"Kite" by Robert Stone

A green caterpillar hanging upside-down on a green leaf over a black background. — Photo Credit: Joshua Cotten, obtained and licensed through Unsplash

Kite

I see this small, muddy-brown circle in the empty bath. I haven’t got my glasses on and I think it’s a spot of blood, or a spider, at first. One of those fat-bodied ones with short legs. They seem to almost tuck their legs into themselves so that they disappear, the legs that is, perhaps when they are frightened, exhausted or in despair. I don’t want to leave it in the bath for all sorts of reasons so I pick it out. It’s then that I realise that it’s not a spider at all but a caterpillar. It’s curled itself into a circle. I’m not very curious about it. I toss it into the back garden and then wish I’d been more careful. Put it on a leaf or something.

A couple of days later I find another one. I’m eating off a plate on my lap and I think it’s a flake of crust. I’m not disgusted. It’s a caterpillar, not a worm or a maggot. I suppose it’s pretending to be dead.

The next day I find a third one. In my navel. But that’s a dream.

***

I can move out of this house and live in the Alpine Resort Hotel in Binfield. Martin says he’ll pay for that. I think he wants to. I don’t know why that hotel is like it is. Why would anyone open an Alpine Resort Hotel in Berkshire? It’s quite near the ice hockey stadium but that’s closed down and it’s got nothing to do with mountains anyway, just cold. I think its main trade must be conferences but when it doesn't have one it’s empty. I expect Martin would get a competitive rate. I don’t want to live in an empty hotel even though it would be very convenient for the site. Walking distance. Wikipedia says that Binfield is the third-safest small town in Berkshire.

***

Martin says he has planning permission for what he calls a project, a striking opportunity, on what he calls unusual ground. A smallish plot. Just a few acres. I think it’s necessary, or at least he says it is, to perform some kind of archaeological survey on this ground before the preliminary work can proceed. I don’t really know why he wants me to become involved in all of this, although I am qualified for such work, actually. Certainly this isn’t a professional attitude on his part, but it’s how he operates. He’ll help a mate out when he can and he likes to keep things in the family. He remembers our talks from school and he’s looked me up and is over-impressed. That’s my guess. He says that there’s no need to get a team together at this stage, it’ll be enough if I begin the work on my own. Just have a look around. I don’t think Martin has any idea what a survey of this nature entails but he’s willing to put me on a salary and I haven’t worked for a long time. It’s not against my interests to string this out. This is all over several telephone calls. He says I’ll find the challenges intriguing. I can tell there’s someone else in the room when he uses words like that. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

***

I met Martin at school. We boarded together for a short time before he left. His parents moved around a lot, did a lot of different things. I don’t see why that matters but it seems to be the reason he moved on halfway through the sixth form.

I can tell there’s someone else in the room when he uses words like that. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

We had a few very intense conversations like you do when you are at that age. On one of these occasions we were talking about another boy who said he liked Charlie Parker, that Charlie Parker was his favourite, and we wondered about that. Martin said that a lot of people were in need of something to make themselves feel special. He thought that that boy said he liked Charlie Parker because no one else even knew who he was and that fact supported the boy’s belief that he, the boy, was unique. I thought that was a perceptive idea for Martin to come up with. He’s like that. He has a kind of tunnel vision. Some things are very clear to him and most things not seen at all. I asked him what he had that made him feel as if he were not like anyone else but I can’t remember what he said now. I know that, typically, he didn’t ask me. Perhaps he thought he already knew. I don’t know what I would have said then if he had asked me but I know now. Not an interest, like an enthusiasm for an individual musician, but something that makes me not like other people. I would say that a member of my family, a close family member, my brother in fact, had been murdered.

***

I’ve arranged to meet Martin and look over the site but I decide to go down a day earlier and inspect it by myself.

Binfield’s an amazing place. I suppose that there’re many places just like it all over England but no one really looks at them. No one ever says, look at this. So people tune them out. There’s nothing to look at. They’re like looking at nothing.

