Chapter Ten Satoshi
Tasting today: ahead of vintage, pinot noir, Tasmania, Australia.
Multiple vineyards are often blended to make quality Tassie pinots, but sometimes a single vineyard needs to stand alone.
‘Try this,’ Isamu said.
He used a glass wine thief to extract tiny amounts from two different barrels of pinot, dispensing them into the tasting glasses in my hands.
‘These come from the two blocks I use to make the Noriko. I’ve always blended them before, but I’m considering releasing them as two separate single vineyard wines this time. What do you think?’
I looked at the wines against the white of my sleeve (both pale, one slightly more purple than the other), smelled them (fresh strawberry and raspberry in one; darker notes of cherry and baking spice in the other), then tasted them.
‘Do you actually think they’ll be better as single vineyard?
Or do you just not want to make the Noriko anymore? ’
‘I’m genuinely wondering whether they’ll be better as single vineyard.’
I tasted them individually again, then tipped one glass into the other and tasted them together, as we both pretended he hadn’t already long since decided what he was going to do.
‘You’ll sacrifice some balance if you don’t combine them, but as a blend, they’re working at cross purposes – speaking over each other. ’
‘That’s what I thought.’
Of course it was.
We spent ninety minutes walking around the winery, trying some of the wines Isamu had in progress. ‘Thanks, Sato,’ he said, as we emerged into the Sauternes-coloured sun of the late Monday afternoon. ‘I appreciate getting your palate on these.’
‘You’re welcome,’ I replied, like he hadn’t been extremely obviously buttering me up.
I’d been bracing for a reckoning ever since I’d let the word Onīsan pass my lips, and I steeled myself for it now. Okay, I’ve pretended I need your help, let’s talk about how you clearly can’t do anything without mine.
As we trudged back up the hill, though, Isamu didn’t say anything.
Okāsan was waiting for us in the doorway of the B&B. ‘There you are!’ she said in Japanese. ‘Okaeri. I was wondering where you’d – oh, there she goes again.’
‘There she goes,’ Isamu echoed long-sufferingly. Yquem – who I’d dropped off before we headed to the winery – had launched herself at him and was wrapped around his neck like a scarf.
‘It continues to be utterly mystifying to me,’ I said, trying and failing to punch the pang of jealousy down, ‘that even though I’m the one who looks after her every need, she likes you a thousand times better anyway.’
Isamu only grunted, blowing a tuft of Yquem’s fur out of his face.
Okāsan had made chicken katsu. I took a brief look through Isamu’s cellar and selected a bottle of Condrieu to pair with it. ‘Itadakimasu,’ Okāsan said, as we sat down to eat.
‘Itadakimasu,’ Isamu and I dutifully repeated.
Our mother was a great cook, and the wine was beautiful (it was from my brother’s cellar, after all), but I was eating and drinking on autopilot, not really tasting anything.
My head felt overfull, stuffed – not like it did when I tried to cram too much information from my theory binder into my head in too short a space of time, but like someone had cracked open my skull and rammed a whole heap of cotton balls in there with my brain.
No amount of my usual rituals had helped.
I had drilled myself with flashcard after flashcard.
I had done blind tasting after blind tasting, looking, smelling, tasting and spitting like an automaton, scratching black marks into deductive tasting grids.
I had polished every glass in Tsundoku several times over.
I had reorganised my already rigidly organised office ten times.
In the dead of night, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d gone downstairs to the bar and painstakingly re-genrefied and alphabetised all the books.
None of it worked, though. All I could think about was Fiona.
The things she’d said to me the other night made perfect sense. Of course she didn’t want to be the subject of any more gossip, not when she’d already been the subject of so much.
What did that mean for me, though?
I might fantasise about a future where I stood beside her in her kitchen and presented the milk to her daughters, but Fiona only saw one where she stood alone and tried, scarlet-faced, to explain what toyboy meant.
She’d jokingly said something about how kissing her at a school function couldn’t be good for my image, but it wasn’t hard to see that it was a polite inversion of what she actually meant: that kissing me wasn’t good for hers.
I’d taken a chance. Even though I knew it was too far, too fast, too soon, I’d told her I’d kiss her in front of the whole world if she wanted – and she’d just ushered me into the back seat, where not a soul could see us.
She was everything to me. But to her, I would only ever be – could only ever be – someone she had to explain away. A shameful secret, someone she’d clandestinely make out with but not hold hands with in public. A guilty pleasure she knew she shouldn’t indulge but couldn’t quite make herself quit.
And I couldn’t quit either. I’d kissed her back, because she’d started rambling about how surely I must be getting sick of her, and I’d panicked and pounced on her before she could follow that thought too much further.
She’d already run once when she thought I’d kissed her purely for her benefit. I couldn’t let her do it again.
But she was going to. Unless I could miraculously age myself up a decade or so, she was going to, and—
I startled as my mother touched my hand. ‘You’re quiet, Sato. Are you feeling all right?’
I nodded. ‘I’m fine.’
She studied me. ‘No, you’re not.’
‘I am, Okāsan, really.’ I made myself smile. ‘Tired, that’s all.’
Isamu put his chopsticks down. ‘And we need to talk about it.’
I resisted the urge to sigh. I’d walked right into that one.
‘I appreciate you stepping in the other night when I had to run out.’ I’d rehearsed this speech several times on the drive out to the vineyard. ‘I was lucky you were there. But that was an isolated incident. I can—’
‘It’s not an isolated incident, though.’ He gave me one of those looks, the ones that made me feel like a teenager again. ‘We have to talk about Birdie.’
I set my chopsticks down too. ‘We have talked about Birdie. Besides, she wasn’t even rostered on the other night. That had nothing to do with her.’
