow and I stand on tiptoes to see over the top to fields that stretch out for miles, some with tents pitched here and there, and further over there are campervans parked up on the lush green ground. No wonder the campsite owner is protesting. A luxury hotel across the path from his campsite is going to have a hugely detrimental effect on his business.
On the right-hand side, hidden from the coastal path by a hedge that’s so overgrown I can’t see over it, is the land that used to be the strawberry patch. I loved strawberries and I loved the seaside – what could be better than a pick-your-own strawberry patch on the way down to the beach? And with the sycamore tree on the edge overlooking the sea as well … I can’t imagine the number of hours I must’ve spent here.
There’s vague chatter and noise from behind the hedge so I walk further down the cobblestone path to a gap in the hedgerow that used to be smooth double wooden gates hooked open on summer days, a wide and welcoming entry to the strawberry patch and the sycamore tree, but now the space is filled by haphazard metal fencing, those temporary panels that builders put in place to keep people out of building sites.
A few of the care home residents are milling around in the garden area. There’s an old woman sitting on a bench, and one standing in front of her having a natter while she leans on a Zimmer frame. There’s a man walking around with a placard that reads “Make peas, not war”, but I can’t work out what pea puns have got to do with saving a strawberry patch. One old man is on his knees on a kneeling pad, doing something to a pair of garden gnomes, two men are sitting on the wall of what was once a raised flowerbed playing a board game, and one woman is sitting on a rickety-looking bench looking at her phone.
Something lets out an extended “baa”.
Another cardboard sign with “No Hotel Here” scrawled on it in brushstrokes of red paint is tied to the metal fencing, and the rusty panels are joined by a loose chain that’s hanging open. I shift one aside and squeeze through the gap, wondering what sort of protest this is if they’re sitting around playing board games. I’d expected to see them chanting and marching with their billboards and petitioning in the streets. I turn around to push the metal panel back into place, and when I turn back, there’s a walking stick pointed at my chest like a bayonet.
I gasp and take a step back in alarm, and every eye in the garden area has turned to me.
‘Who are you and what do you want?’ The man holding the walking stick brandishes it at me. God knows what he thinks he’s going to do with it. The rubber-capped end is coated in mud, so maybe stain me? He’s certainly not going to cause much bodily harm with it.
‘I’m Fel …’ My voice comes out squeaky and I have to swallow before I try again. ‘I’m here to join the protest. I’m Felicity. I’m visiting my dad and heard about what was going on, and I want to help.’ I give them the lie I’ve been practising all night, except in my head, I was self-assured and confident and my voice didn’t wobble at all.
The white bricks of Seaview Heights reflect the sun arching across the sky from the east. There’s a neat hedge surrounding the walkway around the building, and then it opens out onto this couple of acres of land that gently slopes towards the cliff edge and the humungous tree.
‘The thought of it being ruined by a hotel is unthinkable.’ That part isn’t a lie. What is Harrison thinking in trying to buy this land? What are the hotel company thinking in wanting to destroy this area? It might not look like it used to when it was a strawberry patch, but it’s got to be the best view in the south of Wales. Uninterrupted panoramic views, the sea stretching all the way along the horizon, endless dunes and craggy cliffs that form the borders between different Gower beaches, soft waves lapping at long stretches of golden sand many metres below us, and in the distance, the weather-beaten wooden remains of a ship’s hull, still buried beneath the sand from an eighteenth-century shipwreck.
The walking stick is removed from my chest and the old man leans on it as he takes a step back, and the woman who was sitting on the bench with her phone gets up, a head of baby-pink curls bobbing as she comes across. ‘Who’s your father? Do we know him?’
‘Dennis Kerr.’ Everyone in this village knows everyone. It’s the kind of place where if you’re lucky enough to live here, you don’t want to leave, so most of the residents have been here for decades.
‘Fliss! Dennis’s oldest daughter!’ A woman with curly greying hair approaches. ‘I remember you! Haven’t you aged! Oh, and you’ve grown into your boobies nicely! Congratulations!’
‘Ffion!’ I finally make the connection while simultaneously trying not to die of embarrassment and dissolve into a fit of giggles at proportionate boobs being something worthy of congratulations now. She used to run the ice cream van that stopped in the car park and I went to every day on my way home from the beach.
