Dragonflies

The last bus out of town tore through the sleeping suburbs on glistening wet roads. Inside, the fluorescent lights bleached the tired faces of the kissing couples and drunken football fans chanting their terrace anthems. Shouting goodbyes to my friends, I wrestled my way down the deck and stumbled the few steps, before setting off home along the empty street. As usual, after a night out drinking, dancing and causing chaos, I'd ended up with laddered tights, smeared lipstick, and the empty taste of meaningless kisses.

Waltzing a lonely shortcut across the park, the streetlamps receded into the distance. I collapsed upon the grass, dizzy and exhausted; wondering how far I was from home. The world span about me in a vague carousel, before the blurred shapes above me eventually became the stark silhouettes of branches.

With bare, brooding trees and unforgiving gales, everything always seems so much more bleak and hopeless in winter, although somehow impossibly romantic at the same time. The nearby railings glittered with frost as a memory surfaced from a now distant childhood. I remembered, all those years ago; laying in the bow of the branches that now loom over me, casting shadows across my beached form.

Kelly was a girl with a limitless imagination in the year above, who lived adjacent to the park. That autumn, she and I would clamber up the tree's rough surfaces, usually ruining our trainers and grazing our knees, until we settled into the crook of the branches, draping restless limbs precariously. From there, wrapped in the importance of our forthcoming schemes and whispered confessions, we surveyed the toddlers squealing from the playground, the distant church and terraced houses that stretched away down the streets as far as we could see. With the wind whipping around us and stinging our eyes, we made up ghost stories and twisted fairy tales that never had happy endings. I'd feign bravado as we dreamt up intricate plots and murderous characters, though we were always sure to return home before nightfall; trudging through the mud as the sky darkened and threatened to materialise all the monsters we'd conjured up that day, and who would inevitably appear in nightmares, scarring our sleep that night.

Back then, teenage boredom and apathy were yet to encompass us, and our eyes mutated with glee, everything around us into props for our imagined horror show. Lazing up there, out of reach from insolent stares and taunts, we'd watch the funeral and wedding processions winding towards the church. They were all the same to us; the joyous just-wedded couples exiting to the banks of assembled adoration seem so far removed from us that we improvised recitals of our own tragic version, a wedding day massacre where the happy couple were mowed down in a confetti shower of metallic shards, a literal shotgun wedding. Funerals were viewed with macabre curiosity, followed by sickening stories of ghosts and zombies.

From our vantage point, such ceremonies of love and death seemed distant and unimaginable, and we preferred fabricating exotic characters who could travel to places and do things that were impossible to us, though we promised each other we'd play out the dramas we envisaged when we'd finished school and escaped from this town.

As winter crept upon us, it got too cold to venture outside and across the park, and ice made the tree's usually coarse bark slick and perilous to climb. With no inspiration to be found there under overcast skies, the leaves all disappeared; leaving the branches empty and desolate, like they are now.

And now the world slowly stopped spinning; gradually grinding to a halt like a fairground ride, dutifully returning its breathless passengers back to normality. Jolted from my reverie by the grey dawn light filtering through my mascara-clogged lashes, an apparition remained: a starched cotton skirt brushed with the crumbling bark, and a spray of unkempt hair tangling in the twigs. Bound by a school tie and all that it symbolised, her proud face turned to watch imperiously over the drab terraces in defiance. At that moment, I imagine the grubby faced child catching my gaze, and our affinity causes a smile to touch my lips.

"Windows stare at us like eyes,
Behind them December's dark early morning sky,
And a couple of dead trees,
With their ornamental stars.

I wonder in what fields today,
You're chasing dragonflies at play.
My little lost girl so far away."

'Dragonflies' poem by Red House Painters, text by Janie Doll, painting by David Hancock, acrylic on canvas, 8 ft x 4, 2003.