The Spare Room (2 page)

2

It all started when my father got this idea in his head about sending me to Australia to learn English. He'd always made it plain that I'd join his company when I graduated. I know he's been disappointed that I wasn't very successful academically — that I didn't get into one of the best universities. It didn't worry me nearly as much as it worried him. Funny, isn't it? It's my life, and if I hadn't wound up going to business college instead, I wouldn't have met you, Satoshi. And for me that made up for anything I thought I might have missed out on. I mean, I didn't want to go to the college in the first place because I wasn't interested in business. Just like you. But there you go — we both ended up there with all those girls who didn't make it either and who would probably end up in offices making tea for their bosses. If we've made such a success of our country, how is it that the choices still seem so limited? Anyway, you know Dad, he just wanted me to get through the course and join the company. He'd decided that I would join as the English-language expert who would deal with overseas clients. This would be particularly important if he managed to expand as he hoped. He told me all this — I can't say discussed because I didn't get a word in edgeways — and he completely ignored me when right at the very end I said I didn't want to go to Australia. If you'd been going too it would have been different. That would have been great, Satoshi. Anyway, Dad simply acted as if he hadn't heard me. He's so used to never being questioned or stood up to. He's so … but you know all this anyway. You knew him, what he was like. Is still like. And, if anything, your father was worse. Remember how we'd always complain that we had no say in the way we lived our lives? And that's what was too much for you in the end, wasn't it? Things have changed a bit now, of course, because even though I did go in the end, it didn't turn out the way my father expected. I do speak English well. I should after all the time I spent there. Stolly always used to say bars were the second-best place to learn a language. And we spent a fair bit of time in bars. But it was living with the family and then travelling around Australia that made the difference — being out on my own and not being able to use my first language. Having to use English all the time. But that's all ahead, telling you about that.

I thought I'd heard the end of it. But one night I sat down for dinner with my mother as usual. Dad was never there for dinner with us. He'd always be working back at the factory office or going out with business associates. And then he'd come home drunk and Mum would prepare his dinner for him and run an
ofuro
for him. Like she was a servant. It's still like that. After being in Australia I find it really hard to accept. I do everything for myself now, Satoshi. You'd be amazed. My washing and ironing, and lots of the cooking, of course. Although Mum still finds that a bit strange, I can tell she's proud of me. Anyway, she seemed kind of sheepish that night, I remember. There's an expression in English about having something up your sleeve. And that night Mum was wearing a kimono and she did have something up her sleeve. An airline ticket. Booked and paid for. She pushed it across the
kotatsu.
I picked it up and looked at it, then I pushed it back. I don't want to go, I said. She nodded. She knew how I felt. But she just pushed it back across the table again and we sat there in silence. I started thinking about you and what you would have said or done in my shoes. And I started thinking that maybe in Australia there'd be a chance to do what we always talked about. Maybe there I'd be able to make a few decisions for myself and shape my own life. At one point it was exactly as if you were in the room talking to me. Or as if we were on the phone like old times. I could hear your voice having a conversation with my mind. And in the end I picked up the ticket. I never thought it would be possible for someone to look pleased and sad at the same time, but that's how my mother looked then. Pleased and sad.