‘Oh, I am sorry, bach. I’m Morys.’ The man with the walking stick introduces himself. ‘Didn’t mean to startle you. We’re expecting someone from that awful property developer’s London office to come and try to buy us out. With the number of retweets our last message to the world got, Ryan thought it might be this week.’
Ryan. The name makes my blood run cold, but it’s a common name. In the fifteen years since I left, twenty-six Ryans could have moved to Lemmon Cove. There’s no way it can be the same Ryan.
The sycamore tree is on the lower left side of the garden area, a path to it has been cut through the brambles … or possibly chewed, because that’s where the baa-ing was coming from. A sheep is eating the vegetation at the base of the tree, next to a thick silver chain wound around the huge trunk. They weren’t joking when they said people were chained to trees. I just never realised it would be this tree.
I see a flash of grey T-shirt and dark hair as someone jumps out of the branches and lands on the ground, but I’m distracted by the care home residents coming over to introduce themselves.
‘I’m Tonya,’ the pink-haired woman says. Her phone is permanently in her hand as she waves her arm around, gesturing to each person and telling me their names. ‘That’s Cynthia with the Zimmer frame and Mr Barley is the one with the gnomes, and—’
And then it happens. A voice cuts through the air and the whole world stops.
‘Fee?’
If my blood ran cold before, now it turns to ice and stops running completely. There is only one person who has ever called me that. Back then, people at school and work called me Felicity, I was always Fliss to my family, but Ryan Sullivan called me Fee from the first time we met, and it stuck.
I don’t realise my eyes have closed, but when I open them again, he’s coming up the path from the tree towards me, and I force myself to blink again to make sure I’m not hallucinating.
It’s definitely him. Older and more rugged than he was fifteen years ago, but I’d know his voice from just one word. It’s a voice I’ve barely stopped thinking about for fifteen years.
I feel frozen in time as I turn towards him. I’ve pictured this moment so many times. What it would be like to see him again. How calm and composed and non-awkward I’d be. How we’d laugh about old times, and I’d congratulate him on his undoubtedly high-flying life and he’d tell me he always knew I’d go places and do great things in my career, and I wouldn’t be the gawky awkward teenager with too many spots and a blazing crush on him. In my fantasies, I’ve always lost a couple of stone, got glowy skin, non-frizzy hair, and chic clothes that fit perfectly, not gape at the hips and stretch so much to accommodate my boobs that the stitching is liable to burst apart at any moment.
In reality, my breath immediately leaves my lungs and my knees start shaking.
‘Fee, is that really you?’ He laughs a disbelieving but not unhappy-sounding laugh, picking up speed as he comes towards me. ‘I don’t believe it!’
‘Are you all right, dearie? You’ve gone all pale. Shall I fetch some water?’
I mumble something to the well-meaning lady, but Ryan has blazed through every thought and every molecule of my body. Something pulls me to him like a magnet, and I picture myself running down the path and into his arms, a moment of reunion akin to the lift at the end of Dirty Dancing.
What actually happens is my foot plunges into a pile of sheep poo, which squelches across my ballet flats, and one of the old ladies screams in horror.
At the exact same moment, the chain that’s secured to the tree at one end and around Ryan’s waist at the other reaches the end of its tether and yanks him backwards, causing the sheep to baa in annoyance.
‘I’m still as undignified as ever,’ he says with a bright grin in my direction, and I could be mistaken, but it looks like his hands are shaking as they fumble to undo the chain around his middle.
He couldn’t be nervous of seeing me as well, could he?
I don’t have time to think about it because I’m suddenly swamped by care home residents.
‘Oh dear, such messy animals.’ One lady bends down to slip my shoe from my foot, leaving me hopping around on one leg, while one of the men puts a hand on my elbow and guides me to the nearest bench, forcing me down onto a wooden slat covered by what looks suspiciously like bird poo. Honestly, within two minutes here, I’ve encountered more poo than anyone ever needs to encounter before half past ten in the morning.
The woman who took my shoe rushes back towards Seaview Heights with it held aloft, and another man appears seemingly from the bushes with a Pooper Scooper and comes to collect the offending clump of sheep poo.
‘Good for the hydrangeas!’ he tells me gleefully, rushing off with it held out in front of him like he’s won a prize.
Another man is pacing around in front of the bench on “Sheep poo watch” in case there are any more unspotted clusters lurking in the undergrowth.
