Common Ground (21 page)

Nathan groans. ‘Where now?' He sounds weary, too stoned.

Lauren doesn't break step but points ahead, up the lane, dark and cool with canopy shadow, and off over the scrubby fields and wood.

Joe peers down after her. ‘You feeling all right, babe?'

‘Course. But I'm going further.'

‘Can't we just chill here?' he says. ‘There's no fucker about.'

‘No. Not here.'

‘Where then?'

‘The river.'

Now they're confused. The others didn't even know there was a river near town. Mutterings. More groans from Nathan.

Lauren looks back, narrowing her eyes, standing bold, fierce and beautiful. Hera with a crown of hawthorns. ‘Trust me,' she says. ‘You only live once.'

And they do.

By now the
Ephemera danica
, those Vasudhārās, are awake and fully formed. Long, glossy, crème-caramel abdomens, segmented and intricate, have the kind of wispy brown tobacco smears once found on old magnolia pub walls. Elevated above their previous aqueous universe, poised on the alder leaves, cushions of wood ear mushroom and pole-like grass stems, the mayflies took little over an hour to achieve their ultimate incarnation, to moult into the sexually mature ‘spinner', the
imago
. They appear more clearly defined and sharper, as though an aeronautical engineer has stepped in to improve their designs, readying them for their last, triumphant function. The six-jointed forelegs stretch further than before, the three-pronged tails whip out from their rears for better aerial balance and the wings have lost their fine hairs, becoming translucent and etched with black veins. On wider bank-side leaves sometimes two or more of these spinners sit side-by-side. Then small differences in appearance become apparent: the males are smaller in size and darker, with larger, pronounced eyes.

Time is of the essence and yet there is no sense of time. Not as we know it. No fear of the coming, inevitable unknown; these are prehistoric creatures of the present, 300 million years in the making. An order older than dinosaurs. Time to them is in the frequencies of the surrounding birdsong, the fluttering of wings, the sun moving through the foliage, the colours that move across their compound eyes, the vibrations that spill down from a passing heron's croak. Light spills down too, a hot afternoon light that fractures the wood, falling in shards between trees and water. The infinite motion of the river runs in one direction; the endless flux of sky meeting wood in another, and into this strange dimension, as though an irresistible force possesses them, the spinners rise on stained-glass wings, like angels.

Her dad used to call it ‘Duffer's Fortnight', this spell when the mayflies were up. When she asked him why, he explained it was because no one (‘not even a blind bastard dipping a broomstick') could fail to catch the trout when they were snapping away at whatever floated past. ‘It's practically suicide,' he said.

It was always about now, a sunny day around the time of her birthday, when he'd go off to his lock-up and dig out his cane rod. Then they'd sneak down here together, provisions packed into the mouldy knapsack he kept from his army days, pop and sweets for her, Skol and Regal King Size for him, both keeping an eye out for anyone who might ask for a licence or angling club membership. He never owned either of course; then again, they never saw another person down here. He said it was because of the sewage farm around the bend of the river, said people didn't want to fish too close to it. But he swore it was safe, claimed no mayfly would breed in dirty water.
Sensitive souls
, he called them.

‘And they only live for a day, Lolo,' he once said to her, catching one in a fist and holding it out to her. She looked at it, wing crumpled, still trying to lift itself off his palm, clawing. ‘Imagine that.
One fucking day
.'

And she had.

‘So you gotta be quick, right? Seize the moment.'

Then he'd turned, tied on a fly and fed out the line, swishing it back in a looping arc until it became indistinct in the insect-clouded air.

That was then. Back before the flashbacks, the divorce and the hard drinking. Back before he chose a long, slow, selfish death in front of her eyes. Back when Mum was still at home and they kept a scrapbook of found things together like crow feathers, dog-rose petals, once even a four-leafed clover to press between the pages. That was when such things mattered, when everything seemed alive. Then boom. Before you know it, all of it gone.

Except now, just like then, Lauren sits on the riverbank. Eyes full of wonder, drawn by reasons unknown to her, she watches the mayfly's brief, beautiful dance.

The male spinners collect into loose, drifting clouds a few feet above the water. There's safety in shoaling like starlings, like sardines. At first glance, or when seen grey against the sky, they appear as smoke, behaving in the same shifting, slipping way a column from a bonfire does when blown across a motorway. Then they roll into tighter, tornado-like vortices, sometimes visible, sometimes lost against the leaves. In this way countless mayfly bounce around this stretch of river, floating, climbing, falling, passing over the drowned branches and the moorhen nests. Nearer, they look more like the blizzard of dust motes you get after wheat has been cut or glowing dandelion seeds caught in sunlight and a soft breeze. And yet for all their wild, mad dancing, these male mayflies never touch. All moves are planned in this ritual. Contact is reserved for when the female spinners circling on the peripheries dive suddenly into the columns' centres. Using elongated forelegs, the males intercept them, grappling the females by the thorax in a mid-air embrace, mating with her and then releasing her so quickly that the human eye can barely perceive the coupling. A moment of pure life, lost in the veil of the swarm.

They love it, of course, this freedom. She knew they would. After daring each other for a good hour, Joe and Nathan strip down to boxers and tippy-toe over the rocks, mocking each other's flailing, pitching walk. Screams and laughter. Now they splash about its deeper channels, showing off, shouting and laughing, throwing handfuls of mud then suddenly losing their balance and drifting before dragging themselves into the shallower riffles again.

Lauren joins Immy beneath a willow tree where the grass bank becomes the clay-coloured sand of a small, crescent beach. Below, bags of Strongbow cool in eddies overhung with trees. Strewn over the sand are the lads' clothes. Chewing chuddy, Immy sits cross-legged, a can clasped between her denim cut-offs.

