Of Mochas and Macchiatos

Part 14

During our final summer together, the endless summer, while our parents left on some spa retreat, I had spent a few weeks staying with Kiki, as I always did during the holidays. Charlie was away at some law seminar thing and the only adult supervision we had was from the very lax housekeeper who had worked for the Kingsleys for as long as we could remember.

We'd spent so many days swimming in the notoriously vicious Nile that we were both inadvertently yet seamlessly tanned a light nut brown, and we'd explored The Reeves National Park, as was our tradition, so many times that you couldn't walk one hundred metres without finding either a K or an E engraved into the thick boughs of a tree. For all of Kiki's cheerleader looks, that she often emphasised with glowing pink blush and fluttery eyelashes so as to look more innocent that she really was, she was seriously very in touch with nature and we often spent days traipsing through the forests that surrounded Reeves.

Kiki Kingsley, the girl who epitomised the traits of the monarch her name beheld, was, in actuality, a complete unutterable rebel who refused to confine to the constraints imposed upon her by the Kingsley surname. And so rather than accompany her brother to seminars or partake in some Goop-esque wellness retreat, she had stoutly deigned to spend her summer with me, and I loved her for it.

One night, in the darkest hours between sunset and sunrise, Kiki woke me up. She didn't turn any lamps on, and instead flickered on the torchlight from her phone. The whiteness of the pale light blanched her tan features but I wasn't scared. Just intrigued. Every moment spent with Kiki Kingsley was always rife with wonder and intrigue.

"Can you hear it?" She asked me, breathlessly. "The music. Do you hear it?" And I did. A dark haunting melody, arpeggiating up and down a harmonic minor scale. But, concentrating, I could hear more, different voices layered upon one another. A low mournful cry, like a dirge, really. I'd never actually heard a dirge before but that's exactly what it sounded like to me. And then the slow lilting tones of ... carnival music? "Come on!" Kiki cried, dragging me out of the soft goose down of the bed of one of the many spare bedrooms of her house.

After so many years of midnight getaways, we were both experts at climbing out of the windows of the uppermost floors of her home, shimmying down a pipe, finding perfect hand-sized notches engrained within the outside walls of the house. We were both equally adept at ensuring that we were virtually silent as we hustled down and out into the empty lamp-lit streets.

We'd stumbled, half blindly every time a shadow of clouds crossed the moon, following the melancholy tone of the music, until eventually we'd found ourselves within the forest. Every few seconds, we'd tumble into a small patch of moonlight, shining down from us from a slit in the dark canopy of leaves above us and I'd stare at the sky, trying to catch a glimpse of the moon. For a long while, I didn't see it. But then, when Kiki paused, catching her breath in a small clearing, I saw that celestial orb hanging in the sky. It was blood red, and perfectly round. I wanted to tell Kiki that it was some kind of bad omen. A foretoken of disaster or something, but she gripped my hand tightly and we ran farther into the dark, sticks and leaves crunching beneath our shoes. Letting the gnarled branches of the trees whip at our legs and our arms, slicing into our skin. The words I'd wanted to say, stolen from me by the wind.

I lost track of time, the only measure of it contained within Kiki's repeated breathless declarations of "we're nearly there!", "we're close now, so close!" None of us stopped to question the logic of the situation; why or how there could be music coming from within the depths of the forest. And how where we going to find our way back? We should have brought some string or something.

I began to feel like we were stuck in a Labyrinth. The Labyrinth that Daedalus constructed to hold the Minotaur. I'd never told Kiki this, but I actually half believed in the Ancient Greek myths, especially in the dead of night. This mysterious nighttime expedition only further enhanced my younger, more impressionable mind's imaginings. And I could just picture tree nymphs watching us mischievously, sending us on some wild hunt into the midst of the wild woods of Reeves to find a melody that wasn't really there.