I’ve never known sheep poo to cause so much excitement before.
Is this really happening? This is nothing like my fantasy. I look awful. I’m wishing I’d put on full-length trousers or shaved my legs this morning, because the combination of three-quarter-length trousers and my current look is more yeti than sultry. It’s the first day in years that I’ve left the house without make-up on, and the hot morning sun is making me glisten, and not in the good way. I can’t remember running a brush through my hair, I just scragged it back and tied it in a knot. I was trying to look beachy and casual, not like I was about to see the love of my life for the first time in fifteen years.
I mean, no, he’s not the love of my life, obviously. He was just a teenage crush. A flirtatious, fun highlight of my life for nearly four years, but it wasn’t love. Can it ever really be love if it isn’t reciprocated? And despite all signals to the contrary, it clearly wasn’t.
Just thinking about it makes me go even redder than I am anyway. Why is he here? What is he doing here? No matter how much I used to like him, I’d quite happily have never seen him again after the way I humiliated myself fifteen years ago. And now he’s here. Literally chained to a tree in the middle of this protest that I somehow have to infiltrate. It was a bad enough plan without Ryan Sullivan smack-bang in the centre of it.
Ryan’s untangled himself from the chain and is standing awkwardly at the edge of the people around the bench, shifting from one foot to the other like he used to when he was nervous.
He goes to say something, but the woman with pink hair plonks herself down next to me, not caring about the bird poo in the slightest. ‘Ooh, I like your hair.’ She reaches out to twirl a bit of the blue hair that’s sticking out from the knot at the back of my head. ‘Blue always comes out green for me.’
I can’t take my eyes off Ryan. The intense sunshine is making his forehead prickle with sweat, and we’re just sort of staring at each other in a daze. He used to sweat when he was nervous too. But it’s obviously just the sun – it’s not like he’d be nervous about seeing me again. He’s gorgeous and I’m a sheep-poo-ridden disaster. He didn’t humiliate himself and run away fifteen years ago. He hasn’t spent fifteen years thinking about me and subconsciously comparing every other relationship to what he had with me.
‘People say I’m too old for bright-coloured hair,’ Tonya is carrying on without waiting for an answer. ‘But I’m not having any of that. Age is nothing but a number, isn’t that right? I go into town to get it done every few weeks – the brighter the better to pee off the haters.’ She does something with her fingers that’s either a peace sign or some kind of gang overlord symbol.
Ryan’s chewing his lip and trying not to laugh, his eyes not leaving mine as I blink up at him, the sun stinging my eyes and making them water.
‘I can’t believe you’re here, Fee. I never thought I’d see you again,’ he says when Tonya stops talking about the various hair colours she’d had recently.
He takes a step closer, like he’s going to bend down to hug me, and I’m all of a dither. Do I get up and risk putting my bare foot down on this sheep-poo-covered ground? What about the bird poo I’ve probably sat in? I’m going to have to furtively make sure that hasn’t left any marks behind.
‘No!’ The woman returns with my now-clean shoe and a kneeling pad, which she throws onto the ground and kneels on in one swift movement, lifting my leg and slipping the shoe back onto my foot like it’s a glass slipper and I’m some sort of poo-ridden Cinderella.
‘Do you two know each other?’ Tonya looks between me and Ryan.
‘We used to work together,’ I say.
‘She was my greatest friend,’ Ryan says at the exact same moment.
‘I was?’ I say before I can think about it.
‘Good as new.’ The woman with the shoe declares before Ryan has a chance to answer, sitting back on her knees and looking satisfied with her work.
She gets up and she and Morys get their hands on my elbows and pull me to my feet, and the momentum propels me headfirst into Ryan.
His arms come up to steady me, wrapping tightly around my shoulders and pulling me to him, and I realise it’s a hug. He’s hugging me. Ryan’s hugs were always a force to be reckoned with, and the surrealness of this situation makes my brain sputter to a halt and hug him back, my hands rubbing over the smooth curves of well-defined shoulder muscles and a strong back through his grey T-shirt. I breathe in his still so familiar scent, a mix of sea air and some kind of earthy cologne.
‘Oh my God, Fee,’ he murmurs in my ear, the sound so low that I’m not sure if I’ve heard it or felt it. ‘You look amazing. I’ve missed you.’
