A.N I'm on a roll. Expect part 3 very soon. Thankyou for all the kind the reviews. Oh and I've just started Beta-reading so I'm shamelessly promoting myself, if anyone is interested check out my Beta-profile.
Chapter 8, Part 2
The doctor had been Jien's first port of call.
The quaint red-brick building was an easy 20 minute walk from their home, downhill all the way but still, Goyjo had struggled. All the while, as the two brothers made slow and painful progress through the town, Jien cursed himself for only now taking Goyjo to see a professional. He had assumed that the illness would eventually go away on it's own and he supposed he could be forgiven for thinking this. Goyjo had only been sick once or twice in his whole life and even then it had never been serious, not by any stretch of the imagination. Jien picked up his step and Goyjo struggled to catch up. On the approach, he could see dying shreds of ivy cling to locked metal shutters and his heart gave a small, panicky flutter. The clinic was closed and probably would be for some time. He had been flatly informed by a the owner of the tobacconist across the road that the clinic's opening hours were more than erratic and depended solely on whether a doctor had been hired for the new season. It appeared that one hadn't.
Gon Mei lived in a small apartment than perched uneasily on top of the local grocers, it was a new-ish extension that would have had shoddy workmanship written all over if all the paint hadn't stripped off the walls after it's first winter. It could only be reached by tackling the iron wrought staircase that slithered around the back of the building; it swayed and groaned in even the lightest breeze and would have threatened collapse if thick patches of festering rust didn't somehow hold the ailing structure in a kind of order. The whole building had an unholy stink, a constant lingering stench of rotting vegetation, most of it, though not all, came from the grocers.
Mei's father was not exactly a vegetable, he could be best described as a stick of celery that has unprompted and horrific spasms of activity. Senility had not turned him into a racist, violent and disagreeable old man (he had been an accomplished pain in the ass for the whole of his existence), but now he was incontinent, unable to neither feed nor dress himself and was entirely dependant on his only living relative, his daughter; who he had treated poorly from the moment of her birth and had not let a little thing like senility upset the running trend of violence and cruelty within their household. He took his only delight in cursing, drinking, complaining, screaming, lashing out at objects/people and slowly and methodically shitting himself throughout the day. Worst of all, he wasn't even close to dying.
Mei occupied a position in the world that can only be described as voluntary slavery. Since her father's long and unpredictable slide into dementia, she had taken care of the house, earned the rent and performed her role well. She had not settled into a life of drudgery with ease and good grace, but had undertaken it with a feeling of duty and inevitability, her childhood had given her good impression of how little her future would come to and it was as if she had always known that this was the way her life would pan out before her. She was not yet twenty years old but she ran the home with the firm hand of an aging matriarch. What she did for her father could have earned her sainthood by itself, but when she wasn't wiping drool of his crotchety old face and avoiding his lazy, crippled swats, she was sewing and mending for cash, minding local children in the neighbourhood, cooking, cleaning and occasionally, sleeping with Jien. Occasionally being the word of focus here.
Perhaps what Jien liked most about Mei was that she did not demand much from him; she was not easygoing by nature, she had too much responsibility for that. But in terms of romance she was not greedy with his time and when they did see each other now, it was sweet, passionate and over very, very quickly. When her father was unusually quiet for an afternoon, Jien had often come around for a quick grope on her creaky, deflated mattress; sex in that quiet secretive way that was almost, but not quite, pleasurable.
They had understood each other once, when they had been a little younger and little more naive. They had met in a bar not two weeks before Jien's sixteenth birthday and they had shared a illicit beer with the intimate, giddy knowledge that neither of them should have been doing so. They had spent many penniless evenings wandering through the town hand in hand as lovers, stolen beers stacked by the side of the canal in a soft, warm, evening light. Smoking, laughing and, in a small way, confiding. Jien had told her more about his life than had been comfortable, he had told her about his half-breed half brother, his sick, mad mother and maybe that was what dragged them apart in the end. He had known too about Mai's senile, evil father and his what he had done and now, what Mai had to do for him. Perhaps it had been too much to share.
When Jien began to work full time the visits began to wane, when he took his third they stopped in all regularity. He saw her once every couple of months, rarely ever more.
Jien called at her house at around midday, Goyjo had been far too sick to climb the staircase and had waited at the bottom as Jien clambered up with some difficulty. Mei answered the door almost immediately, the many locks clicked open with a hurried impatience.
