Common Ground (26 page)

They've harvested the fields in the three days since I was last here. Now we sit against the lone oak again amid wheat stubble, dust and stones. The air smells yeasty, like a baker's shop first thing in the morning. The tree's roots cradle my ribs. With my arms around her, I, in turn, am cradling Rosie and her bump. I can feel her breathing, the rising and falling on my chest. I'm not sure why it would only just occur to me but I'm trying to straighten out in my mind the fact that soon we will always be three. It will never just be Rosie and me again. The long summer that has been our life since we met twelve years ago is coming to a close. And that's it, I suppose: the realisation that part of our lives is already over. The earth turns and the swifts move. You can't stop the ceaseless clockwork of the universe. Then, as I'm thinking this, the baby squirms beneath my fingers. I feel it like a knuckle twisting in my palm and shut my eyes to better concentrate. After a moment a foot, hand or elbow stretches the skin again. This time my heart lurches with it and I laugh. Rosie does too. Then I think,
How stupid of me
. How could I forget, out here of all places, in the fields of the edge-land, that every ending is also a beginning?

At midday a gust of wind blows briefly down the street. There's a change in the air. A pizza box skids a few yards, rattling its crusts, and flips up against the hubcap of a parked Nissan. For the last hour that greasy cardboard square has covered up a narrow crack between pavement and kerbstone. Now the sun pours down into the miniature chasm, touching the long, folded-back wings of an ant, a queen, as she clambers up its soil sides, using the withered leaf of a dandelion like a loft-ladder. Her antennae emerge, straightening and bouncing, reading air and concrete, followed by her glossy ink-drop head and body. Other ants bubble up behind – smaller males, similarly winged – each making short, darting runs, probing and returning to their fissure as though unsure, massing and conferring. But the queen has waited all summer for this particular conspiring of humidity, heat and light. She opens her wings and flies, flicking through the air quickly, unsteadily, touching wall, pizza box, tyre and tarmac, releasing chemicals to synchronise with neighbouring colonies and lure males into mating and swarming. Many are already airborne and, from out of the blur of daylight, one grabs her and they lock, tumbling along a windscreen wiper and onto a creosoted fence where a cat slumps. The breeze catches them again and they go with it, flying northwards over pavements and fences. A swift dips and ploughs a furrow beside them, mouth agape, swallowing twenty ants, but only glancing the queen and her mate with its wing tip, knocking them down through the tangled leaves of a goat willow and into the foliage that runs along the old railway.

A butterfly watches the ants drop into the patch of stinging nettles and writhe around on a leaf. With compound eyes consisting of thousands of honeycomb-shaped lenses, it registers the brief changes in light and leaf position, the oily roil of disrupted air and after-tremors in the nettle stems. But it remains still on the willow's trunk. With its hindwings folded to reveal flecked black and brown undersides, it is as good as invisible roosting on bark and yet it sees everything in its dome of vision: the scramble of the ants now unsexing, the male flailing backwards; the queen moving to the edge of the leaf, then flicking down to a morass of stone and earth beneath. It watches too as the queen contorts her body and, one by one, tears off her wings before tunnelling into the soil beneath an empty Coca-Cola can to birth a new colony.

The breeze lifts again, rustling the willow's leaves. Sun freckles its trunk. The butterfly senses warm pools of light on the bark above it and crawls towards them, crossing spiky patches of cambium where recently knife-gouged letters spell out the names
Joe
and
Lauren
separated by a heart. It opens its wings and sunbathes, soaking up the heat through its mole-like body, dark brown and covered with velvety hair. Its wings are the same shade, save for the stark orange-red bands and a few white dots, like dribbled paint over the tips. The willow shakes again. The sun dapples and disappears. Now the butterfly moves, churning the air and flitting sideways, landing on the same nettle leaf where the ants fell. Crawling to the tip it lays a single, tiny green egg and then rises, this time flapping westwards, dipping and climbing, keeping parallel with the old railway until coming to rest on a buddleia bursting with cones of purple flowers. Sense organs in the butterfly's feet immediately taste the sugar and it slips its proboscis into the open heart of the petals and siphons their nectar. Drumming its feet, it works its way up flower spikes, until a twinge in its abdomen sends it banking over the meadow towards another clump of nettles. It is halfway across when it detects a different taste in the air –
salt
– rare, but an essential mineral in its diet. Amid the meadow grass cut into fluffy lines between the old railway and the wood, a man lies dozing under the full glare of the sun. Beads of sweat bubble, trickle and pool on his brow. The butterfly circles, then softly shakes down to his forehead and unrolls its tongue.

