As I made my way down the lane to Ryan’s house with my hair caught in the branches of the sapling in my arms, I began to regret choosing a tree as my gift to Ryan. Earlier that morning it had seemed a perfect choice – something that would last as long as the distance between us. Now it just seemed designed to ensure that I looked a mess. My hair was tangled, my arms covered in dirt and I could feel a trickle of sweat run down my back.
‘Wow, a walking forest!’ Ryan laughed as I approached. ‘What’s this? Birnam wood approaching Dunsinane? Have you come to defeat me? To prove once and for all that you can’t escape your fate?’
‘Umm, help?’ I replied, attempting to untwist a length of hair from one of the branches.
The smell of lemons filled the air around me as Ryan gently untwisted my hair and took the tree from my arms.
‘So what’s this all about?’ he asked, a smile making his eyes twinkle.
‘A gift,’ I said. ‘The gardener at the nursery promised me that this tree will last over a hundred years and produce a healthy crop of juicy apples each year. I thought we could plant it today and then when you get back home . . .’ I swallowed as my words threatened to catch in my throat. ‘When you get home it will still be there, an old, crabby tree, full of apples. You can see what’s become of it.’
‘Is it indigenous?’ he said, placing the tree on the ground. He smiled up at me, a big, happy smile that contained none of the barely concealed grief behind my shaky smile.
‘What do you think? Come on, let’s choose a spot.’
Now I was no longer trapped in a splay of branches, I could see that the only car in the driveway was Ryan’s.
‘They’re meeting with a lawyer in town,’ he said, following my eyes. ‘They won’t be back for a while.’
He winked ironically, but I was used to his flirtations by now and knew they were entirely innocent.
Ryan carried the sapling over one shoulder as we strolled across their vast lawn.
‘How was Miranda?’ he asked.
‘As expected. Disappointed in me.’
Ryan laughed.
‘She didn’t have anything good to say about you either.’
‘But she let you come and spend the day with me?’
‘She’s at work. She doesn’t know I’m here.’ I held up my phone. ‘And I’ve switched my phone off so she can’t reach me.’
Ryan fetched a shovel and began digging a deep hole in the middle of the lawn. His muscles bunched and lengthened as he effortlessly scooped out the earth and piled it to one side. He was just about to lower the roots of the apple tree into the hole, when I stopped him.
‘Why don’t we bury something underneath the apple tree?’
‘Like what? A body?’
‘How about a time capsule?’ I said.
‘What do we put in a time capsule?’
‘We did one at school once,’ I said. ‘To celebrate one hundred years of Perran School. It’s supposed to be buried for another hundred years. We put all sorts of things in it. Headlines from newspapers, a photo of the school staff, another one of the student body. A school tie, the school newspaper.’
‘So we could bury things about us,’ he said. ‘What it’s like to be you and me in 2012.’
‘A time-crossed friendship capsule,’ I said. ‘Things that represent our friendship here in 2012.’
‘Any ideas?’
‘Do you have a printer?’
He nodded.
‘Then let’s start with a photo.’
I held my phone at arm’s length, put my arm around Ryan’s shoulder and grinned into the camera.
In the kitchen, we printed out two copies of the photo – one for me to keep and one to bury in our time capsule. It was one of those lucky strikes, a quick snap in which we both looked good. My grin was crinkle-eyed and genuine, quite unlike the careful face I usually composed for a photo. Ryan was smiling at me, not the camera.
Ryan got a Tupperware container from the cupboard under the sink. ‘We can use this.’
I put one of the photos in it.
‘What else?’ he said.
I checked my jacket pocket. My fingers touched a letter I had written for Ryan the night before. I planned to give it to him the night he left.
‘Have you got anything?’ he asked.
I shook my head and then I felt a smaller piece of paper. ‘Train ticket to Plymouth.’
‘Ah, the romantic train journey to Plymouth where I pulled you into the loos and showed you my credit cards.’
‘Do you have anything?’
‘My ticket to the Eden Project.’
‘I think we should include a page from Connor’s autobiography,’ I said. ‘If it wasn’t for that book, I wouldn’t know who you really are.’
‘Too risky. We mustn’t include anything that’s from the future. How about I put in one of my sketches of you?
He ran upstairs to fetch it.
My fingers closed again over the letter in my pocket. I took it out and reread it.
I wasn’t sure I would have the courage to give it to him. I’d never told anyone I loved them before. Not even in writing.
‘I’m going to miss this picture of you,’ Ryan was saying as he came back into the kitchen.
Impulsively I pushed the letter into the container, hiding it under the photo.
‘It’s the first picture I drew of you,’ he said. ‘Back before I knew you were the evil girl who broke poor Connor’s heart.’
I smacked him jokingly. ‘If you miss it that much, you can dig it up when you get back to your own time.’
We carried the container back outside.
Just as Ryan lowered the time capsule into the ground, a car came slowly up the drive. Ryan stood up straight and wiped his dirty hands on his jeans.
‘That’s not Ben or Cassie,’ he said squinting into the sunshine.
The car stopped and a man got out. Travis.
‘I thought I might find you here,’ he said, strolling over to us. ‘Why aren’t you answering your phone, Eden?’
