Kite Spirit (14 page)

‘
Please
, can we go?’ Kite whispered to Seth.

‘Don’t you worry!’ Ellie reassured Seth as they were leaving. ‘If your grandma lived around here, Grandad’s sure to have some information for
you.’

Jack patted Seth’s hand and his mouth stretched into the widest of smiles, revealing a motley collection of higgledy-piggledy teeth that were hanging on for dear life.

‘Kite!’ Ellie called after her. Seth was watching and she felt that it would be rude to ignore her, so she walked reluctantly over to the bar. ‘You know if you need to talk to
someone, it was Dr Sherpa who helped me more than anyone else when my parents died.’

‘Thank you,’ said Kite uncomfortably, and headed for the door.

‘I’d better be going too, as Jack seems in fine fettle today,’ Dr Sherpa scraped back his chair. ‘So I’ll pop in to see you at Mirror Falls.’

Seth nodded pointedly as if he’d made a definite appointment.

It was as she’d feared. Thanks to Seth, they all knew – and they were all going to try to help.

On the way home Kite had to listen to Seth moaning on about how frustrating it was that he couldn’t get an Internet connection to do more research.

‘I’ll have to drive to a library and maybe even a town hall tomorrow to look things up in the book of births, deaths and marriages.’

‘Good! Then maybe it’ll stop you blabbing about Dawn to everyone.’

He looked hurt, and once again she immediately felt sorry for being so vicious. Seth drove along in silence, then switched on the radio; a dance beat throbbed out – the sort of thing that
Kite usually loved and Seth hated. Instead of switching channel he glanced over at Kite and tapped on the steering wheel as if he was enjoying it. A few months ago she would have cranked the track
up as loud as possible. It was the kind of beat that once it got under your skin could take you over, but now it did the opposite, jarring her nerves and making her head pound with tiredness.

Kite hit the radio button with a flat hand to silence the low insistent beat, then plugged herself into Dawn’s iPod. Listening to recordings of Dawn’s playing felt a bit like reading
a book where Dawn had made notes in the margins or folded over the corner of a page, like witnessing Dawn’s thoughts and emotions in action. She turned up the volume and let the deep,
familiar music calm her.

Seth stared at the road ahead, his mouth tightly closed. After a while he pulled over on to a verge. Kite turned the volume down to hear him talking to Ruby, telling her how beautiful the
countryside was, how warm and welcoming people were here, and about the soft lilt of their voices, and the vivid turn of phrase that he wanted to capture in his ballad. He spoke about Jack and then
Mirror Falls and how much she would love it when she visited. He said how being here had sparked a new urgency to find out about his family. It was what he didn’t talk about by the time he
passed her the phone that interested Kite.

‘Haven’t heard him this fired up to write in years!’ Ruby said. ‘And how about you, my darlin’. What do you think of the place?’

Kite didn’t know how to reply. What she did know for sure was that if she told Ruby or Seth or Dr Sherpa that she felt Dawn was trying to reach her here, they would probably worry about
her even more. But somewhere deep inside her she knew that she had been drawn here for a purpose as strongly as Seth had, and now she had no choice but to stay.

‘Kite? Are you all right, my darlin’?’

‘Fine.’

‘And Seth said you slept all the way up to the Lakes. How have you been sleeping since you got there?’

‘Much better.’

She hadn’t slept more than a few moments at a time, but she knew if she told Ruby the truth she would probably jump on the next train up here. Who knows, maybe Dr Sherpa would have her
admitted to hospital like she’d overheard Seth and Ruby talking about in London, and she couldn’t risk that because it would mean missing out on whatever it was that Dawn was trying to
tell her.

When Ruby and Kite had said their goodbyes, Seth took the phone off her, opened the door and walked away from the car. He paced along the boundary of a dry stone wall, picking bits of moss from
between the crevices. Even though she was too far away to hear what he was saying, his pacing up and down made Kite feel uncomfortable. He was listening to Ruby more than he was speaking and that
made her nervous. What new thing did Ruby think would be good for her now? Seth kicked shards of slate aside as he listened – now he seemed to be arguing with Ruby. As he ambled back towards
the car Kite cranked up the volume on her iPod and pretended to be fast asleep. Seth placed a little posy of heather that he’d collected on her knee.

‘Yeah, it’s lovely blue skies and wall-to-wall sun so far – the locals are saying it’s unheard of!’ he told Ruby cheerily . . . as if they’d been talking
about the weather all this time.

‘I don’t care what they say about that woman Agnes, she’s created something exquisite in this house,’ declared Seth as they walked back into Mirror
Falls. He pressed the remote to slide back the living-room roof, then sauntered over to the window. If anything, the owl print showed up even clearer against the backdrop of the deepening fiery
sky.

‘We’d better close the blinds then, if it’s landlady’s orders! We don’t want any more birds injured. I suppose they must get disorientated if they can’t tell
the glass is there.’ He pressed the button for the blinds. ‘Shame to miss the sunset, but that’s pretty good too,’ Seth whistled as the enormous abstract painting of the
valley unfolded.

As they lay at opposite ends of the sofa, Kite began to ponder about Agnes Landseer. Why would you design and build a place as extraordinary as this as your retirement home, and then leave it?
And why did Jack seem so disturbed by even the mention of Agnes’s name?

