Kite Flying

"Let's go fly a kite, up to the highest height...
and send it so-ar-ing,
Up! through the atmosphere,
Up where the air is clear"

Mary Poppins













Content Warning:
Strong language, sex references, threat

Transcript

Kite Flying

Pierre loved his daughter. It had always been abundantly clear that the love he felt for his little girl, the first born of his two children and the only daughter he would ever have, was big, deep, expansive according to any form of measurement or any dimension, and, in its own curious way, perpetuating. But adolescence even at the best of times poses- or rather- unleashes its sulky, weepy, biologic challenges with a certain kind of nonchalance, mercilessness even, and with sure disregard for the treasure, found and preserved, of childhood.

Pierre and Poplar had been close. Their names, alliterative and belonging beside one another, their natures just as naturally adjacent, they tendered a strange little world of which they were the only two inhabitants, a realm of privacy and restriction that admitted no other into its secret, sacred, tender compass.

It was a source of unexpected sadness at first, a shock, the suddenness with which Poplar’s adolescence turned her against her father. She was worse with her mother, more argumentative, more venomous, but that was nothing new. Lettice was quite used to that. Pierre could always depend upon a certain kind of doting from little Poplar. When he returned from the offices in Pimlico, got in on the other side of two tubes and a Great Western train, raincoated or sun-hatted, wet from rain or sun-moist, shaking out his umbrella, cantankerous with manifold irritations, he could so often quite happily and accurately predict those sudden, urgent footsteps on the landing, then clattering down the stairs, and his little Poplar flinging herself at him just as he collapsed into the sittee. Sometimes she even carried, at her mother’s instruction- or perhaps permission- that glass vessel whose enchanting amber contents she did not well understand, a tumbler of whiskey for the weary breadwinner. The “goodnight to daddy” was almost liturgical to her. She had inherited the form of daddy’s-goodnight-kiss as something holy, and was scrupulously obedient to its parameters. “Goodnight, daddy” (pronounced with feeling)…then wait for the reply…go in for a kiss, kiss the cheek, both cheeks if the continental fashion doesn’t seem too much of an imposition…wait for daddy’s show of affection back…then off to bed quickly because daddy was then, as ever, really tired. Of course, puberty and the earliest beginnings of maturity wildly upset the calm, quiet equilibrium of that household, and all too soon, Daddy’s-goodnight-kiss was a thing of the past, and never to be savoured again.  

The death of Luke in his infancy had been a major blow for Lettice. Pierre had found himself unable to fully confront the magnitude of that small pale being’s demise. He allowed Luke to pass from his life without ever having really entered it. Sometimes Pierre thought about him, hugged the pillow to his face in a darkened room, sobbed and snotted into it, quite alone with his grief, trying to stuff it back into the orifices out which it did its damnedest to erupt. But for the most part he couldn’t share life with it, couldn’t share his attentions, his energies, his affections, any strange, sad-coloured corner of his love, with a posthumous Luke. Lettice was the opposite. Having carried Luke, naturally the bond with him was stronger than that which her husband knew, the death was one she felt, deeply, in a place as deep, deeper even, than the womb in which Luke had known more months of life than the breathing world. Lettice’s devotion to memorial acts was constant and ritualistic, even years after Luke’s death.

Within such a shadow, the feeling of loss Pierre felt in Poplar, a loss instituted not by death but by life and effected since time immemorial, could be called comparatively pale. Yet rather than being prepared and made wise, alert and capable in the face of loss, of whatever kind it happened to be, Pierre was over-sensitive, over-diagnostic, over-apprehensive.

He tried to reason with himself that Poplar couldn’t stay a child forever, that a certain dislikability (yet to be tamed) was simply part and parcel of a child’s growth, par for the course in the escape from childhood into adulthood, a tool to aid that long and tortuous journey. Lettice, who, as she was a woman, had been a little girl at one time, though that time felt to her some aeons ago, counselled Pierre, weeping in bed after incurring the wrath of a particularly quarrelsome Poplar, that they could hardly expect her to remain the way she was at nine until she was twenty nine: wouldn’t it be rather strange, Pierre, she said, to have a twenty-nine year old, living in her childhood bedroom, running downstairs to give her daddy hugs and kisses and bringing him his drink after he came in from work. Pierre didn’t like to admit it, even to himself, but it was servitude, docility, un-rebellion of a kind that he cherished so dearly in his daughter. That she had submitted to it so willingly as a pre-adolescent rendered their relationship harmonious, perhaps uncommonly harmonious. But, naturally, unbeguiled Lettice had already seen her daughter’s redder, angrier, less agreeable colours even if patriarch Pierre had not. She would have to fight to become something, Lettice counselled, fight to achieve, fight to keep going, even motherhood is a contest, Lettice advised her husband, and weren’t there still considerable challenges for women in society, she went on, alluding to the proverbial glass ceiling. Pierre didn’t want his daughter to smash through a glass ceiling. The thought, the image, the hideous vision of his beloved little girl launching herself vertically on some terrifying springboard at tremendous speed into a ceiling of glass did not, if he was perfectly honest, gratify him. The shower of glass cascading down, so many sharp, twinkling, lacerating shards of the very ceiling that his beloved Poplar had managed to vault beyond embedded in various section of her body. Even as a metaphor the idea repulsed him. He wanted Poplar home and warm and safe and not smashing through glass of any description.

