‘Listen! What can you hear?’ Ruby said.
At first Dawn had jumped at every rustle of the earth until Ruby had gone through each sound and identified it. A squirrel skittering through the leaves, the hoot of an owl, a car door slamming, the patter of rain on canvas and eventually Ruby’s voice had faded away as they drifted into sleep.
Kite closed her eyes and listened to Seth singing and the cars and lorries speeding past on the wet road . . .
I’m in the flat dancing. There is a loud knock at the door and then someone rings the bell over and over. I turn down the radio and look at the clock. I can’t believe it’s already so late.
It’s Dawn standing in the doorway, half scowling at me.
‘How can you be late on the day of your first exam?’
‘Sorry! Just got to find my shoes,’ I call back to her, rummaging around in the front room, grabbing my bag and a piece of toast off the table and slamming the door behind me.
Dawn runs down the steps, grabs a bunch of sweet peas and hands them to me as I catch up with her. ‘For luck!’ she smiles.
‘I’m going to need it,’ I say. At the bottom of the steps Jess runs across the road to greet us.
‘There you go! A black cat crossing your path – isn’t that supposed to be good luck?’ I laugh, reaching out for her arm, but there is no one there.
‘Dawn!’ I call into the empty street.
Jess is at my feet, arching her back and miaowing louder and louder until she’s hissing and snarling, sticking her claws deep into my ankles.
‘Hey, Kite!’ Seth was shouting, turning around. ‘You’re kicking the back of my seat.’
Kite opened her eyes to see Seth holding his mobile in one hand. She stared out of the window at an open green field with horses grazing. They’d pulled over on to a grass verge.
‘No, no, she’s fine, Rubes. Slept all the way up here. I can’t believe it . . . We’ll have to find another way to get her to sleep though – this old banger won’t stand too much more of a battering! It’s Ruby calling to see how you’re doing,’ he told Kite, raising the phone back up to his ear. ‘OK, I’ll tell her . . . don’t worry,’ he reassured her before hanging up. ‘Ruby’s going into rehearsals now, but she’ll call back later.’ Seth smiled at Kite as he pulled away from the verge and continued slowly down a gravel track. ‘Just a bit of a detour!’
Kite’s eyes were so heavy that it felt as if she’d been drugged. She propped herself up on her elbows and stared out of the window at a huge steel structure . . . a kind of giant with great welcoming wings. The top of her head felt bruised from knocking against the side of the car. She decided not to tell Seth about her dreams. He was big on interpreting them, and the last thing she needed now was for him to start analysing what was going on in her head.
‘Remember you said last year you wanted to see this. I know it can’t be a happy birthday but . . . !’ Seth broke off mid-sentence, opened his door and swung Kite’s side open too. She got out, leaned her back against the sun-warmed metal of the bonnet and stared up at the steel wingspan.
‘The Angel of the North against a bright blue sky!’ Seth picked up a leaflet that someone had discarded on the ground and read. ‘Says here, it’s the height of four double-decker buses, with the girth of a jumbo jet!’
As they strolled in the sunshine up the grassy slope, Kite had the feeling that she was attending some sort of ritual ceremony. There were people walking their dogs and tiny children running as if into the arms of the angel. Only a few weeks ago Kite would have run like that too, but now she could hardly walk a few paces without feeling disorientated. At the top of the hill, a young couple in matching red leather biker jackets were locked in a kiss.
Seth walked away a little and lay down on the grass directly under the angel.
‘I’ve been watching the forecast. It’s hard to believe with the wet weather we’ve been having in London, but it looks like there’s been no rain here for weeks,’ he said as he patted the yellowing grass for Kite to sit down next to him. Then he unpacked the feast that Ruby had prepared the night before. She had made up her usual stack of silver tiffin tins.
‘I thought a picnic was a cheese sandwich, maybe a sausage roll and a bag of crisps!’
Dawn had been amazed the first time she’d tasted one of Ruby’s picnics.
As Seth opened the containers, the smell of jerk chicken and home-made patties wafted around the feet of the angel. The kissing couple sniffed the air and pulled apart.
‘Ah! The power of Ruby’s cooking!’ Seth laughed.
Kite felt not even the slightest whisper of hunger, but she took a tiny mouthful.
