Back when she was a little girl, the walk-in wet room had felt palatial. Now, standing in front of the leaky tub, the bathroom feels tiny and cramped. As Mei washes herself with the shower head, she wonders what other inventions her memories have afforded her over the years.
Towards the end of the dinner, Mei had barely been able to keep her eyes open. The combination of jetlag, food and sake—as well as the constant pressure to be the kind of granddaughter and sister worth waiting for after all these years—was exhausting. The past week her mind had felt as if it had been pushed to its limits, stretched beyond what it was capable of. There had been a crumbling that had begun on the soft grasses of Glyndebourne, and now, alone in the bath, she allows that crumbling to grow louder. She feels the hardiness that got her all the way to this remote edge of Japan split open.
Out in the rice fields she had cried. Haruka had placed her hand on the curve of Mei’s back and patted, soft, consistent taps. They had sat quietly together, and even though Mei should have felt embarrassed, globs of snot running down her upper lip and into her mouth, she did not. There was something in her sister’s eyes that went beyond sympathy. As if Haruka was looking at her from a place of remembrance, an echo of hurt that she had felt too.
After that, Mei had been introduced to the farm workers—young men in cotton trousers, who eyed her like she was an unknown species. And then more strangers came, neighbours who had been told about Mei and wanted a look, and even though they were kind, they had also greeted her with a sense of tragedy, as if Mei was a walking wound. The way Haruka looked at Mei was different though. It was almost complicit.
Then, later that evening, Mei had seen that familiar pain resurface in her sister’s eyes as she had watched her grandfather—their grandfather— drinking himself sick. Mei had wanted to comfort Haruka, but something had sealed over her sister, and Mei, exhausted, couldn’t find the energy or the words to break through.
A wiry strand of pubic hair floats on the surface of the water and she wonders if it’s hers or her sisters. She had never known anyone to have hair like hers, longer than most, strong and dark. Now she had someone that made the things that were strange, or ugly, into something shared, beautiful even.
Mei looks at the plaster across her wrist. The little fine scars straining against the tendons as she pushes herself down into the tub. The last time she was in this bath her skin had been entirely unmarked. Her six-year-old body yet to carry any kind of history. Arms smooth and perfect. Mei sometimes imagined her little white scars as tally marks, most of which could be divided beneath two people’s names: Mama and Fran. And now her father. There were the little thin ones, barely visible, that belonged to a certain kind of pain that is laughed off in adulthood. The marks left by the teenage years that were full of open nerve endings. There were the ones that only showed up when Mei was cold, the colour of blueberries. Then there were the ugly ones that made her feel weak when something or someone brushed them by accident. Her regrets.
Mei remembers her first time, taking a sewing pin and dragging it across the soft inside of her wrist. Aggravating the membrane until it was pink and raw. The following day in chemistry class, Mei had purposefully dropped a pencil on the floor; bending down, seeing the underside of the table with the grey balls of dried chewing gum, Mei had placed her left wrist on the tabletop, exposing her handiwork to her neighbour, hoping she would notice. She didn’t.
It had been around this time that Mei had started talking to a boy called Dilan on MSN. He made Mei’s blood race, even when he said her brown eyes were the colour of shit, even when he called her racist slurs, names that sat under her skin like gravel and grit. In the evenings, Mei would inhale her supermarket lasagne or shepherd’s pie and run back to the family computer, praying that there was still a green dot next to his name. He told Mei he cut himself because his mum had tried to kill herself, Sylvia Plath style. Mei never knew if the story was true or not, but it was enough for her to want to save him. When she texted him one evening saying she had been thinking about cutting herself too, he had texted her back with something like,
I know I should say you shouldn’t, but if it makes you feel better, then do it.
So she did. This time on the floor of her bedroom in front of the space heater, using the sharp end of a school compass, even though all she really wanted was for Dilan to say,
No, don’t do that, silly, come to the Odeon with me instead! I’ll hold your open palm and kiss you in the dark!
She never bled all over the place or had to be airlifted to hospital. There was never a scene. It was done in private. But it hurt, and it made Mei feel like she was in control. Soon, most of the girls in her class had done it at least once. It was a rite of passage that was as shallow as most of the cuts, and it divided the girls into two leagues. Those who had experienced notable hurt, and those who hadn’t. One time during school Mei had walked into the bathrooms to find Daisy cutting into her wrist with the blunt blade of a pair of school safety scissors. Mei had shouted at her, called her an idiot. You weren’t meant to go that deep, that hard. The cut on Daisy’s wrist was like a ravine between two mountains. No blood. But the skin had been gouged into and split open and it made Mei feel sick. After that she had mostly stopped doing it, apart from the days when she did.
Mei had already made a list in her head of all the things in the house she could use. That was usually enough to placate her, stop her from actually doing it.
She leans back, holds her nose and sinks under the water. The last time she had been in this bath, her mother’s soft body had been naked beside her.
Beneath the surface, Mei imagines the water sloughing away the hardened tissue until she is fresh and unspoiled. Back inside the warmth of a womb. Untouched and tethered to Mama.
*
Mei wakes and, for a moment, she thinks she is in Fran’s room. Another body next to hers. Warm and buttery.