She was not an ugly girl by any stretch of the imagination, but she had aged quickly and stood with the solid sloppiness of a middle aged house-wife. A rather stained grey apron was double tied around her waist and successfully hid a pair of rather shapely legs and small inoffensive breasts. Her feet and back troubled her and it gave her an uncomfortable gait, but when she stood upright you could see a proud, thin neck that was delicate, almost fragile. She had developed the kind of unusual skinniness that develops from poor food and little of it, but in her hips there was a maternal spread that that would undoubtedly slide into loose flabbiness by either middle age or after her first kid, whichever came first. She wore no make-up, though she had reason to want it, she could not afford it; her complexion was naturally rosy and had once been troubled by mild teenage acne, but it had evened out quite well into adulthood. There was a small collection of scars by her jaw line, a crowd of unsightly pockmarks as mementos of her adolescence, but aside from that, she had quite sharp, clean-cut features. She had cut her hair herself into a short, boyish crop and beneath uneven tuffs of dark hair, pointed her large, Youkai ears that stuck out in a cute and rather comic sort of way. They had once been pieced with use of a safety pin and it showed, they hadn't quite healed correctly, but they could be overlooked, as a striking and prominent S-shaped Youkai birthmark resided on her left temple. It gave her a rather exotic air, it was the only aspect of herself that she still admired.
Mai gave the overall impression that she had once had the potential for beauty, but over time and circumstance it had long since been worn out of her. Jien had warmed to her face and had an soft, sweet affection for her that he long since stopped trying to understand.
"Hey," She ripped off the headscarf that had been roughly tied around her temple and gave her short, bristly hair a furious ruffle, if was clear that she had not been expecting visitors and her voice did not disguise her impatience. "What is it Jien?"
He had carefully gone over the conversation he planned to have in his mind a dozen times, as they had left the clinic and made short trek to the centre of town; but as she stood there, tapping her foot with in angry rhythm, he dropped the bullshit in half an instant.
"I need to leave Goyjo with you for while." Jien noticed that Mai had begun to open her mouth in a shape that strongly resembled a resounding 'No' and continued right though it. "He's sick, real sick. I tried to get to the doctor but it was closed. I need to find another but I can't take him with me, he can't walk so good."
"Goyjo's with you?" Mai stepped out of the doorway and hastily closed the door behind her, her voice lowered in an instinctive cautiousness, "My dad is awake and about. He has his wits about him. Don't ask me to let the kid in, Jien, you know that I can't."
Goyjo had visited Mai's home once or twice before, when he had been much smaller. It had been when Jien was young and headstrong and would have happily faced hell or high water to see her. When it was particularly unsafe at home Mai had uneasily let him in for an afternoon when her fanatic father was docile and predominantly asleep. While she and Jien kissed and cuddled on the couch in that insufferable teenage fashion, Goyjo had parked himself in front of the old back and white TV and watched to his hearts content. There had never been a set at home and he would eagerly tag along with his brother when the opportunity arose, despite the reluctance Mai would undoubtedly feel to let him in the house.
She had explained once. "It isn't that I don't want you here kiddo. We have fun eh? It's just that my dad aint so well and he, well, he don't take so kindly to red hair if you know what I mean."
Goyjo had nodded and had known what she meant, from a young age he noticed that a lot of people didn't take too kindly red hair, red eyes. Embarrassed, he had thought about not going with Jien next time he asked him, but he never had the resolve to refuse. Mai gave him that strange tingly feeling in his heart, when he lay awake at night he found his mind wandering to her face, her eyes, the way she walked, her sharp, crooked smile. When she gave his hair a rough tussle or sloped her hand around his shoulders in that friendly, carefree way, he couldn't't help but feel all warm and soft in the pit of his stomach, stone-heavy and light as a feather all at the same time.
The illusion had been firmly squashed on Goyjo's thirteen birthday when had seen her small, unremarkable obituary in the local newspaper. He hadn't been able to read any further than her name and the road on which she had lived, but as he carefully traced Gon Mai, Upper Room, Eastern Way he could not help but imagine that the two room squalor above the grocers, the thick smell of lemon rind and rotting cabbage leaves that permeated the thin walls of their tiny flat. The hoarse hacking cough of Mai's father from his locked room and the fearful and dutiful look in her eyes as she fed him, dressed him, lived and abided with him.
