Common Ground (20 page)

The light is changing now, drifting from its height into a watery green. The guns have ceased their shooting and the woodpigeons are cooing away, consoling each other. Blackbirds are tuning up. I can hear a moorhen on the river, under the far bank of emerald larch. Time to go, but I don't want to. I don't want to put my life back to normal. I'm not ready to lose this sensation, to leave the spot where a window was flung open and a world revealed. So I sit back in the hollow. A watcher, waiting.

A shimmering horizon, the sky baby blue, and this triangle of edge-land has never looked brighter or richer. The lane and holloway grow wild with cleavers, nettle, purple vetch, knee-tickling grasses and the white lace finery of cow parsley and wild carrot; the meadow is flush with daisies, the gold of buttercup and yellow dandelion. Last night, quick, chaotic storms stirred the murmuring, sleeping town, but by morning they are no more remembered than an uneasy dream. The wet air steams with early sun, kindling the fragrance of the whipped-cream hawthorn blossom dolloped over the many tangled crowns, boughs, hedges and shrubs. It was known as ‘May flower' once – sometimes shortened further to ‘May' – the only tree to be named after a month, but no one calls it that any more. Not around here, anyway. Opening, ripening, the aroma of the cup-shaped blooms is stifling. Part-honey, part-human musk, it fills the air, the nose, the head, hazing everything with what people used to describe as a ‘carnal scent' – the smell of sex. It carries too, drifting into the windows of cars gridlocked on Skipton Road, swirling into suburban kitchens and through the vents of passing commuter carriages, wafting down, deep down, into the insect-buzzing trees of the wood.

Beneath this intoxicating air, gods stir in the river, making for the shallows. Mayflies. Crawling over the algae-rimed stones, the nymphs of
Ephemera danica
are six-armed Vasudhārās whose tusky protuberances look like ornate headdresses in the sun-percolated water. After two years submerged and feasting on dead matter, hundreds, thousands, millions of these thirty millimetre bodhisattvas are emerging from silty burrows, slowly being urged to rise by the bubbles of gas accumulating under their exoskeletons. There is nothing to be done. No turnaround can occur. To survive they must channel their energy now into propelling up into the flow and through the rubbery tension of the water's surface. Those that resist, exhausting their strength by clinging on or stubbornly diving back down for the safety of the sediment, will never experience the higher realms.

One nymph lets go, a female. It releases and drifts tail-high and backwards before turning its cylindrical, segmented shape towards the sun, long trident tail fanning and bucking it through the water like a tiny dolphin. More follow, ribbons darting and twirling up to the light. Trout have been waiting and thrust from channels in sorties to snatch at the exposed nymphs, but with every swirl of their tails they drive more upwards. The larvae begin to punch through the film, climbing into the hot, moist daylight with an almost human look – like someone hauling themselves out of a hole in a frozen lake. This action breaks open their see-through exoskeletons, their
chucks
, and they emerge unfurling upright grey-green wings, forming the silhouettes of graceful star-class sailboats. Their mouthparts have ceased to function now; their death is predetermined and irreversible, governed by the energy reserves built up as a nymph. With bodies the cream of hawthorn blossom, they float on the water changed, new creatures,
subimago
. These are the ‘duns' waiting to fly.

At 11:02 a.m. Lauren Jackson finishes the early shift, pushes open the double warehouse doors and unclips her name badge. The air is hot as a hairdryer and smells of tacky tarmac and the heated vegetable contents of the red Biffa bins docked like container ships behind Sainsbury's. She sits on the pavement and rolls a cigarette, looking down the road. Despite her manager's complaints about staff smoking where customers might see them, this is where she comes on breaks and for a post-work smoke. It is a short street with a simple arrangement of low Victorian terraces running down either side, but across its end is a chain-link fence where every vestige of town drops away as though sheared. A dip in the land to the west conceals the sloping maze of houses, allotments, roads and sheltered accommodation, so it appears that the road launches straight into distant fields, hill and sky. A landscape of old England; a Gainsborough behind glass. It gives the feeling of extraordinary freedom, as if you could escape into it at any time, even if you never make that leap.

