Family Togetherness

Chapter 3- Luke

Mornings were the most difficult times of day for the Fairfield family. They were probably hard for most families, but with four strong-minded and usually uncooperative siblings, it was even more impossible to get things done.

Luke was lying in his narrow wooden bed, trying his best to make the most of the precious time he had before Six'O'Clock struck and everyone began hauling themselves up and scurrying about like a nest of fighting ants.

His bed reminded him a little of one of those long, thin Viking boats. With its brittle frame and streamlined shape he could easily imagine it floating down a bubbling river into the salty white foam of the ocean.
The grey buoyancy of it would gently sway the boat along, bobbing further out until the sky met the water, and all he would see for miles in any direction would be the pale blue-grey of the stretched horizon. Just peace. Just himself, Luke, at one with the sea and the sky.

Nathan mumbled something indistinguishable and rolled onto his back, tearing Luke's flat grey ocean into a tempest of icy ripples. The rickety boat quaked and slipped under the thrashing water as the alarm beside his bed jumped to life with a series of shrill buzzes. No more peace. The sea and the sky were lost in the jangling shrieks of his clock.

"Turn it off," his brother moaned. Luke swatted at the alarm, and it silenced mid-bleep. It was easy for him to wake up in the morning. He wasn't so good at falling asleep, but he was always lying awake long before the nasal buzzing erupted the peaceful household into a frenzied volcano. Already, he could hear curtains being scraped along the metal railings and feet dragging across the carpet outside.
Mornings were difficult, and Monday mornings were the worst of all.

"This isn't my shirt," Nathan flung something white and creased across the room. He started throwing more black and white garments over his head, a heavy pair of black lace-ups missing Luke's head by mere centimetres.

"It doesn't matter," he said, "they're all the same."

Nathan shook his head obstinately. "I'm not wearing somebody else's shirt. What if it was Victoria's?"

"So? Nobody will be able to tell who a school uniform shirt used to belong to.

"I can tell. I'm not wearing anything that was Victoria's."

Luke sighed irritably as his brother staggered to his feet and disappeared downstairs. Nathan was always so stubborn. All of his siblings were. Sometimes he felt that he was the only one of all of them who would ever let things go, and not demand everything be done his way. Did that make him weaker? He hoped not.

As he slowly got to his feet, he felt his thin legs tremble beneath him and the blood rush to his head; quickly and dizzyingly. He sat back down on the bed, which had mysteriously ceased to be a noble Viking boat and was now a just a cheap mattress.

"What are you doing?" Nathan was back in the room, this time clutching another white shirt identical to the last.

"I don't feel well," he replied weakly, realising it was true. Maybe he had caught a bug yesterday on the bus. He hoped it would go away by Thursday, because he was certain something important was happening on Thursday. What was that again?

Nathan scrutinised him groggily. "You're always sick. How do you get away with it?"

It was true that Luke felt sick a lot. Not always, but fairly frequently. The local secondary didn't look into it when he took days off; because he was small and frail and looked as though he needed a lot of medical attention.

"When you're ill, you feel so bad that you'd almost rather be at school," he told his older brother.

Nathan just scoffed at him. "If I could stay off school on a Monday, I wouldn't mind having a broken neck!"