All of these ill-favoured buildings fidgeting arbitrarily shoulder to shoulder. The low-grade housing stock, like a child’s drawing of a house, the mini-skyscrapers, scale models of more serious buildings, side by side with semi-legal encampments of people who have built houses and even shops out of what looks like rubbish. Alpine hotels and Toyota showrooms. None of these buildings is as attractive as the empty space that might be there instead of them. All the real shops are warehouses. Vast mausolea swallowing titanic quantities of unsellable tat. Carpet warehouses. Ultimate flooring solutions. Everything at a discount. Disappointment guaranteed.

The occasional building has some dignity, built, many years ago, for people who thought something of themselves, who believed in the future. A future which, they thought, would remain a lot like their present and which was hardly different from the past. But those who first lived in them, I think, might have had prophetic nightmares. Their homes snaked around by the venomous roar of the road that now begrimes the white walls and paints the windows with soot, undreamed of in the days when the neigh of a startled horse was considered obtrusive.

The waste ground that has at least fleetingly captured Martin’s attention seems large, although it isn’t, it’s just that its boundaries are obscured by low hedges and little hills. There are many signs of witless activity here – tyre tracks, spent cartridge shells, broken bottles – but even these signs are symptoms of neglect and contribute to a feeling of emptiness, as long as you can’t see anyone.

Everyone feels lost in interstitial places like this, no one’s ever at home, because there’s nothing that’s particular, nothing individual about any of it. This is no abandoned magical garden of blackberries, apple trees, asparagus. No one says that this is where the orchard used to be. You can find bindweed, old man’s beard and honeysuckle here and there, of course you can, but this is a venue for an unlicensed car boot sale, unofficial moto-cross, pointless bonfires, dog fights, after-work punch-ups, heavy drinking of stolen liquor, the tearing-up of pornographic magazines. This is the English countryside.

The landscape undulates in a dizzy rhythm of violent cadences. Writhing, contorted land. Weird contours. Paths are gouged not walked and they lead nowhere. Odd almost-rectangles of what you might call meadowland of coarse grass bordered with cow parsley and wild dog roses. A couple of pylons stringing cables through the air like giant nerves. A choppy sea frozen rigid and grassed over, its waves never breaking. The quad-bikes gambol across it like crabs. The place is both cluttered and empty. Martin, for reasons of his own, wants it to be a Neolithic graveyard, a Bronze Age market place, an Iron Age midden, a Roman fort. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s not haunted by bewildered antique spectres, it’s haunted by its own useless vacuity. This is not a case of indifference or amnesia, there has been nothing to remember. Except for the kites. There are red kites everywhere. Rarely not at least one in the air, sometimes three, scoring the sky with their forked tails. Huge, loose, elastic birds. They never seem to land. They are what is really here, living in that invisible, unreachable storey made of air. I wonder what their map of this world looks like.

Somewhere unseen there’s always a dog barking. Three times a minute the unstoppable, purposeless shout of an animal slowly losing its mind.

***

We speak on the phone, me and Martin. We both speak, neither of us listens, so I don’t know what he says. He asks the occasional question and I get that. I tell him there’s nothing there, tell him to go ahead and dynamite it. No one will care. No one’s ever cared. Some places are resonant with meaning, with a past, but not this one. I don’t know why he doesn’t want to hear this. I try to tell him about the kites, or I want to try.

Martin asks me about burials. I am getting a dark feeling from him about this. We talk about mounds and he laughs. I tell him what incarnation is in the hope that he might take that seriously. I say that sometimes you find bones and you can tell by the scratch marks that the flesh has been scraped from them using flint knives. Not at all like the bones gnawed by animals and I have to insist that it’s possible to tell the difference between bones treated in this way and those left over from butchery. Imagine, I tell him, that what’s left after ten thousand years are the marks made by teeth or a home-made knife.

There were sacrifices sometimes, I say. In Neolithic times. Not murders at all.

I tell him that the site is an intermediate space, what’s left between deliberate acts, that nothing good has ever happened in that place.