Lauren looks out at it for a while and then pops a compact. Curling stray L'Oreal Hot Chilli Red hairs behind her ears, she breathes smoke away from the mirror and fixes it over her stunning, rough, brown eyes.

‘Fit. That's what you are.'

Joe is walking along the low wall behind her with his shirt off, shoulders already pinking in the sun. Happy, handsome Joe; good-looking, full of life. He grins and Lauren smiles back.

‘And you're late.'

‘Had to get these, didn't I?' He swings a white plastic bag sagging with cans. ‘And it took me ages to buy your present.'

From his pocket he fishes out a pack of Marlboro Gold and throws it to her.

‘Fags. Wow.'

‘It's inside.'

But she knows this and has already flipped the top. The edge of a little self-sealing transparent bag has been folded to fit among the remaining cigarettes. The smell of the bud is overpowering: burnt popcorn, oil, herbs.
Fox
. She breathes it in.

Joe crouches behind her and slips his arms under her breasts. ‘Happy Birthday, babe.'

There is a rendezvous planned with mates twenty minutes later at Lauren's dad's house, but it needs to be quick. Friday is his drinking day, much as he might pretend it isn't. He still goes out in his paint-splattered overalls as though off to work, but when he returns for lunch (12:30ish) he's rarely less than three pints in. And that's just the warm-up. There's no violence in him any more, not like when Lauren's mum first left, but he's deathly quiet and morose and, in his daughter's eyes, it's just as unbearable. She hates it – the giving up, the defeat and the lifelessness. So in her little bedroom she quickly peels off the black trousers and purple polo shirt uniform and wriggles into good underwear, leggings and a skinny vest, checking the window for his van driving oh-that-teensy-bit-too-slowly up the road. Only one card by her mirror this year,
To My Little Girl
, with ‘Lolo! 18!' added shakily in her dad's hand. Soon as she opened it (no need to tear, the envelope seal was still wet), she recognised the crap cartoon font from the display racks in the newsagent's next door. Probably been sitting there for eighteen years.

At the kitchen table downstairs Joe skins up a joint then lifts the back-door catch when three raps sound on the window. Lauren rushes in and sweeps her hand across the table, brushing the baccy and stray Rizlas into the bin. Then they're all out of there, out into the heat of the street, the rattle of Water Board jackhammers, the overgrown dandelions in the yard and concrete dust blown up by passing lorries. There are four of them: Joe and a mate from college; Lauren and her best friend Immy, both wearing their sunglasses like Alice bands.

‘Where are we going anyway?' Immy asks, pulling hers down, checking her look in a car window, but Lauren is already gone, threading through the traffic.

There are mayflies everywhere, leaving the slipstream and turning slowly in the eddies in groups of twos and threes. Miniature regattas. More duns drift off with the current under the viaduct and over the heads of the waiting trout facing upstream in the weak-tea water, swimming lazily to keep stationary. Each fish knows the flow of the river and where the channels provide the greatest riches of subimago. Each fish barely shifts a fin, holding its position in the flow, still as a kestrel over a cornfield. Then a tilt, flick, and the
blop
sound as it breaks the water's skin and takes another. Fish gorge themselves until something in the drooping willow and alder boughs, the gold air and the hot, heaped-up grass of the river's edges lures the duns into attempting flight. The mayfly is unique in the animal kingdom as the only creature with two adult winged stages. As it is still sexually immature, the only purpose of the first stage is escape. Suddenly, stretching and beating their wings, the duns begin to leap and lift, careering clumsily into the shelter of vegetation.

