Prologue Satoshi #3
I gave myself a quarter of a second to exhale and adjust the cuffs of my crisp white dress shirt before pasting on my best customer service smile.
This was not the first – or the second, or the tenth – time Matt had summoned me like this, the crook of his finger tracing a line between entitlement and condescension.
He’d looked me up and down the first time he’d ever come into Tsundoku, eyes passing over my pin-dotted waistcoat and hot pink glasses frames before getting stuck on my hair.
Aren’t you a bit old to be bleaching your hair like a surfie teen? he’d asked.
He dropped a ton of money whenever he was here, though, so I had long since resolved to take it on the chin. Forty-something white finance bros were an occupational hazard when you ran a wine bar. Plus, this particular finance bro came as part of a package deal.
Fiona smiled at me as I approached their table, eyes crinkling at the corners, and I couldn’t resist smiling back before I turned my gaze to her husband. ‘What can I do for you, Mr Sinclair?’
‘I appreciate you’re busy,’ Matt said, ‘but we’ve been waiting nearly half an hour for our food, and I’m not convinced your girl has even taken our order to the kitchen.’
‘Let me check on that for you. I’ll pour you another glass of wine in the meantime, on the house. The same again?’
‘That would be lovely,’ Fiona said. ‘Thank you, Satoshi.’
I ducked back behind the bar. Matt had bought them both a glass of the Bibliophile Noriko reserve pinot noir, the most expensive wine Isamu made. They’d finished my open bottle, so I grabbed a fresh one and took my wine knife out of my pocket.
I was just about to open it when there was an incredible crash, a scream, and Birdie burst into tears.
Everyone froze. Including me.
Afterwards, I would remember that so clearly. Everyone froze – except Fiona.
‘Oh, honey,’ she said.
She hadn’t run, but she’d moved swiftly nonetheless, helping Birdie out of the mess of smashed glassware. ‘You’re having a night, aren’t you?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Birdie sobbed. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s all right.’ There was Fiona’s laugh, that champagne laugh, bubbling up under the words. ‘We all have one of those nights sometimes.’
She put her hands on Birdie’s shoulders.
‘Here’s what we’re going to do, okay? We’re going to go out the back.
You’re going to sit down and take some deep breaths, cry it out, whatever you need to do.
I only need you to do one thing for me – show me where the cleaning stuff is. I’ll take care of this.’
‘Fiona!’ Matt barked.
But she didn’t look at him. Instead, she looked at me, eyebrows raised inquiringly.
Still frozen – wine knife in one hand, bottle in the other – I nodded, and fell in love with her.
I did not let anyone work on the floor of my bar without training. Anyone. Even Isamu, who’d spent his entire life working in wine and had several somm qualifications to go with his winemaking ones, had to consent to doing things my way.
That night, though, I was so utterly undone I barely remembered to check Fiona had Responsible Service of Alcohol training.
‘Yes, don’t worry, your liquor license is safe,’ she replied, busily pouring glasses of Margaret River cabernet sauvignon, making herself as at home behind my bar as if she’d helped me build it.
‘I worked in a pub when I was at uni, and then I re-upped a few years ago so we could have a cash bar at the Parents and Friends Association Christmas party. How about you run some of those plates from the kitchen to the tables? People look hungry.’
Then she winked at me.
I stared.
It felt like I’d been kicked in the head and something in my brain had fundamentally shifted, or like I’d woken from a coma after many years to see a world that was exactly the same and yet entirely different all at once. She was still Fiona – my friend Fiona – but – but…
‘Go!’ she laughed, shooing me away.
No one except Isamu had ever tried to give me an order in my bar before. It was mine. I exerted tight control over every single aspect of it.
I went.
Service is like a dance. I’d designed Tsundoku to have as service-friendly a layout as possible, but when we were having a bad night, it felt too small, like no matter what you were doing, you were in the way.
When things went right, though, it was elegant, graceful, fluid, all the different parts of the machine working together in harmony.
That night should have been a disaster, but it wasn’t, because Fiona was the perfect partner.
She let me lead, a few murmured instructions all she needed.
When I was behind the bar, she was on the floor; when I was on the floor, she was behind the bar; the transitions seamless, effortless.
It was the kind of service chemistry that took years to develop, if it ever did at all – Isamu and I had never managed it – and I knew, in a way that I had never known anything before, that I would think about this night on my deathbed.
‘I’d better take this one.’ Fiona laid a hand on my shoulder in warning as I emerged from the kitchen, before taking a plate off my forearm. ‘He’s about to blow his top.’
I glanced over at Matt. A muscle in his jaw was twitching.