‘She’s made your favourite cake too!’
‘I told her not to bother,’ Kite grumbled, pushing the basket of food away from her. It was all wrong. Here she was with her dad sitting in this amazing place eating one of Ruby’s ridiculously over-the-top picnics while Jimmy was packing Dawn’s things away on to a removal van. I wonder what he’s done with the chair that she tied her reeds on, thought Kite. Every time Dawn tied a reed she would leave a little silken thread attached, like a collection of friendship bracelets on a wrist.
Seth brought out a small chocolate and cinnamon cake wrapped in silver foil. In the centre he placed a single candle and lit it with his lighter.
‘Thought you’d given up?’ Kite sighed.
‘I have . . . had . . . until all this! Never mind that now! Ruby thought you might want to make a wish for Dawn.’
‘OK, why not?’ said Kite, trying not to feel angry at Ruby again. Scrunching her eyes closed, she wished harder than she had ever done for anything that she could see Dawn again. She opened her eyes and pursed her lips to blow the candle out, but just at that moment there was a gust of wind. It lifted Kite’s hair so that it streamed on the air behind her, and the flickering flame blew out.
‘Shall I light it again?’ Seth offered.
‘What’s the point?’ Kite sighed.
‘Is it a building or a sculpture?’ asked Kite, staring up at the rust-coloured steel.
Seth shrugged. Whatever it was, she was glad that the angel had an armour of steel to protect it from the weather. She wondered how you set about building the foundations for such a mammoth structure.
‘Do you think it’ll ever fall?’ she asked Seth as she stared up at it.
‘Hope not! If it did, it would crush everything in its path, that’s for sure.’
‘No chance of that!’ answered a thickset balding man, catching their conversation as he passed. ‘Helped to build those foundations with my own hands. It’s more likely to fly than fall!’ he joked as he linked arms with a stooped old lady.
‘We’ll be begging her for rain before the summer’s out! I’ve never known such a dry run,’ the lady remarked, her pale green headscarf billowing in the breeze. It seemed cruel the way that she had to distort her spine in order to look up at the sky but, from the look of awe on her face, she clearly thought it worth the effort. ‘And to think that you had a part in her making!’ she sighed contentedly.
‘I’ve told you, Mam, he’s a man of steel, a proper Geordie shipbuilding angel!’
‘To you maybe!’ The old woman laughed.
Their voices faded as they made their way back down the slope.
‘She reminded me of your Grandma Hannah,’ Seth told her. ‘Funny! She always wore a little chiffon headscarf too.’
Kite turned to him and caught the emotion in his eyes.
‘You know my dad was her man of steel, worked on the railways as an engineer. She was as proud of your grandad as that old woman of her son.’
Kite nodded and stared up at the giant angel again. ‘What’s it meant to symbolize?’
Seth took Kite’s hand in his and stared up with her. ‘I dunno, but it’s genius, isn’t it? To build something that weighs tonnes, but that you truly believe could step off the hillside and fly.’
He paused for a moment and flicked his hair away from his eye
s. ‘Something about seeing all this, after all that’s happened . . .’
Everyone had their own way of avoiding the S word. Seth’s preferred phrase was ‘all that’s happened’.
‘I don’t know how to explain it, Kite, but this sculpture is stirring me up. I know what it is! It gets you here,’ he said, punching his own chest. ‘It’s like there’s something hopeful in its gut . . .’
How could he talk of ‘hope’? At this moment she wished she could have been packed into Jimmy and Hazel’s removal van and gone to live with them; at least they wouldn’t have tried to distract her, to take her out of herself, and one thing she knew for sure, they definitely would not have talked of hope. It had been the worst idea of all to come away, because now all she felt was guilty to be here, in this place, under a picture-book sky that seemed to trample on her feelings. She had preferred the rain.
‘If there’s so much hope in the world, why did Dawn give up on everything?’
Seth shook his head, staring up at the angel as if this steel structure could hold the answer to her question. There was a time when Kite had believed that Seth held the answers to everything. A part of her wished she could go back there, to that time when a good kite-flying day, a blue sky and a gust of wind would mean nothing but happiness.
