Kite Spirit

by Sita Brahmachari

  ‘Don’t you want to keep the reeds you’ve really enjoyed playing?’ Kite asked.

  ‘Maybe this one from the Brahms concert you came to see me in,’ Dawn pondered, picking up a reed that she’d tied with golden thread.

  ‘You should – you were brilliant that night.’

  Dawn shrugged, cradling the reed in her cupped hand as if it alone was responsible for her playing well.

  Later, through her bedroom wall, she heard Dawn practising the same phrase over and over again. It sounded like she was punishing herself for something.

  Tragic Loss of Perfect Dawn

  ‘You talk of her as if she’s still here,’ Miss Choulty commented.

  It was true. Kite could not stow Dawn away neatly into the past like everyone else seemed able to do with their ‘She was so clever’ . . . ‘She had such potential’ . . . ‘She was an outstanding musician’ . . . ‘She always used to’ . . . That would feel like packing her away in a big chest, closing the lid, carrying her up to an old cobwebby loft and switching off the light forever. But the way she saw it, it was Dawn who had abandoned her.

  When Miss Choulty had called around for a ‘chat’ Kite had been the only one in. The teacher hadn’t waited for an invitation. She’d walked straight in, as Kite stood frozen in the doorway.

  ‘Your mum suggested I call. She told me you’re having trouble sleeping,’ Miss Choulty said as she patted the sofa for Kite to sit down next to her.

  A blast of inexplicable anger towards Ruby flared up inside her. Why couldn’t her mum just leave her alone?

  ‘What do you miss about her?’ Miss Choulty asked as Kite stared down at her hands.

  ‘I miss her music most of all,’ Kite replied eventually.

  Actually it had often driven Kite mad as Dawn repeated a phrase over and over on her oboe, going over every note until she’d got it exactly right, but then when she played the whole piece through, usually right at the end of the day, you could never hear the joins and her playing transported you somewhere else . . . More often than not it had lulled Kite into a peaceful sleep.

  Kite could picture the scene right now of the day in school when they’d all been offered the chance to learn an instrument. She’d chosen the violin and given up in less than a month, but from the first day Dawn had been fascinated by the oboe. She had practised so hard that within a year she was playing pieces that put everyone else to shame. And then she’d been given free lessons and the bursary to buy her oboe, and that had been her life from then on.

  ‘I told that police officer. She didn’t play, on the night before . . . not a single note, nothing, and now I think about it, she’d been practising less and less,’ Kite explained to Miss Choulty.

  Could she have seen it coming? Suddenly it seemed possible to spot signs everywhere, not only the night before what she had come to think of as the Falling Day, the day her whole life had begun to fall apart. And she felt as if she was still falling.

  Miss Choulty rubbed Kite’s arm to remind her that she was in the room.

  ‘What did she like to play?’

  ‘I don’t really know the names of the composers and pieces, except for the concert I went to. Brahms. I can’t remember which symphony. I’ll get the programme if you want?

  Miss Choulty nodded, and Kite went through to her bedroom and rummaged in her drawer.

  ‘Brahms’s Symphony No. 1,’ Miss Choulty read out as she traced her fingers down the list to find . . . ‘First Oboe – Dawn Jenkins.’ She bit her bottom lip. ‘Such a waste,’ she whispered. A tiny silver St Christopher resting in the bony enclave of her collarbone rose with her uneven breath. Kite wondered how she had never noticed it before. St Christopher was Grandma Grace’s favourite saint too.

  ‘Darlin’, don’t you just love the image of this great giant muscle man carrying the child to safety over the rough surging river. And his back does ache, and his arms does ache because he don’t even know yet he is carrying the creator of the world on his shoulder!’

  It was good to hear her grandma’s lilting voice in her ear, comforting.

  ‘Now, child, even if you say you don’t believe, one day I will give you my St Christopher. He protects the children all over the wide world, you know.’

  ‘Sorry, Kite!’ Miss Choulty sniffed as she blew her nose and wiped away her tears.

