Endless Descent [Part 5]

[Note: Chapter is long. Perspective has been completely flipped over. Hope you like it =]

Mele: Day five: The Patchwork House

My chest hurts. My arms are aching. I clasp the shopping bag tight in my arms out of sheer stubbornness as we barge in through the front door and practically tumble over each other. Luci carries on his charge straight up the stairs, where I follow the sound of his dino-stamping footsteps across the upstairs hall until his bedroom door slams shut.

I briefly add my own chorus by banging the shopping bag on the side and scream into my collar.

'Stupid boy. When is he gonna grow up?'

'What happened?' Lan asks.

'I asked him about the Greenwood kid and he got all defensive. I mean, if you're going to get touchy about something then fine, but there's no reason to dump your stuff in the road and stamp off like an ape.'

My whole body crumples as I fold down on the table bench and slam my forehead straight into the wood. The pain shoots like an arrow through my head and lingers in the back of my skull with a hot buzz. He's going to be the death of me.

Something warm and gentle creeps across my back and wraps itself around me. Someone. With soft breath and the faint smell of spice on his hands.

Time to rewind. We came in through the door... three people in the room? It's not Lan, his he's too big, his smell too earthy. There's a tall, blond standing near the cooker- I only caught a glimpse of him. He's familiar, but then in a town of strangers I can barely tell who I know and who knows me. Either way, he's too tall.

The bluish tint. That's familiar enough. Those arms were gentle enough.

I turn my head to the side and suddenly I'm staring straight into the heart of the universe. Those eyes are endless. Right now, they're a mixture of compassion and amusement, like the way you'd look at a friend who had just run into a lamp post.

'Hey.' He smiles. His voice is so quiet.

'Hi.' I don't want to smile back, I want to throw a tantrum, but it's almost impossible right now.

'You wanna help me? Ethan is a good teacher, I'll show you some of the stuff I've learned.'

'No. I prefer to eat.'

He laughs and rubs my shoulder.

'In that case you can be our taste tester.'

I lift my head to look at the stranger. 'Who's Ethan?' I know him, I do. Almost. The yellowish colouring to his skin and the marmalade speckles on his cheeks remind me all too much of a certain short, pig-tailed girl.

'Ethan is Sammy's oldest brother, and used to be Lan's apprentice. Now he's teaching me.' He leant in closer to whisper. 'I think we're here so he can show off to Lan.'

The calmness of his voice settles in my head and the echoes of Luci's tantrum fade. I'll be lucky if that kid doesn't drive me crazy by the time summer comes. For a brief moment my mind strays to wonder what it would be like if it were Valeo here, instead of Luci, but it's easy enough to shake the thought from my head. There's no point in wishing things that aren't true. It never did good for anybody, and it won't start now.

'Come on, pretty girls shouldn't sulk.' He uses my shoulder as leverage to climb out from the bench. Ethan fishes through the shopping bag. Each item he observes and presses in his bony hands, in a way that is identical to how Lan does it. When his fingers clasp around the lulo fruit he cracks the first one with his nails in the palm of his right hand and passes it over to the left, and makes it to the worktop without spilling even a drop on the floor.

I tried cracking lulo fruit once. I blamed the knife not being sharp enough when the whole thing burst and splattered everywhere.

He makes it all look easy. There is a fascinating similarity to the way they move, he and Lan. Like clockwork dolls, ticking to the gurgle of water and the crackle of hot oil. Everything is precise and smooth and practised.

Ethan grinds guama seeds like a meditation, pressing down on the pin and dragging it back with each slow breath, until the dust is so fine it whips up an orangish cloud around his hands. The smell makes my nose tingle.

To his right Lan kneads dough with his thick, ageing hands, and to his left Valeo chops vegetables with thin, hesitant fingers. Three generations lined up side by side. It's cosy.

Everything costs money in the city. Nothing happens without coins changing hangs. This place is taking its grip on me. The smells of spices and roots drown out the last of the smoke in my head, and the old, looming images of skyscrapers have been bleached out by the sun we walk to school beneath every day.

When the sun is gone, there is this cool, dim, patchwork house, with rooms stacked up like cardboard boxes, and herbs and vegetables growing wild in the back yard. And Luci. Every castle has a beast lurking in its dungeons, I suppose.

'Hey Lan... What actually happened to the Greenwood girl?' I ask.

He skins the peel from an abbul, slowly curling the knife around the edges in a single, long piece. 'She was a young girl who got killed.'

'Sammy said she was murdered and the police found pieces of her-' stop! Splattered across the road, is what was to follow. I manage to shut up before the words pour out. Small town. Everybody knows each other. People don't talk about the evils of the world here in the same way as they do in the city. People... kind of care, here.

'Tsk, that kid,' Ethan says. 'The library newspaper archives should have some information, if you want to look them up. The problem with these things is everybody talks like they were there, so everybody has a different version of the story.'

'That makes sense.'

I slouch down until my chin presses against the smooth, cold table and suck in deep the smells starting to simmer on the cooker. Each breath leaves a circle of damp mist on the wood. You could have sedate a boar with one whiff of those sweet spices.