Like most teenagers she began to develop a life, a private, surreptitious life, conducted mostly through screens, and from which her parents were non-negotiably banned. They could not even be trusted with the least crumb, the least hint concerning that adolescent gossip Poplar was hardly alone in making something of a religion out of, much as they tried, in vain, to take an interest and include themselves in it. They simply wished to know their daughter a little, know something about what she was saying, hearing, thinking, seeing, doing. From what Pierre could tell of his daughter’s social media and internet activities (he managed to sneak a look at her unlocked computer on a few occasions), it was a world, superlatively jejune, of scurrility and superficiality and triviality. The group she considered her friends, in the least ironical sense, seemed more like enemies to Pierre. And the boys to which she made it her mission to become simply irresistible, the boys she pined for in a strange sense though such a truthful self-expression was of course utterly taboo in Poplar’s new world where sarcasm and indifference were and remain majesty, to Pierre they seemed repulsive, gangly, ugly, acne-ridden, spiritually and morally destitute. That even for a moment she could hold them in higher esteem than him virtually deranged Pierre. Lettice began incipiently to find this marked feebleness in Pierre more and more revolting. It’s part of growing up, Lettice would groan, sounding the mantra for the umpteenth time. I am a fucking grown-up, Pierre would snap, I’ve grown up…I don’t want to vicariously go through it all again.

After some months Poplar did ask her parents for permission to meet up with a boy she had encountered online. This meeting did become a shaky, angst-ridden, unblossoming, curiously chaste relationship. Boyfriend, girlfriend. Territory claimed, the acquisition of an epithet, for yourself, and another. He was called Kit: Pierre called him Kit-kat, part humorously, part contemptuously, P.E-Kit if he was particularly angry.

Poplar was still a child, legally, in all actuality. But it was a moribund childhood. It felt like a kind of death, as Pierre tearfully trawled the internet for pictures of his daughter, provocatively apparelled, the head ever tilted and the lips ever pouting and the green irises in the eyes ever raised in suggestion and the new, small breasts declared with as much spectacle as their recent, little bulbousness would allow, her face painted so her eyes looked demonic and her soft, native cheeks synthetically hued. In that painted face and only recently self-elected costume and that newly learnt pose, the spectre of that little girl, who kissed daddy goodnight every night before she went to bed and brought him his drink after a long day working and arguing and commuting, loomed towards Pierre, the current parody rising like a shadow with its own agency from behind the little girl in which it originated, following her fearfully. It sickened him. It hurt him more than he believed anything else possibly could. There were no two ways about it: his little girl had grown into a whore.

The constant and invariable source of the arguments with Poplar was money, and related to that, permission: permission to go here, the money to go there, money to do this, permission to do that. She was a simple soul, all she really wanted to do was meet up with her friends (Kit always there with her, but somehow sombre and backgrounded)- and dodge the fare on the trains, languish languorously on various sea fronts, in various cafes, occasionally go to house parties where alcohol had somehow been acquired, the rare occasions when two parents took a holiday, leaving one of Poplar’s friends on her own, a mercilessly infrequent burst of freedom, the opportunity went to their heads like any stimulant, they couldn’t think or talk about anything else all week. Sometimes she’d come home, able to hide her intake of vodka, but would vomit the next day, hangover added to the fundamental and inherent teenage cantankerousness, which was quite a cocktail of moodiness to behold and incur. Other times she’d be too drunk to hide her intoxication, or the vomit was already on her lips, and she’d be simply unable to avoid the castigation, having tearfully or furiously stumbled into the doorway and floundered before her disappointed guardians.

