I saw you through the gates. You had short, spiky hair in mauve or it might have been black, I don’t remember now. Inked on one shoulder was a huge Pegasus, its wings wide and green and on the other, the motif of a woman embracing a man: the image dreamlike and fantastic in muted, earthy blues and greys. With a bar in one eyebrow and a stud through your tongue, I noticed that when you smiled, you had a ring in the flesh above your top teeth, although I guess you must keep most of these in a treasured box by the bed now.
You were tall, distinguished and cocksure amongst the jostling bodies.
You looked up to the sky and beyond the high fence at the clouds gathering with a look of rain on your face and with open arms ushered the children in your care through the school doors to the sound of the wet play bell.
That was eight, maybe nine years ago now. I’d just moved a million miles from where I grew up to live with a wonderful but distant man and having cried my way around the bored housewives tutting at the quality of slacks in department stores too many times, I decided what I needed was a friend. Always one to wear the wrong brand of flip flops, my skin was too natural a colour and my clothes too close to plus size for me to fit in well with the other mums at my son’s school at the time but something about you spoke of interest, life and excitement.
Lifting me out of my delirious melancholy, something about the fact that you were the most unconventional dinner lady ever woke me up.
And now up you go: in the belly of the helicopter, rising with your future.
Because living on the seesaw isn’t easy. It’s isolating. I know that.
Do you remember the time I picked you up and we went shopping? It took no longer than passing by the chicken wings to realise that it was a bad day for you. There were issues with the joints of pork and you thrust a jar of pasta sauce at me: shortly afterwards you shouted at some special offers on an aisle end and told off a mother with a howling child. My cupboards remained empty until later that night but I knew that I had to usher you out of the supermarket before something permanent happened.
Thinking back, we found out not long after I saw you in the playground, that although our children went to different schools, they were the same age: tendays difference, in fact. It was meeting you at Scouts that secured the notion that we were somehow meant to be a pair of caped crusaders: less Batman and Robin and more Morecombe and Wise or perhaps even Laurel and Hardy.
It took some time for your past to catch up with us. I remember as a child, letting go of my mother’s hand while walking to town and jumping a small wall to rescue a bear left out in the rain. She was horrified and came in to the stranger’s garden to catch hold of me once more but having seen the bear’s damp, limp ears her face softened and together we rang the doorbell and handed it over. I’d often seen toys left outside at night in my neighbours’ gardens and it unsettled something deep inside, like my heart and lungs had changed places or something. Things made to be treasured should be just that.
And since your childhood, you had been left out in the rain too many times.
So now, camera in hand, near-adult son at your side, you soar for the first time ever: up to the mighty fighter planes, the giant jumbos and the angular magic of your favourite fixed wing jet. I’ve been smiling at the thought for days.
Then there was the time you hid for months. Neck pain and a faulty MRI scanner meant you stayed the safe side of your coffee table, piled high with ignored bills, tv remotes and old teacups until you felt safe to come out again. It was the rain again. I could tell because your ears hung down.
I have a rich collection of snapshots. Your face around the back gate when I was heavily pregnant and deathly tired: you had lunch in one hand and a duster in the other. Then there was my wedding: you wore a trouser suit and a smile. With a glass of bubbly in one hand and my cake topper in the other, I could tell that something bright was laying quietly dormant, waiting for longer days and brighter skies.
Perhaps one of the things that I am most grateful for are the times you can engage with my husband on the nature of gaming, cricket and sixteenth century military maneuverers on my behalf. I am more than happy to move down the bench. Sunny days follow dark nights but always there are the totems of childhood joys stolen through the gaps of adult anguish.
And having delighted in sharing my family with you for so long, since I spied you through the gates, every time I go to lift your soggy fabric body off the lawn lately, I’m intrigued to find another pair of hands there first. This man makes your eyes bright. Your manic bounce quietens into a gentle undulation, like an ocean under swell and you fit into the cup of his hands as if you were always there.
And this is where he has led you: the steps, the upward draught of the blades and a weightless lifting off. He’s the other side of the world but money flies and I almost hope that his Airshow gift soars you up into the clouds, into the skies above and then out beyond the atmosphere.
Then in eight, maybe nine years’ time I’ll think of the friend I haven’t seen in a long while and I’ll smile about the thought of her flying around the sun.
