The shadow of the red kite comes and goes, smooth on the soft road. Its template is disrupted when pale weeds break through the tarmac or spill over onto the roadside. But it remains, a gentle grey silhouette, a companion for our journey. We drive past the house where the man who reintroduced the kites to the Chilterns used to live, when I was a child and my mother was a young woman.
“Remember when Theo lived there, mum?” I say, keeping my eyes on the road.
“Yes, of course.”
Her voice is thicker and deeper now. The disease has locked around her organs, squeezing them slowly, constricting their actions and purpose. It took a long time to find where the primary was, the root of it all. It had seemed so important to know at the beginning. Where it had started didn’t seem to matter now that the cancer was blooming all across her insides. The question that consumed us now was how