The milestone of sixteen rapidly approached. Maturity’s once forbidden fruits make themselves available, while the ordinary, tempering wisdom which also is maturity takes a little longer to arrive. Pierre wasn’t quite sure whether or not Poplar and Kit had had sex, but he made it his own personal mission for a while to ascertain as much. What evidence there was seemed to suggest that in all likelihood they had not, but Pierre was surprised at how difficult such an investigation into the sure, hard facts of the matter proved to be. Though his frenzy was worrying, he drew the line at sedating Poplar, creeping into her room, and, while she slept, taking a magnifying glass to her genitals to see if the hymen was still intact. He did ask Poplar directly at breakfast one morning whether or not she and Kit had been “intimate”, under the guise of birds-and-the-bees rhetoric, counsel in contraception and STDs and date rape. Of course, being the late era it was, such education had been cheerily provided amongst all the Shakespeare and French verb tables and Bunsen burners, more than twice. The PowerPoints were thorough, the images unforgettable. Poplar and Kit had kissed, many times, searched each other’s mouths pretty thoroughly from the looks of things, their hands had even riskily wandered across each other’s persons. However, it consoled Pierre a little to observe in every Facebook or Instagram photo that there was, that strange gaucheness in the youthful kiss, a certain wariness, ungivingness, a certain discomfiture in the alertly cocked head and the almost arbitrary castings-about of the tongue, lips, cheeks. With how much more grace, worlds more in fact, Poplar had always kissed her father his goodnight. Anyway, Pierre surmised, what was the odd kiss between friends?

Poplar’s sixteenth birthday was an operation of two parts: there was the public party under adult supervision where one, perhaps two, glasses of wine were permitted and copious nibbles alongside. And then of course there was the clandestine, unsupervised party just for Poplar and her friends, and their boyfriends. On the other side of both, both of these parties seemed to have been conducted, according to the lights of those in charge, with great success.

Groaning with hangover in the morning following the latter of these, Poplar rose reluctantly from her bed. As she did, she heard a knock at the door. Pierre, already up, washed, dressed, teeth brushed, braced, slippered (his boots on eager standby for the morning excursion) got to the door first. He opened it and was amazed by what he saw, having looked about briefly. Standing there, not levitating, but certainly preternatural in its posture, perfectly upright and vertical upon its lowermost point in the windless air, there was a kite. It was a blue kite: every centimetre of its diamond-shape was painted a bright, but not too bright, lagoonish, butterfly blue, the blue of a sunny sea. Trailing behind, it was tailed in an ornamental column of bow-ties and hair-ribbons. It was also attached to a black flying string, and the majority of that string’s considerable length was of course wound up carefully on a spool. Pierre picked up the kite, one hand on the edge of each lower slope. It did not resist him at all. He had half expected it to bolt like a wild animal at his advance, but it submitted, keenly. Pierre began to look at all the bow-ties and hair-ribbons. They were beautiful items, yet in totality the arrangement of them on the tail of the kite tinged his soul with disquietude, an unease. If he held the folds of these bow-shaped ties and ribbons smooth, he was able to observe dates, all kinds of dates, pairs of dates with a dash between them. Of course, the most usual context for such a marking is the gravestone. He read 1889-1947, 1933-1967, 1930-2005, 1981-1999. And in places, with far less frequency than the dates, he saw images: weird faces, with wide, black, aghast mouths, and red crossed eyes. Pierre was perfectly relieved: all these items belonged to dead people, people deceased. He had been so concerned that they had been stolen from persons living, that this kite was a devious thief and illicit collector.

Holding this kite in his hands, a tremendous sense of warmth, a consoling tremor of power, an optimism upon which he thought he had lost his hold some years ago, spread through him, pervaded him, penetrated him. It lit him up. Pierre had a marvellous feeling about this kite. He imagined releasing it, setting it free, sending it sailing, soaring, up through the atmosphere, up where the air is clear, as the song went. It would heal their wounds, it would make them a family again, it would knit them, weave them, every one of them, together again, like a waxwork family, ever preserved. Why this good ghost should choose the kite as his form, Pierre wasn’t quite sure. They had flown kites, Pierre, Lettice, Poplar. Running along the shingle, running after it as though it led with agency, running to catch up, inspired by its vaulting powers. Sometimes the shingle was the colour of the sea, and sometimes the sea was the colour that the shingle just had been, they alternated bluish-grey, and greenish-blue, cordially, courteously, depending on the sun’s position, the obstruction of the shaft, cloud cover, wind speed. Once they had a row, directly prior, or perhaps during kite-flying. Once upon a time, Poplar had her heart set on flying a kite, but the day was windless. They tried, it leapt a moment, and then lay flat, utterly unruffled, undisturbed, on the ground. Where was that kite? Pierre asked himself, the one they had flown. Long disposed. How she had cried. But when it worked, she had enjoyed it, the unobstructed leap to a place of buoyancy, the string in her hands, responsible for that kite as though for a life, fragile, breakable, the air, blue and cream and loud and motional with currents, dangerous with gulls, those big harpies boasted by that particular town, bothering children and kicking off the tops of their ice creams. They were just one of a number of dangerous living things and living species in its arsenal. Not long after, she became enamoured of the lighthouse. When the pink and blue and orange of the evening had lastly disappeared, luminous and alive at the horizon’s rim for a precious hour, almost mottled in a kind of ailment before night’s calming uniformity, the lighthouse light began turning. They had walked towards it in the evening glow, on the shingle, effortful, crunching. In places, sea holly clustered, big, barbed silver bunches on the stones. On the right was the sea, noisily hushing itself wave after wave with a small sliding of pebbles down the long cheek of shore, amid all the froth. On the left were the grasses, buzzing with the Roselle’s cricket, his continuous whirr. Not just one of them. Many, many of them. Turning round, returning, darkness fell, and the lighthouse lit up, and began turning every degree of the circle’s three hundred and sixty, showing ships and boats the way. Poplar’s attention couldn’t be diverted from it, she was in absolute thrall to its spooky, whirling glare, that cone of perfectly phantasmic white light in the night’s starless blueblackness. How she whooped, giggled. Poplar never whooped or giggled anymore. Yes, Pierre was quite certain, this kite was going to fix her, fix the illness of her adolescence, heal the havoc of which that adolescence was the invisible maker. The kite lay in his hands, facelessly inviting and gentle. Virgin, unsexed, purified of all lusts, unblemished, chaste. Tenderly, he kissed the kite: he saw to it that every inch of that kite's sensual geometry was kissed.

