Chapter 24 Screws fall out all the time and land on Fuko
Screws fall out all the time and land on Fuko
Sunday mornings are usually my house-cleaning days, but this new-found freedom (desperate unemployment) allows me to clean the bathrooms on a Thursday morning when Dad’s away.
Yesterday’s dinner was icy. Not a single word was uttered. Hannah went out; Dad put the telly on, and I reopened my old job-tracking spreadsheet. August is not a good month for vacancies. Or maybe it is, but I’m just not a good person for a job.
There are many things on my mind, but Toby’s face forces me to defrost the freezer to give it a proper clean.
I scrub the toilets viciously, remembering him grabbing my hand and asking me to be honest with him about my feelings.
I unpin, wash, dry, and iron the curtains, thinking about the way his eyes rounded when I told him he makes me do bad things.
The house is completely spotless by the time Father is back.
‘Trying to win some points?’ he asks humourlessly, seeing the organised kitchen drawers.
‘Had a lot on my mind.’
Dad gets the fish out the fridge and starts chopping it for today’s dinner.
‘Did Hanako help at all?’ he asks.
‘Um...’ I try to find words, suddenly aware that he changed the topic. ‘I haven’t seen her today.’
He tuts and shakes his head. ‘I swear, that girl...’
‘What?’ I ask, tensing my eyebrows.
‘All she does is play video games, go out, and do god knows what at the modelling shoots.’
‘So?’ I’m defensive on her behalf. ‘She’s 18, just finished her exams. She’s allowed to have fun before uni.’
My stomach stings. She might not get into uni, but that’s not important now. I hear it, I hear what Hanako meant. I know what Dad is going to say.
‘When you were her age—’
‘Dad, stop. Hannah and I are different. I thought doing everything right would get me far, and what do I have? Fired from my job, friends who are angry with me, and...’
And Toby. Toby will never speak to me again.
‘Why are they angry?’
‘I am not great, Dad. I keep messing up and hurting people.’
The fish goes in the bowl and a drizzle of mirin and soy sauce coats the chunks. What is he making?
‘Then you should apologise.’
‘I tried. But I made such a mess of things, I don’t think they’ll ever forgive me.’
He goes through the stash of fatherly wisdom in his head. But he just reaches out and squeezes me into a hug. ‘You need to be braver.’
‘Weirdly, that’s the second time someone has said something like that to me.’ I laugh ‘No, wait, maybe third.’
Toby and Leon both said something along those lines before. Maybe I do need to do something else. Something braver to entertain the lady luck.
‘But be nicer to Hanako, Dad, she is a different person to me, and she will do great things once she grows up a bit.’
‘Maybe she will be a teacher like your mum.’
‘Yeah, ishi ni Hanako ga saku.’ I wiggle my eyebrows at the word play. The Japanese equivalent of ‘when pigs fly’ is ‘flowers bloom on stone’. I replaced the word for flower with my sister’s name...
Look, it’s quite skilful, okay?
‘Masterful.’ See? Dad agrees.
He returns to making dinner, and I let myself go upstairs, knocking on my sister’s door. I wait for her to answer with an annoyed ‘yeah’ before entering.
She is sitting by the desk. Her pink headphones are blasting some loud alt-rock music. There’s a small window of a cozy farming game on the screen that is hiding a maths paper behind it.
She was doing some maths to see whether she got any marks, I realise.
‘Hey.’ I wave awkwardly.
‘What do you want?’
‘I just spoke to Dad…’ I say, and her head furiously snaps at me. ‘Not about the grades. I was just talking, and you are right. He does unfairly compare you to me.’
I take the slippers off and sit on her bed.
She doesn’t say anything.
‘I am sorry for what I said. I shouldn’t have had a go.’
She nods, lips pressed into a thin line.
‘If you want to go to uni, I promise you we will find a way. Only if you want to. Student loans are no joke.’
She sniffles. I stretch my arms and let her snuggle up to me in a hug as she cries her eyeballs out.
‘I promise you it will be fine. No need to cry.’ But she doesn’t listen. I reach for the tissues on her bedside table and let her blow her nose and wipe her tears. ‘Leon’s A-level grades were piss poor and yet here he is, so I’m not worried about you in the slightest. We’ll figure it out.’
She finally calms down. ‘You can go now.’
‘Wow, I actually came here because I have a favour to ask.’
‘What is it?’
‘Do any of your friends have a boom box?’
‘A what now?’
‘Like a loud thing that plays music.’
‘You’re so old.’ She rolls her eyes and presses something on her phone to record a voice message to someone. ‘Oi, melt, can I borrow your speaker?’
A small red speaker playing ‘Salut, Vera’ by Valeriy Meladze in my hand is not quite as impactful as John Cusack’s boom box at the end of Say Anything, but it does the job of attracting unwanted attention under Sashka’s window.
A few joggers throw some sideway glances at me, a group of lads cheer me on, and a mother with a stroller huffs something about me blocking the pavement when I stand in the street. But the lights in Sashka’s apartment stay unchanged.
Hanako is waiting quite far away from me, too embarrassed to be seen with a weirdo displaying this behaviour. I have given her the amulet and asked her to give me a shout if it jingles.
Maybe I need to do something else. Something that will truly grab attention because of how poorly I do it. I take a deep breath and belt the chorus, in the language that I do not speak.
Hannah gasps and points at the amulet. ‘Holy shit, it just did it by itself!’
The lights in Sashka’s Victorian terrace kitchen go from idly dim to illuminatingly bright, as a shadow in a graphic T-shirt props the window open.
‘Fuko, what are you doing?’ Sashka shouts, sticking her head out into the street.
‘I need to talk to you.’ I wait for the small instrumental interlude to finish before returning to the song, off pitch and off tune and off language.