I insist that so much of the past, of the archaeological past, must certainly remain irrecoverable because it’s made of nothing, it’s the space between things. It’s still there. You can’t see it now and you never could. The walls are gone, the people are gone, but the air between them is still there. All the ancient air. I tell him that the Indians – he snorts – build scaffolds and platforms on which they place their dead, in the mountains, so that the corpses will be eaten by vultures. They call these structures towers of silence. I want him to tell me what this practice implies for the remembering of the dead. I ask him if he’s ever wondered what it might be like to be murdered, although I had meant to ask what it might be like to be only a memory, but he’s gone by the time I correct myself. I don’t know how long before that he’d hung up.

***

It is the kites that draw me back. Always there. Always moving but almost never flapping their wings. They are the only things that can be seen in the invisible world that they appear to inhabit. I lie on my back in the field and watch them, waiting for that barrier between the visible and the invisible to crumble. They live in the atmosphere of Binfield. Martin and I both talk about that, we’re both disturbed by it, but it means different things to us. Maybe he despises the kites because they don’t kill what they eat. They never kill anything. It occurs to me that the interest that I take in Martin’s schemes is an indication of how very bored I am. I long for him to break a promise, but he won’t. I know I’m wasting my time but I can’t persuade myself that that matters. Sometimes I lie in bed at night and I can see the site but I’m looking down on it from sixty feet in the air.

***

Death is that feeling of rolling up within yourself, like a caterpillar. There’s the idea of becoming less, of disappearing. Walking until you’re out of sight. I’ve a hankering after lightness. The burden of life, the chores, the obligations, the issues lie across our shoulders like a bag of flints. The drudgery of carrying the bag far outweighs the pleasure we get from occasionally putting it down. Wittgenstein said that when you die the world does not change, it ceases. I’m pretty sure I’m misunderstanding what he means by that. Like a boy with his hands over his eyes who thinks you can’t see him?

Martin starts talking to me about the French Revolution. There’s no telling what he’s going to talk about next and it’s part of my burden to sit there and be quiet while he says it. He tells me that during the Reign of Terror there was an inexplicable spike in the number of violent suicides in England. He says that a large number of English men and women had ended their lives by cutting their own throats. That’s the serious suicide, Martin tells me, that’s no cry for help. But his point is that in choosing this method, the English were deliberately importing the guillotine across the Channel. What they most feared they volunteered to undergo. The trepidation caused by the possibility that they would fall victim to the Terror was so unendurable that they’d bring that about rather than continue to be made fearful by it.

Sometimes I lie in bed at night and I can see the site but I’m looking down on it from sixty feet in the air.

I think of the rush of life beating against the walls of your body until it floods out. I shave with a straight razor. An affectation, I know. It comes with a sharkskin sheath. But suicide? That’s not my way. I’m not a bit like that.

***

I remember the first time I saw red kites. It was on a childhood holiday in Glamorgan and we stopped off at Rhayader at a red kite feeding station. The birds were much less common then. I know you can see them very reliably from the car on many motorway journeys now. That place in Rhayader will have closed down because who’d pay to see what you can see for free from your car window? Well you stood in the hide with a lot of other tourists looking out over this steep pasture surrounded by a tall fringe of trees. There were birds in those trees all of the time, waiting. Not kites, but mostly crows. And at an appointed time the people running the centre would drive up in a little tractor pulling a trailer and the trailer was full of offal. Isn’t that disgusting? I don’t know where they got it from twice a day. Slaughterhouses. All of those dead animals. Calves’ heads, lungs and spleens. Bladders, glands, veins and ligaments. They tipped out the trailer and the birds fell on the meat, like a cloak thrown over it. Crows, including a few ravens, buzzards and many kites. Ten or twenty or so, anyway. I suppose they ate everything. Picked clean.

Even in that place, you couldn’t see the kites as well as you can at Binfield. Right over your head. Every feather.

***

Martin writes to me regularly. Thick padded envelopes. I open these to see if they contain money, which they don’t. I look at what he’s written but I can’t really read it, or not finish it. I thought he’d be giving me instructions, laying down deadlines but he wants to tell me about those useful, medicinal maggots that only eat decaying flesh and have anti-biotic shit. Then reincarnation, resurrection men, hibernation. Things like that. If the letters are obviously just letters I don’t open them at all. I can’t. I must have been out of my mind when I agreed to become involved with this man again.