I open my eyes.
A red admiral!
For ten or twenty seconds its silhouette blots out the zinc brightness of the sky as it absorbs the sodium chloride evaporating from my skin, then it floats off in that weirdly graceful-dashing way butterflies move, like burning paper. Maybe it's the heat – I've been lying here over an hour without hat or sun cream – but as I jump upright to follow its flight, the world swoons. The sun, a Maltese cross above the pylons, has scorched the asphalt and roofs, smearing the edge of town into a blur. Everything seems briefly skewed out of true, as if the butterfly slipped me something as it drank. Rubbing my eyes only makes it worse. Now every blink sends blobs of green, mirages of field and wood, flashing over the houses.
This is what happens
– I tell myself –
when you get up too fast
.
A momentary lack of blood in the brain. Blind spots. Disorientation
. I concentrate and try to bring it all into focus.

It is 1979 and Bilton is caught in a wave of change. The old railway has been decommissioned for years; its sleepers removed and track reduced to scattered shingle. The sidings are overgrown; the grand viaduct over the Nidd abandoned – a far cry from twenty years earlier when smart, stout ‘Hunt'-class engines thundered daily across the gorge, whisking passengers between King's Cross and Edinburgh, each locomotive emblazoned with a leaping fox on its nameplate. Vanished too are almost all traces of the smaller, narrow-gauge line – The Barber Line – which hauled coal from the intersection of the railway and Bilton Lane (‘Bilton Crossing') to the New Park Gas Works between 1907 and 1956. Now the only signs it ever existed are the immovable airshaft and a bricked-up tunnel peeping through the hydrangeas in a newly completed suburban garden. After years of vandalism and wet rot, the council has demolished the red-brick signal box that stood at the crossing point, its white wooden gates having fuelled the community bonfire on 5 November 1965. But such details are minutiae. They pale into insignificance when compared to the scale of the transformations happening to the south.

After decades of building momentum, the town's encroachment over Bilton's open fields and ramshackle cottages has reached fever pitch. Construction is booming. Tightly packed micro-suburbs and rural-sounding housing estates – Sandhill, Meadowcroft, Woodfield, Coppice, Hill Top – explode like flower heads from the tendrils of Edwardian and Victorian roads that once demarcated Harrogate's urban limits. The farmhouses, meadows and cornfields that had conspired to form a landscape here since the Enclosure Acts have all been sold; most have been steamrollered and built over. The remaining few await their turn. Divided and sub-divided again, the estates fold into confusing patterns of beige, grey and red, hotchpotches of style and design that spill across the gently undulating slopes. Link roads, recreation grounds, community halls and new Lego-block schools cut across the old views of distant hills. The sprawl has spread so rapidly since the Second World War that it has begun to eat its own tail. Ageing veterans of Dunkirk and El Alamein who bought the first pebble-dashed semis after demob grumble to each other about mullet-haired plasterers with their noisy transistors singing along to Gloria Gaynor's ‘I Will Survive' over their back fences. It seems that every time they look a new avenue of concrete-rendered bungalows has sprung up; some man in flared jeans is hauling a tea chest through a front door, a stack of Sabbath LPs under his arm. Even where the boggy fields meet the old railway's sidings, a building site has been delineated with fencing. Diggers are tearing up the last of the hawthorn hedges and drystone walls, preparing the earth for what will one day become the smart cul-de-sacs and driveways of the ‘Poets Estate'. There's an irony to this, but one perhaps lost on the glum-faced digger driver hacking away great sections of the tawny clay: the line of the railway was originally drawn far out here specifically to ensure it kept its distance from Harrogate. Now the town grabs at it like a lifeline. Once the houses of Keats Walk, Tennyson Avenue, Shelley Court and Coleridge Drive are finished, it will describe its northern boundary.