But that wasn't yet.
Mei ungracefully descended the staircase, stomping barefoot on the cold, damp iron with a crafty knowledge for it's tricks. She approached Goyjo with a little unease. She hadn't seen him for a couple of years and was shocked, not only by his hot, flushed face and feverish little shivers, but also by how tall he seemed to have suddenly grown in such a short space of time. He was far from the 7 year old that had sat so close to her TV with those wide, unblinking blood-red eyes, that reflected the fuzzy, black and white picture with such simple pleasure, absolute rapture.
"How you doing kiddo?" She leant to a crouch and he blinked back at her weakly. She noticed his eyes were bloodshot, yellowish even, in the poor light and couldn't't help noticing a very round purple bruise on the left side of his cheek. A jumble of purple and green flashed out of his discoloured skin, 'Some things never change,' she thought bleakly and forced a sideways sort of grin as Goyjo seemed to rouse.
He inwardly blushed and let out a squeak that could have been. "Okay."
"I wanna cig." He began and Mai gave a wry disbelieving chuckle.
"He smokes Jien?"
A little guilty Jien leant back onto the fire escape and grinned. "Yeah."
The smile from Mai's face dropped, but only a little as she pointed to the cigarette packet hanging out of Goyjo's front pocket. "Highlights, Jien. Just like you."
A silence passed between then, long and painful until a short, hacking cough resounded from the flat and shook them out of their stupor.
"You're not kidding Jien." Mai pressed a cool hand to Goyjo's burning forehead and winced at the throbbing heat. "He needs a healer"
"They won't see him Mai."
"Because he's…." Mai did not say it out loud, but she knew and she gave a slight nod. "They might, or they might not."
"I can't leave him at home, mom isn't well…it isn't safe for him right now. You know Mai"
"You know there is no guarantee you'll be able to find a doctor in the next town over, right?" Mai piped up, she tapped her fingernails on the plastic sheen of her apron.
Jien gave a sick, slight nod and looked at her painfully. "Yeah, I know. But where else?"
"Take him to Aunt JuJin." The thought popped into her head without warning and she elaborated with more hope than the situation warranted. "She might, she might just see him. She's done stranger things."
The thought flickered through Jien's mind as a possibility, a long shot, but a possibility all the same. It was a shorter journey up the foothills to the ancient Youkai than to some human clinic out of town. He could take Goyjo with him, carry him if he had to.
After a moment Jien learnt down to his brother's side and said, slowly and carefully."We've gotta walk a bit futher now kid, can you stand?"
Goyjo did, slightly unsure on his feet, he wiped away the moisture from his watering eyes. Not crying.
"Thanks Mai." Jien resigned, "I guess."
"I would leave, Jien, If I were you." In the dimming light her eyes shone with a sudden sincerity, she smiled, softly, an old familiar childhood smile. "You can't stay here with her and the kid forever, it's gonna kill you. Somethin's gotta give Jien."
He swallowed and ran an anxious hand through his hair looking first to the floor and then back to Mai who shivered in the evening chill. She began to back up the staircase, clinging a little too tightly to the rusted bar. It left flecks on copper on her sleeve and they picked up the light in tiny bloodlike flickers.
"Could you ever leave your old man eh?" Jien began. "Could you?" He said it almost with malice, as if it was his own justification.
Mai closed her eyes gave a short, trembling sigh. Jien could only imagine what she could see behind her eyelids that must have forced her to say.
"No, you know I couldn't. Jien." Her face was aged, tired. She smiled once more, this time laced with more exasperation than sadness. "I know that…." She stopped herself, but only just.
Jien took Goyjo's hand who was by now, too weak to resist. They stumbled over the uneven cobbled alley and began the long thankless trip up the mountainside. Jien's features were only more resolute.
"Keep him warm." She shouted back down the staircase as the distance between them began to widen. "He'll catch his fucking death wandering around like that and get him some water too or he'll dehydrate."
"Take care Jien." She said, but he was out of her range and her voice had long since lowered to a whisper.
A jumble of curses, threats and nonsense reverberated from within the house, it was the constant sound of her father needing and wanting and hating. She cast a look to the brother's fading silhouettes as they turned out of the alley and up to the main street. She blinked away salty, unapologetic tears and slowly, re-entered the house.