Rowan

An excerpt from Nightbathing.

Times are that nostalgia grips me and I lose track of where I am on the map. There’s a house similar to my high school best friend’s where Donna and I spent most of the summer of ‘97 eating heavily buttered tiger bread and slathering ourselves, unevenly, in fake tan. September that year, for our return to school, we strutted along the driveway together with irrevocably streaked legs thinking it was finally our time to be the cool girls. Before the crushing realisation that we would never be the cool girls we continued to fill that summer with a cocktail of innocent adolescence - sunbathing and water fights and hiding and climbing amongst bushes and dens in a wild expanse behind Donna’s house. We’d flit between spending hours playing Super Mario and covering ourselves in candy floss fragranced salves and potions whilst staring enviably at models with model boyfriends in teen magazines. On the outside wall of the house I imagine running a stick of chalk along as I walk and when I next pass I see someone, much smaller than I, had done just that. There’s nothing remotely similar about where I live now and the suburb of my youth but there’s something hypnotic enough about the endless grey road running on ahead of me that enables me to time travel. 

Now that I observe the suburbs with such purposeful scrutiny I’m indoctrinated into them in the way only children seem to be. Although I don’t know the ginnels and alleyways, the shortcuts and hiding places the way my daughter one day will, I am exploring in much the same way as her, the kind of exploration thought of as a luxurious flaneurism in cities is really more of an unavoidable aspect of parenting alone, and of being poor. In wastelands, children are attracted to the lack of authority, but in exploring the suburbs the draw is territorial - they are the rightful owners and can map the terrain in a way no adult ever could. The shortcut through the grounds of the Muslim Centre, the hidden kissing fenceposts on an alley that appears at first to be a dead-end, these are places you discover effortlessly as a child and are drawn to unwittingly. 

I don’t imagine I’ll discover these cut-throughs, or notice ideal spaces in the bushes for a den, but I am as curious of the ground as much as I am the birds - it compels me to sit at the curb edge and poke at dirt and pebbles in its gulley. There’s an affinity with stones again, the joy of finding one with that enviable hand-feel, a smooth valley in which to rub my thumb back and forth. I read that rock collecting is a commonality between large numbers of meth addicts; in America they are also inextricably drawn to Native American arrowheads, one user described the strange hobbyists in action: ‘You just get to walking and looking at the ground. You get to looking and an arrowhead catches your eye. Many nights [I] found [myself] in fields full of fellow arrowhead hunters. The strangest things you find out there is other dopeheads’. I wonder what replaces the fields and arrowheads for the addicts living amongst the city lights.

The road out of the suburb is a thick strip of tarmac laid over old cobbles from the suburb’s early days. At the gutter edges the tarmac runs out and a half metre wide strip of cobbles on either side is visible for the length of the road. The tarmac strip and its rough edges look like a huge glob of flattened Play-Doh and I imagine peeling it back to reveal the entire cobbled road once more. There’s a satisfaction picturing the deep, accurate indentations of each cobblestone left on the dough’s underside.

It seems alien now in the short winter light how I could ever imagine the road as freshly-poured black treacle bitumen the way I do in summer. Last May marked the start of a fiercely hot blaze that ended just as August arrived, the trees sucked the life from their leaves in order to shed them and fortify their trunks, fruits ripened too 

soon (or not at all) and died on their stalks, and the lawns turned to straw and 

stubble. In America as the meth addicts trade pebbles, the arid gardens around them are being spray-painted grassy green. I watch, unbelievably, a variety of online adverts for competing lawn paint companies, each feels a parody of the last. The ads link to real websites, and the websites sell real products but I can’t shake the feeling it’s a satirical prank. The camera zooms in as tiny pearls of green spray from the hose and eddy across dead blades of grass: ‘Simply spray your lawn problems away!’. How long can we deny these ferocious days before the paint fades and peels? 

I look around me at the streets and realise there are no rowan trees on Rowan Avenue.