  ‘Sometimes when she plays her oboe at night it helps me get to sleep,’ Kite whispered. Miss Choulty leaned forward, as if hopeful that Kite would continue. But that was all she had to say. After a period of silence, Kite didn’t even look up as Miss Choulty said her goodbyes and left.

  How could she describe to anyone how much she missed Dawn, that her silence was like a clamouring emptiness filled only with Kite’s unanswered questions? ‘What if I could have done something to help her? What if I’d knocked harder? What if I’d kicked down her door and gone inside? What if the ambulance had been called earlier? What if I’d seen her the night before and talked instead of just Facebooking? What if I’d never got involved at Circus Space? What if I’d been more sensitive? What if I’d asked more questions? Been a better listener? What if . . . ? What if . . . ? What if . . . ?’

  And then the Whys would start. ‘Why couldn’t she talk to me and tell me what was going on in her head?’ Kite asked herself over and over. But this was a tortured phrase of music and Kite would never be able to fix the joins in it now, no matter how hard she tried.

  Sleepless Night

  It should have been a relief to be in her own room that night, away from all the questions and phone calls and visits. She knew that her friends from her running club were only being kind by calling around, but she couldn’t bring herself to go back to the things she’d done before. It would feel like saying that everything was back to normal. She didn’t even know where they’d taken Dawn’s body. Nobody seemed to want to answer her questions, but she had seen enough films to imagine that Dawn was probably lying in some ice-cold mortuary. Even the words filled her with horror. ‘Mortuary . . . autopsy,’ – they sounded like a kind of dissection. Why did it all have to take so long? Why couldn’t they just let Dawn be?

  Jacey and Laura had called around again this morning and she’d told them straight that she wouldn’t run until after the funeral. It wasn’t exactly true. Only yesterday she’d found herself putting on her trainers and attempting to jog around the park – but instead of the familiar feeling of freedom as she pounded the pathway, her legs felt heavy and her chest tightened, as if someone was squeezing her lungs in a vice. She had only been going for ten minutes before her legs began to shake. Kite doubted that she would ever feel the urge to run again.

  Whenever Ruby or Seth persuade her to venture out of the flat she drew sympathetic nods and found herself locked into strained conversations in which people told her how sorry they were, and she’d automatically say ‘thank you’, as if it meant anything to her that people she hardly knew, and who didn’t really know Dawn, were sorry. She’d decided that it was better to be on her own. The problem was, alone in her room she bombarded herself with more questions than anyone else had thought to ask her.

  Kite stood up and walked over to her long mirror. Her skin, normally a rich brown colour, had taken on a sallow yellowish tinge. Her huge moss-green eyes were sunken into her face. She stretched her arms towards the ceiling and felt the same strangled stiffness as when she’d tried to run. She would have liked to raise her head to the sky and howl, but no sound came. She dropped her shoulders and hung her head so that her coils of thick black, copper-lit hair brushed over her feet. The rush of blood to her brain made her dizzy and the backs of her legs ached. Until now she had always felt that her body could carry her anywhere she wanted to go, but since the Falling Day she had a growing sensation of standing outside herself, watching events, with no power to change anything.

  Instead of sleeping she found herself wandering around her room doing and thinking the most random things. She sat at her computer and googled Brahms to fi
nd out what sort of a man he was. As if knowing about Dawn’s favourite composer would provide her with the answers she needed.

  ‘The music of Brahms shows a passionate nature turned in on itself.’

  She read the sentence over and over again. Maybe this is how Dawn had felt too, distant from the world and everyone in it.

  Kite stared at herself in the mirror again. ‘Dawn Jenkins is Kite Solomon’s best friend,’ she said out loud. And who was Kite Solomon without Dawn? Maybe because she had known Dawn for longer than anyone except for her parents, she had never realized how far her sense of who she was, was bound up with Dawn.

  Kite could picture Dawn on her sixteenth birthday, only three weeks ago. Her fine auburn hair was pulled back into a ponytail, her soft hazel eyes heavily lined with black. She’d worn skinny jeans and a tight long-sleeved T-shirt with an abstract line drawing in the centre, and the locket that Kite had bought for her when they’d left primary school. It contained a photo of eleven-year-old Kite in one side and eleven-year-old Dawn in the other. She was willowy slim and tall, with legs that seemed to go on forever, but Dawn could never see how beautiful she was, always going on instead about how lucky Kite was not to have grown too much, what a pain it was to have curves and boobs and have to wear a bra.

