The Wasp Factory Page 0,42

kite and the fierce doggy painted on it. The kite lay on the wind-ruffled grass like an impatient manta, rippling. I found the main control lines and gave them to Esmerelda, showing her how to hold them, and where. I had made loops to go over her wrists, I told her, so that she wouldn’t lose her grip. She stuck her hands through the braided nylon, holding one line tight and grasping the posy of bright flowers and the second line with her other hand. I got my part of the control lines together and carried them in a loop round to the kite. Esmerelda jumped up and down and told me to hurry up and make the kite fly. I took a last look round, then only had to kick the top edge of the kite up a little for it to take the wind and lift. I ran back behind my cousin while the slack between her and the rapidly ascending kite was taken up.

The kite blew into the sky like something wild, hoisting its tail with a noise like tearing cardboard. It shook itself and cracked in the air. It sliced its tail and flexed its hollow bones. I came up behind Esmerelda and held the lines just behind her little freckled elbows, waiting for the tug. The lines came taut, and it came. I had to dig my heels in to stay steady. I bumped into Esmerelda and made her squeal. She had let the lines go when the first brutal snap had straightened the nylon, and stood glancing back at me and staring up into the sky as I fought to control the power in the skies above us. She still clutched the flowers, and my tuggings on the lines moved her arms like a marionette, guided by the loops. The winch rested against my chest, a little slack between it and my hands. Esmerelda looked round one last time at me, giggling, and I laughed back. Then I let the lines go.

The winch hit her in the small of the back and she yelped. Then she was dragged off her feet as the lines pulled her and the loops tightened round her wrists. I staggered back, partly to make it look good on the offchance there was somebody watching and partly because letting go of the winch had put me off balance. I fell to the ground as Esmerelda left it for ever. The kite just kept snapping and flapping and flapping and snapping and it hauled the girl off the earth and into the air, winch and all. I lay on my back and watched it for a second, then got up and ran after her as fast as I could, again just because I knew I couldn’t catch her. She was screaming and waggling her legs for all she was worth, but the cruel loops of nylon had her about the wrists, the kite was in the jaws of the wind, and she was already well out of reach even if I had wanted to catch her.

I ran and ran, jumping off a dune and rolling down its seaward face, watching the tiny struggling figure being hoisted farther and farther into the sky as the kite swept her away. I could just barely hear her yells and shouts, a thin wailing carried on the wind. She sailed over the sands and the rocks and out towards the sea, me running, exhilarated, underneath, watching the stuck winch bob under her kicking feet. Her dress billowed out around her.

She went higher and higher and I kept running, outpaced now by the wind and the kite. I ran through the ripple-puddles at the margins of the sea, then into it, up to my knees. Just then something, at first seemingly solid, then separating and dissociating, fell from her. At first I thought she had pissed herself, then I saw flowers tumble out of the sky and hit the water ahead of me like some strange rain. I waded out over the shallows until I came to them, and gathered the ones I could, looking up from my harvest as Esmerelda and kite struck out for the North Sea. It did cross my mind that she might actually get across the damn thing and hit land before the wind dropped, but I reckoned that even if that happened I had done my best, and honour was satisfied.

I watched her get smaller and smaller, then turned and