‘Stop, stop, stop, stop. Why didn’t you just knock like a normal person? How long were you planning to stand there?’
‘We’ve made a playlist!’ Hannah shouts and waves.
‘Hi, Hannah!’
‘Hey!’ She waves.
‘You can stop the music, Fuko, before someone calls the police.’
Hanako presses Pause on her phone, and the music stops.
‘Can I come up?’
Sashka thinks for a minute, sighs, then says, ‘Fine.’
Hanako takes the speaker and lugs it back to the station by herself. I didn’t ask whose speaker we borrowed. Is my sister the type of person to call her significant other melt? I doubt it, somehow.
Sashka isn’t a tidy person, so I am surprised to see the living room in good shape. All the clothes are gone from the drying rack; the paperwork is stashed in folders and rudely shoved in the corner of the room.
‘Tea?’ she asks coldly.
‘No, thank you, I am not planning to stay very long.’
I sit on the couch. Sashka plops herself into the armchair.
She doesn’t look at me, twirling a lock of hair that’s fallen out from her hair clip. I muster all the courage I have, but she starts speaking first. ‘Toby came here yesterday.’
My mouth dries up. Hearing that he was in this house less than twenty-four hours after we had sex... What feeling does it bring to mind? Jealousy? Shame? Regret? Whatever it is, it is delivered to my heart wrapped up in thick layers of pain. His name makes my chest ache as it has never done before.
I look around the room and imagine Sashka frantically tidying her apartment. Toby probably would have texted that he wants to talk but made it a point that he would go to hers.
‘He’s told me everything. About your job and’—she takes a deep breath—‘about you two sleeping together.’
My stomach sinks. I was meant to be the one to tell her. Why the fuck would he do that? He just ruined my chances of fixing our friendship. Pain turns to anger as I see glistening tears coat Sashka’s eyes. My own words come out distant and panicked. ‘I’m sorry. It was such an unimaginable mistake.’
‘I don’t know if it was, Fuko,’ she cuts at me.
‘I don’t know how it happened. I was just drunk.’
‘You were in a bad spot. And he was near. Just like John usually was.’ She explains my own actions to me.
She knows about John. ‘How... How did you—’
‘You do have weird destructive tendencies. I saw him leaving your uni flat in third year after your break-up. John has an awful I-just-got-some face, by the way, very easy to tell.’ A half smile, coated in sadness. ‘But Toby came yesterday and... He said some things that made me upset.’
‘I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you,’ I blurt out.
But she shakes her head. ‘It’s not that. He made me realise that I have been quite awful to you.’
‘You were completely justified.’
‘There are limits to cruelty, Fuko. And I... I think, I need to stop.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
She takes a deep breath and turns away from me.
‘I was the one who posted the picture of John feeling you up,’ she says quietly. ‘I also know Atticus. I knew he was going to complain about not being let in and had a direct way to stop him... But I just sat silently, listening to his complaining at a meeting.’
‘What—’
‘And Leon. I have made up emergencies so that he doesn’t hang out with you.’ She blushes, embarrassed by her action. ‘If you think about it, I am really the reason you had no one else to turn to.’
The information sits badly in my stomach, like eating a prawn cocktail that was left out in the sun for too long.
It doesn’t take away from the overwhelming guilt that’s been building over the last few weeks, even before the sex or the kiss.
I don’t think it should count as betrayal, not like Aaron betrayed Martin in Primal Fear.
No, it’s not really a betrayal, as I was the one who set things into motion, but the thought of my best friend doing anything to hurt me, even indirectly... It stings.
‘I—’ I try to find words to deliver my thoughts, but the only thing that comes to mind is, ‘I feel like shit.’
‘Me too. I am really sorry, even if I was angry, you are still my friend—’
‘Best.’
‘Best friend. I fucked up. So did you.’ She adds the last part with a quick smile.
‘Really badly.’ I nod, fighting back the need to cry.
‘But I really messed this whole thing up. They should give a prize for worst friendship fuck-ups.’
‘We’d tie.’
We sit in silence for a moment. Sashka taking deep breaths, clearly trying to figure out how to say the rest of the things that have been bothering her.
‘I think Toby and I were actually very wrong for each other,’ she says, her voice breaking, ‘because the way he spoke about you... I wish someone would speak about me the same way.’
Stunned. Shocked. Surprised. These are some of the words that could explain the way my face contorts after hearing her sentence. The air is so heavy that I’m sinking deeper into the couch, and it’s rendering me immobile, when I quietly utter, ‘There is nothing between Toby and me.’
‘You need to stop lying to me, Fuko,’ Sashka says, unimpressed and frustrated.
‘Nothing, I swear.’
‘Then you need to wake up and stop lying to yourself. Because no man would ever bother trying to fix a girl’s friendship with his somewhat-ex if he didn’t care about her.’
‘But...’
I can’t possibly date him after what I’ve done. To him and to Sashka. There is no fix to this; things won’t just magically work out.
As if reading my mind, Sashka says, ‘I know there is girl code and stuff about dating the same guy. I’m not going to lie and pretend that I wouldn’t be hurt.
’ She sits, assessing the truth of her own words, judging the weight of her feelings.
‘But I think, with some time, I will be okay with this. I would hate to be the reason that you miss out on an actually good guy because of my petty jealousy.’
‘Sashka.’ The couch finally releases me. I slide off it and give her a big hug.
She hesitates but hugs me back. ‘But I will need some time and distance. To get my emotions in order.’
‘And to get really hot and find a rich husband to rub it in our faces.’
‘It’s like you’re in my head.’ She laughs. ‘But I think this is not the end of us, whether you figure it out or not.’
You—not you and Toby. You, Fuko, need to sort your shit out.