The Red Lighthouse

It rained all Friday, and at three o'clock, in the middle of sixth period, it stopped.

I watched it stop. The drops on the window slowed, and thinned, and then there were none, and the sea came out from behind the grey like a photograph developing. By cleaning time the whole town was steaming. Kotone wiped the corridor windows faster than I have ever seen anyone wipe anything and was gone at 15:35 exactly. I had to empty the bucket. I left at 15:40.

I ran. Down Tsubaki-zaka, past the camellias, through the steam rising off the road, past the station, down towards the harbour. At the bottom of the slope I realised I was still wearing my indoor shoes, the green-toed 29.5s Tetsuo had ordered from Yokohama, and that they were now grey. I decided that was a problem for Monday.

At the port I slowed down, because the breakwater was wet, and because my heart was going faster than my legs.

The breakwater runs straight out into the bay, a long concrete wall with a flat top wide enough for two people to walk side by side. On the left, the sea. On the right, the sea. Gulls stood along the edge facing the wind, all pointing the same way, like a class waiting for a teacher. The concrete was dark with rain and shone. At the far end, getting bigger with every step, was the lighthouse: small, round, red, eight metres of it, very bright against all that grey.

I reached the end at 16:10.

She was sitting on the step at its base, with her knees up and her arms round them and her school bag beside her, looking at the sea.

I stopped a few metres away. I didn't know the rules for this. There was nothing about it in Lesson 12.

She stood up. She took a blue note from her pocket, and held it out, and I took it. Her hand was cold.

Summer rain has stopped—

the whole sea is listening

for what I will say

I read it. I looked up. She was looking at my collar, and her ears were red, and she took a breath the way you take a breath before you go under the water.

"Sardor-kun."

It was small and hoarse, like a door that has not been opened for a long time. It was my name. For eleven weeks I had heard it from teachers and classmates and host families and Daichi, who can't say it, and I had never heard it before.

She stopped. The gulls stopped too, or it felt as if they did.

"Your haiku…" She swallowed. "…were terrible."

And then a laugh got out of her, the teaspoon against the glass, and she put her hand over her mouth, and took it away again.

I laughed too. I couldn't help it. It was true. It was the truest thing anyone had said to me in Japan, and she had said it out loud.

"Keep writing them," she said. "To me."

I had no seventeen syllables ready. I answered the only way I know how to answer anything, which is plainly.

"I'm sorry I gave them to a desk," I said. "From now on, only to you."

She nodded. Once, firmly, the way you close a lid.

"May I call you Kotone-san?"

A nod.

We sat on the step with our backs against the red paint, which was cold and a little damp through my shirt. There was just room for two. The sea was grey-green and moving, and all along the crescent of the beach the town was steaming quietly, and the shrine hill at the far end had a scarf of cloud round its neck.

I didn't say anything. I had learned that from an umbrella.

After a long time she said, "Mizuki-senpai."

I waited.

"Last year's president."

"The one who graduated?"

A nod. She was looking at the sea. "I promised."

The waves came in against the wall below us, and went out, and came in.

"Keep it alive," she said.

That was all. I counted them afterwards, the way I count steps. Nine more words, and I counted Mizuki-senpai as one, because it felt like one person. Nine words, and in them a girl with a suitcase on a platform, and a club with sixty-three years on its shelf, and a promise that had been sitting on this step with her every afternoon since March.

So I told her about the bread. About Buvi at the door in Chilonzor, and the round non, still warm, and the bite, and the shelf. About the loaf waiting there now, in every video call, getting harder, dusted on Fridays, until I come home to finish it.

"In Uzbekistan," I said, "we don't say goodbye to a journey. We leave the rest of the bread."

She rested her chin on her knees. She didn't say anything. She had used up her nine words, and I didn't want any more of them than she wanted to give. But she listened the way she writes, with nothing wasted, and I have never been listened to like that before.

At five o'clock the town chime began, "Yūyake Koyake", and came out to us over the water, thin and sweet and a little out of tune, telling the children to go home with the crows.

Neither of us said anything about Wednesday. Neither of us ever did again.

I walked her back along the breakwater to the steam of Shirase Suisan, and bowed at the door, and then, instead of going home, I went the long way, along the whole crescent of the beach, very slowly, in my ruined indoor shoes. Halfway along, a last shower came in off the sea and soaked me to the skin. I didn't run.

At 18:20 I pushed open the door of Moriyama Cycle. The bicycle bell went ching.

"Tadaima," I said.

I didn't think about it. It just came out, the way your own name comes out when somebody calls it.

Mio was sitting behind the counter with her phone. She looked up. She looked at me for a long moment, dripping on the mat.

"…You said it," she said.

"Okaeri!" called Yukari from the kitchen, over the sound of something frying, as if I had been saying it all my life. At the workbench, Tetsuo looked up from a wheel he was truing and said, "Mm," which I have decided meant the same thing.

That night, at my desk, with the window open and the slice of sea black between the two roofs, I wrote it down before I could lose it.

Wet street, the shop light.

Without thinking, I said it:

tadaima. Home.

On Monday morning there was a blue note on the corner of my desk, for the first time since the eighteenth. It was about the rain, and only about the rain, and I have never been so happy about weather in my life. I put it in the Blue Book, and the Blue Book went home with me in my bag that evening, and from then on it lived there.

At four o'clock I was in the school library with my JLPT workbook, because the N3 was on Sunday and the reading section frightened me. Fumika was at the next table with a laptop. The librarian called her to the desk about a form, and she went, and left the laptop open.

I didn't mean to read it. I was practising reading. It was just there.

It was a page from a novel website, the kind Jasur reads under his blanket. At the top, a title that went on for ever: Reincarnated as the Villainess of the Seventh Tide, I Swear to Protect the Silent Princess! — Ch. 188 — by Kamome Rose — 20,114 bookmarks. Below it, a paragraph, and a cursor blinking at the end of it, waiting for the next word.

Sir Sardar, the Desert Knight who could not read the wind, knelt before the silent Princess Kotoha…

I read it twice. Sardar: not Sardor. One letter wrong, the way I had got one letter wrong on my first morning, about a girl by a window. It was, I have to say, excellent reading practice. I understood every word.

I looked at the ink stain on the middle finger of Fumika's right hand as she came back from the desk, and for the first time, I thought something of it.

She stopped beside the table. She looked at the screen. She looked at me.

Nobody breathed.

"Aliev-kun," said Fumika, very quietly. "If you tell anyone, I will end you. Article One."

A pause. The air-conditioning hummed. Somewhere a page turned.

Then, even more quietly: "…Did you read chapter 188?"