Kite Spirit Read online

  ‘You’re doing really well, Kite, carry on.’

  ‘Well, I knocked a few times and called her name. Then Jess, Dawn’s cat, came springing out of the flap and got under my feet. I picked her up and she miaowed and miaowed. Her coming out made me think that Dawn must have left because Jess never leaves Dawn’s side if she’s in the flat. So when I texted her and there was no reply, I thought she must have got fed up waiting for me and gone on ahead. She would have been stressed about the exam so I thought I’d better head in to school. Anyway, I waited by the railings near the zebra crossing and I kept remembering how Jess wouldn’t stop wrapping herself around my ankles as if she didn’t want me to leave . . . and that’s when I got this sick feeling in my belly that something wasn’t right.’

  ‘Why was that? Do you think there might have been any warning signs?’

  Kite shook her head in answer, but the question kept echoing through her mind. If anyone should have known, surely it was her.

  Facebook Memorial

  Every night before she laid her head on her pillow, as she did now, Kite took herself back to the day of her exam. She dredged through every detail to see if she had missed something, anything that might have been a ‘warning sign’. Sometimes she imagined the story that she’d told the police officer veering off in another direction.

  ‘Take your time.’

  Kite stared at the birthmark on the police officer’s neck.

  ‘I texted her and she texted me back: “I need help”. I hurled myself down the steps and kicked at the door to her flat. It took three hard shoves and then the latch gave and I let myself in. Jess miaowed from Dawn’s bedroom and I ran through to her. Dawn was just lying there looking pale and ill; there was sick everywhere – the room stank of it.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked her as I propped her head up.

  ‘I’ve taken some sleeping pills, a lot of pills,’ she told me.

  That’s when I called the police, and the ambulance came.

  The worst thing was that nobody could answer the question that was haunting her day and night. ‘What if Dawn wanted me to find her?’ Kite stood up and walked over to her desk and clicked on the message she wished she could delete from both her Facebook page and her memory forever. Like a moth to a flame, she had read it a thousand tortured times, turning the questions over, searching for a warning sign hidden among those final lines.

  Then she scrolled down to read the endless ‘Rest in Peace’ messages, commemorative photos and shared memories people had posted on the memorial page she’d created. The contributions just kept flooding in.

  Part of her regretted setting up the page. Why had she felt the need to do it in the first place? It had taken her ages to find the right words and photos. It had been something to do, she supposed. But she had not been ready for the response. None of these people had really known Dawn at all and yet here they were, claiming that they’d been great friends. It made Kite sick, like watching vultures in a feeding frenzy. At least the messages from Dawn’s old orchestra friends felt genuine.

  ‘She played like an angel. I’ll miss her. XX Esme’

  Kite vaguely remembered this girl from a concert she’d been to. She was the one who had sat next to Dawn in orchestra and also played the oboe.

  Kite could hardly stand to look as new messages of sorrow appeared before her. Seth was right. She should shut herself off from all of this, at least for a while. There was enough going on in her head without it. That’s what she should do, but once again she found herself reading the last words that had passed between her and Dawn. Words that she now knew off by heart.

  Dawn: Where’ve you been all weekend?

  Kite: On my trapeze! Done no revising though! You?

  Dawn: A bit!

  Kite: Worked all weekend then!?

  Dawn: You know me so well!

  Kite: Stop worrying! You’ll fly like you always do.

  Dawn: You’re the flyer!

  Kite: Working on it!

  Dawn: You’ll fly like a bird on that cloud swing one day.

  Kite: If I’m ever strong enough!

  Dawn: You will be. I don’t know anyone stronger than you.

  Kite: That’s cos you hardly know anyone!

  Dawn: Funny!

  Kite: Gotta go. Ruby’s on my case about getting an early night! See you tomorrow. Don’t stay up all night. You can’t get higher than an A*.

  Dawn: You’re an A* friend.

  Kite: Don’t get all emo on me! You too, ‘Sister!’

