‘One of my favourite spots in the Lakes . . . this tarn, well, the whole of Kite Carrec really,’ he told her, looking up at the birds wheeling above their heads.
Kite bristled. What were the chances of finding herself in a place that bore her own name? The same place that Jack had shown them in the photo. So these red birds were kites. Grandma Grace would definitely have said that she’d been led here for a reason. Kite reached up for her St Christopher. She had forgotten about it for a while, but the feel of it seemed to bring her back into herself. The boy looked down at the necklace, eased himself away from the rock, picked up a piece of flat slate and started skimming stones across the lake. Ever-increasing circles danced on the flat surface. The boy picked up another slate and handed it to Kite; she threw it flat across the water to form one, two, three, four widening circles. The boy turned and smiled at her. She’d always been good at skimming stones.
Dawn’s death had not been a flat pebble. That sort of death would have been something like dying from a random inherited disease. It would have been awful and the ripples would have spread wide across the life of her friends and family, but it would have been better than this. The stone Dawn had lobbed with her suicide had set off explosions in every direction, thought Kite, as she watched the ripples ebb and flow into one another, settling once more into a smooth calm. The ripples of what Dawn had done would stretch out forever, and the water would never feel smooth or still again.
‘I’m Garth,’ the boy said, interrupting her thoughts. She had almost forgotten he was here. She’d never heard the name before, but it seemed to fit him and this place so well. Looking into his eyes now it was hard to tell exactly what colour they were; in this light they seemed to be more blue than grey.
‘I’m Kite,’ she managed.
‘You’re having me on!’ Garth laughed. ‘You didn’t fall from the sky, did you?’
His laughter jarred somewhere deep inside her as it echoed through the valley, as if he was mocking her. There was no way that he could have known how close to the truth his words felt. Above them the red kites sent up a piercing screech. If this was all part of Dawn’s plan, she needed to understand how it all pieced together. She stroked Bardsey’s head and attempted to gather her thoughts.
‘He’s Agnes Landseer’s dog, isn’t he?’
Garth looked a bit taken aback.
‘I’m staying at Mirror Falls,’ she explained.
‘She’s my gran; I’m up for the summer.’
So Garth was the beloved grandson that Dr Sherpa had mentioned.
‘But she’s insane.’
The words flew out of Kite’s mouth before she could stop them.
‘Is that what folk say?’ The sparkle went out of Garth’s eyes and he stood up abruptly. ‘Come away, Bardsey –’ he hesitated for a second– ‘unless you need me to walk with you?’ he asked as he kicked at the ground in his beaten-up old walking boots.
Kite shook her head. To be honest, she wondered how she would actually make it back to Mirror Falls on her own, but she didn’t want him to think that she was weak. After all, how could he know anything about Dawn or how disorientated she felt after sleeping through a whole day? She winced at a sharp shooting pain in her head and watched him walk away.
‘She’s been leaving notes at our door, that’s all!’ Kite called after him to offer some sort of explanation for her rudeness, but he had already disappeared into the woods.
Wandering
Her legs felt like steel as she climbed the last stretch of path along the waterfall to find Dr Sherpa’s grey Land Rover parked outside Mirror Falls. Now she remembered why she’d run away in the first place.
‘So the wanderer returns!’ Dr Sherpa was sitting at the kitchen table. He half smiled, half frowned as Kite walked in.
The last thing she needed was to have to explain herself to this stranger. All she wanted now was to take a bath.
‘Your dad’s been going out of his mind with worry. The police and mountain rescue were about to set out to look for you.’
‘Where is Seth?’
‘He’s just walked to the end of the track to call off the search and to let your mam know you’re OK.’ Dr Sherpa pointed to the Dawn-owl window. ‘We just got in from looking for you and then we saw you ambling back along the stream.’
Kite hesitated at the doorway, wondering if there was any way she might excuse herself.
‘You look all worn out. Come and sit down for a moment?’ suggested Dr Sherpa, pushing back the chair beside him. He had an authority that was hard to ignore. Now that she’d sat down, her whole body seemed to collapse in on itself.