As soon as the kiss was over, Pierre cried out: “Poplar!” His voice resounded, bounded up the stairs. “Lettice! Poplar! Get your stuff, both of you. We’re going to the beach. We’re going to fly a kite. Now!”

He felt a sense of urgency about the whole affair. His enthusiasm disarmed them and they obliged, sluggishly, warily. The tone, the avidity, the energy was new to them. It has finally arrived, Lettice reasoned, the breakdown, the crisis to which all those in middle life are hopelessly and poignantly susceptible. As far as hungover Poplar was concerned, she barely had the time to let up her usual protest, stun her father’s authority with her stroppy majesty. Pierre hassled both his wife and daughter into readiness.

As to the matter of the mysterious kite, this hopeful if inanimate visitor, he didn’t share it with them at first. He stowed it, flat and safe, in the boot of the car, the string and spool too, though not with anything like the care with which he handled the lovely blue kite. Lettice simply assumed that Pierre had quite accidently stumbled upon some long-abandoned kite among the catastrophic riot of things that was the cupboard-under-the-stairs, and been aidlessly seized right then and there by yet another of his fanciful and nostalgic notions, that they would be a little Victorian family again, genteel, dignified, respectable, promenading, descending to the shingle, flying a kite. Croquet, ice-creams, fish and chips in newspaper, quik cricket, teas or cream-teas on the lawn. 

There was something meaningful to be found in the figure of the kite, to be extracted from, remembered in such an aerial diamond, that Lettice couldn't deny. 

It wasn’t until they were zooming at furious speed up the A road, having joined it with much trepidation at the slip road, having gently finished threading the quiet, winding rural roads, that Pierre explained to Lettice that the kite was brand new, free of charge, and that it had quite simply appeared on the doorstep, knocked at the door, been there when he opened it. Lettice was confused and disturbed.

“What if it’s from a pervert?” Lettice hazarded. “What if we’re being stalked? What if someone’s after our Poplar?

“I’m going to be sick,” Poplar protested. “I need a fucking plastic bag!”

“Language, young lady,” Pierre warned.

“I’m fucking sorry alright, please…I’m going to…”

Lettice removed a plastic bag from the tangle in the glove compartment and fed it back to Poplar, who burped a few times and then belched into it with an unmistakable splatter of vomit.

“Pierre!” Lettice complained.

“What?” Pierre replied.

“I’m not happy about this.”

“About what?”

“This kite. What if it’s from somebody weird?”

“No no, dear,” Pierre answered, dismissing more than consoling. “It was standing up all on its own, on its point, it came here on its own. It has agency.”

“Agency!?” Lettice exclaimed. “A kite with agency! Whatever next?”

The town lay visible, the sea, bluegrey, just beyond the squares and lines of little terraced houses; and the lighthouse, a white pillar, small but somehow emphasised, in the west.

“Look, Poplar! The lighthouse!”

“Ugh, I wish I was dead,” Poplar grunted.

“Where is it this kite anyway, Pierre?” Lettice asked.

“It’s in the boot,” Pierre answered efficiently, quickly. He was nervous. He didn’t know why.

By the time they had located a spot in the large, outdoor pay-and-display, the worst of Poplar’s difficulties seemed to have passed. With typical dead-eyed obligation, strapped into the backseat, she gazed on the flicking, changing screen of her phone, thumbing the lower right of it, both thumbs in fact moving at their usual swift and practiced rate.