Seth began his familiar light wheezy snore. She covered him with a throw and walked up the spiral staircase and into the bathroom. She filled the sink and reached into the cupboard where she had
hidden Dawn’s soap. She let the rich lemony scent seep into her skin. It was uncanny how that smell could summon Dawn into the room. Kite placed the soap on the side and walked into her
bedroom, pressing the remote to open the bookshelf, behind which she had created a den out of cushions and blankets, like the ones she and Dawn used to make in primary school. She snuggled under
the woollen blanket and took out Dawn’s reed box. With great care she flicked up the little copper catch and prised the lid open. There was Dawn’s golden reed. She eased it out, holding
it between her thumb and index finger and raised it to her mouth. Then she took a sharp breath in and blew as hard as she could, but no sound emerged. Kite placed the reed back in the box and hid
it under her den pillows with her Dawn feather and her unopened birthday card.

It was snug in here, and being so close to Dawn’s precious things might help her sleep. Maybe Dawn would come to her in her dreams.

‘Close your eyes and open your senses, my darlin’.’ She heard Ruby’s soothing voice like a lullaby in her head.

Rush of waterfall . . . click of switch in the kitchen below . . . something electrical turning itself off. Sheep bleating . . . dog barking, or perhaps too high-pitched for a dog. Maybe foxes
mating in the dark then . . . And yes, there it was, hollow and clear, the insistent hoot of an owl. What was Dawn trying to tell her? There was no way that she could sleep. The cacophony of her
own mind was even louder than the waterfall. She threw off the blanket, crawled out of her den and surveyed the bookshelf. Her attention was caught by a thick coffee-table tome on the top shelf.
Its cover was stained and the pages well thumbed.
Owl Lore
. The title was written in old-fashioned swirly writing and a giant owl face stared from the cover. She shivered. This could not
be a coincidence. She felt as if Dawn was leading her by the hand.

Kite reached up, tilted the heavy book over the shelf edge, eased it down with both hands and returned to her den. A corner of the dust jacket, where the owl’s wing should have been, had
been ripped away.

She closed the wardrobe, lay down on her bed, propping her head on her pillows, opened the front cover and read the ‘Foreword’.

Kite’s hands shook as she turned the pages. She flicked through the pictures of owls in various stages of flight until her eye was caught by a paragraph in the section
headed ‘Folklore’.

‘
You know what they say when a great bird like that flies at you
.’ Ellie’s words from earlier echoed back at her.

Kite slammed the book closed. Maybe she
was
going mad and needed help . . . to talk to someone; but the person she needed to talk to more than anyone else in the world was Dawn.

Kite took the first two steps down the stairs. There was the Dawn owl print, as bright and sharp as ever against another bright blue sky.

‘Did you sleep?’ Seth asked as she continued down the stairs. He was lounging on the sofa, roof off, guitar by his side, along with an untidy splayed-out mess of papers covered in
crossings out and reworkings, which he was just now collecting into a pile. She had the impression that he hadn’t slept either.

‘Not bad,’ Kite lied, edging her way to the opposite end of the sofa and lying down. Her head throbbed with tiredness.

‘I was remembering last night when I started teaching you and Dawn the guitar and you would never practise because I suppose you were rebelling, but really, from such an early age, she was
always going to be a wonderful musician. I hope to God it wasn’t too much pressure for her, getting that scholarship to music school; I thought she was looking forward to it. Did she ever say
anything to you?’

‘Only that she’d got in,’ Kite replied.

Seth wiped the tears from his eyes as he spoke and tried to cover his emotion by tidying up his manuscript papers.

When he’d finished he patted the cushion for Kite to join him at his end of the sofa. She rested her head on his shoulder, following the path of a few wispy clouds meandering like smoke
trails high above them.

‘You won’t believe what Ajay told me about Jack! Sometimes a song will come back to him from his childhood and he can sing the whole thing through word perfect, not a stutter or a
stumble.’

‘I thought he couldn’t speak,’ said Kite.

‘I know, that’s what so incredible, isn’t it? Ajay was explaining to me that it’s a curiosity of the brain that the songs you sing over and over as a child can be stored
in the memory forever.’

Kite wondered if Dawn’s Brahms symphony had been stored like that somewhere deep inside her. She could hear her playing right now as swallows darted above them, swelling the sky with
life.

‘Ajay’s going to drop by and see how you’re doing later,’ Seth said in a throwaway manner. ‘I gave him the referral letter from our doctor and he thinks it might be
useful for you to see him. Just to make sure you’re feeling OK.’

‘You had no right to do that!’ Kite pushed Seth away sharply as she jumped up off the sofa, her chest tightening with anger. She’d sensed that all this softly, softly stuff was
leading to something.

‘He can come if he wants to, but I’m NOT talking to him.’ She turned her back on Seth and walked towards the window.

‘But, Kite, sweetheart, you haven’t even cried for Dawn, and you won’t talk to any of us. We’re worried about you. Isn’t that what happened to Dawn, bottling things
up and refusing to talk?’

‘I don’t
know
what happened to Dawn!’ Kite shrieked at the top of her voice, slamming her fist into the window. ‘I mean, what do you want me to say? Once upon a
time I had a best friend and then one day she killed herself, committed suicide, and she’s not here any more and then we all lived unhappily ever after. Rubbish story, isn’t it?
It’s easy for her. At least she’s dead and can’t feel anything. There you go, I’ve said it, given it a name, which is more than you’ve had the guts to do.’

Seth’s eyes filled with tears again but he didn’t try to pursue her as she sprinted to her room, her knuckles burning from the punch. She threw on some running gear and her trainers.
Her hands shook as she fumbled with the laces. She ran back down the staircase, ignoring Seth’s pleas for her to come back, and headed out of the open entrance of Mirror Falls.