A policeman picks his way around the cluster of bare-chested builders sitting smoking rollies on a stack of bricks. The copper is new to his job – it's clear from the pressed uniform and the mirror-shiny boots. The valiant attempt at a moustache on his upper lip can't disguise his greenness. One of the builders wolf-whistles, sending his mates into fits of giggles; spurred on, another one enquires loudly, ‘Who ordered the stripper?' The copper says nothing but grits his teeth: this is not how he envisaged life in The Force. This is not the kind of action he dreamed of when watching
The Sweeney
with his girlfriend over Saturday-night egg and chips. But he slops through the mud regardless, reminding himself that solving crime is solving crime, whether heroically apprehending a murderer in gangland London or investigating reports of a stolen car dumped on the outskirts of Harrogate. Squeezing through two sections of steel-mesh fencing, he athletically scales the bank in four leaps. From the railway, he scans the land to the north, frowns and pulls a map from his buttoned-down pocket. He's never been here before but judging by the symbols, even the cartographers at Ordnance Survey have struggled to keep up with the pace of change. The remnants of track under his feet are pretty much the sole point of correlation. Where the map details a meadow and, beyond it, a plump wooded gorge, reality reveals a swathe of sad mud torn up by motorcycle scramblers, dumped with mounds of rubbish. Brick pallets and paint pots have been hurled up here from the building site; chipboard and packaging stacked against the gorse shrubs, soaked with petrol and set alight. A noxious stench drifts from blue plastic drums kicked onto their sides, and the pools of liquid inside swirl with the rainbow sheen of chemicals. Oxidised tin cans and the glassy detritus of broken bottles are scattered through the flowering knot-grass. The policeman strides out, keeping half an eye on where he treads, walking across a patch of earth old as England, now scorched, weedy and strewn with torn-out flaps of kitchen linoleum, and fag packets.

Town-bruised, town-battered, the birth of the edge-land has been a messy one. Quick, but bloody and injurious. Its woods, once the sylvan heart of Bilton Park and the Forest of Knaresborough, are thinned and sickly, the edges deformed, hacked down and fire-scarred. The copper detects a whiff of fresh smoke and smouldering plastic as he steps over the dusty, tattered semi-skeleton of a crow. The gully marked ‘Bilton Beck' on his map is so soupy with litter it is more scrapyard than watercourse. The wreck of a motorbike juts up from the water like some installation from the Indica Gallery. The grey shell of a burnt-out car sits halfway down the bank, engine exploding with brambles and sycamore saplings. There's no point scrambling down for a closer look; it's too old to be the vehicle he's been sent to investigate.

Half an hour later, in the meadow further west, closer to the viaduct, he spies a more likely suspect. The pea-green Austin Maxi has its doors flung open and is wrapped around the trunk of a Scots pine, half-hidden in a bed of stinging nettles. Notebook in one hand, the policeman reaches in with the other and removes the keys still dangling from the ignition. Then he carefully records every detail: registration, condition, location. He checks the boot and scrutinises the steering wheel and gearshift for fingerprints, then bags an eight-track cassette of Pink Floyd's
The Wall
stuck in the stereo, and a cigarette he finds tucked under the carpet of the passenger foot-well. Evidence. It is a thorough inspection, yet one that fails to record the casualty at the scene. There is a body. Crushed between the Maxi's radiator grille and the tree, a partially mangled creature is burial-wrapped, shrouded by its own wings – beautiful brown wings with orange streaks and white spots. It will never be discovered. Long before the policeman can organise a salvage team to recover the car, the errant hands that hotwired it will be back to finish the job, dousing its seats with lighter fluid and tossing in a screwed-up torch of flaming newspaper. Seconds later, in the fireball that engulfs it, the last red admiral of Bilton will be instantly cremated, lit by the fiery light of exploding modernity. Butterfly, sacrifice, metaphor.