We picked my friend up one late summer evening, to go down to the canal bridge.
I'd known for years that bats lived underneath, in the concrete rafters, amongst the trees. When he was younger, my brother and father had built a bat detector from scratch, as a home electronics project. Essentially just a little black, plastic box with a red L.E.D and a couple of knobs on the side of it, you'd turn these controls to different frequencies, pointing the device towards bats when they hunt at dusk. It made such odd noises that some friends had often used it at band practice.
We decided that this kind of light meant that there would be dozens of them about, so we drove down to part of the canal where we used to go as children.
By the time we arrived however, the sun had already set and there was only a breath of violet in the sky over the grey-black mass of the bridge to show it had ever been there.
..Vibrating blips and squeals..
I spent a lot of my younger years doing stuff like that, running around in the trees by the canal, pretending I was some kind of feral forest girl with my best friend Chessy. Once we found a little dappled glade by a stream, with part of an old sofa in it. It was to be our den, but the longer we played there, messing around with sticks, something felt increasingly wrong. The stream was dirtier than we'd thought, full of discarded things we didn't recognise, with syringes, broken bottles and empty glue cans on the floor. We were too young to understand, but savvy enough to leave. It's often in my dreams; beautiful and forboding each time the fuzzy realisation hits home.
..Ccc-c-c-b-brr-rrrrrrrrrch, pi-pi-piiiiiiiiiiippp..
As we neared the bridge, I turned on my torch to avoid any dog mess. The place was still beautiful, even at night, though it seemed different somehow; unfamiliar though I knew it well.
The bat detector was making little metallic crunching sounds, feeding back softly. A pale blue light was coming from one side of the bridge, where the concrete embankment sloped upward. The space used to be our rocky little playhouse.
No word from any bats so far. Only the magnified sounds of keys in pockets and the crunch of gravel underfoot.
Trying to keep our spirits up, chatting about inane things, the three of us drew closer to the bridge along the black path. Waiting under a smaller, much older stone bridge nearby, I decided to talk reasonably loudly, so that whoever was making the glow under the bridge would know someone else was there. I'm not sure why I wanted them hear me, maybe I was trying to let them know I wasn't afraid or something. After all, they couldn't see us either. Voices in the dark. The others didn't like this method, and either whispered or didn't speak at all. Hardly drawing breath at times it seemed. The water made cold, ghostly green phosphorescent flashes on our bridge's mossy roof, like a smaller, more personal version of the Aurora Borealis.
Knots tightening in stomachs.
...Prrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiippppppppp...
Tinny music drifted over in little pockets of night breeze from the small group of teenagers drinking under the bridge, and mingled with the detector. Their mobile phones lit the cave-like space around them.
We never actually saw anyone, just heard their muffled voices and saw the glow. The dull, thin clank of empty cans being discarded on rocks. I wondered if the bats were there with them, hanging silently above them in the feint blue light, watching or sleeping.
In a way it was like I was back in school again, where no-one really understood why I preferred nature to shopping or whatever, and where I felt worlds apart from virtually everyone. Our worlds would cross but never really meet, just as the blue light's inhabitants and the old bridge's onlookers would not.
I could tell my brother and friend had given up on the bat idea pretty much as soon as they'd seen the bridge, and were suggesting leaving now, with whispered agitation. We walked back to the car, with the torch off.
Maybe the bats had moved on; quietly left one evening, en-masse, while no-one noticed or perhaps, even cared. Tiny spectres, effervescing like puffs of fog on the last trails of dusk. Marking the changes with their pips and squeals.
The drive home was where the city melts into the countryside. Tunnels of trees, sparks of yellow streetlamp light falling on everything through leaves. I wound down my window and rode the wind with my palm for a while. I held up the bat detector, and as we drove down the empty roads to drop my friend off, I occasionally heard their tiny mouthes speaking to insects in the dark.