Once I got used to the idea I came to like it. I went to the college library and got out books about Australia. I saw pictures of the outback. Uluru. Rain forests and beaches like you've never seen. And down at the bottom, Tasmania, where I was going. That's where the language program was set up. In Hobart. Hobart was the capital city so I thought it must be pretty big. It looked very green and beautiful in the photos, but somehow unknowable. Almost as if it wasn't real. I'd never been out of Japan before, so it was difficult to imagine myself physically in another country with different sounds and smells and customs and language. In Japan it's so, well, so Japanese. Everything is so Japanese. The only foreigner I'd ever spoken to was that American English teacher at the college. I wasn't doing English then though. I only did it in high school like everyone else. But I remember he spoke to me one day when we were both watching a soccer game on the television in the refectory. I was shocked. I kept saying sorry because I couldn't understand what he was saying to me. I panicked because I knew my English was very poor. After a while my brain unfroze and I realised that he was actually speaking to me in Japanese. In perfect Japanese, with a little accent. Isn't that amazing? We laughed about it and then someone got a goal and that was that. It was not a lot of foreigner experience to base any expectations on, was it? I knew I was in for a shock, but, because I had no way of imagining how it all might be in Australia, I couldn't tell what kind of a shock. I couldn't tell anything. It was going to be a leap in the dark. I was anxious about going by myself, but I knew other students were going into the same program at the university there and I would be living with a nice Australian family. So I'd have a home. I wouldn't be lonely. I would enjoy myself. That's what the program officer at the college told me. She also told me what things to take with me. She gave me a list that had all kinds of Japanese medicines and teas and little Japanese presents for my homestay family and new friends. As the time drew closer she also gave me details of the family I'd be living with. I read the information over carefully. There were a lot of rules too — about behaviour and responsibility and attendance at classes and sharing chores in the home. I wondered if I was really up to this or if I was kidding myself. Perhaps I should have felt flattered that my father thought I should go at all, that I could handle it. He didn't talk about it though. My mother helped me take care of arrangements like getting a passport and a visa and the necessary travel bags. And a million other things. After a while I couldn't wait to get going. I'd had enough of those dull classes and without you there they were so much duller. One day I skipped classes altogether and went to sit with you in the sun. I brought Kirin beers, your favourite kind. And after I drank the third one I had to lie down right there for a while. I must have gone to sleep, because when I opened my eyes there were some people looking at me very disapprovingly. But I knew you wouldn't mind, so it didn't matter to me. In a way, after that, I felt you were going with me after all.

3

Time seemed to drag all of a sudden and I was keen to get going, keen for the change, for new experiences. I was still scared, no doubt about that, but I had a feeling it was going to be a kind of test for me. All the time I'd been going on about independence and living my own life and that kind of thing, and here was a chance to escape, just for a while, the tight confines of my life in Tokyo.

When the day finally dawned I was already dog-tired. I hadn't been able to sleep. My mind was still mad with trying to imagine what it might be like there. Trying and trying, like a computer someone's forgotten to shut down, and there it is whirring away. I felt as if I had a little light blinking inside my head. What will Hobart be like? What will the classes be like? What will my homestay family be like? My mother was agitated and anxious. She fussed around me as I gulped down some oolong tea and double-checked that I had everything. She made me promise I'd eat well and eat some of the Japanese things she'd packed because she was sure that my digestive system was more suited to Japanese food than western food. Finally I was all set and, although by then I would rather have been going back to bed to get a bit of sleep, I stood on the threshold of our apartment and looked around the living room. The
tatami
floor, the
kotatsu
, the big thermos full of tea set down next to it. Just for a moment I wondered what it would be like when I saw it next, saw my mother next. What would I be like then?

My mother bowed, as it was after all an important occasion, and she started to sniff a bit and I knew that once I'd gone she'd probably cry. Her only child was off into the big wide world. My father was already at the office. I was to call in and see him to say goodbye. In Australia it would probably seem strange that no one was going to the airport with me, but you know what Narita Airport's like. It's a two-hour drive out of Tokyo if you're lucky, and through lots of toll gates. No one goes to see people off. There was no hugging from my mother. That's not the way families behave in Japan. Not my family, anyway. When I'd tell Australians that, they'd find it very strange, but it was some time before I had the language or the confidence to talk about such things. I wonder why it is that customs develop as they do. Why is it that in some countries people kiss on the cheek or the mouth when they meet, whereas in others they hug or shake hands, and in Japan they bow? I even heard that in New Zealand Maoris greet each other by pressing their noses together. It's a strange and varied world, that's for sure. But I didn't know any of these different ways then, at least not first-hand. I'd seen movies, but those places and customs didn't seem real. Now that I've lived in another culture even movies have changed. I can get inside them more. That's how it seems, anyway.