  Dawn’s messages never failed to make her smile. That’s how it was when you’d known someone all your life and you would always be best friends, no matter what. There was none of the ‘If I say this, will it be taken this way or that?’ that Kite worried about with other people. The strange thing was that this last exchange had made her smile even more than usual. She imagined it was because when it came down to it, no matter how different they became, they would still be there to wish each other well for the big moments in life. It had always been like this between them, ever since the day in nursery when Dawn had asked Kite, with her four-year-old’s lisp, if she would be her ‘thithter’.

  Now every word of Dawn’s last message seemed weighted with a double meaning . . . Why hadn’t Kite seen it before? She winced at her jokey attempts to get Dawn to lighten up. If only Ruby hadn’t interrupted them when she had . . . if they’d carried on chatting and she’d taken more time to find out what was really going on in Dawn’s head, maybe something might have been said that would have changed everything. Kite placed her hands on the keyboard and bashed out the words ‘WHY? WHY? WHY?’. The bizarre thing was that she could sense Dawn sitting at her computer downstairs reading her message. Her hands paused over the keyboard. She half expected a reply to come flying back at her like a boomerang, but her urgent question was greeted only with silence.

  Kite could not bring herself to name what Dawn had done. In her head, she had come to call it simply the ‘S’ word. She typed an ‘S’ on her page and a ‘u’. Then deleted the ‘u’. She could not think it, or say it, or type it, but what was the alternative? She could not even accept that her friend had ‘died’, as Jamila, who had known Dawn a bit from music lessons, had written in her kind message.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Kite. I know how close you two were. No one can believe that she’s died.’

  In Kite’s view, people ‘died’ because they got old or sick, or were caught up in a terrible accident they had no control over. She didn’t care that the way you were supposed to describe it now was ‘Death by S…’ Apparently, the phrase ‘Committing S…’ was a hangover from the days it was thought of as a crime. But that’s exactly how it felt to Kite: a crime. Dying was something that happened to a person, but what Dawn had done, she had done to herself.

  What was the other phrase people used? Oh yes, ‘passed away’. Kite hated this one more than anything. It was intended to be soothing, as if the person had quietly drifted off to sleep and never woken up. Of course Dawn had fallen into a deep sleep, and quietly too, so that no one else in the world knew that she was drifting away. Not her mum or her dad or even her so-called best friend who had been sleeping in the room above her. Deciding to end your life – what was soothing about that? Kite tried not to think of Dawn’s neat little bedroom where they had spent so much time together when they were little, playing dolls, Lego and board games. In the past few years they had listened to music cranked up so loud that it seemed to obliterate the whole world; in that bedroom they had tried on make-up and clothes and plucked their eyebrows disastrously; they had danced and teased each other about their latest crush. That room had felt so full of joy – making Dawn laugh was the one thing Kite had always been able to do.

  No, Dawn had not simply ‘died’ or ‘passed away’. There was nothing peaceful about what she’d done. Kite stared at the letter ‘S’ on her computer screen. They had been in Year 1 when Dawn had taught Kite how to write the perfect ‘S’.

 
; sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

  S is for silence, S is for sleep and S is for . . . the unspeakable thing that Dawn had done not only to herself but to everyone around her.

  What little sleep Kite could grab these days was broken by memories of Dawn, and on waking Dawn’s presence was so bright and clear that she could almost reach out and touch her. Sometimes, as it was today, Dawn’s lemony soap smell lingered through the morning. Kite wondered if she would ever sleep well again, knowing what her friend had done to herself in her bedroom below. She would have liked to scream, to retch, to wash away of every memory of Dawn.

  She’d overheard Seth and Ruby talking about how strange it was that she hadn’t once cried. But to Kite, tears seemed too easy a way to release the turmoil inside her.

  Annalisa Pain

  At weekends Kite had been one of those people who sprang to life, threw open her curtains and felt a little bubble of excitement rising in her stomach as she considered the multitude of possibilities for the day ahead.

  Now Kite slowly pulled aside her curtains on to a pitifully grey day. She looked up at the dull sky and felt as if the roof of her world had been lowered.

  ‘It’s that Annalisa Pain again, from Circus Space!’ Ruby knocked, gently opened the door and held the phone out.

