Fever, Chicken, and Cards in the Street

On Saturday night I was writing winter season words on slips of paper for the Christmas kukai, and my hand would not hold the pencil still.

The plan had been made on LINE, in the only style Kotone allowed there: times and places. Wednesday 24th. After the closing ceremony. Club room. Fumika had added Cake: Yukari-san (confirmed), and Yukari-san had confirmed it so many times that the cake had become a law of nature. I wrote first snow, winter moon, frost on the rails. The last one came out like seaweed, and I blamed the draught from my window.

On Sunday morning the thermometer under my arm beeped, and Yukari-san read it and turned into a different person.

"Thirty-nine point four," she said. Not loudly. Yukari-san has two modes, festival and clinic, and until that morning I had only ever seen festival. In clinic mode she wore a mask, spoke in short sentences and moved like a nurse on television. The Shirahama Clinic is closed on Sundays, which to her was a detail: she telephoned the doctor at home, and at a quarter past nine he let us in by the side door, wearing a cardigan over his pyjamas.

A cotton swab went up my nose far enough to touch my childhood. Ten minutes later: influenza A.

"Five days in your room," Yukari-san said on the way home, holding my elbow as if I were eighty. "School rules. You'll miss the closing ceremony."

"And the kukai."

"And the kukai."

At home she set up my isolation like a field hospital: a box of masks, a bucket, two litres of sports drink, and a bicycle bell, which she screwed to the edge of my desk with a screwdriver from the shop. "Ring once for water. Twice for the toilet. Three times if you're dying."

I lay under two quilts and was furious with my body. In sixteen years in Tashkent I had never once had the flu. "In Tashkent," I informed the ceiling, "the air is too dry for germs."

"That's not how germs work," said Mio, from the corridor.

On Monday the fever took me somewhere else.

The house went on without me. Through the floor I could hear the shop: the hiss of the pump, the bell on the door, Tetsuo-san saying "Mm" to customers. Every time the bell rang I thought someone had come to see me, and every time it was a puncture.

In the dream, Tashkent and Shirahama were the same city. The green dome of Chorsu Bazaar stood over the harbour, and the whitebait boats came in underneath it. Buvi's tandir was in the club room, on the tatami, and she was slapping rounds of non against its hot inner wall while Hanzawa-sensei slept beside it, upright, like a loaf himself. Kotone sat at the window, writing. Every time Buvi pulled out a loaf, there was a blue sticky note on the crust.

When I woke, the pillow was damp and there was an orange note beside it, in pencil so crooked it looked as if it had been written on a moving bus. I did not remember writing it.

Winter fever-dream:

Buvi's oven, Chorsu's dome,

a blue sticky note

"You were talking in your sleep," Mio reported through the door at lunchtime. "In alien."

"What did I say?"

"'Buvijon', something, something, 'Kotone'. In one sentence." A pause. "Mostly the second one."

I rang the bell three times. Nobody came.

From Monday to Wednesday, Mio was the postman.

Kotone could not come in, so every afternoon she came to the shop door after school and gave Mio a folded blue note. On the outside of the first one, in Kotone's small upright hand, it said: Mio-chan: please read it to him. Any voice you like.

I looked at that for a long time. In June a boy had read her words aloud to the class in a voice she hated, and she had stopped writing for a week. Now she had handed them to a twelve-year-old with a phone and a grudge, and written: any voice you like. Nobody had made her. It was her choice. It had always been going to be her choice.

Mio chose terrible voices. On Monday, a robot, which made a note about the harbour in the rain sound like a train announcement. On Tuesday, an old man with no teeth, who read:

Winter cold—your desk

collects dust and three handouts

and my blue notes, too

"Seven out of ten," said Mio, in her own flat voice. "Too sad."

I made her read it again anyway.

On Christmas Eve the whole house smelt of fried chicken. Yukari-san had reserved a bucket from the Colonel back in November, like a train ticket, because in Japan, Mio explained through the door, that is what Christmas is.

"Christmas is… a colonel?"

"It's tradition."

"Since when?"

"Since forever. Since the seventies."

Yukari-san brought me one drumstick on a plate, in her mask, and left again. I ate it sitting up in bed under two quilts. It was delicious. I understood nothing.

Later a sheet of pink memo paper with a cat on it slid under my door.

Big brother is sick.

I ate his Christmas chicken.

Get well, idiot.

In Japanese she had written onii-chan. She had never once called me that out loud, and she would have died before starting now. On paper, apparently, it was allowed. I knew someone else like that.

The floorboards creaked outside. Then a soft bump against the bottom of the door: her back. She was not allowed in. She sat down on the other side with her back against the wood, and after a moment I got out of bed and sat down on my side with mine.

"Who am I going to tease next year?" she said, to the door.

I did not answer. I could not.

There are silences you fill and silences you keep. I had learned the difference under an umbrella at Meigetsu-in. I kept this one. We sat back to back through three centimetres of wood until Yukari-san came up the stairs and sent her to bed.

"SADO!"

Christmas Day, three in the afternoon. The fever had broken in the night, and I was sitting up in bed reading Sardor's Haiku, Volume One for the fourth time when the Shiokaze Ginza started shouting my name. Or Daichi's version of it.

I went to the window. Below, in coats and scarves, their breath white in the cold, stood Kotone, Fumika and Daichi, each holding a big sheet of drawing paper against their chest.

"WE'RE NOT ALLOWED IN!" Daichi bellowed. "SO WE BROUGHT LITERATURE!"

They held the sheets up one after another.

Winter stars, look down—

the boy in the upstairs room

is missed on this street

Daichi's line was upside down. I read it with my head on my shoulder. Fumika reached over without looking and turned it the right way up.

"Don't open the window!" Yukari-san shouted from downstairs.

I opened the window. The cold came in like a slap, and it smelt of the sea and of steam from the tofu shop.

Then Kotone stepped forward into the middle of the street, in front of the tofu shop, put her hands round her mouth, and shouted:

"GET WELL!"

The whole street stopped. A pigeon stopped. The tofu-shop owner, in his white apron, put down his wooden paddle and began to applaud. Nakagawa-san came out of the butcher's and applauded too. Kotone's ears were red enough to see from the second floor. She did not run.

My throat was sandpaper; I had no voice to give back. So I bowed, from the window, the deepest bow a person can make from a window without falling out of it.

"Thirty-seven point one!" Yukari-san announced half an hour later, back in festival mode. "Seventy points! Close that window!"

She had brought up a parcel they had left at the shop door: a bag of mandarins and a cake box. The kukai had been postponed until I was no longer, in Fumika's words, a public-health matter. The cake, she had ruled, could not be postponed. One slice was missing. In the cream at the edge of the gap there was a fork mark I would have recognised anywhere.

That evening Mio came in without knocking, wearing two masks, and picked up the last box of manga from the corner where it had stood since April.

"So it doesn't catch your germs," she said, and carried it out.

The corner was empty. The room was mine. She had never said so, and she was never going to. She had just carried the last of herself out of it and left the door open a crack.

At the very bottom of the parcel, under the mandarins, there was a plain blue note. Not a haiku.

New Year's morning. 5:30. The beach. Fuji might come out.