There's plenty about the rain that at every turn hurtles Eve into a stifling realm of serenity. The featherlight pelts, the sodden smell it foments, the ballooning ripples upon a puddle. Or perhaps, its jeering inconvenience. Only ever by umbrella-less adventures and freshly straightened hair and the few jinxed instances she opts to ditch the luxury of her car. It's leastwise easier to laugh about it after the factâwith muggy clothes and a bird's nest for a hairdo.
This evening, the irony is only in the knicker-twisting grump of it all, piggybacked on the murky pastures overhead. As the heavens peel back their gates to swill the world beneath it, Eve feels nonetheless dead to the ambiance, heedless of the reddened tips to her fingers and her trumpet for a nose, which she buries into a tissue twice or so every passing minute to blow with all her might. She's pained to embrace the cold and the overpass' generous shelter from the downpour, as she patiently soldiers outside The Link.
Her anticipation is slowly traded with soul-sinking disappointment the closer her watch ticks to half past. With a minute to spare, she huffs a bout of warm air into trembling hands and begins a humbling shuffle back towards the warmth of her building. Her back turns by a whisker, but stiffs at the paced swashing of approaching footsteps. She peers back over her shoulder, only to behold a bedraggled Kamale at long last.
His angst to the lessening distance between them is blatant as he slows and then altogether halts, six odd feet apart from her. With pursed lips and shivering hands, Eve can't help but reel over the script capsized between them. She'd been two strides over just shy of a week ago when he'd snatched her bag, the same bag he now fists at his side like he's scared someone may just do him the same way.
"Kamale," she heaves. "You okaâ"
"Here."
He thrusts the thing towards her, and Eve ponders for a moment before she takes it from him. She glances inside, and then ahead. "Thank you."
Kamale shifts his weight from one foot to the other, and then back again, and then evenly between his two. His catapulted confidence is quite the mockery to all the backbone it'd taken for him to barefaced mug her, yet she draws no comfort from the fact. She looks at him and sees only his youth, and it troubles her darkly.
He mumbles, "I ate your Party Rings. Sorry."
"Are you from around here, Kamale?" She asks. He only stares right through her. From the minute Jahseh had dropped her to her car, Kamale had for the entire day occupied a dire portion of her conscience, yet in the face of all her thoughtful brainstorming and for all the hundred schemes she'd mastered to help the kid now cowering before her, she's suddenly drawn a blank. "I live up the road, in the new build. I've only been there a month or so, though. I'm not really a local yet."
He swallows back an uncaring grimace.
"You look cold, Kamale. Look, come insiâ"
He swells the rift between them with a cautious step backwards, "Aye, I gave you back the bag. It's one shitty pack of biscuits, I-I'll get it back."
"I don't care about the biscuits. Just..." Eve quietens with her dwindling hope in the situation. There's a limpidity to his restless social cues, and Eve knows it well. As she does the rags he wears and the smell that so tangibly stalks him. It's her job to. "Come inside, let me help you."
Something about this seems to strike a nerve. "Are you a social worker or something? 'Cause I promise you're wasting your time if you aâ"
"This is, what, our third encounter? You look like you ain't seen the inside of a bathroom let alone a shower in weeks, you're robbing people at the stupidest hours of the day and stealing biscuits? Of all the things to take from this bag, biscuits?" Eve holds up the bag, in all its sudden triviality. "I'm not a social worker, Kamale, but I can help you get cleaned up, give you something that isn't drenched to wear, and a hot meal. And thenâif you likeâwe can have a conversation. How's that? Is that okay?"
Kamale's scowl is as discouraging as anything, bona fide heartbreaking, and Eve can only bluff her nonchalance to the fact. But as the two silently face off, the feverous silence between them barely fazed by the far-flung roll of thunder, Eve can see the withering might to his guard.
"Why?"
She gives in to her relief with the deepest of exhales and a gentle smile, "Well if you come inside, I can tell you. I just want to talk."
Within an hour, Eve is instead raptly seated in her own office, surrounded by the thickness of its swelter and the slurping ruckus gurgling from the very back of Kamale's throat as he scarfs down his tupperware of China City like it's his first and last meal. Skin scrubbed raw and well-robed in a fresh crewneck and its matching joggers. Despite her repose, Eve's nerves holler aloud in her ears as she tiptoes around a segue into conversation.