‘I talked to some of your staff.’ His gaze was unwavering. ‘It sounds like she’s absent more than she’s there.’
Of fucking course he’d snooped around.
‘Sato,’ he said, his tone gentler now, ‘if you can’t bring yourself to fire her, I’ll do it for you.’
‘I’m not going to fire her, Isamu!’ I snapped. ‘We’ve already had this conversation. You know my position.’
‘Why not, though? I get that she’s dealing with family stuff, but there has to be a limit. You can’t have someone on staff who isn’t doing their job. Particularly when it means you – you, who is insisting on studying for the hardest exam in the world – have to do it for her!’
I gritted my teeth.
‘Why?’ he demanded.
Because Fiona Fisher, more than a year ago, had sat across from me and said, Speaking of Birdie, you’re not going to fire her, are you?
‘It’s none of your business,’ I said.
‘It’ll be my business when you work yourself to death like Otōsan!’
‘Isamu!’ Okāsan said.
‘You are just fucking like him.’ Isamu jabbed a finger at me. ‘So set in your ways you won’t listen to anyone else. So convinced that only you can do things right that you won’t accept help. So fucking obsessive that it’s going to kill you!’
‘Maybe,’ I grated out from between clenched teeth, ‘if you actually trusted that I can manage my own shit, I wouldn’t have to work so hard to prove it to you.’
Isamu’s nostrils flared. ‘Sato—’
‘Excuse me.’ I stood, snatching up my glass of Condrieu. ‘I need some air.’
It was nearly the summer solstice, so even though it was after nine pm, the sun had only just set, a few early stars speckling the sky.
I sank onto the front steps, which were so low my knees almost ended up around my ears.
I wanted to yell my frustrations out, to listen to them echo back to me off the vine-covered slopes, but that would only worry my mother, so I settled for a long, extended exhale instead, which did nothing to ease the snarl of feeling in my chest.
I had sat on these steps the night Otōsan died.
He had collapsed in the vineyard, his heart giving out after decades of hard work and long days.
Isamu – aged twenty-eight, but in everyone’s eyes a man, not a boy – had stood stoically, arms folded across his chest, dealing with the paramedics, but after they’d taken the body away, he’d left, striding away through the vines.
Noriko had gone after him, and Okāsan had retreated into the house, but I’d sat out here on the steps, and I’d looked up at the stars, and I’d cried.
I had cried tears of grief for my father, whom I had loved. But I had also cried tears of guilt and tears of relief, because this time he had gone somewhere he could not make us follow.
I wasn’t like him. I wasn’t. I would never do what he did: drag his family around the world in fanatical pursuit of glory, denying them any sense of stability. Hadn’t I come back to do just the opposite? To build a home in Tsundoku, one that would make others feel at home too?
‘Sato?’
I looked over my shoulder automatically, although I didn’t need to. ‘I’m sorry, Okāsan.’
My mother sat down, two stairs above me, knee just brushing my upper arm. ‘You’re having a tough time at the moment, aren’t you?’
There was no point lying to her. ‘Yes.’
‘And your brother’s not making it easier.’
I let out a long breath. ‘He’s trying to. I know that. But no, he’s not.’
‘Oh, my sons,’ she said. ‘My poor sons.’
She put her hand on my shoulder. I had to resist the urge to rest my head against her knee like a child.
‘He’s so lonely, you know,’ she said, after a long moment. ‘Out here by himself, with only me for company. Ever since she left.’
‘That doesn’t mean he needs to come and check up on me all the time.’
‘Would you prefer he didn’t?’
I didn’t say anything.
My mother didn’t say anything either. She’d always been good at that, at holding space open when it needed to be held.
‘I don’t want to be someone he checks up on,’ I said. ‘I want to be someone he visits. Someone he trusts. Someone who could even check up on him sometimes. I want to feel like his brother, not his son.’
That was at the heart of it, really. There were plenty of people who loved me.
I had no illusions about that. But they never quite loved me the way I wanted.
Isamu would never quite love me as an equal.
My father had loved me, but not more than his work.
Fiona… god, there was so much I could say about Fiona.
Hell, even my cat didn’t love me the way I wished she would.
I looked up at the stars. ‘I don’t want to be like this, Okāsan. I want to be taken seriously.’
‘So that’s it.’
I glanced over at her.
‘The exam,’ my mother said. ‘That’s why you’re so desperate to do it.’
‘No. Well – yes. The exam’s part of it. But not all of it.’
I looked back up at the stars. ‘There’s… someone,’ I admitted. ‘Someone I like very much. And I started to hope that maybe I could have her. But it’s complicated. She’s older than me. She’s got children. And…’
And I’ll never be more than her dirty little secret, I could not bring myself to say.
‘That is complicated.’ Okāsan squeezed my shoulder. ‘Children make it especially complicated. No matter how much you love each other, children always make it complicated. Look at what happened with your brother and Noriko.’
A hollow ache built behind my ribcage. Isamu never talked about it, but it was no secret that he and Noriko had split up because she wanted kids and he didn’t.
‘Part of him will always love her,’ Okāsan said. ‘But in the end, he had to make a choice: between breaking his own heart once, very hard, or letting it be broken slowly, little by little, day by day.’
Tears pricked at the corner of my eyes.
‘Maybe that’s a choice you won’t have to make,’ she said. ‘Maybe this person will love you back the way you deserve – and you deserve to be loved, Sato. You deserve someone who will love you, who will respect you, and who will take you very, very seriously.’
I swallowed, hard.
‘But if you do have to make that choice,’ she said, smoothing her hand over my hair, ‘just know that it will hurt, but like your brother, you will survive it.’