Kite Spirit (17 page)

‘I could sit and talk to Jack all day. It’s weird, isn’t it? If I hadn’t come here with you, Kite, Jack’s songs could have been lost forever.
Ellie says she’s never seen them written down anywhere.’

It was a longer drive to the Haweswater Dam than it appeared on Jack’s map. Seth seemed thoughtful on the way, caught up in his own thoughts.

As they travelled along a narrow winding lane Kite caught glimpses of a valley off to her right that contained ruins of old walls and buildings.

‘So, according to the map, this is it!’ Seth announced, pulling up in a dirt car park surrounded by drystone walls. It was quite literally the end of the road. They got out, walked
to a stile and climbed over. Sheep ambled close by, unconcerned by their presence. A scattering of people were taking various different tracks down to the bottom of the dam, as if there was an
unwritten code that no one should stray too close to each other. Just like me and Seth, Kite mused, wandering aimlessly along random paths, never walking the same thought track. As if to contradict
her, Seth took her hand as they continued to scramble downhill and over the ruins of a bridge leading to a crumbled boundary wall.

‘To think we could be standing in the house where Jack or my grandparents grew up,’ Seth pondered as they trudged over the rubble. ‘Sad, in a way, that all this history’s
usually underwater. Imagine finding out that the village where your family have lived for generations has to be flooded to make a reservoir to supply water for somewhere as far away as Manchester.
They must have felt like sacrificial lambs . . .’

While Seth was absorbed in picturing his ancestors, Kite looked around at the barely visible remnants of walls. There wasn’t much to see, as far as she was concerned. Then a loud bark
pierced the air and Bardsey bounded up to her, throwing his paws against her chest and knocking her off her feet.

‘That dog gets everywhere!’ Seth laughed.

Kite dusted her clothes off and sat up. ‘What are you doing so far away from home?’ she asked, stroking Bardsey’s soft head. The dog seemed to have a real affection for her;
she wondered if he could sense how sad and lonely she was.

Bardsey ran back to a huddle of walkers who were gathered around some kind of sculpture rising above a drystone wall. Next to the sculpture stood Garth, holding a trowel. Bardsey trotted over to
him and nuzzled his head into his side. Garth looked up at Kite without smiling and continued his work.

The other walkers wandered away so that now the sculpture came clearly into view. It was formed from a whole sheep’s carcass. Could this be the one Kite had seen under Mirror Falls?

Seth frowned with concentration as he stepped closer to watch Garth work. ‘Mind if I have a look?’

Garth opened his arms as if to say, ‘Be my guest.’

Seth approached the sculpture, which sat within the confines of a wall made of layers and layers of slate and stone jigsawed together. ‘What’s this?’ he asked, indicating the
boundary that surrounded the structure.

‘It’s called a garth – a sheepfold. I’ve looked at old maps of the farm and rebuilt it in the same place that the original would have been.’ Seth nodded
appreciatively. Kite supposed in their own way they were both retracing the history of the valley.

Kite hung back on the outside of the walled area, wishing that Seth would leave them alone for a few moments so that she could apologize for what she’d said about Agnes. The weird thing
was that because she’d thought so much about Garth, even dreamed of him, she felt as if she knew him so much better than she did. But now, watching him work on this sculpture, she realized
she knew nothing about him at all. Why would he want to make a sculpture out of bones? It must have taken him ages to reconstruct the skeleton. Where the stomach would once have been he had wedged
tiny pieces of flint forming a curved drystone belly within the ribcage.

‘Did you get this from under Mirror Falls?’ Seth asked.

‘Aye, Agnes found it.’ It made Kite shudder to think of Agnes Landseer rummaging around underneath the house.

‘So you’re Agnes Landseer’s grandson.’ Seth looked from Kite to Garth. ‘You two have already met then. Aren’t you going to introduce me, Kite?’

‘Seth, this is Garth,’ Kite mumbled.

‘Garth – and you’re making a garth! You could call this a sort of signature piece then?’ Seth laughed.

Garth smiled at him and carried on working.

‘What are those?’ Seth asked, peering in between the cracks.