‘Here.' She hands over a half-smoked joint and then pulls her T-shirt over her head revealing her flabby torso and pink plastic belly-button stud.

Lauren takes the smoke, fills her lungs and peels off her vest too. Both lie together in their bras with the sun full on their skin. It feels like a gentler heat now, older, that getting-towards-evening sun. Long draws on the joint as Immy whispers to her and pops her gum. ‘Do you think Nathan fancies me or what? I really want to lose some weight. I'd give anything for your figure, y'know …' Lauren listens and comforts, but it all sounds so distant, like she's higher, up there with the clouds of mayfly, playing the same game she used to – trying to follow them in the air to see where they go. Circling and circling.

Neither of them hears Nathan until he is walking up the bank with his clothes in his hands. He looks unsure of what to say.

‘Do you know what's down there then?' he grunts eventually, jerking his head off towards the bend in the river downstream.

Lauren shakes her head.

‘Why?' says Immy, shielding her eyes, sitting up. ‘What's up, babe?'

‘Nothing. I dunno.' He shrugs and reaches down for a drink. ‘Thought I might go look. Thought it might be a laugh. You wanna come?'

Immy looks at Lauren, then back at him. ‘Yeah, all right. I'm up for a laugh.'

As Nathan walks off to get dressed, Immy hangs back. Then, when he's out of earshot. ‘So I might see you back in town then. Is that all right?'

‘Course.'

‘Thanks, Lo. Oh and …' a kiss on her head, ‘Happy Birthday.'

Lauren watches them walk away, Nathan slipping his arm around Immy's bare midriff as they disappear into the greenery.

‘So you coming in or what?' shouts Joe from the water. He's doing backstroke.

Lauren laughs. ‘Better idea. Why don't you come out?'

Joe doesn't know how good he looks rising from the water, his muscular pale form emerging through the peaty brown. Happy, handsome Joe; good-looking, full of life. When he wades out, his broad, burned shoulders turn white in the light, his hair is plastered over his forehead. Mayflies land on the golden-haloed outline of his head and he doesn't even realise. Lauren grins and he smiles back. It's then that she sees him as something more – a shaft of light, part of the million beautiful growing things all around her.

‘Why've we never come down here before?' he says, dripping wet, skin goose-pimpling as he stands above her wiping his chest with his shirt.

‘We're here now, aren't we?' she says.

And she means it. She means we are here, now. Just us. There's nothing else.

Somewhere back there is a world of financial storms and wars, a world of shitty shift patterns, rotas and customer service training. Tomorrow's early-morning stock-take. The 6 a.m. start. The collective denial. But that's not
real
life, not like this. Not like this one perfect day.

One fucking day, Lolo! So you gotta be quick, right? Seize the moment.

She lifts her hips and rolls down her leggings, then lies back on her elbows. Joe seems suddenly shy, intimidated by the perfection beside him – her curved, caramel body, the black satin bra and knickers. So she grasps his arm and kisses him. His mouth is still river-cold. His flesh washed with wild water, but it only makes her want him more and she pulls him down onto her, down into the seeding rye grass. Then everything becomes details. The swell of his bicep and the nape of his neck. The smell of skin and saliva. They way they kiss in-between undressing each other, the sun still warm on their bodies. His lips along her collarbone. Her legs wrapped around his back. Sweat on her reddening chest. Open eyes, closed eyes. Foreheads pressed together. All the time so quiet, so intense.

Afterwards, Joe rolls onto his side, his arm across her, watching her face. Gravity anchors Lauren to the earth. She focuses on the rise of her abdomen when breathing in, then the stream of warmth through her nostrils as she exhales. Nothing happens next. There is no destination. This is it. Here and now. And as she lays there, her shock-red hair tangled with purple loosestrife, she senses a sudden emptiness. Above, the mayfly are fading from the air.

The flurries of ecstasy wane with the dying sun. Plumes break up and drift apart as, gradually, spent male spinners crash down to the water or, more commonly, the grass and leaves of the river edges. No one knows why they might be drawn to the land to ebb away their last, but by nightfall they will decorate the silk of spider webs and fill the bellies of finches, moorhens, frogs and bats. All the while, just beyond the battery-running-out flickers of weakening wings and forelegs, a peculiar green and yellow evening light shimmers on the Nidd. Here, on this unloved stretch, where Celts once sank votive offerings in the hope of raising nymphs and naiads from below, the female mayflies return to the water to do the same.

Keeping about a foot above its skin, they head upstream. Often flying in circles, each wafts down on rearing wings, curling its long body, dipping its abdomen into the shining screen and releasing a batch of fertilised eggs. Sometimes the spinners settle for a few seconds on the surface, sometimes they barely appear to touch, but every time they meet a reflection of themselves rising from the deep. This strange, driven, determined action is taken without thought of the risk from feasting trout and, now, the mallards and ducklings that are leaping and flapping for them. Many are taken this way, many more survive to reproduce. A thousand eggs here, a thousand eggs there – up to 8,000 per spinner deposited in intervals – creating final ectoplasmic clouds in the water below, each a swarm of millimetre-wide eggs that sink to the bottom and attach to the rocks, sediment and weed. In ten days, these will hatch into little river gods, burrowing into the sediment and beginning the cycle again.

Time flies.
Timeflies.
It could be a name for the mayfly. What seemed an unstoppable orgy of life only an hour ago has receded like a disappearing universe. The air has turned everything copper and bronze. With all their eggs and energy expended, the female spinners tire and fall to the river's surface. It's now that they look oddly human again: either confused by the tension holding them or embracing it, laying their wings across the water as if, with purpose fulfilled, they no longer fear death in the jaws downstream. And like this they drift on, a million crashed gliders. Falling quietly around them, the rusted hawthorn blossom. Before long there will be no trace that either ever existed.