“Everybody out of the car!” Pierre cried; his command was its own pang of needy pathos. He paid and displayed with tremendous haste.

Lettice clambered from the front seat, sunhatted and sunspectacled, and truthfully remarked how lovely the weather was. It was even, to Pierre’s quiet elation, ideal kite-flying weather: there was a fairly stiff, sure breeze that wasn’t too wild, a long way from being a gale. There were no stormclouds, brooding and weighty, in the sky. There were plenty of clouds, white as rice, sheep-like, but not enough to obscure the sky’s perfect blue, blue as Pierre’s new kite, and the sun, palegold and radiant, lending to the fluffily jagged edge of cloudshape after cloudshape, a gleaming polish. It was all there. Shingle, greenish-blue, the sea, bluely blue, far bluer far less grey than it has seemed from far away. Sea thistle, the lighthouse- slumbering unlit- about a mile to the west, the swing and shush of the sea, the buzz of crickets in the grasses. Poplar languidly emerged into the sun, shivering with the cold she felt. Quite by accident, and rather inexplicably, she left her phone behind.

“Let’s see it then,” Lettice said. She seemed to have parted ways with the notion that the kite was a thing of danger, or menace.

“Certainly,” Pierre said, unlocking the boot. The boot lid rose, slowly, levelly, like the upper jaw of a hungry clam. Pierre picked up the kite from within, and he lifted it high, holding the blue diamond body by each of its two perfectly diagonal shoulders, the tail of bows and ties dropping, flowing beneath; what little of it reached the ground coiled up. Pierre felt proud of it, proud as he might be of a certificate of his achieving, or a newborn baby of his siring. Poplar barely looked at it, Lettice regarded it dispassionately. Then she said 

“What’s that?” pointing at something while she said it.

“What is what?” Pierre replied.

“All that red, that…hang on, it looks like a scar…it looks like blood.”

“What?” Pierre snapped, incredulous. He turned the kite one hundred and eighty degrees.

Sure enough, there was a gash, a laceration in the blue as though that blue material were flesh, and from the wound, the perforation, the little traumatic rupture in the kite’s blue skin, blood dribbled and stained it.

“That wasn’t there before,” Pierre protested. “Did you do this Poplar?”

“No,” Poplar glumly assured.

“But it…it…it’s just a scratch. He must have cut himself on something…cut his cheek…” Pierre tried to say.

“Why do you call it Him?” Lettice probed.

“I don’t know.” Pierre felt himself welling up, he wanted to break down and weep. It was as though a beautiful white bird under his supervision, an egret of slender neck and virgin white plumes, had managed to dash the brains out of its head on some rock. “But…but it still works…I’m sure it still works…” He wondered what to do. He had an idea. “Lick it clean.”

The three monosyllables had been intended for Poplar but this had not been made particularly evident. 

“Poplar, lick it clean!” he barked, in a spirit of unambiguity.

“What?” Poplar answered, from a figurative hundred miles away. It was the “What” of Pardon-me? and yet it was also the “What” that meant You-must-be-joking.

“I’m not mucking about, Poplar. Lick it clean,” Pierre reuttered, with extra emphasis where emphasis seemed due.

Poplar looked at her father, strangely, warily. She was so used to replying in the negative, so used to saying “No” to all manner of encouragements, instructions, and commands. In some part of herself she always knew that she was in the wrong, that her reply was mindlessly, pointlessly defiant. But this time was different. She was sure she was right, she felt she was resisting an abuse of a kind, that it was her right to say No, to this.

“No,” Poplar said.

“Fucking lick it Poplar!” Pierre snapped and rammed the bloody blue kite in her direction.

“No, no, I won’t do it!” she cried out.

Lettice, whose nature was a little dreamy, who wontedly succumbed to distraction and had been briefly mesmerised by the sea’s wonderful, whale-wonderful expanse, heard the commotion, and intervened quickly, putting herself in the middle of Poplar, and Pierre and the kite.

“Mum, he’s gone mental! He wants me to lick a kite!” Poplar cried out. A family of two much younger parents, and a little boy, clambering from their car with deckchairs, looked at Pierre and Lettice and Poplar, and the kite. From eight metres away or thereabouts, on the painted asphalt, the younger family stared at the more practiced one.

            “Pierre, that’s…” Lettice looked at the kite, took in the sight of its stains.

Hardly considering the action that she took, she snatched the kite off Pierre, and licked it absolutely clean. She took, on her tongue, every drop of the blood that had dripped like tears from the small wound and pooled on the smooth blue cheek of the kite. Then, in ire more than care, she reached into the glove compartment, and managed to locate a small packet of plasters. She took one out and put it on the kite’s wound.