'Lan, teach me to cook like that.'

'No. Not if you're anything like your mother.'

'I'm nothing like my mother.'

'Then Ethan can take you on. I'm retiring!' he say it all in good humour. I think. 'No more kids. I'm getting too old for this.'

'Kids?' Ethan looks back at me. 'Of course! That's why Mele is here.'

Everything stops when Valeo, handsome, knightly boy, curses aloud. Ethan flinches and the shock ripples across the three of them.

There's blood dripping off the worktop.

'Mele, go get the first aid kit,' Lan commands.

'We don't have one.'

'It's in the craft room.'

Didn't he hear me? Valeo has wrapped the bottom of his tee-shirt around his index finger and the blood gets absorbed straight into the cotton.

'I cleaned out the craft room, remember,' I'm trying to sound calm. 'There's a green box with a few plasters in.'

I scurry to follow him as he paces straight into the other room to find the green box that, I assume, was once full. 'That one.'

He opens it then passes it over to me. 'Hold that.'

I step backwards into the doorway to stay out of his path as he tips out the draws and boxes that took me the best of four hours to sort. The clatter and rattle and thunk almost drown out the conversation, but I can just about hear their quiet words.

'I've had worse,' Valeo says. He sounds breathless, and his tone flat. If I were him I would have been bawling my eyes out by that point.

'Just keep the pressure on it.'

'You were supposed to tell me.'

'I didn't know. Sammy said she lived further up the road.'

Valeo swears again and takes in a long, audible breath.

'Mele!' Lan yelled. 'Get your skinny hands in here.'

I drop the green box. Lan is bent over at the other side of the room, trying to reach behind one of the draws. He looks like a clumsy ogre, shuffling back on to his knees. He clambers up onto his feet, the weight of his body taking its toll on the bones. 'It's fallen down behind there, see if you can get it.'

I squat down and reach in as far as I can. No time to be squeamish now. That furry feeling is either dust or cobwebs, and I'm going to pretend it's the former just to save my sanity for an extra few seconds. The box is stuck, and I pull and twist as hard as I can until it breaks free, and the draw above grazes a layer off my skin when it comes out.

The rest is a jumble of confusion. A few minutes later Valeo is tied and bandaged, and sits on the bench with his chin in his left hand. Sulking, like a wounded puppy. The commotion is enough to lure Luci back into the world, and he makes it downstairs just in time to see me wiping the last few drips of blood from the floor with an old rag.

'Someone trying to show off?'

'Yeh,' Valeo laughs.

His face brightens almost instantly. I thought they were just schoolmates, but I wonder if it goes a little further. Luci has a friend. A real friend. He's annoyingly smooth outside the house, when he's Luke and not Luci, and I thought maybe he didn't realise that most of the people he surrounds himself with are admirers, nor friends. But I wonder if he does know.

Seeing him with Valeo brings a different light to him- though I'm not saying it's enough to make me like him.

'Come upstairs, you can borrow a clean shirt. If you don't rinse that before it dries you'll never get the stains out.'

'You mean I finally get to see the upstairs of your house?'

'Stay out my room!'

Valeo laughs loudly as they head upstairs. 'I can only imagine.'

The two disappear upstairs, as if they'd just put a plaster on a scratch and are now off to play games. I can hear them talking still, and it sounds like Valeo is still standing in the hallway while Luci clambers through that mess he calls a space of habitation.

'You want one too?' Ethan is holding up a plaster with a cartoon squid on it. He winks at me. Only now does the graze start to sting, but it seems petty to make a fuss of it after what happened to Valeo. 'Sammy is number seven of eight. I'm the oldest. I spent most of my life patching up scrapes and grazes.' 'When you were home.' Lan says.

Ethan shrugs. 'When I was home.'

'There was a time, middle of the night,' Lan begins in his storytelling voice. 'Ethan turned up here after having an argument with his parents and didn't go back all summer. Better here than camping on Bakers hill I suppose.'

Luci and I aren't the only strays that Lan has taken in over the years. Over the course of the conversation I piece together the pieces. Ethan resented having to work at his parents motel, and until Lan taught him to cook and gave him purpose he had roamed around causing trouble and developed a reputation as a runaway.

Lan never had a long term partner, not since he was young (mum told me that part.) And that was more years ago than he cares to admit. Even if he finds someone, the option of having kids isn't exactly on the table.

It leaves him with a void that plagues every man who starts growing old without ever laying down roots, a void that aches if left empty. So he takes in strays, filling those spaces with the love of his surrogate children.

It makes sense, in some faintly tragic way. Luci and I will grow up and head home some day, just like Ethan, and the kids before him. I don't... I don't think I want to leave. I don't want to go to whatever new foundations my mother has laid down only to be torn up a few months later.

It makes sense, in some faintly tragic way, that for the first time in my life I feel like this is where I belong.