‘So what happened?’
‘I went running and then I fell asleep and the next thing I knew it was evening,’ Kite replied truthfully.
‘Aha! And how are you feeling now?’ Dr Sherpa asked, looking into Kite’s eyes. She felt that he would see straight through her if she lied.
‘I don’t know,’ Kite answered.
‘You know that your dad’s told me what happened to your friend,’ Dr Sherpa continued. ‘I am very sorry indeed.’
Kite shrugged.
‘I was concerned to hear that you haven’t been sleeping or eating properly, but it’s a very good sign, you sleeping all day. Not that I would have recommended it in this way – a gentle walk might have been better,’ he smiled, indicating her running gear, ‘but the exercise might have done the trick.’ What would he have thought if she’d told him that it was really Dawn that had found a way of getting her to sleep by playing her music?
‘You will probably find that you feel even more exhausted for a while,’ he continued. ‘You’ve got a lot of catching up to do. The more you sleep, the more you’ll need to sleep. For a doctor I have never been very keen on pills. If you ask me, sleeping, eating, exercising and talking are the best medicine in the world!’ There was something slightly hypnotic about the slow and steady way he spoke. ‘Of course, you must be prepared: your dreams may be troubled, but that’s the mind’s way of trying to process everything.’
Dr Sherpa stood up from the table and peered down the path to see if Seth was coming. ‘I know you don’t want to talk to me, and that’s fine, but you must find some way of letting your feelings out,’ he said.
Kite stared down at the table. When she didn’t reply he paced up and down the stepping-stone bridge as if he was searching for the right words.
‘I’d forgotten what an extraordinary house this is. You would never guess how many tons of concrete they had to mix to weight the building down at this end enough for it to balance.’ He stomped his foot on the ground as he spoke. ‘Sometimes I think that it’s a bit like that, growing up. You need to have a sturdy foundation so that you can go out into the world and face whatever’s in your path . . .’
Kite closed her eyes and sighed sleepily. But his talk of foundations took her back to a project she and Dawn had done at school in RE. They’d had to draw a picture of themselves and then surround their self-portrait with all the elements that made them who they were. It had been one of the few pieces of homework Kite had found easy. She’d included kites and flying, and Dawn’s name and a photo of them both, and school and the trapeze and Grandma Grace; she’d done a drawing of Ruby dancing and Seth’s guitar, her orange door and the birds of paradise . . . she would have added more but she ran out of space. She had been so surprised when Dawn had called around asking for help with her assignment. It had nearly always been the other way around.
She remembered because of Miss Evans’s comment in class. ‘You’ve written what subjects you like at school, not what makes you tick! The question I’m asking is what makes you Dawn? What’s at the core of you?’ That’s all she had said, but Kite had been shocked to see Dawn’s eyes filling up with tears. Miss Evans had noticed too and swiftly changed the subject.
‘What does she want me to write?’ muttered Dawn after class. ‘How am I supposed to know what’s at the core of me?’
Thes
e tiny moments between them were starting to stack up in Kite’s brain, and it seemed strange to her now that she had never thought to ask Dawn why she got so upset about the smallest criticism.
Kite heard Seth running up the track behind her. She stood up from the table and turned to him.
‘Sorry!’
‘Never do that to me again. I can’t tell you what was going through my mind . . . It’s nearly dark – where in hell’s name have you been?’ His voice trembled as he strode towards her and enfolded her in his arms, squeezing her so tightly she thought he would never let go.
Kite lay in bed and listened to the two men’s low concerned voices echoing up to her from the kitchen below. She had the oddest sensation that they were talking about someone else. The Kite who inhabited this new aching body was unrecognizable even to herself from the person who had once been strong enough to win a half-marathon and train for hours on the trapeze.
The voices moved outside the building.
‘I’ll call to see her again soon!’ Dr Sherpa shouted over the din of the waterfall.