I have to bite down on my lip to stop tears prickling at my eyes. He’s missed me? At first, I missed him like half of my body had been ripped away. When I moved away, I didn’t know what to do with myself without him. I looked at his number in my phone so many times and wondered what it would be like if I pressed dial. But I never did. I couldn’t after the kiss.
I croak out something that hopefully bears a resemblance to ‘Missed you too.’
It must have been intelligible because his arms tighten around me, squeezing me as tightly as you’d imagine such muscular arms could squeeze and rocking us from one foot to the other, just like he used to.
I lose track of time as we stand there, still lost in the weirdness of this situation, of the chance encounter in exactly the same spot I last saw him. I can’t compute that he still lives here or that when I laughed at the idea of protestors chained to trees, it was him all along. And I’m still half-certain that this is all a hallucination brought on by heatstroke or overexposure to the tang of prunes that Morys is now funnelling into his mouth.
Ryan’s arms get impossibly tighter. ‘My Fee,’ he murmurs, making my legs feel decidedly weak. ‘I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it … And I appear to have accidentally turned into Victor Meldrew.’
It makes me laugh out loud and disentangle myself from him so I can take a step back on knocking knees. I blink up at him as he holds a hand up to shield his face from the sun, grey-blue eyes smarting in the light, a wide nose, and dark stubble covering his jaw. Pale lips that are so full you’d think he’d had something done to them, but they’ve always been naturally like that, the kind of lips that are impossible to look away from, and even though I’d never repeat it, that familiar urge to kiss him tingles again, apparently not deterred by the fact he’s undoubtedly married by now.
‘Of all the protests in all the world, you walk into mine.’ His voice sounds as shaky as I feel, and it buoys my confidence that maybe he is a little bit nervous too.
‘Yours?’
‘Well, ours. I’m just helping these folks out. Can you imagine what kind of heartless, soulless company would want to put a hotel here?’
I gulp, and suddenly remember we’re not alone and take a further step backwards to put a bit of space between me and Ryan.
‘It’s our only outside space,’ Tonya says. ‘We know it’s a tad overgrown, but we still come out here to sit on the benches, and some of us do the flowerbeds …’ She gestures to the knee-height red bricks that form the walls of square flowerbeds, although they’re at least seventy-five per cent weeds now. ‘A lot of us chose this place solely for the view.’
It’s a huge area, big enough for the most luxurious of hotels, but there’s nowhere you could put a building without completely cutting off Seaview Heights. The land is overgrown, and it gets worse further away from the care home. Up here, it’s trampled and worn down around the row of rickety old benches on either side of the entrance, but the rest of the ground is lost to brambles and gorse bushes creeping in from the surrounding fields. Some of them have reached such heights that I have to look up at them, and there are a variety of self-sown wild trees rambling away.
‘A hotel would block their view completely,’ Ryan says. ‘They’d have walls outside their windows. I can’t stand by and let that happen.’
‘So you … chained yourself to the tree?’ I nod towards the solid steel chain, still lying on the path where he discarded it, brambles on either side looking like they’ve been hacked away and are already making a resurgence.
‘For as long as the site’s occupied, they can’t swoop in and steal it.’
‘What about at night?’ I remember several incidents where Harrison has sent men in to secure protest sites when the protesters drop their guard and go home at night.
‘I’m here all day, every day. Sleeping here, eating here, I go home for showers when one of this lot will cover for me.’
‘Sounds uncomfortable.’ I try not to show my surprise. When Harrison said people were chained to trees, I didn’t think he meant actually living in the tree itself.
I look past him to where the sycamore tree sits on the cliff edge, so close to it that from here you’d imagine the roots to be coming out of the rocks themselves, but close up, it’s further from the edge than it looks, and surrounded by a sturdy barrier keeping everyone safe from going over.
‘We’re expecting someone to come and offer us blood money any time now,’ Ryan continues. ‘Those property developers have no morals. They think money solves everything, and they’ll do anything, no matter how morally corrupt, to get what they want without a second thought to the human cost involved.’
I gulp.
‘Like that tree could ever have a price.’ His face shows every emotion and none of them are good. ‘Three hundred years old, visible for miles across the sea, a guiding light that’s stood here since times so long ago that we can’t even imagine them. Not even Mr Barley, and he’s about the same age.’
