One day in summer my two friends
and i, Ellie and Hardie, went for a walk by an old church only we know. It’s
only small with a little car park, a smattering of trees and a graveyard that
seems to go on forever over fences and fields. A sea of graves that never move,
rows of names that never change. We walked around the grave stones some days,
looking at names and dates because we have nothing better to do. Occasionally
we would pass a stone with a wreath on top “I hope people put wreaths on my
grave” I said in a somewhat morbid tone “Don’t worry mate we will, or at least
I’ll get someone to do it for me in case I forget” Hardie was funny like that
but still, it’s the thought that counts. It was strange to us. To be there in the
day light felt odd and unnerving as we were used to the cover of night for most
of our activity’s together. We had been
to get food earlier on and were now stacked up with plenty of snacks for our
walk near the little chapel, which was carried in a crumpled old plastic bag.
I was at the back of the pack and Ellie
at the front, leaving Alex in the middle. Ellie was wearing her summery dress,
looking like the hippie she is and she matched the flowery surroundings. As we walked on Ellie sang herself a tune and
me and Hardie talked about other times we had to find obscure places to get
high. This was a stage in all our lives where we had all discovered certain
things that warped perspective and changed the world, horse tranqus being the
new big thing. Today was no exception. Both I and Hardie were at the point of
questioning our own existence which cannot have been helped by the fact alcohol
had been involved at other points that day.
I was doing a lot of the talking because
Hardie was too busy looking around at leaves to really care. “So mate, where the fuck we going?’” I
said, in a manner only wonk could allow, to Alex who turned round and just kept
walking, all the while Ellie was still singing in her summer dress, ignoring
the world while letting it all soak into her.
Later
on in the hike, it could have been minutes it could have been hours for all we
knew or cared. We came across a dead dear or foal as it was smaller than what I
would have expected a dear to be. Alex
and I were stood away from the deer but Ellie was nearer already looking at
the deer. It was in the state of decomposition where its bones were visible but
meat still hung from the crescent shaped ribs. Rot hung in the air refusing smell
anything but death, it hijacked our senses. Death smells of so many things I
couldn’t even begin to describe. Approaching, we could clearly see it had been
attacked by some kind of animal, there were bite marks all up the bones sending
shivers up my spine, odd thoughts ran through my head. Still all I could manage was “mate…
that’s grimy” .Gravel crunched beneath us as , slightly muffled by mud and
twigs that broke under the weight of me and Alex shattering the silence as we
all saw what it was. Light and darkness, life and death all in one image.
If I hadn’t been so fucked up that day I
might have registered the odd beauty of the scene. Sunlight shone through the
overhanging trees, casting irregular shadows over Ellie and the deer. Her
clothes wrenched my eyes from carcass to her, for some reason she made the
death all right. Having her next to death so full of life and beauty. She
emanated a feeling of happiness that day I’ve never been one to buy into karma
or auras but if I have ever seen a perfect one it was her. We looked and poked
at the deer for a while as kids do, and marched off, us three down that long
downhill slope to the field.
By the time we eventually reached the
field, drugs had taken hold, ketamine gripped our skulls our bodies and our
minds. All your senses become irrelevant because we were no longer human anymore.
We were omniscient narrators to our own lives. Hardie crab walked into the
field, talking about how walking was “easier said than done. I was much the
same, finding even walking more difficult than peeling an orange with no hands
but not Ellie, oh no, she floated past me like a spirit singing with a voice
that slipped into my mind like she had sent the words straight into my blood
stream. She was quiet after her song, and there was no more noise. It was a
vacuum that washed over the whole field. The silence created more noise than
any animals around us and I noticed my surroundings, it was a field that’s all
I could see, nothing special just four sides and a lot of grass.
Hardie and I had started to play our
music, a soft song called “good luck” which sent mournful notes echoing across
the grass. Rippling in the wind, sending notes on the strong currents to more
exotic places. We talked and talked of things that we never did like doing band
and living together.
A drop of rain hit my face sliding down
until it dripped off my chin, swiftly followed by a second and a third. It was
only a while after I registered the rain that I snapped out of my trance.
Hardie took a while longer but eventually came to, we complained about rain and
how “it shouldn’t fucking exist in the summer”. Five to ten minutes after we
noticed the absence of Ellie, everything suddenly felt depressingly normal and
not very special. The rain kept falling and it didn’t stop. Flooding our summer
paradise and damping our high to a point of sobriety.
When the rain had stopped me and Hardie crawled
out of our cave made from the overhanging trees and guitar bags to find Ellie stood
at the edge of the field. To me she seemed like some kind of guardian, chasing
away the attacking force of the rain bringing an army of summer with her. Letting
it crash over my world it brought back life and sound saving Hardie and i from
a fate of dampness and wet shoes.