  ‘Tell her I’m not coming.’

  Ruby placed her head on one side and paused to look at her daughter. Kite gazed back blankly. She had the oddest feeling of looking at her mother critically, as a stranger might have seen her. She noticed that Ruby had new nail extensions with little sequins sparkling in half-moons at the tips. Ruby glided towards the bed and sat down beside Kite. She was a graceful woman with velvety dark, unlined skin, it was impossible to tell what age she was, partly because she was so fit from all her dancing and choreography. She wore shocking pinks and mustards, or lime greens with purples, and always a thick dramatic Cleopatra line skilfully drawn along her eyelids. Sometimes, as she had today, she twisted silver and golden threads into her long braids and added ‘a bit of shimmer’ to her eyes. Looking again at her sequinned nails, Kite winced inside at Ruby’s refusal to blend in. Until now Kite had always been proud that her mum didn’t, sheep-like, conform to a bland standard.

  It was way back in nursery when Dawn had first made her realize that Ruby and Seth were a bit ‘different’.

  ‘Why don’t you call them Mum and Dad?’ Dawn asked.

  ‘Because they’re Seth and Ruby.’ Kite shrugged.

  ‘And why did they call you Kite?’

  ‘They said I chose it myself. They went for a walk and I was being carried in my baby sling and I kicked my legs cos I saw a kite flying.’

  ‘So what did they call you before?’

  ‘Nothing – Ruby and Seth think babies should choose their own names!’

  ‘That’s silly! Babies can’t talk!’ Dawn giggled.

  ‘I suppose!’

  Kite still remembered the odd shifting feeling inside her that day when Dawn had first come for tea. Ruby and Seth had told her the story of her naming so many times that she could almost picture her baby self reaching out and grasping her name from a sky full of floating possibilities.

  ‘What’s a hippy?’ Dawn asked.

  ‘I don’t know.

  ‘Ruby! What’s a hippy?’ Kite asked at tea later.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That’s what my mum and dad said you are,’ Dawn answered.

  ‘That may be so!’ Ruby laughed.

  There was something about hearing four-year-old Dawn’s thoughts that made Kite smile, until she remembered. Ruby smoothed Kite’s cheek as if she had glimpsed in her fleeting expression a tiny ray of hope. Kite pushed Ruby’s sparkling hands away. Today she wished that the world could be as colourless and numb as she felt.

  ‘Annalisa thinks the training might do you good,’ Ruby coaxed. ‘What shall I tell her?’

  ‘I’ve told you I’m not going.’ Kite burrowed her head under the pillow. Why couldn’t they understand that she just wanted to be left alone?

  ‘OK, darlin’, you take your time,’ Ruby soothed, her soft, lilting Caribbean accent always at its strongest when she was concerned about someone. Ruby promised Annalisa that she would call her later, hung up and eased the pillow away from Kite’s face.

  ‘Do you want to talk?’ she asked, gently tucking a coil of Kite’s hair behind her ear. Kite pulled away and turned her head to face the mattress.

  ‘Does it look like I want to talk?’

  ‘When you’re ready, my love, we’re here.’ Ruby sighed deeply as she stood up, walked quietly out of the room and closed the door behind her.

  Kite had always been able to tell Ruby and Seth anything that sprang into her mind. No subject was off-limits, but now she felt as if they were living in separate universes and there was no way that she could talk to them because the Kite she was now felt so far from the Kite she had been only a few days before. She knew it was unfair to take it out on her mum, but she was sick of being told what would be good for her. She had overheard people saying things like, ‘If she would only get a bit of exercise, it might take her out of herself.’ Where did they think she would go if she wasn’t in herself? It was as if everyone thought that, given enough time, she would forget Dawn, move on and get back to ‘normal’. Why couldn’t they understand that what Dawn had done had changed everything forever; even the things that she had treasured about their past together were sullied now.