I took a train out to my dad's factory. I walked in towing my suitcase, which suddenly seemed ridiculously large — like towing a small trailer, really — and very top-heavy on its four tiny wheels. I'd never realised how big the factory was. It seemed to take forever to walk from one side over to my father's office. At each sewing machine the machinist gave me a bow without stopping her fingers from working. I bowed my head a bit and I felt very foolish, I remember, bowing at each machine, which seemed to throw me more off balance with my suitcase. Finally it occurred to me to leave the suitcase, so I abandoned it in the middle of the factory floor, which caused a bit of a giggle among the women. I briefly wondered whether, when my father expanded and moved some of his business offshore to factories in the Philippines and Thailand, these women would have jobs. Unemployment wasn't something that had worried anyone in Japan for a long time, as you know, but now, so it was said, Japan was in decline, its economy sliding as surely as if it was sitting on its backside coming down the side of Fuji-san. I remember doing that once, after watching the sunrise from the top. I remember seeing all the drink cans and the sweets wrappers and thinking
so much for our sacred mountain.
But I didn't have time to dwell on that, and, besides, it was precisely that kind of talk of declines and recessions and interest rates that bored me so totally at college. At least I wouldn't have to hear that kind of talk for some months. Six months, in fact. That was the idea, anyway, but possibly extended for a year, depending. On what exactly was never made clear.

You'll probably have some inkling of the way I was feeling by now, Satoshi. My father was never a father who put you at ease. I always felt he was more like the school inspector, making sure that you were all in order. I was feeling a bit tense. But if I wanted to I could look at this as my father believing in me enough to send me to Australia. For his own ends, yes, and against my will initially, yes, but still he must have had some faith in me. It's not something he would ever put into words. Nor would I expect him to. That would only embarrass us both. Or would it? Now I know I would like to have a bit of praise, like to hear a direct word that is not a command or a criticism. Now I know what a bit of praise can do. But this was then. Before everything happened. Before Australia. And I still had to face my father. And not face him at home in his
yukata,
wet-haired from the
ofuro,
or over the occasional breakfast soup together, or stretched out on
zabutons
in front of the television. This time it was on his territory, where he was kingpin. This was his factory, and it had been his father's before him. And, it had to be supposed, it would be mine at some later date. That thought was enough to stop me in my tracks outside my father's office. What would I do with a factory? But then I gave myself a mental shake, knocked and opened the door. My father wasn't there. I wandered over to the far wall, which was covered in photographs. There was one of my grandfather and his first workers, and one of my grandfather and my father as a young man. And there was one of my grandfather, my father, and me as a very small baby held in my father's arms. I leaned in close to the glass over that photo. How strange, I thought. My father holding me in his arms, and I can't remember a thing about it. Memory, I've decided, is a very tricky thing. I think about Australia and there are some things I remember so vividly, but they're not always the things you think you'd remember, not the big things, or the outwardly important things, like graduating from class. They're often the smallest things, things you don't even know you've stored away in your head until they pop up much later. Once at work I was chopping vegetables or doing something else that I can do with my eyes closed and suddenly I found myself thinking about the book that I read to Daisy the night before I left Australia, some of the funny characters in it. And how she kissed me goodnight. It makes me smile even now as I write this. Dear Daisy. She must be jealous as all hell.

Just then my father opened the door and looked completely surprised to see me there, as if he'd forgotten I was coming in to say goodbye. He asked me a couple of questions, nodded a lot, told me he hoped I would behave appropriately, and then made it clear he had work to get on with. We stood there, both a bit awkward, a bit shy, a bit nervous even. That's speaking from my side, I suppose. It's hard to tell how my father felt. But we did a bit of leave-taking, with me bowing my head and shuffling. I wish we could have at least shaken hands. But at that stage I'd never shaken anyone's hand at all. And the thought of it frightened the wits out of me later on the plane when I realised I would probably need to shake hands with my homestay family, or at least the father, or … I realised all of a sudden there were a lot of things that weren't on my list and that I should have asked the program officer before I left. I consoled myself with the thought that they would be as nervous meeting me as I was meeting them. And that's a bit of how I felt there in my father's office, guessing at what was going on in his mind. I knew I was only guessing though. I suppose we always are. But some people give more hints than others.