‘Found things, and stuff folk have brought me off the fells.’ Garth shrugged. ‘That woman I was just talking to, she brought me this baby’s clog.’ Garth reached
forward and placed it in Kite’s hand without even asking if she wanted to see it. It was no bigger than her palm.

‘That could have belonged to my grandma,’ Seth began to examine the other objects lodged between the sheep’s bones: cotton bobbins, rusty old horseshoes, coins, sheep’s
wool, tiny yellow-white teeth, old nails, broken pieces of pottery and knitting needles. He examined every object as if they were clues to a complicated puzzle.

‘And it’ll all be washed away when the reservoir fills up again?’

‘We’ll see . . . I’ve built it fairly sturdy though. Anyway, that’s sort of the point.’ Garth smiled again.

Seth looked at Garth and held out his hand. Why was Seth being so weird? He hardly ever shook hands with anyone.

‘I see you’ve inherited your grandmother’s artistic eye.’ Seth walked to the front of the sculpture and stood back to admire it.

Kite cringed, but Garth seemed happy enough to talk about it.

‘I just started building, and then folk seemed to be taken by it, and now the newspapers have been down here taking photos and everything.’

‘I can see why!’ Seth nodded admiringly. ‘I’m just going to have a bit of a wander.’

After he had walked away Garth kicked a few pieces of loose slate under his feet and finally looked up at Kite.

‘Want to help?’

Kite picked up a handful of slates and stepped inside the wall. He stood on the other side of the sheep looking through its bones at her with his piercing eyes.

‘Don’t you think it’s all a bit grim?’ Kite asked as she began placing tiny shards of slate in the ribcage of the sheep. She could hear the tone of her voice, and she
wished she could have found something kinder to say.

‘Not really – it’s just the natural cycle of things, is how I see it,’ Garth answered. She wondered what he would say if she told him about Dawn. How could what Dawn had
done fit into any natural cycle?

‘I’m sorry!’ Kite blurted, as she wedged in another piece of slate. ‘For what I said – about your gran.’

‘It’s nowt others haven’t thought.’ He shrugged. ‘You were upset. But she’s my gran, and if you got to know her, you wouldn’t think badly of
her.’

They worked silently for a while. As she placed slate after slate inside the sheep carcass Kite wondered what it would take for her to change her opinion of Agnes Landseer.

‘Are you ready to go?’ Seth called over to Kite. ‘I expect we’ll see you again, Garth,’ he added.

‘I hope so,’ Garth spoke the words softly, as if they were meant only for Kite.

‘Got something about him, that boy,’ Seth said as he opened his car door and turned back to watch him working. ‘A sort of grand humility. I like that –
what do you think of that as a lyric: “grand humility”.’

‘It’s good,’ agreed Kite as she looked down over the valley where Garth seemed little more than a spot on the landscape.

Seth drove along, humming the tune that Jack had sung earlier. As they meandered along the winding lanes Kite closed her eyes and tried to piece together what she’d seen of Garth. Now she
was certain. The way he said so little while tuning into everything around him definitely reminded her of Dawn. It was not until now that she’d realized how much of the talking she had always
done, and how much she had relied on Dawn to listen.

As soon as they got back to Mirror Falls Kite retreated to her bedroom. She went over to her pillow and took out her Dawn treasures. Her hands paused on the birthday-card. If
Hazel had not already told her that there were no final words, no confiding explanations inside, she would have ripped the envelope open straight away. Why was she keeping it? What good could it
do? And yet her hands shook as she turned the card over and slipped it back inside the folds of her pillowcase.

The feather and the reed were the sorts of thing that Garth might weave into his sculpture, thought Kite. She took out Dawn’s golden reed. The natural bamboo would fit perfectly between
the tiny shards of slate, and the golden thread might catch your eye and draw you to it. Seth had been right about Garth when he’d said that there was something deep in what he was doing.
There were secrets and stories in these objects. How many precious things had she and Dawn talked of as she’d watched her work away at her delicate reeds? She smoothed her fingers over the
fine worn ends. Dawn had loved the sound it made so much that after it was worn out she’d bound it together with golden silken thread and from time to time even soaked it in water as if she
hoped that one day she would play it again.