A grey wagtail waits and watches on a semi-submerged stone. Breast a bright cadmium yellow, body tapering into the fine point of its long, folded wings and tail, it looks like a horsehair paintbrush halfway through a Van Gogh sun. Flying in a short circle, the bird plucks a few of the airborne forms, then, beak bristling, rests with its tail bouncing like it's counting their numbers. But the weight of duns emerging is too much to monitor; they float up to the bank-side leaves, stems and trailing blades of green. Each lands weightlessly, basking, ripening in the warm threads of sunlight, spiny forelegs bent, wings straight and three tails extended like whiskers. Their final stage is already beginning. Even in apparent stillness, the mayfly never ceases to move; it is always folding in, pushing out, reforming, like the walls of the ever-expanding universe, or the edge of a town.

Lauren is the only one who knows where they're going so she leads, but even if she didn't, she'd probably still be at the front. Working their way down the hot, empty tarmac runways of royal-sounding streets – Albert Road, King Edward's Drive – they come to a back alley hemmed in by the high fences and lines of locked garage doors, where dumped rubbish bags have been split and strewn by foxes. She lights the joint with a sharp inhale and holds it. A few more steps down the runway and
Take Off
. The slow release of excitement in the stomach, the skyward lift and simultaneous sinking inward of the mind, the sudden malleability of tedium and boredom, the potential for it all to become something different, something beautiful and mysterious.

The alley leads into a tatty car park pitted with collapsed asphalt. It is a sump for the houses around it, surrounded by sow thistle, dock, nettle and brambles. Everything is jewelled with litter – a bright pink prawn-cocktail crisp packet, sheets of soggy paper, plastic bottle caps, a rusty shopping trolley coiled with the green heart leaves of bindweed. Joe's mate Nathan, dressed in a black Lonsdale T-shirt, high-tops and jogging bottoms, drops an empty cider can and kicks it ahead of him. They follow its rattle along the track towards a metal railway bridge scrawled with a bulbous graffito and a solitary lamppost dressed in a tutu of barbed wire. Running alongside is a galvanised steel palisade fence, the top of its metal points split and peeled like bananas to heighten the treachery of its cutting edges. Beyond it lie the last few houses of red northern brick and a rectangle of yellow: an enclosed patch of waste ground wild with ragwort and dandelion flowers. A collapsed sofa slouches at its centre, its exposed, fat-like cushion foam colonised by invertebrates. Leaving it all behind, Lauren registers the shift towards a place beyond restrictions, out of the way of town, out of the way of people. A lightness somewhere between her eyes.

At the intersection of the old railway and Bilton Lane, a completely different vision: a spectrum of greens to thrill her now slow-blinking, dilated eyes. Near greens and far greens, lime greens and greens that make her think of the beer-stained pool tables at High Harrogate WMC. This place is ablaze with life, though, not stale with slow decay. Every cranny and fissure is filled with wildflowers she doesn't know the names of; there is the musty hot-skin scent of Joe's burning torso in the warm air. The sun is so bright it falls like a cape of gold on Immy's bare shoulders. Another joint is rolled and passed around. Lauren takes in the last of the tangy, tarry tail end and stares down into the verges, entranced by the powder-blue flowers of forget-me-nots and the hairiness of the sticky stems of cleavers. In the heat of midday, she imagines she's melting into the old, ivy toadflax-coated wall they're leaning against. She can hear the timeless vibrations of the million worker bees and, far off somewhere, council lawnmowers trimming verges.

Laughter. Nathan has one arm around Immy's waist, fingers in the back pocket of her jeans, and they slurp from a fresh Strongbow. Minds are slowed, senses paradoxically dulled and thrown open. They stare at a piebald horse and its nervous foal at the bottom of a sloping field.

‘D'you dare me to ride him?' Nathan says. ‘I fucking could, you know.'

‘Which one? The baby?'

‘
Shut up
… '

More laughter. More bravado and flirtation. Four-to-the-floor beats tripping tinnily from Immy's iPhone. Nathan's lighter flicked to touch cigarettes. Heavy-handed acts designed to show off a sort of tough kindness, all rehearsed and perfected of course. Joe laughs at him and suggests that they skin up in the meadow, but Lauren shakes her head, pushes off the wall and crosses over the old railway, ducking down under hawthorns where its scent is heaviest. Thick as department-store perfume counters. ‘It's this way,' she says.