1982
She didn’t think of it often.
It wasn’t right somehow.
To intrude on a past that existed perfectly well without her.
An expired country and she, a faded intruder watched wide eyed from the long grasses by the bank.
How beautiful they were.
With their crisp white skirts and neatly laced shoes.
Their long ponytails delighted her swishing as they moved. Her own damp and unruly curls clung to her pink face.
The diluted squash in a glass jug and the clunk of the ball.
The air heady with mown grass which lay in heaps around the courts.
She sun high in the July sky in her eyes as her clammy fingers grasped the stalks. Pulled herself higher and peeped.
Saw him kiss her. Fleeting. Cotton on cotton and his dark hands lifting her skirt to reveal peach skin. An intricacy of the summer game strangers played perhaps.
Played out in the shadows, the edges, almost bleeding from the page.
Falling back she glimpsed her mother by the pavilion. A myriad of flowered skirts and jams and sandwiches sweating on swirled plates.
Every inch the jolly mummy.
While she in the grass, a tiny secret keeper. Pink pony forgotten in the flattened green. Mane sticky with ice cream tangles and uncertain plaits.
Eyes staring up unblinking at the impossible blue.
