Monster and hound, our jagged shadows are thrown up twelve feet tall in front of us. I stand aside, flat against the walls of the shed. The dog sits. We both watch the Benz as it slips up next to us, waiting for the tinted windows to slide down, hoping for a door to open. Red tail lights, the last traces of the demon, shrink away.
It’s Friday night, and I can hear Otosan in the bath. He’s spent the past four nights in the company dorm in Tokyo, eating company food. Okasan is preparing a big dinner, because she’s a married woman again. When Otosan comes to the table, he brings tomatoes picked from the garden. He holds one out to me, bringing another one to his nose and drawing in the scent of summer and home. I smell it too, and hand the fruit back. He passes the globes up to his wife to slice. She has pounded tororo in a bowl with serrated sides, and mixed it with a warm soy soup. She serves it in rounded wooden bowls, with rice , and seaweed flakes on top. Tororo has to go straight into your mouth. Miss, and it burns your skin. I love it. I accept a second helping.
Strange stranger, says Otosan, in Japanese, and he presses me into a little more beer. He can’t drink. Not until his stomach heals. There was cancer there, not long ago.
He used to be very fat, says Okasan.
Pig fat, says Otosan, looking at his wife.
And a big heavy drinker. My husband is a big heavy drinker and my son is a big heavy drinker.
I’m a big heavy drinker, I say.
Okasan pours out green tea.
At seven thirty the door bell starts ringing. It’s not a button on the outside of the house, it’s a little cast iron bell that hangs from the door handle and rings when the door is open. It lets you know that someone has come into the genkan, or left the genkan. Each time it rings, it sends out a prayer. One, two, three, four, five schoolgirls pile inside and scuff off their shoes. Otosan keeps his eyes on the TV. We troop upstairs to my bedroom. Evening classes begin.
She is sorry but she has come to class in school uniform because she has been practising basketball and has not had time to change.
They got new seats in class today, and it was good.
She has long brown hair and a small round face and big round eyes.
There was an English test. It was not good.
She smiles, eager to please.
There was a long grey hair on top of the rice in her obento.
She’s wearing a brand new shirt that says Too drunk to fuck
There was a sports festival and she ran, five hundred metres.
Her hair is fresh out of rollers.
My students seem clean. Narrow. Uncomplicated. Precious. Who am I to be teaching them?
That night, I dream. Okasan is on stage in an evening dress, singing an aria while a dashing young man accompanies her on piano. They are on a world tour. London, New York, Paris. They go everywhere together, and he brings her roses, but they are just friends. Otosan is stuck up on the north island, with a lot of men in underwear. They throw buckets of melted wax at each other, then buckets of iced water. As the wax sets into stalactites, a TV crew sets the men up on a three tiered wedding cake and then throws more wax at them. Dripping, coated, iced, they become one huge white monument. A thick flannel corset has clamped itself over my nightgown and two brown plaits are snaking down to my waist. I’m in a draper’s shop with dark wood counters, wires that carry change and high shelves stuffed with rolls and rolls of cloth. More corsets are suspended from the ceiling and pinned around the walls. A padded chair stands on a counter, and I climb into it, holding tight to its arms as it winches itself up towards the beams above. There I sit, bent double and cradled in the small space between chair and ceiling. Two ball bearings roll down my cheeks, hit the boards below and clatter away towards a door where daylight blazes.
The order came through and the first Box Flower, containing an excerpt about a road trip to Queensland in the late 1990's, flew away to my friend in Glebe.