From across the garden, the man who’s finished rearranging his gnomes and is now sitting on his kneeling pad sticks a finger up at Ryan with a grin.
I catch sight of his gnome arrangement and nearly do a double-take. The male gnome is painted to look like Boris Johnson and the female one is reaching across … Blimey, what is Theresa May’s hand doing down there? And why does Boris look like he’s enjoying it so much?
‘Aw,’ Tonya sighs. ‘He’s already done that one but with Margaret Thatcher and Ed Miliband. We need more inventive gnome sex positions! Gnome sex positions, anyone?’ She claps her hands to get the attention of the group. ‘Suggestions on my Facebook page to get people talking!’ She turns back to us. ‘Anyhoo, I must go and photograph them. My Twitter followers will be waiting for today’s update.’ Tonya rushes across to the gnomes, and I can feel Ryan’s eyes on me.
‘Welcome to the land of fabulous mad old people.’ He leans down to whisper in my ear, making me jump with his sudden closeness. ‘You’ll get used to it. Gnome sex positions are a regular topic of conversation around these parts.’
Gnomes or not, talking about sex positions with Ryan is a bit too much for me and there’s a genuine possibility I might be about to spontaneously combust.
‘And I’m not sure that was the best choice of words. These people spend far too much time thinking about gnome parts.’
Either I’m delirious or it’s the most hilarious thing ever, and I let out a guffaw so loud that every eye in the vicinity swivels towards me, including the sheep’s. A guffaw, for God’s sake. I don’t guffaw. I’ll be tittering and chortling next at this rate.
Ryan obviously takes pity on the guffawing fool and changes the subject.
‘Are your dad and sister okay?’
He’s still so nice. He was always the kindest, most caring guy. No matter what he had going on in his own life, he always checked to make sure my dad was okay after my mum died. Always kept boxes of Sullivan’s surplus fruit and veg to make sure he was eating well. Cheryl was still young when I knew him, and he’d always buy her toys and have more fun playing with them himself before he gave them to her. He was like an older brother, always looking out for us. I swallow back the lump in my throat. ‘They’re fine. Just well overdue a visit.’
‘Oh my God, Fee. There’s so much to talk about. I don’t know where to start.’ He runs a hand through his hair like he always used to – surprising that someone’s little habits don’t change over so many years, and surprising me by how natural the instinct is to reach out and grab his hand, like I always used to when he went to do it with compost-covered gardening gloves on.
My nails make crescent shapes in my palm as I force myself not to be so stupid. ‘So how are you? I didn’t think you’d still be—’
‘What’s this? What’s this?’ A lady with long champagne-blonde hair rushes down from the care home waving a phone around. ‘I lost the last round, I can’t lose this one too!’
She stops to show the phone to Tonya and Mr Barley as she passes them, and then she spots me and Ryan. ‘Ooh, young people, you might know!’
No matter what she’s talking about, it’s quite nice to be considered a young person. Generally that term stops when you creak your way out of bed every morning and feel too decrepit to shop in Primark.
The long-haired woman is out of breath by the time she reaches us and pushes her phone in front of us. ‘What is it?’
On the screen is a photograph of some household object, but she whisks the phone out of sight as the two men abandon their board game and come over and Cynthia on the Zimmer frame hobbles this way, and Tonya pulls Mr Barley up from his seat and they all gather round.
The woman must notice my look of bewilderment because she holds out a hand and shakes mine. ‘I’m Alys. I play “Guess the Gadget” with my friend in the next county over. We send each other photos of household objects and score points for each one we get right, and she’s beating me by nine points at the moment. I’m not letting her outfox me on this one too!’
The phone is passed between all of them and they chatter about what the mystery object onscreen could be. Eventually someone’s holding it under my nose again, and Ryan steps closer to see the screen over my shoulder, and his closeness once again makes something inside me sputter to a halt. If I was made of electrics, a circuit board would’ve definitely just fried.
I’m hyperaware of his presence. His tall frame behind me, six-foot-one of solid muscle, so close that I can feel the brush of the dark hairs covering his tanned arm against mine. It takes all I have to remember how to breathe. Of all the ways I thought this day might go, trying to identify household gadgets with Ryan Sullivan standing so close I can feel his body heat certainly wasn’t one of them.
‘Isn’t it a cherry pitter?’ I say, trying to focus everything onto the phone screen in front of me and not the warm body behind me.