Kamale's penchant to seamlessly shift into fight-or-flight mode is clear to her now, and she makes sure to bear this at the forefront of her mind as she watches his meal hit pan.
"It's good?" Kamale stiffens, rolling his gaze towards her. Even after he's swallowed his mouthful, he only replies with a thin-lipped stare. She sighs. "Can we talk now?"
"About what?"
Her mouth opens and closes, and then she clears her throat before she lets it open again, "Where do you live?"
"Are you gonna call the police?"
"No." You can see his baldfaced lack of faith standing on your head, and Eve can only remedy this with a disbelieving, "I promise." To which he curtly nods, before he forks another bale of noodles into his mouth. She watches the wheels of his jaw as he chews and then the laggard gulp that slithers down his throat as he swallows.
"How old are you?"
"Seventeen."
Eve allows herself a moment to look him over. He doesn't look seventeen. Howbeit, she can only assume that starvation has that effect. She distracts herself from his wilting physique with the paling bruise still etched onto the corner of his lip. "You live with your parents?"
"My stepdad."
She frowns, "Did he do that to your lip?" Kamale, despite the ravenous hunger still clawing at the walls of his stomach, now pushes the scraps of food he has left around his container by the prongs of his wooden fork. The answer Eve is looking for, the one Kamale finds himself tongue-tied to admit, is as clear in their silence as the nose on his face. Still, his gaze lowers as he curtly nods his head. Eve's anger is swift and knotty and wholly sparse of all the delicacy the situation requires. She forgets his flighty nature, the fear he wears as plainly as his clothes. She only sees a child; unfed, unwashed and uncared for. "Kamale, the police can help youâno, will help you. If you just let me call them, we canâ"
"I'm leaving."
Eve blinks, and he's already halfway across the room. She takes lengthy strides to get ahead of him, the two waltz about each other as he attempts to get by her and she dives each and every way to make sure that doesn't happen. She can't understand why on earth he'd turn down a helping hand, but what she can understand is that she never will. She can try and imagine herself in Kamale's shoes, but until she's put them on and walked a mile, she can't begin to grasp the whys and hows of his situation. Even then.
"Okay, okay! Stop, just... Look, okay. Uh, how about..." Eve rakes a hand through her curls, lip gnawed to shreds and heart a ruckus within her chest. There are wrong moves and right ones, yet every option that reels through her mind seems one step closer to the worst. "Okay, you have to promise to come by here everyday. You can use the showers and get something to eat and... Even if you just need to be somewhere that isn't home. This is what we do here, I want to help you, Kamale. You have to promise to come back tomorrow, or I'm calling the police, okay?"
Kamale doesn't know anything as well as he knows hunger. It's
a constant, never-ending ache that pulls at every corner of his abdomen like he's a breath away from unravelling into a heap of bones and desiccated flesh. Yet now, as he stands before this woman he can't name by anything other than the items in her bag, with a full stomach and clean skin and unsullied clothes, that equable appetite is overcome by something almost as heavy. North of his belly, sieging his chest like a million vines and setting fire abaft his eyes.
It's only when he takes the back of his hands to his dampened cheeks that he realises he's crying.
"I stole your bag."
Eve's heartstrings thrum a wrenching chord as she watches Kamale appoint all his strength to fight against the sob that cracks at his words. "And my biscuits, I know. All them posters outside aren't for show, this place is for people like you. You're just a kid. Let me help you."
"Why?" Kamale sniffles.
"We all need somebody to lean on," Eve beams. Kamale attempts at a scoff, either at her corny name of tune or her childlike naivety, it is nevertheless overtaken by the cries he fails to swallow. The sound is quickly dulled by the confines of Eve's embrace, as she wraps her arms around the boy and lets him be.
I was on a roll before, but I've definitely lost it again. Whatever crack I was on two weeks ago to be pumping out chapter after chapter? Yeah, I need that.
Kamale returned the bag, as we knew he would. He's just lucky Jahseh weren't around when he did, lol.
Eve invites him in, now we somewhat know his situation. His stepdad is a pleb. Is Eve gonna call the police or take matters into her own hands?
I got a bit sad writing about him being starved, but I'm hungry right now so it came very easily to me, LOL!
Not all my chapters are inspired by songs but this one also is, so...
I'm slowly building up a playlist for this book, I'll probably put it in the beginning when the story is done.
See you lot when I see you lot, at this point. LMAO.