Finally I made my escape. I would like to have given my father one of those searching looks I'd given our living room, so that I could indulge in wondering about changes that would occur, in him, in me, before we met again. I hadn't thought to do that with my mother, but somehow my mother was more known to me, whereas my father managed to be an enigma. I thought about how he achieved that, as I walked back to my marooned suitcase. And I decided it was through silence. I thought of the rare nights when he was home soon after dinner-time, or the even rarer nights when he was there for dinner. He maintained this silence about him as if he had loftier things to think about and didn't want to waste his energy. Perhaps he just had nothing to say and didn't feel driven to fill the spaces.

As I reached my suitcase I realised that I felt a bit sad. Who knew what lay before me, what adventures or trials out in the unknown land of Australia, and this was all the send-off I was getting. No fanfare, no hugs, no wise words. Just then there was a commotion among the women all down the line of machines. They were motioning to me and pointing. When I looked around, there was my father standing outside his office. Standing there waiting, as if there was something he'd forgotten. Perhaps he did have some words of wisdom for me. Perhaps he did have a hug for me, I thought, as I retraced my steps. I had to stop myself from running and I felt self-conscious with my father watching me approach and all the women lifting their eyes as long as they dared from the machines. I stood in front of my father and had at least a moment for that searching look I'd wished for. Then he held out his hand. In it was a white envelope, the kind we put money in. I looked at him and at the envelope then reached out and took it. I thanked him and he said goodbye and turned back to his office. I stood still for a while and watched him settling down at his desk, then I turned and walked back to my suitcase. As I walked to the door, again with my suitcase wobbling with a life of its own, one of the women winked at me and I grinned at her. I couldn't help it. It felt, at that moment, as if that wink was the best possible good-luck charm I could have for my journey to Australia.

Travel is meant to be romantic, exciting. But as the airport bus began to weave its way out of Tokyo I wondered about that. Why is it that way? Is it because we are refreshed by the new and the different? It can't be because of the actual getting there. At least, not going somewhere by plane. It must have been different in the old days of sea travel, where the journey was equally as adventurous and important as the arriving. Planes are more pragmatic, aren't they? But I could feel a spark of anticipation and excitement even as we set off. Around me wheeled concrete and glass skyscrapers, streets and footpaths, bridges, rivers with roads built above them, people going about their business. Mobile phones were at almost every ear, I noticed, so that people walked along talking as if to themselves. Everyone hurrying, the air metallic and clogged from exhaust fumes. I looked at it all through that bus window for the first time as an outsider might, someone from another country. Everything so familiar to me that I rarely noticed it became so odd, weird even, that it appeared as if in animation, not real at all. I shook my head to try to clear it of this sense of distance, but it didn't work. As the bus rolled along, my thoughts shifted from the view outside the window to the blank inside my head — Australia.

I think it was then, on the bus, or it might have been later on the plane, I took out all the papers to do with my program. I shuffled through them until I came to the pages about the family I was to stay with. I read over everything and tried to form a picture in my mind. The family name was Moffat. There was Alex, the father; Jessica, the mother; and two children, Daisy who was nine and Angela who was seventeen. I rolled the names around in my mouth, trying out the sounds. It was like having very pointy and awkward sweets in my mouth instead of the usual smooth round ones. I read further. A non-smoking, pet-free household was the way it was described. There was a little section about hobbies and interests: theirs were drawing, cooking, going to the beach and bushwalking. I tried to remember what I had put down — probably movies and driving. When I filled the form in, it looked so pathetic and I asked myself why my life was so … thin. I remember thinking I'd better get a few more hobbies and interests while I was in Australia. It's almost funny when I think back on it, how I was wondering about them and they would have been wondering about me, and we all were so very wide of the mark.

The plane trip was pretty uneventful. I read the inflight magazine, which was full of information about Japan that I never knew before and found interesting. Perhaps it was then I first had an inkling that in going off to another country I might actually end up learning about my own. I had a window seat and the seat next to me was empty. I played a little game with myself and pretended that you were sitting there and we were sharing every new experience.