“There. Happy? Now, let’s go fly it, Pierre,” she snapped, truculently. “If that’s what you want, if that will make you happy, let’s fly the fucking thing.” The kite changed hands. Pierre held it contentedly, and caressed the plastered face, softly, clemently.  

Pierre was overjoyed. He went gallivanting off down the slope towards the promenade, holding the kite tight, giggling like a small child. He leapt down the small set of steps onto the shingle and practically jumped onto his back, as though the pebbles of the beach were a bed, and, once supine, he idled in the sun, the kite pressed carefully to his torso. Lettice and Poplar followed slowly behind, eying his odd, juvenile ecstasy with some suspicion and some disgust. Eventually they reached the beach.

“The string!” Pierre cried out. He had detached it and left it in the boot of the car, wound around the spool. “Keep hold of him,” Pierre said, entrusting Lettice with the kite.

He hurried up the steps, and up the slope, all the way to the carpark, the car keys jangling in his pockets. He opened the boot and almost died from the relief that the string and spool had not been forgotten. He hurried back down to the beach where Lettice and Poplar camped, with towels. The briskness of the air, the kiss of salt in it was healing to Poplar: and she felt her throat unburdened of the day-old vodka’s sickly pinch, and she breathed free. She didn’t admit it aloud but she remembered this place. In its calm, muted tones, in the green and blue and cream, she traced a nebulous idea of herself. A little girl, that she couldn’t believe was her, ran back and forth on the pebbles, and laughed. She so rarely laughed anymore. Not genuinely, heartily, not like she used to, not like that little girl so often did. Now she only laughed in cruelty, in sarcasm, for purposes of manipulation and entrapment. Odd, cold flirtation: social laughter. Where had the real, unstoppable, enormous, immature, spontaneous laughter gone?

“Okay…” Pierre wheezed, breathless from his eagerness, from his quick flight up the little incline and then back down it again. “Let’s do this. Let’s fly this kite…”

“Can we relax in the sun for a bit first?” Lettice suggested.

“NO!” Pierre roared. “Poplar, get up!”

She had learnt defiance, through years she had allowed herself to be taught its double-edged pleasures. But she feared the desperate anger in her father’s voice. Or was it the desperation that she feared more? The desperation in his red, moist eyes, in his flushed, bedraggled appearance, in the gleam of perspiration on his brows, cheeks, neck? So, Poplar stood up, retired the memories that had briefly stirred out of this calm, lit, maritime place, and took hold of the string, which Pierre had carefully attached to the attachment point in the crossed frame at the back of the kite.

The kite leapt immediately, finding a home and haven in the lift of the wind. In the wake of his hasty ascent, the tail twirled behind. The diamond of blue material fluttered nervously, jauntily, as the breeze ruffled it in certain, playful jets. Poplar was surprisingly deft in her handling of the line. Gradually she stepped back, unwinding the string from the spool. Backwards, backwards she stepped, more of the black binding string unleashed with every step, and the kite began to soar.

“Keep going, Poplar!” Lettice cried.

“Yes, that’s it…good girl. Good girl!” Pierre cried out. Poplar grimaced briefly: she didn’t like being called “good girl”. Bad girl seemed greatly preferable. 

The mother and father stood at the side, on the sandy periphery of this duet- or was it a duel?- between their daughter and a kite, between the forces of air and land, one mischievous, buoyant, airy, the other firm, flat, stalwart, stoic. Against the epic scene, the two figures were small, brittle, and initially distrustful of one another. But, gradually, they began to enter into a kind of dance, and so they danced. Poplar even felt a strange, unexpected thrill, or at least the beginnings of one. Force, levitation, air currents, buoyancy, it all entered her, it swept through her with a gently, responsibly administered excitement, like an older lover carefully deflowering her virgin body. The wind and weather and blue sky were perfectly themselves all around, bold as brass in every respect, the world was all theirs, and all was big and marvellous.

It almost brought a tear to his eye. Finally, things were changing, things were going to be better. Pierre was able to watch his daughter fly a kite: he knew that it had been a serendipitous visitor, that blue kite, a sign of good fortune, a vision of a future’s unencumbered loveliness. He wished this scene would never end, that his daughter would never go back to her profile page and her tapping and texting and Kit and her makeup and her secret parties and her disagreeable, trifling, gossiping, grasping little friends and their painted faces and their eyes like owls. Pierre wished that this moment might never die, that this scene could remain immortalised. If he was a painter, he would have painted it. If he had a palate of paints and a brush and a canvas and an easel, painter or not, he would have painted this scene. How fervently he wished to live inside this brief, heavenly passage of time...he would happily make it his place of inhabitance forever, and his daughter's too. He would happily trap her in the little glass case of this memory, never allow her to break away from that kite. She would do nothing but caper on the pebbles for all of time, until she faded, never having been hurt, never having been broken.

