Grass Stains

I left in one of my dad’s shirts; over sized, grey and battered, he had thrown it into the charity bag. It was that stuffy time of the year, where England gets confused as to what season it is. The trees have barely gained back their leaves but the heat is stifling, until that icy wind cuts through everything. These two weeks of summer we treasured, when the world turned green and blue with a wash of yellow over everything, like a filter, it was just there. You had to squint your eyes.

I drove that afternoon up past the giant estate. Trees stretching for miles around a country house that we insisted on keeping as a national treasure. The sort of place you took your family when they visited from various other parts of the country, you took them to look round someone else’s house. Everyone had ice cream that was locally sourced, toffee crunch. "Yeah go on; we’ll have a flake." I’m not sure it belonged to anyone, the house, maybe just the people. A house for the people: huge and empty, entirely uninspiring and out-dated. That’s just the people, the house was worse.

It was the summer I’d been spending up at the stables. The boy’s uncle owned a livery yard and we hung out round the back of the huge barns and lay around in the paddocks that weren’t occupied with children's riding lessons. Just kids I suppose, pretending we were everything we weren’t. I smoked, he drank cans of dandelion and burdock. We held hands the way grown-ups do. I pulled in to the yard that day and just the same as always, he knew I was there before he saw me. I remember he wore odd gloves, to do his manual labour. One yellow, one brown. What a strange thing to remember.

I got to ride the horses, from time to time. I didn’t really know how, it was something everyone knew how to do in the country, ride a horse. You just did it, like in the movies and hopefully you picked a horse old and placid enough that just went along with it, plodded you around at a snails pace, round the same trodden path, the same field. It wasn’t ever like a movie; I always just wanted to just get off. I wanted to be with him instead.

I couldn’t really call it a summer of love; young love never is as everyone says it is. Fireworks and butterflies were missing; I got horse flies and grass stains instead. Everything was tired here, Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. Even people’s feelings, no one was ever happy, no one could ever admit to being in love. In this stunted part of the Great Britain, where not one person was ever content and something was always wrong, but no one would ever leave. They called it "God's Own Country," which makes a whole lot of sense when you think God is all a façade of bullshit himself.

I think his uncle had a business on the side, didn’t everyone? One day my stable boy went into a static caravan and he didn’t come out. A silly game of guns and drugs, all just boys’ toys, it swallowed him up and I didn’t fit in anymore. Everyone grows out of horse riding eventually.

I left for that last time. I went to the house, the people’s house. I let my hands ripple through the trees as I walked through the grounds, following the flow of the tiny streams as they all fought to get back to each other. Split apart by the way of the land but moving mountains to be one again. There was music in nature, it was the movement, you could almost hear the forest growing, the aching in the trees. I could still feel the wind, but here, it sounded like tiny daggers, trying to cut through this cover of green. It was angry, but it was far enough away that it couldn’t bother us here, the trees and I. I wished it were my house that people wanted to show off: that this national treasure was mine. I’ll never know what happened to the house; I stopped wearing that grey oversized shirt. I started wearing things that fit me.