She turns to see black hair and remembers where she is, the anger at her father returning, flooding her body. The room she is lying in is white and bare, with two single futons laid out next to the other. A reading light on the floor. A simple set of drawers with a black bi-folding mirror. Haruka’s makeup spread across the tabletop. Behind Mei’s head are sliding doors that open up onto a thin balcony. Mei needs to wee, but she doesn’t want to go downstairs and find herself with nothing to say to her grandparents. So, she lies there and thinks back to the night before, the change in the air that made everyone sharpen. Mei recognised the heaviness that came with the unspoken. She had known that heaviness, felt it at dinner tables, on long car journeys, between best friends. She had come to know it so well that it felt like she was the most defined, the most alive in those unspoken moments.
When Mei had come up from her bath last night, Haruka was already in bed. They mumbled their goodnights and Mei was certain she had seen Haruka’s eyes wet and bright, as she turned to face the wall. Mei had whispered her sister’s name into the darkness. A whisper that felt girlish and silly as it hung in the air with no response. After that, Mei had lain there afraid to move, listening to the sounds of Haruka’s breath. Listening to see if it was still catching, or slow and deep. There was a part of Mei, the part that kept her awake, that wanted to roll on top of Haruka, shake her from her sleep and demand she tell her everything about her mother. All the intimate, happy moments they shared without her. The meals they ate. The conversations they had or didn’t have about Mei, Mama’s life in England, the decision to leave. She wanted to extract all of her mother out of her sister and feast on it.
It was a similar feeling to the one she had with Fran. The need to know all the little details between two people and the closeness that shut Mei out. With Fran, there was a sickening arousal that came with hearing the particulars of her and another man. Mei always imagined them together, mouths and chests and hands would slip into her brain and torture her. She would let it play out. She didn’t push it down or pinch herself or turn up the volume of a song. She would sit in it and let it burn her up, and then finally continue on. Jagged and a little horny.
Mei rolls over and unplugs her phone from the socket, checking to see if Fran has messaged. There are four messages and six missed calls from her father. She ignores them and opens up WhatsApp. She stares at the last conversation between her and Fran, the final messages, three in a row, sent by Mei almost two weeks ago. She watches as the word online pops up under Fran’s name.
All she wants is for Fran to start typing, to call her, to say, I can’t imagine what you’re going through, I’m here, I’ve always been here, you know that right? I love you. So much. I love you, I love you!
Mei’s phone sits unmoving in the palm of her hand until the screen goes dark.
That morning they go for a cycle ride. Haruka takes her bike and Mei takes Baba’s old one. They have to pour oil on the seat lever to lift it up to the height of Mei’s hip, and for some reason this makes Mei feel sad. She feels nervous about cycling, something she never does in London, but she hides this, aware for the first time that she is the older sister, that she should be the capable one. Baba sends them off with cold bottles of mugicha and shopping bags for the market. They cycle past rice fields, beneath phone lines and open sky, past curious neighbours with their vegetable patches. The locals stop their picking and watch them ride past, their sun hats turning at the sound of wheels, their gaze lingering on the foreign girl. Now and then, Haruka calls out a greeting and they falter and nod back. In Tokyo no one had given Mei a second glance, but here on the winding country roads, they notice her.
Haruka cycles ahead, her black hair blowing the scent of shampoo back towards Mei, her slender legs pushing forwards and back. And Mei, hot and tired from another sleepless night, existing as if she were in a dream. The sound of frogs and crickets simmering beneath the soft roll of wheels on tarmac. They cycle to the nearest shopping street and buy fresh prawns for lunch. In the store, Mei feels awkward and pointless as Haruka speaks quick and decisive, barely looking in her direction.
That morning when they had woken, Haruka had been accommodating, though something invisible had been driven between them. There wasn’t the ease that they had found lying next to each other in the fields the day before. There was a distance, a space between them that made Mei wonder if coming to Japan had been a mistake. That her visions of fitting in, finding her family, her missing parts, was a foolish hope. The stuff of children.
On the return ride, Haruka cycles fast, the plastic bag with the prawns and the ice pack swinging from her handlebar. They slow and stop at a little table outside an expanse of green where an old woman with a paper fan sits, selling vegetables and fresh fruits. Tomatoes, peaches, bundles of giant mountain grapes. As Haruka buys a handful of corn, the old woman stares and questions her. They turn to look at Mei, regarding her like a museum piece. Mei smiles, feeling small, hating herself for not being able to speak the language that should be hers. She thinks back to a few years ago, a time when she had felt ready to be a good girl again. When she had taken a fresh notebook and a new pencil case to a language school in Holborn, and had learnt beginners Japanese with other students. Mostly anime fanatics with badly dyed hair, and nervous business men with parochial lives. For some reason, Mei’s kid brain had held onto the language that should have left her long ago, and she was able to grasp the accent easily. The words for book and walk and strawberry met her with ease and Mei was soon top of her class. She imagined the imprint of Japanese on her brain resembling the dried, delicate skeleton of a leaf—a suggestion of what once was alive. The grey-haired Japanese teacher who wore the sorts of dresses Matilda might call ethnic was not moved by Mei’s progress. As with everyone who discovered her heritage, this woman expected her to be nothing less than fluent.
Back on the road, Mei watches her sister cycling ahead, her legs filling heavy with shame. It was a specific kind of shame that always hit her with full force when she found herself in a Japanese restaurant, or café, desperately trying to connect with someone who looked straight through her. Mei knew she only had herself to blame. That as a teenager she had performed a botched surgery, mutilating herself into someone white and wanted. Slicing herself down the middle, keeping only the bits that were accepted. Back then it wasn’t desirable to be anything other than blonde and blue eyed, head of the netball team, mean.
Now, cycling across her motherland, the ragged seams of herself split apart, and she bleeds. Drops catching on bicycle spokes, seeping into the black of the road.