Lost
The grey road seemed to stretch on forever. Kite wasn’t sure when it had happened exactly, but there came a moment when she realized they were surrounded by mountains, and then she knew for sure that agreeing to come into this perfect pastoral fantasy had been a mistake. Cows grazed in the fields close to the roads, and far away the hillside was dotted with what resembled clusters of white flowers swaying in the wind.
‘When I was your age, I had this romantic vision of myself as a shepherd!’ Seth smiled, following her gaze up to the distant sheep.
Staring out at the endless green she really couldn’t believe that she’d let herself be talked into coming. What was she going to DO here? The house they were staying in was apparently in the middle of nowhere. Now she thought about it, she’d never really spent much time in the countryside just for the sake of it. Camping at festivals in Devon and Cornwall or Suffolk didn’t really count, because they were always swarming with people, activity and life. The countryside had been somewhere they’d gone to for a reason, like outward-bound trips to Wales with school – and for years now Dawn had always been by her side.
‘Looks like we’re going to be lucky with the weather.’ Seth opened the window and held out his hand to feel the warm air. ‘I remember watching a film about two jokers coming up here from London and it rained so much that they ended up walking around with bin bags on their feet! Come to think of it, I watched that film on my first date with Rubes. I didn’t really fancy it, but I fancied Rubes so I went along and it was actually laugh-out-loud funny. I’ll have to get it out for you when we get up there. There’s no TV, but they’re bound to have a computer and screen to watch films on.’
‘Why no TV?’
‘It’s a complete getaway. We’ll have to make our own entertainment.’
Great! She wouldn’t even be able to escape from her own thoughts, let alone block Seth out. His constant attempts to cheer her up already made her feel like flinging open the car door and running away.
They were driving through a small town now with a clock tower made of sandstone at the centre. A group of boys and girls about her age was hanging out on the wide steps that led up to the tower. Strewn around the bottom were bikes, a cluster of mopeds and one beaten-up old motorbike. One of the girls, with shocking pink hair and an impressive collection of ear studs and a nose-ring, glanced into the car and smiled at Kite.
Seth pulled up in front of an old-fashioned delicatessen. Now some of the boys, sharing a bag of chips, were glancing over at her too.
‘Come on, let’s stretch our legs,’ Seth said, jumping out of the car.
‘I’ll wait here,’ she muttered.
The smell of cold meats and strong cheeses wafted towards her through the open window, making her feel sick. Anyway, there was no way she was getting out of the car with that lot staring at her.
After a while the group of teenagers got on their various bikes and headed off in different directions. The girl with pink hair climbed on the back of the motorbike and the oldest-looking boy, wearing a badge-covered leather jacket, started revving the cranky-sounding engine. The girl turned and nodded in Kite’s direction as she secured her helmet.
After they had left, Kite watched people coming and going from the deli. They seemed to be watching her too. A lot of them were quite old; some so old that they seemed to have to stop every step just to catch their breath. From the way they looked at her, she wondered whether they could tell that something awful had happened to her. Or maybe there was another reason. Now she thought of it, nobody she’d seen in the town, except for the Chinese woman she’d spotted coming out of the restaurant, had been anything else but white. Everyone in London was from different backgrounds, and most of the time she never thought about being ‘black’ or ‘mixed-race’ – or what was it that Ruby came back from a job in America saying half-jokingly? – ‘a person of colour’. In fact Dawn sometimes said in London that she felt the odd one out for not being from somewhere else. At home Kite would have just been a girl sitting in a car, but here she attracted attention. She should never have come.
Then, as if to contradict her, a young woman walked past, struggling on to the pavement with a double buggy. Seth was coming out of a shop and Kite watched him offer to help. He leaned down to the children and ruffled their hair. They were twin girls with skin the colour of Kite’s and tangly wild hair. Seth pointed in Kite’s direction, and the young mother looked up at her and nodded. Seth came jogging over to the car, his backpack full of groceries.
‘Did you see those sweet little girls? They reminded me of you when you were a toddler. Sorry I was so long. People do like to chat around here. I can tell you, they’re a friendly lot,’ Seth gabbled on as he started up the car.
Sometimes she sensed that Seth wished she was still that sweet little girl.
‘All right?’