Kite sensed that he was the kind of person who once he made a connection with you would not let go. But what he had said about sleep bringing more sleep seemed to be true. Kite yawned and walked over to the bookshelf, pressed the remote and rummaged underneath her den pillows for the reed box, her feather and her birthday card. And, cradling her Dawn treasures close, her eyes grew heavy.
Stepping Stones
Garth knocked on the glass. His mouth moved as he held a hessian sack up to the window. Something stirred inside it.
‘My gran sent this. She says you must not try to follow it.’
First one graceful cream wing appeared and then another. An owl with Dawn’s heart-shaped face fluttered out and landed in front of the window, staring in. Then it turned and flew off in the direction of the path under Mirror Falls.
Kite ran to the stepping-stone bridge and peered down to the rock platform below. Crack! The glass shifted and gave way under her.
She was falling, arms and feet splayed in all directions, bones and feathers cascading through ice-cold water, spiralling down, limbs flailing, careering head first towards the gully floor. The owl was screeching and screeching . . .
Kite jerked awake only seconds before she smashed into the ground and clasped her hands over her ears. Seth placed his arms around her shoulders. He was crouched uncomfortably against the back wall of the wardrobe.
‘What are you doing in here?’
‘I could ask you the same question! I came in to say goodnight and found you hiding away. You kept this quiet. What a wardrobe!’ He smiled. ‘You were sleeping so soundly I didn’t want to move you in case I woke you up.’
‘What time is it?’ Kite asked, squinting into the light.
‘Nearly dawn,’ he said, then winced at the sound of her name. He sat up and tried to unfold his long body in the confined space. His neck clicked.
‘You shouldn’t have slept in here all night. I was fine on my own.’
‘That’s just it,’ Seth explained. ‘I wanted you to see that you’re not alone in all this.’
A high-pitched screech propelled him out of the den on his hands and knees and towards the spyhole window.
‘It’s the owls,’ Kite explained. ‘I’ve been reading about their different cries in a book.’
‘It gets under your skin a bit though, doesn’t it?’ Seth said, as he stretched from side to side and walked through to the bathroom. ‘I’m going to need a long hot bath this morning!’
As Kite rearranged her den she quickly gathered up her precious Dawn treasures and carried them over to her bed, tucking them under the bottom fold of her pillowcase. Now that Seth had discovered her hideaway there was no point in keeping them there.
So just as Dr Sherpa had predicted, sleep had brought sleep, however disturbed. Maybe years of listening to Seth’s interpretations had washed off on her, because now here she was desperately trying to analyse her dream. Releasing that owl seemed to be saying that she had to set the bird free. Then there was the warning shot about not following Dawn – that probably came from Agnes’s weird note – and the spiralling down, well, that’s what she’d been doing since the Falling Day. No matter how weird, the dream had strengthened her conviction that Agnes, Garth and the Dawn owl were all bound up together in this. She just had to find out how.
A memory of Garth’s hurt expression at the lake returned to her, and she resolved to seek him out to say sorry. Looking back on how rude she’d been about his gran, she felt ashamed of herself. Why had she pushed away the first person she’d actually felt a moment’s peace with? She wished she could go back to the lake again to hear Dawn’s music. It was Dawn who had led her there and Dawn who had made her understand that there was no need to feel guilty about wanting to see Garth again, because she had brought them together in the first place. If only she knew why.
Bonny Lass
‘You can’t just have fallen asleep. For all that time?’
Seth was pacing up and down the living room insisting that she ran through the account of yesterday once more.
‘So this boy you met, Agnes Landseer’s grandson – what was he like?’
‘How do I know? I only met him for a few minutes. He seemed all right,’ she said, trying to look as disinterested as possible.
‘And you ran all the way there, with the dog following you?’
Kite sighed deeply. ‘What happened to me is that I fell asleep. Everyone’s been going on about how they think it’ll be good for me to sleep, and then I do sleep for hours and now you’re worried about me sleeping for too long.’
‘OK, OK. We won’t say any more about it. Just spend the day with me today, please. I’ve arranged to pick up Jack.’ Kite groaned. ‘It’s just for one day, Kite, Ruby’s coming tomorrow so you and she can have a proper talk.’
