Kite Spirit (25 page)

‘Come and watch it from here!’

A thick overhang of rock served as a secure roof sloping low on both sides so that the water drained off the edges, leaving the view over the dam clear.

Garth rummaged in the back of the cave and found a hessian sack full of dry twigs and wood.

‘This is my place where I like to come, to be alone with all this!’ Garth spread out his arms, taking in the lake and surrounding mountains with his gesture. He stacked the twigs
into a pile and took out a lighter. The fire was slow to start and smoked for a while, but Garth kept piling twigs on until bright orange flames started to rise up.

‘Thank you!’ Kite said as she warmed her hands.

‘What for?’

‘Bringing me here, listening to me, helping me through.’

She laid her head on his shoulder and they watched the rain pour over the ledge and steam mingle with smoke from the fire. She felt his fingers lift a strand of her hair and twist it around and
around, making perfect spirals. He bent down slowly and kissed the top of her head and she could feel what was coming next. She pulled away from him.

‘I can’t,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I feel as if I’ve just buried my friend.’

Garth nodded and placed an arm around her shoulder, pulling her close to him. She could feel his heart beating against her chest and she closed her eyes. She listened to the rain falling and the
crackling of the fire and then she heard another sound, warm and free and golden. Dawn’s music rose up from where the reed lay lodged between slates and bones, up into the air and travelled
through the valley towards her, coursing along her blood stream, up through her spine and into her heart.

At first it came upon her gently like a whisper of sadness blowing through her, but then the tears were rolling freely down her face and her chest ached, as if her ribcage was about to crack
open with surging grief. Now her breath came in great sobs that she had no control over. She felt Garth draw her closer to him, but he didn’t speak or try to quiet the emotion in her. The
rain poured over the edge of the rock and the reservoir below began to fill with water. The tears that she had held back for so long, tears for the friend she would never see again, fell hard and
strong, building in force, not weakening, as she let them flow.

It was not until morning that Kite realized that the owl print was gone.

‘As if it had never been . . .’ she whispered.

‘Well, I just hope we make it through this weather!’ Seth muttered to Dr Sherpa, Ellie and the rest of the little group that had gathered outside the Carrec Arms.
Just as they were about to leave Aida wheeled herself up to the car and gave Seth a hand-sewn leather deer.

‘This is the toy that Peter, your grandad, made!’

‘Thank you, Aida!’ Seth clasped it in his hands delightedly.

The car started on the third attempt. The little windscreen wipers swished back and forth, desperately trying to keep up with the constant rivulets of rain pooling against the bonnet. As they
drove slowly along, the girl with pink hair came running out of a little stone cottage. Not seeming to mind about the rain, she stood and waved.

‘Who’s that?’ asked Seth.

‘Cassie.’ Kite waved back.

‘Seems like you’ve made some friends around here.’

Kite smiled. She looked down at the little slate necklace Garth had given her and thought how much she would miss these people and this place.

The windows were steaming up. Since she was little Kite had always loved the feeling of lying across the back seat of the car driving through the rain, all cosy and safe whatever was happening
outside. Seth’s shoulders were hunched in concentration as he kept slowing to clear the mist on the inside of the windscreen.

Kite placed her hand in her pocket and slipped out Dawn’s card, opened it and read the words that she knew could not be avoided any longer.

A small sharp noise escaped from her mouth. Just as Hazel had said, there was no explanation here, nothing. Slowly she closed the card and turned it over to see the image on the
front and, as she did, she had to struggle to catch her breath. In her hands she held a photograph of a great white owl soaring over a mountain range, her wings lit up against a starry night
sky.

Kite had seen Lucy the counsellor as soon as she’d got back, on Dr Sherpa’s suggestion. She’d felt ready to speak of everything she had felt, everything she
was still feeling, and it was reassuring to know that whenever she needed her Lucy was there. But the person who helped her the most over the next two years was Miss Choulty.

Kite had missed her in school while she’d been on maternity leave and had spontaneously hugged her when she’d called round to check that Kite was ‘getting through’. It
felt strange to be sitting with Miss Choulty, talking of Dawn, as she fed her newborn baby, and yet somehow comforting to witness what Miss Choulty called her ‘miracle of happiness’
that she had named ‘Hope’.

‘What are the hardest things to cope with?’ Miss Choulty asked as she placed Hope in Kite’s arms.

There had been so many hardest things . . .

Coming back to Fairview to find that a young couple had moved into Dawn’s flat. Jess’s cat flap had been boarded up and the door painted a creamy yellow colour. Instead of
Dawn’s music through the wall she’d heard their baby crying, laughing and gurgling. Over the next two years, as she took her GCSEs and finished her first year of A levels, she had
watched little Ebony grow. The day when Jodie and Richard had asked her to babysit she’d had palpitations, wondering whether she would actually be able to step foot inside Dawn’s
bedroom. What do you expect to find? she reasoned with herself. Dawn has gone. Nothing of her is here any more. As soon as she entered the flat she knew that that was true. Like Ruby, Jodie was a
fan of colour and every room had been repainted. The living room was a rich, cosy orange and Ebony’s bedroom was painted in shocking pink, a far cry from the delicate duck-egg blue it had
once been. As Kite peered into Dawn’s bedroom from the doorway Jodie came to stand by her side.

‘It’s OK, Kite; we know what happened to your friend. I’m so sorry!’

A feeling of relief washed over Kite. The only ghosts of Dawn that lived in the flat were the ghosts of her own memories. Sometimes she let them play over her and sometimes she knew that if she
was to carry on and do her A levels and babysit for Ebony, if she was to live and grow, she could not let visions of Dawn, either in her waking moments or her sleep, take her over as they had once
done.