  Every time they looked in the mirror Dawn would compliment Kite on her eclectic style, admiring her latest quirky buy from Camden market and her DMs, her coils of hair, her smooth brown skin, her slightly upward-turning nose, the beauty spot on her right cheekbone, and what Dawn called her perfect ‘Angelina Jolie’ mouth.

  ‘Yes, well. You make me sound perfect. This!’ Kite laughed, pointing to her beauty spot, ‘is actually more of a mole, and what about the spots I’m hiding under my hair?’ She lifted up her tangle of curls to reveal a fine rash of spots she got every month around the time of her period. ‘And how come you completely forget to mention my scar-brow!’

  Kite’s scar was about a centimetre long and it cut through her right eyebrow like an arrow: the hair would never grow there. She’d got it on the day she’d jumped off the rope swing and crashed headfirst into the ground, Dawn crying out in horror. The wound had gushed blood with a frightening force, but once it was all cleaned up and stitched it wasn’t really that big a deal. Because of her wild hair most people didn’t notice the scar, or perhaps they were too polite to mention it. It didn’t really bother Kite, but according to Dawn she had a habit whenever she was nervous of pulling on her hair to cover it up.

  Now she thought of it, Dawn’s sixteenth birthday had been the last time she’d been in Dawn’s room. As she’d watched Dawn applying her make-up Kite had noticed how cracked and dry Dawn’s skin had become; the worst that she’d seen it in a long time.

  ‘I can completely get rid of that scar, if you want me to,’ she told Kite as she finished making up her own face. ‘Can you see my birthmark?’ She turned to the side. Kite shook her head. Dawn had taken to masking the mark with foundation, powder and concealer.

  ‘OK! I’ve often wondered what I’d look like without it!’ Kite agreed, staring at her scar in the little hand mirror.

  Dawn went to work on her with her toolkit collection of make-up, powdering, buffing and drawing in the gap in her eyebrow with a pencil and eyeshadow.

  ‘Perfect! You look like a model,’ Dawn smiled when she was done.

  Kite stared at herself in the mirror. Her scar was completely gone, but she felt like a painted doll someone had given her as a child that had freaked her out and given her nightmares.

  ‘Maybe, but I don’t even recognize myself!’ she laughed and went over to the corner sink to wash the make-up off while Dawn buffed another layer of powder over her birthmark.

  ‘Why do you always have to wear so much make-up? You don’t need it,’ Kite asked, slumping down on Dawn’s bed as she dried her face.

  Dawn shrugged and walked over to the sink, smoothed her tongue over her teeth, and flossed carefully. Afterwards she took her lemon-scented soap and began her ritual hand washing.

  ‘I do actually – my skin looks dull without it,’ Dawn finally answered.

  Dawn’s parents had given the newspapers her last school photo in which she’d made herself up perfectly, just as she had on her birthday. The headline in the newspaper read: ‘Tragic Loss of Perfect Dawn’. When she’d seen it Kite had wished that Hazel and Jimmy had provided a more natural photo to show the world how gentle and young Dawn really was. Now, thinking back to her birthday, Kite wondered . . . If Dawn had not been wearing her make-up mask, would she have confided in her how she’d been feeling? She racked her mind for what else they had talked about on that day.

  ‘Has he asked you out yet?’ Kite asked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mr Saxy! The clarinet player I saw making eyes at you at the concert – the one you said “plays the sax like a dream too”.’

  ‘Funny!’ Dawn blushed bright red from the neck up and changed the subject. ‘How’s it going with you and Mali then?’

  Mali was a boy Kite had met at Circus Space. He juggled mostly and was training on the giant globe hoop. She loved to watch him turning upside down. He reminded her of that da Vinci drawing sketch of the man with all his muscles showing, turning on an axel. Kite had let slip to Dawn that they’d joked around a bit when they’d been training, but when they’d kissed she’d felt nothing. It had been Kite’s fourth kiss, and the best yet, but still not that special.

