Margot and the kite

Margot had spent the whole of August in the garage. On her father's workbench, between the boxes of screws and the pots of glue, she had built a kite in the shape of a manta ray: two big wings of midnight-blue cloth, a frame of bamboo sticks she had sanded one by one, and a long tail sewn from curtain scraps. She had named it Tide. On the cloth she had painted pale spots, like stars in water.

The village contest was held on the first Sunday of September, on the big dune behind the beach. Every year about thirty children turned up, and every year the same boy, Oscar, won with a red kite bought in a shop. Margot didn't necessarily dream of winning. She wanted Tide to rise higher than the dune and stay up there.

On Sunday the wind was perfect, a steady wind off the sea that smelled of salt and warm sand. Margot stood facing it, her heart drumming, while her father held the spool. When she started to run, Tide lifted, hesitated, then climbed into the sky to a chorus of "oohs" from the crowd. Ten metres. Twenty metres. Margot felt the string pulling at her fingers, and she thought everything was fine.

Then a gust turned. Tide tipped to one side, began to spin, and dropped like a stone. It crashed into the marram grass with a dry crack. One stick had snapped in two, and the left wing hung torn along its whole length. Somebody laughed, not unkindly, but Margot heard it. At that very moment, a little further along, Oscar's red kite was climbing the sky.

She didn't stay for the prizes. She picked Tide up in her arms, its tail trailing behind her in the sand, and went down the dune by the back path, the one nobody used. Her father caught up with her at the bottom and walked beside her without a word. After a while, he simply took the spool out of her hands.

That evening she laid Tide on the rug in her bedroom and didn't look at it. She looked at the ceiling. One sentence had been going round in her head since the afternoon: a whole month for thirty seconds. Maybe she just wasn't any good at this. Maybe she should have bought a kite, like Oscar.

Around eight o'clock, her father knocked on her bedroom door. Behind him stood Gaston, the neighbour from the end of the street, the one who walked around the dune every Sunday with his stick. "He's got something for you," said her father. Gaston looked at Tide on the rug. "Fine work." "It fell." "I saw." He leaned on his stick. "My first kite, I planted it in the church pond. I was eleven. The priest fished it out with a net." Margot smiled in spite of herself. "The wind has no opinion about your kite," said Gaston. "It does what it does."

He held out a piece of blue cloth. "This is yours. You dropped it in the marram grass." Then he went back down the stairs with her father, his stick knocking on every step, and Margot stayed sitting on her bed with the scrap of cloth in her hand.

She went over the scene in her head, slowly. Tide tipping to the left. The whirl. The tail that didn't follow, too light, floating instead of pulling. She got up, picked up the broken stick and felt along it. The break was clean. She rummaged in the drawer, found some fishing line and a tube of glue, and by the light of her desk lamp she splinted the stick, tightening the turns of thread one by one, the way her father had shown her.

She covered the tear in the wing with Gaston's piece of cloth. She added one more knot to the tail, with a slightly heavier scrap of curtain, and then she stopped. It was late. The glue needed all night to dry. She set Tide on the desk, switched off the lamp and slid under the duvet.

Through the open window she could hear the wind in the marram grass, the same wind from the sea, steady. She counted her next tries: one the next day after school, another the following weekend. There was surely a corner of the dune where the wind turned less. Her breathing slowed. On the desk, Tide's tail swayed a little in the draught, as if it were listening too. Margot fell asleep.