It had taken her weeks to pluck up the courage to call Hazel and Jimmy at their new home. That had been one of the hardest ‘hardest things’. Jimmy answered the phone and there had
been a long pause after she’d said, ‘Hi, it’s Kite,’ because for years, her next line had always been, ‘Is Dawn there, please?’ But they had not talked about
Dawn. ‘Remember that job I was going for?’ Jimmy asked Kite. She had forgotten, but she did remember now that he’d worn the interview suit at Dawn’s funeral. ‘Well, I
got it. Anyway, don’t know why I thought of that really, but Hazel and I don’t work shifts now; it makes life a bit easier. I’ll ask Hazel to call you, though it’s hard, you
know. Don’t be offended if she can’t bring herself to.’

For the first few days afterwards Kite had listened out for the phone, but the call from Hazel never came.

At school everyone was kind and sensitive towards her and went out of their way to draw her into their friendship folds. But she couldn’t always bring herself to be with them in the places
that she would have hung out with Dawn. Of course she had the excuse of having to catch up and actually take her GCSEs before she could start on her A-level courses with the others, and that
provided her with the get-out she sometimes needed.

It had been Garth’s suggestion that she go to a concert, when she’d told him how much she missed the sound of Dawn’s playing through her bedroom wall. One day she contacted
Esme and Eddie on Facebook and that’s how she found herself in a concert hall, listening to them play.

Some of the hardest moments of all were when she felt happy. On her third week back Jacey and Laura from running club had turned up at her front door. They were training for a team run and they
needed
her, they said. It took her two months to get back to fitness, but she found that the running took her out of her head. Sometimes they would chat as they ran along, talking about
nonsensical things that happened at school, a film someone had seen, an outrageous post on Facebook, who fancied who, and she would run along and just listen. After a few weeks she would find
herself laughing at something, and feel only a wisp of sadness that she had not been able to share the joke with Dawn.

The race they’d entered was a county championship. As Seth and Ruby drove her on to the car park of the muddy field she suddenly lost her nerve. She had almost dropped out, but it was a
recollection of Dawn at her last race that made her carry on.

As she lay collapsed in a great heap of wet clay at the finish line, Dawn stared down at Kite and giggled her infectious little giggle.

‘You did it! You beat your best time!’ she shouted, throwing Kite a towel.

Something had changed in the way memories of Dawn came back to her. She was no longer dissecting every conversation they’d ever had, searching for reasons why. Now her memories were often
of the happy, random times they’d spent together, and when she was transported back to them she would, more often than not, feel bolstered and encouraged, rather than burdened.

‘Thank you, Dawn,’ she said as her spikes ploughed up the thick clay, her heart pumping hard. She could feel her lungs opening as she pounded the ground and began to pass other
coloured bibs. When she faced the last hill she thought of Jack running up Kite Carrec and her legs extended further. At the top Ruby and Seth were jumping up and down in a frenzy of excitement
calling her name.

‘Run, Kite, run!’ Before she knew what was happening she was being funnelled into the finishing lane. Seth ran over, lifted her up and twirled her around, mud flying in every
direction. The feeling Kite had at that moment was one of pure joy, and she was relieved that she could still feel it, even though the fact remained that happy moments in a world without Dawn were
also the hardest things to bear. They had always turned up to support each other on big occasions. More and more she called on these happy memories of Dawn so that she could carry her best friend
with her through all the important days of her life.

It had taken a lot longer to try to fly again. One day she’d overheard Ruby talking on the phone: ‘You won’t stop calling, will you? I’m sure
she’ll come back in time, so please keep trying.’

Annalisa had more than lived up to her promise, calling regularly until finally she’d come and knocked at their door. At first Kite hardly recognized her with her new shock of bright red
hair cut into a sleek bob and finished off with a sequinned bandanna.

‘I
adore
the flowers!’ Annalisa enthused, looking down at the sculptural orange heads of the birds of paradise. ‘It is not possible to have these exquisite birds
outside your door and never fly!’

Annalisa sat in her cross-legged yoga position on Kite’s bed. ‘I know you have your examinations to catch up on, but Ruby says you are doing well and must have a break from
revision.’

Kite lowered her eyes.

It was difficult to describe even to herself what had stopped her from going back to Circus Space, except that it would feel like she was moving on and fulfilling her dreams without her best
friend.

‘I know this doesn’t make any sense, but I feel like it’s a sort of betrayal.’

‘So remind me . . . what was the last message of your friend?’

Kite stood on her bed and took down the birthday card, with the Dawn owl feather inside. ‘I think it was probably this.’

Annalisa ran her fingers over the feather, examined the image on the front of the card, and raised her eyebrows. ‘Exactly,’ she seemed to say.

Kite stood and looked at herself in the mirror. She was taller and stronger, and after all her training at Circus Space over the past six months she had finally lost her
skinny-little-girl straight-up-and-down figure. People who hadn’t seen her for a while commented on how much she’d ‘matured’. Mali has whistled when he’d first seen
her and asked her out again almost straight away. She’d told him that she liked him ‘much better as a friend’. ‘That’s the line no one wants to hear!’ he’d
joked. Then what was it that Grandma Grace had said when she came to visit last month . . . ?

‘You’ve bloomed, my darlin’.’

But if she had changed on the outside, the real growing she had done was invisible to most people around her. It had taken time to understand that she would never be the old Kite again, that
what Dawn had done had changed her forever.