***

I do feel guilty for ignoring him, for not co-operating. Martin thinks I’m some kind of Basil Brown. I go to Binfield and drive a few wooden pegs into the ground and lace them together with twine. Somewhere where I think no one will trip over them. A token effort I can point at if I ever see Martin there. It looks like a crime scene. The whole of Binfield looks like a crime scene. The background music’s a barking dog.

The potential for violence in this place is so obvious. It’s why the kites are here. I see a bottle, one of those long-necked cider bottles, unbroken under a hawthorn with the beer cans and the butcher’s paper that chips are wrapped in and it looks like a weapon to me. It’s like looking at a sword. I have my lunch in the pub and everyone there’s the same age. A crowded place and there’s less than five years between the youngest and oldest. A lot less. Where is everyone else? Killed by these twenty-two year-olds. They look so smart, normal, groomed, but they’re all murderers. At least they’re not cruel. They lack the imagination for that.

***

I’m in bed, frankly an increasingly chaotic place and in that Antarctic region by my feet I suddenly feel this metal bar, with the soles of my feet, and I can’t think what it is. I retrieve it. It’s a thermos flask, a silver cylinder I take to Binfield with me. I don’t know how it ends up in the bed, but it reminds me, or makes me think, of hospital beds and those adjustable railings that they have that the nurses pull up to stop you rolling about. One day, I think, I’ll stretch my legs and my feet really will meet those railings, lying on my last bed and I’ll not be able to get up off it. That really frightens me for a few minutes but then I fall asleep and don’t think about it again for three days, until I’m looking for the flask. How can you just forget stuff like that?

***

I sit on top of a mound in the sunshine, reading, looking down at my pegs and watching the kites, of course. The mound is what the amateur moto-cross boys use as a ramp.

There are little animals everywhere. I find if I sit still that within minutes I’ll be visited by a ladybird, a money-spider, a tiny beetle not unlike a ladybird in shape but with black elytra and a red head, an ant. Numerous flies. None of these creatures wants anything. They don’t bite you or sting you, they simply struggle through the hairs on your wrist and forearm, triggering tickle responses and being brushed away into the grass. I suppose they’re looking for something to eat. Many of them come straight back.

The world is crowded. Emptiness is rare. People are everywhere, thick on the ground. But they do disappear.

There’s the puzzle of what the kites find to eat. How they find enough carrion, setting aside the competition they face from crows, buzzards, foxes and rats. Are there really rats everywhere, as people say? In the fields? Perhaps not. People, rats, kites.

I get that cough again, the one that rattles my insides. Worrying, but with some consolation in the idea that I may be hollow, but I’m not empty. I think that the insides of my lungs might look like Binfield. Both ravaged and innocent of events. And I still have that rash on my side, or it may be rough, dry skin. The body is always sick. I have this taste of metal in my mouth.

I fall asleep, then drift in and out of sleep and have a dream of falling, or maybe flying, or floating in the air. If I lie asleep for long enough will the kites think I am dead? I start wondering what it might be like to be eaten by a bird. Will the beak of a kite leave any mark on my bones?

***

I’m not sleeping well. Nothing new there. I always plug my ears with wax to give myself that chance of silence and then I hunker down in what I hope will be the pit of sleep. I pull the covers up around my face and they make a rustling noise deep inside my head as they scrape against the wax plugs in my ears and I think that there’s a bird in the room.

***

The world is crowded. Emptiness is rare. People are everywhere, thick on the ground. But they do disappear.

I was reading Lautréamont on the mound. Maldoror. Quite deliberately, because I remembered that he wrote about kites. He describes them very precisely, quite beautifully, I think, although I am reading him in translation. He says that the birds do not fly to hunt, nor to pursue prey, nor on a journey of discovery, but because flying is their natural condition. The kite spends its life in the air. He also says that they appear to be swimming, rather than flying, which I don’t really understand, and he says that they hover for hours in one place, which is not only the kind of exaggeration to which poets are given, but is also not accurate. Kites don’t hover. Except that Lautréamont may not be writing about red kites at all. He calls his kite the royal kite. He spent most of his short life in Uruguay and the royal kite could be a South American bird and have distinct habits. I know I can look that up, but I can’t be bothered and it doesn’t suit me to do it.