‘Oh, yes, I think you’re onto something there.’ Tonya nods her head of pink curls.
‘Yes! It can’t be anything else!’ Alys claps her hands together. ‘Fantastic! Thanks, Felicity!’
I go red even though the ability to identify a cherry pitter isn’t exactly something impressive.
‘As I said,’ Ryan whispers into my ear. ‘The land of fabulous mad old folks.’
It makes me laugh again, especially when he steps back and the distance allows me to take a much-needed breath. I hadn’t realised I was so perilously close to passing out from lack of oxygen.
‘How long’s it been since you two saw each other?’ Ffion peers at both of us.
‘Fifteen years,’ we say in perfect unison, and our eyes meet over the sea of old people between us.
‘I didn’t think you’d ever come back,’ he says without dropping my gaze, a smile tilting his lips. ‘You must have such a glamorous life. Didn’t think I’d ever see a high-flying career girl from the big city back in this little village. What are you doing now?’
‘I’m a—’ Oh God, I can’t tell him. I can’t tell any of them. The one thing they cannot know is where I work. They’ve made it quite clear what they think of companies like Landoperty Developments and how open they’d be to the idea of someone turning up and offering them a wodge of money in exchange for giving up the protest. They cannot know who I am or why I’m here.
Alys is texting her friend the answer to “Guess the Gadget”, but all the others are still surrounding us, and I’m squirming under their expectant gazes. They’re going to be suspicious if I don’t come up with something soon. It can’t feasibly take this long to remember what you supposedly do for a living and I look around desperately for inspiration.
One of the care home staff is making her way down from the building towards us, carrying a tray of cakes and cups of tea.
‘A chef!’ I say it so suddenly that I make myself jump, and two of the old folks glare at me in fright. One of the board game men takes his hearing aid out and gives it a whack.
A chef? What the heck am I thinking? Of all the fake careers I could possibly have chosen, why on earth did I say that one? I can’t cook for toffee. I definitely can’t cook toffee. Does toffee even need cooking? Why have I gone off on a toffee-related tangent when these people are standing around thinking I’m a chef? The most complicated thing I can cook is a Pop Tart. And that usually ends up burnt.
‘Oooh, where do you work?’ Tonya asks.
‘A restaurant. In London.’
She looks at me expectantly, like that’s plainly not enough info.
‘It’s called Riscaldar.’ I remember a property my boss sold last year. ‘I’m kind of an assistant, a kitchen manager, a waitress … I do a bit of everything.’
Why didn’t I think this through? I spent so long last night practising everything I was going to say, but it didn’t once cross my mind that they’d ask about my job.
Ryan quirks an eyebrow up. ‘A sous chef?’
What the heck is a sous chef? ‘Er, yeah, one of them.’
He lowers that eyebrow and raises the other one. ‘You? You didn’t used to be able to make a piece of toast without needing the fire brigade on hand.’
‘That was one time! And it wasn’t my fault that a passer-by saw smoke coming out the window and called 999! And the blame was half yours for distracting me!’
‘You’d set the timer knob for ten minutes. A block of ice would’ve charcoaled in that time.’
‘I’m not sure ice quite works like that when you heat it up.’
He grins. ‘Well, you’re the chef – you’d know.’
Tonya’s looking at her phone and making impressed noises. ‘Ooh, it says that rich and famous people eat there. Who’s the most famous person you’ve ever met?’
Oh God, did she have to google it? ‘Oh, I don’t really—’
‘Holy moly, those prices! It’s a good job they display them on the website or people would be having heart attacks all over the place when the bill came.’ She hands the phone around to show everyone. ‘It looks so fancy. Who knew a girl from Lemmon Cove had done so well?’
They give me a round of applause. They seriously give me a round of applause for working in a posh restaurant I’ve never even been to. All I did was sort out Harrison’s paperwork when he sold it.
It won’t be the disaster it seems to be, I tell myself. All I have to do is find this youngster and all this will be over. It’s not like I’m going to have any reason to prove my occupation. It’s a couple of days and then I’m out of here again, because I can already feel the need to put as much distance as possible between me and Ryan Sullivan.
‘Seriously, how’d you get into that?’ he asks.
‘I, um …’
‘No wonder you knew the cherry pitter.’ Alys finishes her text before I have a chance to think up a response to his question. ‘I’m going to come to you for all my “Guess the Gadget” needs.’