Kite’s head whirred. Ruby’s laser vision was all she needed now.
‘He’s taking us to show me where some of the Storey family once lived. You know they had to flood the whole valley to make the reservoir provide enough water for Manchester. The old village is usually underwater, but because of the drought we’re actually going to get to walk the dry reservoir. I tell you, I’m feeling so many songs simmering away . . .’ Seth placed his precious guitar in its case.
‘You’d better call Rubes,’ he said as they drove down the track. ‘She was worried sick about you.’
Jack was sitting in a chair outside the Carrec Arms when they arrived. He was wearing his green tweed jacket and matching cap, despite the heat of the morning sun. On his lap he had the little black-and-white photograph of a line of children perched on a wall.
‘Ready, Jack?’ Seth asked, swinging open the car door and helping him into the front seat as Ellie appeared at the pub entrance with a little posy of wild flowers.
‘Will this do you for, Grandad?’ she asked, handing it to him. He patted her hand in thanks. ‘He’s been sat there waiting for you for two hours past. I’ve not seen him so keen to get out in ages.’ Ellie handed Seth a map. ‘He’s had me up half the night, marking out where he wants to take you. Look! I’d love to come along, but we can’t afford to close up at this time of year, with all the thirsty campers and walkers passing through. He maybe won’t get out of the car, but he’ll enjoy the ride no doubt.’
Seth handed the map to Jack and the old man tapped on a red circle with the number one written inside it. Seth studied the roads and set off through the hamlet.
‘I don’t suppose there’s any point in asking Boss–Nav!’ Seth joked, turning to Kite. She forced herself to raise a smile. The least I can do is not drag him down, she thought.
At first there was silence as Jack kept glancing over at Seth, then tracing his fingers along the row of children in the photo, pausing over a little girl with long fair hair. Jack opened his mouth to say something and closed it again. Twice he tapped his head as if that would help to get the information out. Seth ke
pt glancing Jack’s way as he drove along the narrow lanes, but when no words came he eventually put on a CD and began humming along to the harmony.
‘This is one of mine. What do you think, Jack?’
The old man raised his good hand in a ‘so-so’ gesture that made Seth laugh.
At first Kite couldn’t tell where the crackly but tuneful sound was coming from. Seth switched the CD off, and the old man’s mouth moved as his right hand tapped his knee. Seth looked around at Kite in amazement.
‘There was a bonny lass
Sat upon a stile
I said to yonder lass
Will we walk a while?
Will we walk a while?
O’er fell and stream?
Then the bonny lass
Broke into my dream
There was a bonny lass
I walked her to her door
I said to yonder lass
Will we walk some more?
Will we walk some more?
Fall in step with me
For you and me, my lass
Were surely meant to be
I saw a bonny lass
Sit upon a stile
I said to yonder lass
Will we walk a while?’
As the song came to an end Jack laughed gleefully at the sound of his own voice.
‘Are you sure it’s OK for me to record your old childhood songs and maybe make something new from them?’
Jack gave Seth a thumbs-up sign.
‘I’ve already got a title: “Song of Storeys”.’
Headstones
Kite’s forehead knocked against the neck of Seth’s guitar. As she opened her eyes it took her a moment to orientate herself, until she registered that it was Jack sitting in the front seat, his car door thrown open.
‘I’ll just go and see where Seth is,’ Kite muttered, but then realized that Jack was fast asleep too, his head lolling as he wheezed heavily in his sleep.
They were parked outside a tiny stone church that backed on to open fields. Seth stood at the far end of the graveyard among the headstones. Why had he brought her here? As if she needed to walk among the dead! But as soon as she entered she felt that there was something peaceful and spacious about the place; so different from the bleak concrete church yard where Dawn had been buried. ‘I like it here.’ Dawn’s soft voice filled her mind. Then it came to Kite, like a revelation, as the delicate wild summer flowers brushed against her calf. What if she could give Dawn a proper burial, somewhere beautiful?
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