Note: Suitable for adults only.

Adult Contemporary Fantasy

Dragonfly Summer

Howie tracks me down over the Internet.

Man, I hadn’t even thought about the guy in maybe fifteen years. I guess I wanted to forget him. Last time I saw him he was standing over me, fists clenched, face twisted in fury. He knocked me flying, even though he was scarcely half my size. Can’t say I blame him.

When his email turns up in my inbox, I almost spam it, but then my mind holds up one of those little red flags, and I pause, cursor hovering over Spam.

Howard Hawkins. Double-H.

Fuck.

#

I pull my car into the car park in the middle of the afternoon. It’s a Saturday, a couple of weeks later. There’s only one other car there, a battered blue Volvo with its back bumper hanging half off. There’s no one in it, but it isn’t a Howie car. Howie would have something low and black and fast. Maybe it would be dented and a little old, but it would be hot. Nothing about this car says Howie. So I sit there, staring out over the estuary to the wading birds on the silver-streaked mud, enjoying the peace, waiting.

When I forgot Howie, I forgot this place too. I reckon if I just drove past, I wouldn’t recognise it.

They’ve paved the lane, flattening out the narrow, potholed track and replacing it with sleek asphalt. They’ve put in this whole damned car park, complete with information board and little padlocked iron donation box. Progress. It makes the whole place feel tired rather than fresh. Or perhaps that’s just me. I’m not nineteen anymore, and everything seems old.

I’d brought a map, but in the end, despite it being twenty years since I was here, I hadn’t needed it. Yeah, I’d forgotten it, but Howie’s email had brought it surging back like a tidal bore.

I put the steering wheel lock on–you can’t be too careful, even out here–then lever myself out the driver’s seat. We aren’t due to meet for almost half an hour. Might as well take a look around. See the old sights.

School books sprawl over the back seat of the Volvo. Dozens of them. Definitely not Howie. Howie would be–what? My brain suddenly can’t come up with what Howie might do for a job. The whole idea of Howie working nine-to-five just doesn’t fit in the space in my head that Howie occupies.

The pub’s still there, but it isn’t The Saracen’s Head anymore. It’s something called a Hungry Horse, whatever the fuck that is, complete with a new glass-walled extension containing colourful plastic structures and screaming kids. The peeling paint, cracked brickwork, and smoke-stained windows have been facelifted away. I walk past it, onto the towpath between the canal and the estuary.

Half a mile seems longer than it used to. I’ve been meaning to get down the gym more often, but this last year, things have been too busy, and anyway, there always seems to be something else to do. At my age, everyone gets a few extra pounds, don’t they? A couple of beers at lunchtime and a couple after work every day. They soon add up, even if you don’t eat that much. But what can you do? It goes with the job, just like the fags. My fingers are itching for one again. I pull the box (crushed) out of my back pocket and work one free. I let the wreath of stained smoke slip into the warm air.

At first I think I’ve remembered it wrong. Around the bend, past the first of the concrete boats dragged up onto the bank to act as makeshift breakwaters. I was sure I would find the windmill there. Isn’t that what we’ve come to see, after all? The scene of most of our triumphs and a fair few of our disasters? That damned windmill.

But it’s not there. There’s just a strip of grass, stretching to the bushes and heaped wild roses on the edge of the mud beach. And standing there, a small, middle-aged woman.

Her black hair is cut short and peppered with grey. She wears a thin, too-old jacket. Smoke rises like an emaciated, pale finger from her cigarette. Some people smoke with style and some smoke comfortably. I’m one of the latter. This woman is the former, in spades. I take a step forward.

“Sophie?”

She glances back. Her face is narrower than I remember, like it’s been drawn back by a pinching hand, and slightly yellower.

“Howie contacted you too?” I ask, then realise it’s a stupid question. Of course he has.

“All of us,” she said.

“Fuck.”

“It’s gone,” she says.

I step up beside her.

“Look,” she says, pointing with her chin at the grass. “You can’t even see where it used to be.”

She’s right. The grass is unmarked. I feel a hollow bubble press against the inside of my ribs then burst. The vacuum it leaves is shockingly painful. I force myself to ignore it.

“Twenty years,” I say. “Things change.”

She shakes her head.

Even back then, the windmill was old. Its sails were rotting ribs, stripped of the canvas that once drove them. In the wind, it sometimes creaked like an old man. There were cracks in the walls, and the dust and bird shit were thick on the wooden floors. But it still looked like it would last forever. Everything looks like that when you’re just a kid.

“Do you remember?” Sophie says. “Up there on the top floor, in the old straw? We fucked like rabbits.”

“Sophie!” I’m obscurely shocked that this forty-year-old woman would say fuck. Back then, she wouldn’t have dreamed of it. Back then, I probably said it every other word, and she was the one constantly shocked.

“It’s true,” she says. “I’d only slept with a couple of other guys before you, but you didn’t let that slow you down. You fucked my brains out anyway.”

“You told me I was your first,” I say. Shit. Now I sound like an offended teenager.

She shrugs again. “It’s a good line. Doesn’t really work after you pass thirty, though.”

I look around, desperately looking for something more normal to say. Seeing that cynicism in Sophie is like looking into an all-too-clear mirror and not liking what you see.

“So,” I say. “Got any kids?”

“I’ve got thirty different kids every hour, six hours a day,” she says. “You want me to take some of them home?”

Something clicks in my mind. The Volvo. “You’re a teacher?”

“Yeah. Gold star.”

“How about husband? Boyfriend?”

“Men are bastards.”

“Right.”

She blows out a cloud of smoke, then drops her cigarette and grinds it out under her heel. “Fancy a drink?”

“For old time’s sake?” I say, not able to stop the grin spreading on my face.

“No. It’s just a drink.”

I glance at my watch. “What about meeting Howard?”

“Fuck Howard,” she says.

Continue reading Dragonfly Summer in the At the Gates and Other Stories collection.