Lautréamont introduces his kite knowledge into a description of the funeral of a ten-year-old boy. The priest says that the boy is really alive and that the only truly dead man is Maldoror himself, because he is beyond salvation. The people at the funeral see Maldoror riding by on his famous horse at this point.

Lautréamont likes describing birds, but he may have got a lot of his observations from reading ornithology books, rather than from watching birds. That’s according to the introduction.

***

We have one of those storms with the wind blowing in from the Sahara. The sky’s yellow with sand for an hour or more, then the windows, the car, everything’s coated with sand. Martin loves all of that. He’s unpleasantly excited. He says that a few years ago there was a similar storm and that had deposited locusts and scorpions in his garden. I don’t believe him. The scorpions particularly. I realise that I can’t remember what Martin looks like. I try to conjure him up but nothing’s clear. I might see him in Binfield and not know. The kites will have been surprised and delighted by a rain of locusts.

***

I’m starting to feel vulnerable, penetrable. And at the same time I do want something to change. I want my ideas, my concerns, my mental structures to be flushed out. I want a new mind. I have all of these conversations going on in my head, not with imaginary people but with people from my past. They’re monologues in truth of course. I play all of the parts. I need to stop that. I need to stop thinking of the women I always think of. I need to talk to someone else. And to stop being so anxious. I can’t help the way I am. I am sick of myself.

I feel I might be sprinting towards some terrible fate.

Twice last week I got on the wrong train. Very unusual for me. I got confused by the announcements or platform changes or something. It didn’t seem to matter much. Everywhere around here looks like Binfield.

***

Why is there something instead of nothing? What’s the excuse?

***

I remember some of the grand old houses I’ve been in, or looked at. Elizabethan mansions made of medieval trees. I love them not because they’re expensive but because they’re beautiful. The Alpine Resort Hotel resembles them. If I could live in a house like one of those mansions, I’d be content to live forever. When Shakespeare was alive, the red kite was the most common bird of prey in England. What’s happened couldn’t be helped. Things just work out a certain way.

***

Martin starts to talk to me about volcanic caldera, hidden fires, unpredictable geysers of sulphuric gas and I begin to wonder whether Martin’s real. I never see him at the site. I only guess that he’s responsible for some of the things that happen there between my visits. There’s never any indication that he’s the owner of this place, in any sense. No signs, or fences. Whenever I phone him he always picks up but I can never concentrate on what he’s saying. Little meaningless words floating high in the air. He reminds me of my brother sometimes, and I don’t like that. That upsets me.

***

I sit by the stream and notice a long leaf floating down it, the tip of an iris blade, perhaps. I decide to watch it and see what happens to it. It’s caught by a twig, a dead wire of bramble, the end of which just arcs into the water right by my feet and it’s trapped there. I decide I’ll continue to watch it. I quickly stop being interested in its struggle, what might be called its progress, I’m interested in my own decision and determination. I can reach out and move it on but I never consider doing that. It’s so close to twisting away several times. It might take a collision with another object to rescue it, if rescue is what it should be called, or for the water to be raised or lowered. But then I’m distracted by a low passage of kites and when I look back at the water the leaf has gone.

***

I lie back and look at the sky and then close my eyes. I want to be the same as this soil as though it’s a mud bath, although it’s quite dry. I’ll sink into it, make a gigantic and inhuman sarcophagus of it. I raise my head in wonder and realise that I can’t hear the dog.

I’ll wait for the kites. Keeping still, so still that they’ll land near me, curious about me at last. They might land with a little awkward bounce, or they’ll flap their great wings just before and descend daintily as though to a most secret meeting. If I don’t move, even the shallowest of breaths disguised by my heavy coat, how will they know I’m not dead? How do I know that I’m not dead? Soon shrouded in a hood and pall of red feathers.