Kite nodded. Maybe she’d been hasty to assume that she was completely in the minority here. She smiled as they passed a minibus with ‘Birmingham City Challenge’ written on the side. It could have been an outing from her own school, with black and Asian kids and a few white kids in there too. Kite had the ridiculous impulse to wave at them. What was going on with her? At home these thoughts would never have crossed her mind. She supposed it was because for the first time in her life she felt like an outsider. That’s how Dawn said she felt all the time in her orchestra. Like she didn’t fit and maybe like she didn’t even have the right to be there.
They were winding along a country lane, following a sign that read: ‘To the heart of the Lakes’. Kite recognized some of the place names from streets she knew in London: ‘Coniston’, ‘Windermere’ and ‘Buttermere’.
Seth pulled over to switch on the satnav he’d bought especially for this journey and listened for a moment.
‘Does she seem bossy to you?’ he grimaced as the nasal-sounding satnav woman ordered them down narrower and narrower lanes. Seth insisted on reading out the names of all the villages they passed in the early-evening sunshine.
‘Drybeck . . . Eskdale . . . Longsleddale . . . we’re in the land of the Celts and Vikings now!’ he declared.
To Kite these places sounded like they belonged to a different country and time.
Now they were entering ‘Swindale Common’ and had slowed to cross a cattle grid. When they were halfway over, a herd of sheep ambled in front of them, forcing them to stop. Seth wound his window down.
‘Evening,’ he said to the sheep.
One of them stopped and looked at him idly for a second and then wandered on.
‘Smell that!’ he ordered Kite as he stuck his head out of his window and breathed in the fresh, clean mountain air.
Kite frowned. She gazed out of the window, her eyes following the path of a stream that ran alongside the road, scrambling over rocks and tumbling into deeper pools.
‘I’ve had enough of you “Boss-Nav”!’ Seth switched off the engine and cut her off mid-command. ‘I’m not about to be in the most beautiful place in the world and be ordered about by you!’
He got out of the car, stretched and wandered down to the stream. A little way off some dishevelled-looking fell ponies stared at them before turning and trotting off. If Dawn was here, she would probably have thought it was the most beautiful place in the world too.
‘A penny for them?’ Seth asked, peering into the car and holding out his hand.
‘You wouldn’t want to know.’
‘Well, we’re in the wilds now!’ Seth announced as Kite reluctantly followed him along the stream. She took off her shoes and dangled her feet in the icy water. A flash of Kite’s dream in the car returned to her and she felt as if she’d been here before, desperately trying to gather up Dawn’s floating reeds. Seth lay down on a flat rock and stared up at the fading blue sky.
‘Listen to the music of the mountain stream . . .’ he sang. ‘Scrap that! Corny, isn’t it?’
Kite nodded and half smiled. As she did, a rusty green tractor grumbled towards them along the track. A boy of about her age, maybe a bit older, was driving. Lydia in her tutor group had written something random this morning on her Facebook page: ‘Congratulations, now you can drive a tractor! As if!’ Seth sat up and the boy nodded towards him and raised his hand in a friendly wave, then his eyes moved over to Kite and a warm smile spread across his face as he continued to wave to her, as if he recognized her. His eyes sparkled grey like the slate of the mountain, his sandy-blond hair was cut short, his skin all weather-tanned. Kite played with her hair, teasing the curls over her scar.
‘Looks like you caught someone’s eye.’ Seth grinned at her.
‘Shut up, Seth!’ Kite snapped. It was bad enough that, just for a moment, she had been so mesmerized by the boy. How could she even think about fancying someone so soon after . . . How shallow did that make her? Kite felt the muscles tense and she forced herself to wipe the stupid smile from her face and purse her lips closed. This was a new feeling and the worst yet, when just for a second she forgot what had happened. If Dawn had been here, that boy would have provided them with hours of gossip, wondering who he was, where he came from, which one of them would stand a chance. If Dawn had been here, he might have smiled at her too, but now that would never happen. Seeing this boy made her understand why she felt so angry. Dawn had robbed Kite of sharing the stories of her life – funny stories, sad stories, love stories, predictable stories, mistakes and successes with her best friend. Dawn’s was a story not even half written.
Kite Spirit Page 7