  ‘Well, at least you’re not sixteen and never been kissed!’ Dawn joked.

  ‘Never by anyone I really wanted to kiss!’

  After that Kite had handed over her present: the little reed box with the green velvet lining. Dawn had cried as she’d inspected the soft leather box.

  ‘It was supposed to make you happy!’

  ‘Best present you’ve ever given me.’ Dawn hugged her tightly.

  She’d bought it while Dawn spent hours searching for what might turn out to be ‘a golden reed’. Kite had thought Dawn mad when she’d told her that her favourite place in the world was Howarth’s wind instrument shop, until the day she’d gone there herself.

  Kite stepped inside Howarth’s smart door, ran her fingers over the smooth wooden counters, and watched the man in the old fashioned hessian apron and double rimmed spectacles taking out a tray of reeds.

  ‘Smell that!’ Dawn sighed as she breathed in the rich oboe resin.

  Dawn led Kite along a wall of oboes sniffing as they went like a couple of dogs picking up a scent, making each other giggle as usual. Dawn was inspecting a basket full of bamboo. She picked up a stick and felt its weight.

  ‘This bamboo’s from a farm in France. It’s the one my teacher makes her reeds from!’ Dawn explained.

  Kite peered down. To her it was nothing more than a stick.

  On the way out they passed a wall of portraits of famous wind musicians.

  ‘I bet you’ll have your picture up there one day!’ Kite commented as they walked out of the shop.

  ‘I doubt it!’ Dawn replied.

  I doubt it.

  No matter how much people told Kite not to rake over things she couldn’t help casting back to these moments. Her mind was like an endlessly whirring film reel with scenes cut up in the wrong order, flitting backwards and forward in time, desperately trying to search out what might have been a cry for help. But how could she have known? Everyone her age had insecurities about something.

  As she looked back on the scene, knowing what she knew now, she couldn’t understand why she hadn’t screamed at Dawn to stop worrying about things that didn’t matter instead of trying to shrug everything off with a joke.

  What else had they talked about? It was all coming back to her now.

  ‘Somewhere down the line most of them are probably related to Brahms or Mozart!’ Dawn joked. ‘At least Ruby and Seth know about music and art and stuff like that. I never would have got that scholarship for music school without your dad’s help. My mum and dad don’t know about
that stuff.’

  ‘But look how proud they are of you. Photos and certificates on every wall . . .’

  Dawn groaned.

  ‘And remind me! Who’ve they made the first oboe in your posh orchestra?’

  She wished now that she had sat and listened to what Dawn was trying to say. Instead she had changed the subject and started complaining about Ruby and Seth.

  ‘It’s all very well for you; you don’t have to live with them!’ Kite laughed. ‘Or a name like Kite!’

  ‘Dawn.’ Kite spoke her friend’s name into the mirror, letting the tip of her tongue rest on the roof of her mouth. It was as if she was saying the name for the first time. And for the first time, she registered the meaning of her friend’s name.

  Dawn is only the break of day, the beginning, you can’t end at the beginning, Kite pleaded. But who was she pleading with? Her head clamped as if someone was tightening the pressure inside her mind. Until the Falling Day she had never once experienced the headaches that had gripped Dawn so suddenly and so often. She scrunched up her eyes and wished as hard as she had ever wished for anything that she could fall asleep and wake up in the nursery playground on the day that she and Dawn first met, peer down through the playground ladders of long ago and start all over again . . . at their beginning.

  Climbing Frame

  I’m standing at the top of the red ship climbing frame; a girl is underneath on the grass. She’s looking down at the ground so I can’t see her face, but she’s got a long neat plait and she’s wearing shiny shoes. They’re brand-new navy blue, no scuffs on them at all. I look down at my new trainers, already caked in mud.

  ‘Will you be my thithter?’ the girl lisps.

  It’s cold and I can see her breath forming in the air, like ghost whispers. Her voice is high and sweet and it floats straight up to me. She sort of smiles. I haven’t got a sister or a brother so I say, ‘OK! Climb up then!’