Les Grands Chantiers (Wattys 2022)

14. Snowbound

"It's snowing." Adrian looked down at the streetscape below, covered in a light dusting of white.

"Great." Brendan deadpanned, still not entirely awake. He was dressed in a robe he had found in the dresser in the spare room. It was too big but it he had decided that he liked it. It was well beyond anything he would normally wear. "Now we get to pretend to be a Nordic country for the next two months." Through the floor-to-ceiling windows. he watched a tram turn left through the big intersection at the centre of Briarleaf. As was the ritual every year, traffic was having a hard time adjusting to the snow. A bendy bus was struggling to pull out of a kerbside stop.

"Tea?" Adrian said, from behind the immaculate granite countertop that formed the perimeter of his kitchen. The decor was sparse, not surprising given he had moved in only a month ago.

"Longjing?" Brendan too a seat at one of the bar chairs.

"There's a bunch my relatives sent over." He pulled some canisters out of a drawer, arranged in an immaculate rosewood container. "Not sure what types these are." 

"You got any recommendations?"

He shrugged, pointed out the closest of the canisters to Brendan. "I've been taking this one for the last few weeks. It's quite good."

"Eh, I'll take it. Where's it from? Some mountain?"

"Eh, not quite. It's from the middle of China. One of the provinces."

"Hunan." He perused the characters on the side of the packet.

"You can read?"

"Only a bit of simplified. Traditional does my head in. My parents forced me to do it. I nearly had to sit my high school Matura for it. Except I dropped out. That was what they were bummed out about. I guess they'd already given up hope of me being a doctor or a lawyer a long time ago, so that was the only thing they had left. Well, that's how they sell it, oftentimes. Hey, asian parents! Did you know that magic can help with doctoring or lawyering?"

"Are you fluent in Mandarin?"

"Yes, I am fluent. I'm also fluent in orange, lemon, lime, I can understand tangelo and I can say a few phrases in grapefruit as well." He looked him in the eye across the counter. "You never know when a deranged Alpha kidnaps you and takes you to his pack and the next thing you know, you wake up from your drugged stupor trapped in his impossible citrus maze, from which no-one has ever escaped."

Adrian laughed one of his wry little laughs.

Brendan peered at the thin wizened grey strands that tumbled out into the glass beaker. Hmm?" "There aren't any leaves. It's just the shoots of the tea leaves. You'll see." He poured hot water in. Brendan watched intently as the little dried nibs gradually lightened in colour, dropped to the bottom and began to unfurl into little light green tips.

"The thing is, they do have a lot of little hairs. Be careful. They can be a little annoying. But they don't do anything. You don't notice them at all."

Owing to his condition last night Brendan hadn't had the chance to take a proper look at the place, so he had had to take a breath when he stumbled into the lounge room and realised that the space was double storey. A spiral staircase led up to door, which he assumed led to Adrian's room.

Brendan had tried to hide his surprise. "You have this all to yourself?"

"Well, occasionally my relatives visit when they come over for shopping. That's why they bought this in the first place."

"Don't they have malls in Laidlaw?"

"Well, there's this cake shop my mum swears by," Adrian said. "And there's boutiques and stuff that we don't even have. It pays to be closer to power, sometimes."