Lettice was as lost in reverie. She thought of Luke and she thought of Poplar. In her mind, scenes rose from the flame and the ash of their dying. Back and forth her mind’s eye glanced, looked, stared: Luke, Poplar, Luke, Poplar. It seemed neither parent was watching the girl before them, the Poplar on the shore, kite-flying.  

“Help!” Poplar cried out.

Pierre and Lettice were woken concurrently from their daylit dreams by their daughter’s shout.

“Poplar!” Pierre barked. “Get down from there. Stop fooling around!”

“I…I can’t!” she cried.

The wound string deceptively short and Poplar grasping onto it still, the blue kite soaring and pulling her up on the end of it, as if desiring her to join him in his blue, airy precincts and play with him there, lifted metre by metre from the earth, Poplar was rising into the sky.

“Pierre!” Lettice cried. “Do something!”

“Erm…what should we…Oh, God!”

At an alarming rate, already too high to confidently let go of the string, too scared to do so, Poplar was airborne, and rising, rising. Up and up she went!

“Do something, Pierre!”

“What do you suggest Lettice!”

“Oh god oh christ oh fuck!”

“Don’t panic, Poplar.”

“Fucking help me!” she cried out. Already her voice sounded muffled with the distance she had risen.

“Language, young lady,” Lettice admonished.

“Call mountain rescue!” Pierre cried out.

“Mountain rescue!?”

“Why not?”

“She’s not up a mountain! There are no mountains for about a hundred miles in any direction!”

“Call the air ambulance, call a fire engine, call anyone…”

“I think I’m having a panic attack, Pierre…oh lord…”

Poplar's ascent on the end of the blue kite was eerily clean and perfect, a perfect upward vertical. It was as though she were a mistake in the universe, a mistake being lifted from the face of the earth as cleanly and efficiently and quickly as possible. She was high now, so high that she looked small, she was fast becoming nothing more than a squiggling silhouette. He voice sounded faroff, faint, leagues away, a small gang of herring gulls began to caw and swirl around her. She screamed and cried, she even began to wail, and the wail dropped hauntingly down from the blue height to the pebbles of the shingle and the sibilant sea-hiss where it rang more nervously; and this wail permeated every shaking molecule of the air, animated every particle, it simply was the moaning pathos, the soft female scream, that runs through all things.

Pierre and Lettice began to feel like they were pleading at nothing more than an abstraction, a dot, sending their shouts up to an accidental shape among cloud, a thing almost as listless and nearly non-existent as a let-go-of child’s balloon.

“Let go, Poplar!” Pierre called up. “Let go of the string.”

“She’ll be killed, Pierre,” Lettice said.

“I’ll catch you, Poplar!” Pierre wondered if perhaps he hadn’t stated his promise loudly enough. “I’ll catch you!” he screamed with all the volume he could muster, the words were almost distorted. The shout soared, high as heaven.

There were sparse gatherings of sun-bathers, families in swimsuits, old, orange couples in deck chairs, a father or two, a father of two, buried in the stones, children tapping sandcastles into compaction beneath buckets with their little spades, radios, beer bottles on ice. A few heads turned, in annoyance more than worry, vexation more than sympathy. It was quite a pandemonium they were able to produce just the two of them: Pierre and Lettice, incoherent, shrieking, and enraged, ran in different directions, appealing for aid from the pale faces and the blank stares behind sunglasses.

Pierre approached a very old woman, supine, on the pebbles. She was a white woman but her flesh was not white. She was brown, dark as dusk, and the skin was folded, creased like a brown paper bag. Her hair was grey with age, blanched by the heat and glare of what could be no less than seventy summers; yet the thickness of it, the length of it, was almost youthful.

“Please madam!” Pierre breathlessly petitioned to the woman’s serene, stony apathy. “It’s my daughter! She’s stuck in the sky! This kite turned up at our door, you see, and it’s taken her away from us”. The old woman’s eyes were not visible behind her sunglasses. But she had seemed utterly unmoved, her wrinkled visage made no sign of compassion or acknowledgment, not even the tiniest twitch, her shaded eyes fixed upon the sky. Very slowly, with a weird rustle, a noise like the creak of long-loved rocking chair, her head turned in Pierre’s direction. In an inhumanly economical motion, without an iota of movement from any other section of her body, a pointed index finger on her right hand lifted as if of its own accord and rested on her lips.

“Sh” she said, through the finger, her lips barely moving.