Goosebumps prickle across my arm and a melancholy chill tickles my spine. I leave them pink-faced over the heat of the cooker and drift upstairs to find a tee-shirt with longer sleeves. So far my wardrobe hasn't yet been reinstated and my options are limited.

Minimalism. What kind of stupid philosophy is that. I'm cold.

Luci is mumbling something from the crack in his bedroom door, while Valeo stands bare-chested in the hallway. He's in his last year of highschool, I think that makes him about seventeen? But the tone of his physique makes him look older- especially compared to Luci's scrawny bones.

'Dude, how long does it take to find a clean shirt!' he yells.

'Wait!'

'You'll be waiting a while,' I tell him. 'There's a theory that he has tunnels leading to different parts of town where he's buried his stuff in holes and under tree roots.'

'Explains a few things.'

I try to step around him, and in the two steps it takes for me to bypass he swivels round so fast we pump straight into each other. What the? Don't think. Don't think.

My heart is pounding.

We stare at each other, both with the same wide-eyed surprise of how we ended up face-to-face.

'Sorry,' I say, or try to. The word is barely audible.

I slip through a narrow gap into my room and close the door tight behind me. That expression. Block it out, it doesn't matter. The inches between us don't matter. Focus. Dissect. Focus. Dissect.

The wall is cold as I press my head against it and filter through the images in my mind until I find the right one- that glimpse of his shoulders, that angle. Lumps on his back. Like ridges, or chunks of displaced spine. Edges of a splintered, purple scar.

Or a trick of the light. A really, really weird trick of the light. Or a genetic abnormality. What kind of thing leaves a scar like that?

I pull my tee-shirt straight off over my head, jumper on, draw a deep breath and open the door again.

He's slouched against the wall now with his arms crossed, cradling his injured hand. 'Cold?' He asks.

'A little.'

'Me too!' He says loudly. 'Freezing out here! If only someone would find something for me to wear!'

'Shut up,' Luci emerges from his pit and throws a large, knitted jumper at him. 'You're taller than me, if that doesn't fit then deal with it.'

'Thank you sweetheart.' He mocks and yanks the jumper over his head. Together we file downstairs to sit and watch the artistry of the master and his apprentice at work.

By the time they're done it almost hurts. My stomach has been gurgling for the past five minutes. Spices are sweet and vegetables have softened with a slightly bitter tinge to them. If heaven is real, I bet the clouds taste like Ethan's curry nut rice, and the rain is tinted with the subtle, lingering flavour of fermented jot berries, and even if the bread only tastes half as good as Lan's gali and korin flat bread then I'll still be happy for the rest of my days.

In the yellow flicker of the downstairs light bulb we sit together and eat like kings until, already drunk on flavour, Lan breaks out the cider and we retreat to the rarely-used sitting room.

The couches are plump and squishy, and if I press my head against them and breath hard enough I can still smell the dust and faint traces of people who'd sat here before. I wonder if there might me a lingering trace of my mothers perfume.

Lan kicks his feet up on a wooden stool and Ethan slouches down into the cushions with a half glass of cider in his hand. His cheeks are still red from the heat of the cooker and now from the alcohol slowly sleeping into his blood. He's got no intention of making it home tonight, I know it, he knows it, and I don't think Lan cares.

The three of us 'kids' are left to cram on to the smaller couch. Valeo takes his place in the corner of two cushions. I sit next to him, close, so I won't get jabbed by Luci when he decides he hasn't got enough space.

Of course. There is never enough space.

He's already decided he wants the full spread of the couch, whether or not someone else is in the way, and stretches out to lie across us both. I know, I complain a lot... But this isn't so bad. iI's warm, and kind of cosy once we're settled. Luci has diluted cider, but by how passive he has suddenly become I figure it's probably gone straight to his head. Valeo lifts his bandaged hand from the crush and lays it flat on Luci's chest.

'We never actually made an agreement, did we?' Ethan's voice has developed a sing-song quality to it.

'Nope. One night we were discussing where I was going for a few days on a job and I suddenly realised that this punk had become a part of my life.'

'Punk? I wasn't so bad.'

'That's alright,' Luci says sleepily. His eyes are already closed and his weight dead. 'You're Punk. I'm Brat, aren't I? Mele is Listless.'

'Listless?' I ask.

'Because you keep us awake by wandering round talking to yourself at stupid oclock.'

'Nothing keeps you awake, brat.'

'This is what it's like you know,' Lan says. 'All day. Every day. Pair of them like parrots going around and around and around and around.' He rolls his eyes, making the four of us laugh. 'And around and around.' He stops suddenly, like a little bird has swooped in and plucked the thought straight from his mind. 'It fills the silence, I guess.'

'I'll have to move in one day, see what it's like,' Valeo says.

'You dare, that chopped up hand will be the least of your worries.'

'I wouldn't mind,' Luci says.

Valeo smiles down at him and carefully strokes the blonde hair from his forehead. 'That's because you're a softie, really.'

'I am, aren't I. Just because it's you, I'll even build a bunk for you. In Mele's room.'

'Brat.'

'Smurf.'