‘Yes, you were,’ Lily said, wriggling further along the tree branch, very glad she’d chosen to wear jeans and not shorts that morning. ‘When I popped up, you spun around and looked really guilty.’
Unconsciously the boy moved his body to one side, obscuring the main trunk of the sycamore tree.
‘What are you hiding?’
‘You really are the nosiest little girl in the world, aren’t you?’
‘I’m not that little. I’m going to be twelve soon.’
‘Twelve and nosy,’ the boy declared.
‘What’s your name anyway? I can’t call you “the boy from the tree”, can I?’
‘There’s no need for you to call me anything. But if you must know, that’s what I was doing when you got here.’ He leant back and Lily saw a dangerously sharp-looking penknife resting by his legs and the first three letters of a name gouged into the tree bark. ‘I like to leave my name wherever they put me.’
‘J ... O ... S ...’ she said out loud, as though she was back in Reception class trying to sound out a new word. ‘Is your name Josh?’
The boy almost gave a flicker of a smile before scowling it away at the last moment.
‘My name is Lily. Will you carve that into the tree too, when you’ve finished yours?’
The boy gave a non-committal shrug, but Lily already knew that he would do it.
Chapter Three
‘Fletcher! Fletcher!’
Hissing clearly wasn’t working, so I raised my voice as loud as I dared, glancing around anxiously in case someone from the Neighbourhood Watch came out and complained about the early morning disturbance.
Fletcher had either gone conveniently deaf or was having far too much fun to respond to my commands. It was my fault for unclipping his lead at the top of the driveway. Instead of trotting obediently towards my parents’ front door, his ears had suddenly shot up, as though he’d been summoned. Which was kind of ironic, because when I attempted to call him back moments later, all he did was ignore me.
I watched him shoot down the neighbours’ driveway at a speed which belied the many slices of toast he’d enjoyed over the last year. Even the narrow gap beneath the garden gate did little to slow him down. He simply dropped to his belly and wriggled beneath it before disappearing from sight.
I looked around, convinced net curtains must be twitching at every window as I briskly followed my dog into next door’s front garden, glancing at the weather-beaten For Sale sign hammered into the lawn. Mum had mentioned last night that the house was currently empty and had been up for sale for around six months.
For a horrible moment I thought I might have to scale the fence to retrieve my runaway dog, but the gate was stiff rather than locked, and a hefty shove released the latch. The back garden was a suburban jungle and looked nothing like it had done when the Bakers lived there. I’d spent so many hours in this garden between the ages of eleven and fifteen, and yet today I scarcely recognised it.
I caught a fleeting glimpse of Fletcher’s bushy tail as he vanished into the undergrowth and sent up a silent plea that whoever lived here last had kept the fences in good repair. The thought of losing Adam’s dog was too terrible to contemplate.
I moved fast through the dense foliage, scarcely noticing the thorny rose bush that snagged my quilted jacket, or the bite of the stinging nettles as I pushed them aside. What was impossible to ignore however, was the huge, felled sycamore. I’d assumed it had long since been cleared away, but it still lay exactly where it had fallen in the November storm. Its roots were enormous, reaching into the air like a tangle of tentacles, seeking but never finding the soil they had been ripped from.
I felt a momentary sadness for the tree’s ignoble demise, but my attention was more focused on Fletcher, who had somehow managed to scale the fallen tree and got himself caught in its branches. He was barking loud enough to wake any resident in the street who I hadn’t already disturbed.
‘Shhhh,’ I hissed, as I looked for a way through the branches to reach him. ‘This is what happens when you don’t come when I call you.’
I shrugged out of my jacket before it sustained further damage and scrabbled over the enormous tree trunk to reach my dog, who was now whining and looking very sorry for himself.
There was a weird feeling of serendipity to once again be climbing the old sycamore, something I’d never expected to do twenty years or so after my first journey into its branches. Thankfully itwas easier now it was horizontal, and within a minute or two I was close enough to Fletcher to see the relief in his eyes. ‘It’s meant to be the other way around, dog – you’re meant to savemefrom danger,’ I muttered as I fought my way through the branches to reach his collar and haul him out.
But then, as I bent towards him, I saw something I’d never imagined I would see again. I pulled aside a few spindly branches, releasing a very excitable Fletcher and fully revealing the section of tree where he’d become ensnared.
Fletcher, his lesson learnt, was trying to climb on to my lap to cover my face with grateful swipes of his tongue, but I scarcely felt them. I shook my head in disbelief as I reached out and traced the grooves in the bark that time had scarcely diminished. Josh’s name and mine were just as clearly visible in the tree trunk as they’d been twenty years ago, on the day he’d carved them into the wood.
The tree was vast, easily over twenty metres tall. Fletcher could have got caught anywhere along its length, and yet he had ended up in the exact spot that marked the beginning of my friendship with Josh. Those two etched names would forever hold the memory of the day I’d stood at my bedroom window and watched a boy I’d never seen before climb a tree in our neighbours’ garden, and for some inexplicable reason had decided to follow him. They marked the start of a friendship so precious that I’d known my first experience of heartbreak because of it, when four years later the Bakers and their foster children had moved away. But by then my foolish teenage heart was already his. Not that I’d ever found the courage to tell him that, of course.
And now, two decades later, with all sorts of uncomfortable history between us, with gallons of water – much of it muddy – beneath the bridge, and my late husband’s request forever ringing in my ears, fate had put me right back at the spot where it all began.
I raised my eyes towards the sky as though Adam was indeed up there, hidden from sight by the gathering grey clouds.