‘Tell him it’s on the house.’ The place where she’d put her hand felt hot, like if I stripped my shirt and waistcoat off, there would be a perfect impression of it, burned into my skin. ‘Obviously. Along with another glass of the Noriko.’
‘Will do.’ I was treated to another glimpse of her luminous smile. ‘Would you mind pouring it, though?’
‘Of course.’ I was amazed I’d managed to get the words out. I was fluent in three languages and conversant in several more, but I’d forgotten every word in every one of them that wasn’t her name.
She was still standing at Matt’s table when I came over, a stutter in our perfect service rhythm. ‘… to Melbourne tomorrow,’ he was saying. ‘We agreed—’
‘—that we’d sit down and connect tonight, I know, but—’
‘—you decided playing waitress was more important?’
‘So sorry for the delay, Mr Sinclair.’
I set the glass of pinot down in front of him. Matt glared up at me. ‘I don’t want your wine, mate.’
‘Honey, I won’t be much longer,’ Fiona said. ‘Once things get a bit quieter—’
‘Forget it.’ He stood. ‘I guess the babysitter can go home early.’
‘Matt—’
‘I’ll see you at home – if you can fit that into your busy schedule.’
The door of the bar slammed shut behind him. Fiona sighed. ‘Sorry about that, Satoshi.’
‘There’s no need to apologise.’ Married, she was so unbelievably married, and yet she was fizzing through my blood like sparkling shiraz anyway. ‘If you need to, please go. I’ll be fine.’
‘No.’ She picked up Matt’s abandoned glass and took a long swallow.
Her eyes fluttered closed for a second with pleasure, and I fell even deeper in love with her.
‘There’s no point talking to him while he’s like this.
Besides, I—’ she took another sip before grinning at me over the rim of the glass ‘—have work to do.’
It was incredible, really, how the loveliest person in the world could completely ruin your life in a single evening.
Later, when dinner service had passed, the chef had gone home, and only a few quiet drinkers remained, I made Fiona sit down. ‘Not only do you not have to do this,’ I said firmly, taking the cloth she was using to wipe down tables out of her hands, ‘I’m not going to let you.’
‘But you sent Birdie home already. And it’s no trouble.’
I put my hand between her shoulder blades and steered her towards the bar, the world tilting briefly on its axis as the ends of her hair brushed my knuckles. ‘This is my bar. I’m the boss. And the boss says sit down.’
The chef always left post-service plates for the floor staff. We never ate in front of customers, but I broke my own rule and brought the plates earmarked for Birdie and me out to the bar. ‘You ordered this, about, oh, two hours ago?’ I set one in front of Fiona. ‘Sorry it’s late.’
She laughed. ‘I should have known you’d never forget my order.’
The seasonal special that evening was a spring vegetable and goat’s cheese risotto.
It had suffered a little from being left under the heat lamps, some of the cheese going gluey, but it was still fresh and flavourful, full of sugar snap peas and asparagus.
‘Can I pour you something?’ I asked, desperate to find my way back to more well-trodden neural pathways.
‘I’ve got a new Sancerre and I could use some pithy phrasing for the tasting notes. ’
‘Oh no, my arm, you’re twisting it so hard.’ Did she have to keep smiling at me? I only had so much strength.
I busied myself with the familiar ritual of pouring wine – taking down glasses, opening the bottle, smelling the cork, tasting to check for faults – so I didn’t do anything ridiculous, like falling at her feet and telling her I would die for her. ‘What do you think of this?’
Fiona closed her eyes, inhaled the bouquet – oh fuck, oh fuck, I’d always thought she was pretty but how had I not realised she was exquisite? – then sipped. ‘Oh, that’s lovely. Like a summertime salad – charred peaches and basil and sunshine.’
‘That’s much better than what I’ve written so far.’ I leaned into the bar, trying to make it take some of my weight. ‘Although silex soil influences, aged in old oak, bottled à la chèvre has a certain poetry to it, I guess.’
‘We can pretty it up, don’t worry. What’s bottling à la chèvre?’
‘Hand-bottling direct from barrel using gravity. It’s not very common outside Sancerre, but Isamu learnt how to do it one of the times we lived in France, and he’s made a few vintages of sauvignon blanc that way. I’ll dig one out of his cellar next time I’m at the winery so I can show it to you.’
‘Won’t he mind?’
Isamu would definitely mind me raiding his museum stock, but I shrugged. ‘Wine is about pleasure, not preservation. It’s meant to be drunk.’
‘Speaking of Isamu—’ she took another mouthful of risotto ‘—is he still annoying the shit out of you?’