Pierre was able to sob and plead and beat his knees before this woman, but something stopped him, chilled him, stilled him. The woman’s brief, calm hush, seemed to echo on the shore. The shush skated across stones, and through the water, and even seemed to drop from several places in the sky, as though the sky were domed, cathedral-like, or cavernous. Riding this universal hush, ushered by its ominous consolation back to earth, twirling in balletic helixes upon its spooky sound, the blue kite dropped from the blue, heavenly height to the greenish shingle where Pierre stood. He caught it in his hands. The tail of bows coiled itself on the ground beneath. He was horrified to observe that the blue kite now had a face, a face he recognised. His daughter had been assumed into this blue kite, her eyes and mouth and nose resided within those cheeks of blue diamond, a blue once so beautiful now somehow lulling, hallucinogenic, untrustworthy. The plaster his wife had laid upon the kite’s impossible wound was still there. As if it had cried out for life, for an inhabiting personality, it now had one.

“Darling? Poplar,” Pierre said to the kite with his daughter’s face. The face twitched, the eyes blinked, the iris was exactly the green he knew so well. The lips even pouted.

“Gggggghhh…”

“What is it, Poplar?” Pierre said.

“Ghhhhheeee…”

“Are you in any pain?”

“Eurghhh…”

“I can’t understand you, Poplar…”

“Ggggghhh…”

Lettice had seen something from the other end of the beach. She had made her own helpless appeals to apathetic sunbathers. Seeing a change, she ran along the stones, to Pierre. She found the shingle difficult to run on. She had seen something, some kind of vertical drop. But, casting her gaze upward and upward, to the firmamental bigness of air and cloud and ozone, gulls bickering, a secluded and distant flock of black forms she couldn’t identify battling swirls of their own, she was certain that her daughter was no longer up there, kite high.

Breathlessly, she approached her husband from behind. She noticed the old, old, dark woman on the pebbles in the sun, calm, motionless, released by something not unlike death. Pierre was intent upon something in his hands. He knew it was his wife approaching, he recognised her approach, the pattern or weight of heir gait told, even upon unfamiliar stones. He turned just as she said:

“What’s happened to Poplar?”

She saw the blue kite in his hands. The eyes blinked, the nose snuffled, the mouth tutted, then the tongue strayed beyond the lips and waggled, and lastly the whole face seemed to grimace with something like a painful gulp or an odd silent sneeze. Then the face lay neutral, hanging, deadpan. Lettice recognised the plaster from before on the kite’s blue cheek, and she recognised the green iris in each eye.

“Oh, Poplar!” Lettice sobbed.

“Fuuuurgh…” the kite with the face of Poplar groaned.

“I don’t think she can speak, dear,” Pierre said. “She can only grunt and groan and moan.”

A tear slid from one of Lettice’s eyes. Its downward course was patient and unhurried. Lettice looked away from Pierre, having heard his words. He sounded soft, his voice softened by a tranquillity she thought long robbed from him. Lettice watched the momentum of the waves, she allowed herself to become seduced by it, and so enchanted, her gaze crossed that blue expanse of foam and wet rhythm and iridescent sibilance and ripples and wavers. To the west, she considered the small standing lighthouse, a white obelisk, its hoisted lamp unraying, redundant, in the sun. She considered her children, two small beings, both unrecognisable now in the deep wakes of their respective predicaments. Her dead son, and her daughter of whom nothing was left but a face recorded in a blue kite. At the perpendicular intersection, Poplar’s two brows met. She was now without agency, stuck, grounded, irreal, portable though not alone, non-verbal though not mute, and seemingly mindless.             

Back in the car, Poplar’s mobile buzzed. She had a message from Kit. It said: I miss you. I love you. Poplar had broken up with Kit just before her party. One of Poplar’s friends, Hilary, had a much-publicised and much-discussed crush on Kit. She had been all over him at Poplar’s party, the unsupervised one. But Poplar was the one Kit cared about. He wasn’t free of her strange, early powers; the uncomprehended, ill-commanded, unsung visionary power in her green irises.

“Muuungh!” Poplar’s face protested from within the blue kite.

“I know, darling.” Lettice said. Lettice was holding the kite in both her hands. A moment later she said, following what in a playscript might be called a BEAT: “I feel relatively satisfied. I think everything’s going to be alright. Let’s go home,” she finally said.

They turned and walked back up the beach towards the carpark. Pierre and Lettice walked side by side, their steps crunching on the shingle. Every so often, a stifled grunt, or a longer moan that sounded each time almost tongueless, unalarmingly anguished, stole from the kite-lips. Whoever was holding her in that moment caressed her cheeks; all the while, very graciously and the exchange ever soft and unselfish, they passed their daughter back and forth as they trudged the greenish pebbly way towards the car. They took turns holding the blue kite in their aging hands.