Common Ground

(To all those who can hear),

We share our merits with all beings.

Buddhist Water Ceremony

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.

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.

‘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.’

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.’

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.

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.

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.’

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.’

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.

‘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?’

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.

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.

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.

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.

ONE DAY