‘What’s this?’ Kite asked, holding up a little jam jar full of water.

‘I carry that everywhere with me, to soak my reed before I play. If you let them get brittle and dry, they’re ruined.’

Kite walked through to the bathroom and washed her hands in lemon soap, just as Dawn always did before she touched her reeds. Then she held the reed under the tap and as the water streamed over
it, the seed of an idea that had come to her in the graveyard began to grow. Perhaps Dawn had led her to Garth because he had created the perfect place to bury Dawn’s reed. Now she though of
it, this was the nearest she would ever get to burying Dawn’s body. She held the fine, worn bamboo up to the light, remembering Dawn’s description of the reed’s heart, spine and
voice, but for the reed to ‘speak’ Kite needed rain. When the dam was full of water, Garth’s sculpture would be the perfect resting place for Dawn. It was all clear to her now.
She would wait until the weather broke and then take the golden reed down to the reservoir and give Dawn a proper burial. Kite imagined the water flowing through the reed, playing its own gentle
music. She would be able to come back to this place whenever she wanted to be with Dawn. This would be nothing like that wretched mud-puddle burial in London. I need to do this for Dawn . . . to
bring her peace, Kite told herself as she clasped the golden reed in her hands, and I need to do it for myself, to let her go.

Back in her room Kite switched on the iPod and lay back to listen to Dawn’s playing.

In flew the Dawn owl, wings outstretched and soaring towards her. Kite watched herself screaming, ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’ over and over again, but the great bird with Dawn’s
face kept coming. She pressed her hand against the window as if that could make the owl change her course. The glass fell away beneath her and she was spiralling downward, jagged rock, stone and
bone snagging her clothing as she fell. Then a flurry of wings and the soft sound of Dawn’s playing and she was being lifted and placed gently on a rock ledge. Beside her lay the carcass of a
sheep. She felt someone brush against her arm. She turned, and there, sitting beside her, was Dawn.

‘What are you doing here?’ Kite whispered.

‘Trying to make you understand,’ Dawn said, smiling sadly, then looking up to the path where Garth was standing watching them both. He was holding Dawn’s reed.

‘What’s this?’ he asked, inspecting it.

Kite turned back to Dawn, but she seemed to have melted into the water. Only her lemon smell lingered.

‘That was Dawn’s heart, her spine and her voice,’ Kite whispered.

She woke to the sound of a girl sobbing.

‘Dawn!’ she called out, but there was no answer.

She stumbled down the staircase and stared through one of the glass stepping stones, hypnotized by the force of the waterfall that surged beneath her feet.

Kites circling round and round

Water falling

Kite’s falling

Dawn’s face

Tears falling

Feathers falling

Music in the air

Driftwood floating

Reeds circling

Around and around and around and around . . .

Someone was stroking their fingers over her scar-brow as if to smooth the hurt away. There was only one person in the world who did that.

‘You said she was doing well!’ Ruby’s voice was shrill with shock.

Kite felt herself being lifted and laid down on a sofa. ‘I’ll call Dr Sherpa from the end of the track!’ Seth yelled back from the kitchen, and she heard his car rumble
away.

She hardly dared open her eyes to face the barrage of questions, but when she did Ruby simply enveloped her in her arms and the warmth of her cinnamon perfume and rocked her to and fro.

‘My darlin’, I got such a shock when I saw you lying on the ground like that. What happened?’

‘I was just running downstairs, slipped on the glass and hit my head,’ Kite explained, reaching up to her forehead and feeling an egg-shaped bump.

‘The doctor will be here in a while. You should try to stay awake till then.’ Ruby fussed around her, placing an icy flannel on Kite’s bruise. ‘So tell me! What’s
all this about an architect and her grandson?’

Kite shrugged. For a moment the image of Garth reaching out to her in her dream flashed through her mind. She wondered why, out of all the people she had met, she had entrusted him with
Dawn’s precious reed, even if it was only in a dream . . .

Ruby followed Kite’s gaze up towards the owl print.

‘There must be a way to get rid of that,’ Ruby took a step closer to the glass.

‘Not unless it rains.’

‘No sign of that.’ Ruby smiled, pointing up at the endless cornflower-blue sky.