Oh no. I’m going to have to start studying up on household appliances. They’re going to expect me to know what everything is now. Let’s hope they don’t play “Guess the Gadget” too often.
‘Wow.’ Ryan runs his hand through his hair yet again. ‘Of all the things I imagined you doing now, that was absolutely the last one.’
Me too. Trust me on that. Although the thought that he’s imagined me doing anything is nice. I thought he’d have tried to erase every memory of me from his mind. ‘What about you?’
‘Nothing as interesting as cooking for the rich and famous. I do this and that. Odd jobs around the area. And I—’
‘There’s nothing Ryan can’t fix,’ Ffion interrupts. ‘He unblocked my loo last year and it’s been working like a charm ever since. Seaview Heights has got him on a retainer to fix all problems.’
‘Thanks, Ffion, I really wanted the person I haven’t seen for fifteen years to think of me up to my knees in the sewage tank.’
‘Glad to be of service.’ Ffion salutes him as his sarcasm goes over her head, but I can’t help giggling.
‘The level of excitement in this village hasn’t changed then?’
‘What a day that one was. I’m not sure I’ve ever recovered.’
I can’t get my head around him still being here. It’s the opposite of what Ryan wanted to do with his life. Not that I can talk. Collecting Harrison’s dry-cleaning wasn’t exactly my greatest ambition either.
The nurse who came out sets the tray down on the flowerbed wall, and the elderly gang start hobbling across for cakes and cuppas, leaving me alone with Ryan.
‘And I own that over there,’ he carries on like this is not an unusual situation to be in. He lifts a muscular forearm and points across the hedge.
I follow his finger and push myself up on tiptoes because I must be missing something. All I can see is the campsite, fields and fields of static caravans, campervans, and tents, all spread out with little amenities buildings at the edge of each field.
He cannot mean the campsite.
I glance back at him. He doesn’t appear to be joking.
‘You’re the youngster?’ I say without thinking.
He looks confused.
I am terrible at this. ‘I overheard some village gossip,’ I say quickly. Village gossip is a believable excuse for anything in this village. ‘Said a youngster was running the protest and stirring up all the old ’uns.’
He laughs a gentle rumble of a laugh. ‘I’m only a youngster by comparison to that lot. And I assure you, it’s them stirring me up. This was all their idea. I’m just helping out because, well, the youngest of ’em is seventy-seven, they can’t be spending hours chained to a tree every day, and if we leave the site unoccupied, those underhanded property developers are going to prevent us getting back in.’
I try to ignore how sick that makes me feel, and pretend that I haven’t thought about him on every birthday that’s passed. I know he’s thirty-eight now, three and a bit years older than me, and definitely not a youngster. From Harrison’s description, I was expecting a teenager to swagger in wearing a black mask with a skull on it and a can of spray paint in one hand. He is nothing like the protest leader I was expecting, and nothing like the kind of person who’s going to give this up in exchange for the cash Harrison expects me to throw at him. And how can I now?
Ryan loved this place, especially that tree. There is nothing of monetary value that could persuade him to let it go. He’s made it clear what he thinks of the company I work for, and I’ve told him I’m a chef. How am I ever going to un-lie this lie I’ve told? And if there’s one thing I know about Ryan Sullivan, it’s that when he commits to something, he never gives up.
‘Occupy the sycamore tree!’ He shouts and punches a fist in the air, and the group of old ’uns return the cry with mouthfuls of cake being spat everywhere and tea being dribbled out. Alys wallops Mr Barley for spilling crumbs on her skirt.
He grins and starts back down the path towards the tree. ‘C’mon, let me show you my humble abode.’
I hesitate. Is going to the tree with Ryan a good idea? After all, it is the exact spot where I kissed him. The very place I last saw him. Do I really want to stand under those branches with him again? I glance at the care home residents. Someone’s produced a packet of biscuits and now they’re having an argument about which biscuits the Queen would prefer if she eats biscuits. She’s British – it would be a crime if she didn’t eat biscuits. Judging by the heated arguments about the merits of Rich Tea versus Arrowroots, they’re going to be occupied for a while.
I need to make an excuse and get out of here. Go and phone Harrison and tell him I’m on the next train back to London, no matter what. This can’t continue now, not with Ryan here.