  Why would she want to go down to Circus Space and turn herself upside down on the trapeze, of all things? Her ambition to fly on the cloud swing, the highest of all trapezes, seemed so ridiculous now. She wished that she had never met Annalisa and got caught up with the whole scene at Circus Space. Maybe then she’d have had time to notice what was going on with Dawn.

  ‘I’ll only be an hour or so! I’m helping out a friend with a bit of choreography,’ Ruby called as she disappeared into one of the studios.

  That ‘hour or so’ turned into a yawning three hours. Sick of waiting, Kite wandered into a vast brick warehouse to find a woman arcing through the air like a great bird of prey. At the sight of her, something within Kite clicked into place, as if she’d discovered what she was meant to do, meant to be. Watching the woman fly made Kite’s heart leap out of her body and gave her a surging feeling of hope that anything was possible.

  Then there was the day she’d gone over to Dawn’s to break the news about training with Annalisa. She remembered the nagging feeling in her gut that the new friends she was making at Circus Space would take her away from Dawn. ‘Don’t worry! You and me are always going to be best friends,’ Dawn had reassured her. Actually it had felt, at that moment, more like a promise. Kite had been so relieved that she threw her arms around Dawn and hugged her tight. Dawn had always been able to read Kite’s thoughts. She was just that sort of person, noticing things about people, being sensitive to their moods.

  ‘Lighten up!’ Dawn joked, as she pulled away from Kite. They did that sometimes, just for the hell of it, changed scripts. ‘So? What’s she like, this Annalisa?’

  Kite sprang up on to Dawn’s mattress with such enthusiasm that she nearly bounced Dawn off the end of the bed and tumbled to the floor herself.

  Dawn broke her fall. ‘Steady.’ She giggled.

  ‘She’s quite amazing-looking – really tall with this dyed blonde hair, almost white. It’s so short it practically looks shaved, and you’ve never seen arms and legs as long as hers, not even yours!’ Kite joked, as Dawn tucked her legs under her. ‘After she’d finished this unbelievable routine on the cloud swing she somersaulted her way down a rope and I waited for her at the bottom! I went over to say how good she was but before I could, she just stuck her chin in the air and marched past me. Then I followed her into this cafe area and started talking to her anyway. You should have seen the way she looked at me, peering down from her long neck. Come to think of it, she does look a bit li
ke a swan!’

  ‘She sounds kind of awe-inspiring!’

  ‘She is! She kept trying to fob me off though, but eventually she said she’d give me a trial!’

  ‘That’s what I love about you – once you’ve got an idea in your head you’ll never give up!’ Dawn smiled.

  ‘What? And you would?!’ Kite retorted, climbing back up on to the bed and peering down at Dawn imperiously. ‘What eez your name?’ she asked in what was meant to be Annalisa’s French accent.

  They played this game a lot. Kite had discovered when they were in Year 1 what an amazing knack Dawn had of mimicking people. She said it was because she was an outsider so she had the time to observe them from a distance, unlike Kite, who was more a part of things. Kite was always trying to get Dawn to put herself forward for plays, but she never would. She amazed everyone when she acted a part in drama lessons though. She’d even played Ruby once, slipping into her light Caribbean accent and making Kite roar with laughter with her over-the-top dancer’s gesticulations.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Annalisa, I’m Kite!’ said Dawn, perfectly capturing Kite’s equally proud upright stance and direct gaze.

  ‘You cannot be serious!’ laughed Kite throwing back her head in a ridiculously exaggerated Annalisa gesture that sent Dawn off into a giggling fit.

  ‘Sounds like you’ve found your thing,’ Dawn smiled when they’d stopped messing around. ‘I knew you would. You’re as much of a perfectionist as me in your own way.’

  ‘I suppose I am, once it’s something I want to do. Like you with your oboe. You’ve got to really love that instrument to bother with all that reed-scraping stuff!’ Kite walked over to Dawn’s desk. A pile of thread and bamboo shavings littered the surface.

  ‘Maybe.’ Dawn shrugged.

  Dawn often asked Kite what she thought of the sound of each new reed, and Kite had tried to explain that she could never hear the difference between the ones Dawn rejected and snapped and the ones that ‘showed promise’.