‘Dammit,’ Camellia said as a puzzle-sized piece of her hand fell into her gin and tonic. She fished it out and put it in her pocket.
‘How are you feeling now, Dahlia?’ the woman asked, looking into the bucket.
‘I feel much better now, really. I think you should take me out of this bucket, I’m feeling a bit stronger, more firm, I don’t want to get stuck in here.’
They gently extracted Dahlia from the bucket and placed her on the bar stool.
‘Is it bad?’ the goo asked.
‘You’ve never looked better,’ Camellia said, as a piece from her head fell off again, and into the goo that was her sister.
‘Ow.’
‘Sorry.’
The woman again observed her tucking the missing piece into her pocket.
Camellia took a sip of her drink, trying to maintain her dignity. ‘Gin should always be drunk at lunchtime,’ she said, closing her eyes and relaxing.
‘If anyone saw me drinking at lunchtime …’ The woman shuddered and looked around the quiet pub, thankful her colleagues didn’t know where she’d disappeared to.
‘I don’t think it’s the drinking they’d worry about,’ Dahlia said.
‘We do need the break,’ the woman said. ‘We have to listen to our bodies. They’re telling us to stop.’
‘They’re telling us something,’ Dahlia muttered.
‘Would you mind helping me with my coat? I’m afraid my other arm is loose now,’ the woman asked Camellia as she now only had her head, her body and one leg in one piece.
‘Has it been this bad before?’ Camellia asked as she removed the coat and surveyed her snagged sister. She looked like a ball of wool, all tied up in strings, difficult to know where she began and ended.
‘It’s never been this bad. It’s happened a few times to a smaller extent but it was manageable, I just wrapped myself up again. I think it needs more attention this time.’
‘That’s what we’re here for,’ Dahlia said and suddenly she was beside them again, fully formed on the seat.
They cheered her return and embraced.
‘You’ve sand in your hair by the way,’ the woman laughed, dusting her down with her free hand.
‘I stink of fish,’ Dahlia sniffed the air, and reached into her bag for her perfume.
‘We were collecting crabs on the beach. Sorry. Maybe I should always travel with a container for you, just in case. Maybe we all should.’
‘Maybe she should stop needing to be contained,’ Camellia suggested.
‘Says you, the walking puzzle!’ Dahlia snapped back.
Camellia and Dahlia ended their harmless bickering to turn their attention to helping their unravelled sister.
‘No this bit goes over here, and this bit here,’ Dahlia said. ‘If you do that, her thumb will be on her arm.’
‘No, no, because her elbow is in a knot,’ Camellia said, carefully following a thread.
‘You’ve tied yourself in knots, sweetie,’ Dahlia said gently, untying her fingers. ‘Seriously, we can’t let it get this bad again.’
‘Says you.’
‘I know, I know.’
‘So what’s up with you?’ the woman asked Dahlia.
‘Do you really want to know?’ Her face turned red, as her issues took centre stage in her mind. She looked ready to explode. But before she had the chance to explain her woes, she was gone again. In a waxy dripping mess on the floor.
‘Fuck it,’ the mess said.
‘Just calm down, stop getting so riled up,’ the woman said.
‘I know, sorry, just give me a minute.’ Dahlia the mush took deep breaths, quivering like a vibrating jellyfish.
Camellia continued the job at hand, gently putting her sister back together again.
‘Is it sore?’ Camellia asked her sister.
‘No not exactly achingly painful, just … confusing, worrying, a distraction. What about both of you?’
‘It makes me feel hot,’ said Dahlia the mush.
The woman used her free hand to fan her liquidized sister.
‘Ah, that feels good. Thank you.’
‘You need to stop letting things build up so much,’ Camellia said, carefully finding where the snag began and wrapping the spaghetti skin around gently.
A piece fell from Camellia’s body again. She tucked it into her pocket. The woman glared at her.
‘What do you do with all those pieces?’ the woman asked.
‘I’ll put them back later.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Dahlia said.
‘Me neither,’ the woman backed her up.
‘Oh please.’
When the woman’s arm was back to one piece again she quickly reached out and pulled up Camellia’s sleeve. Her arm was like a jigsaw puzzle, a faint outline of pieces in light blue veins. Some pieces were missing and she could see right through to the stone floor beneath.
‘Oh my …’ She wasn’t the only one to notice.
‘Turn out your pockets,’ Dahlia was back in one piece and ready for action. She stood up and, against Camellia’s will, turned out her pockets and dozens of pieces fell to the ground.
They gasped.
‘You said it was just one or two pieces now and then,’ Dahlia raised her voice.
‘And you need to chill out and stop having meltdowns,’ Camellia snapped back. ‘If you’re not careful you won’t have anyone to keep scraping you off the floor. We’ll put you back in the fish-stinking bucket, and we’ll leave you there.’
The woman snorted and the three dissolved into laughter, glad to be able to poke fun at their situations.
‘I’m just feeling … more unfulfilled than usual,’ Camellia explained. ‘A bit, empty. Like I’m missing something – I’m not sure how to put it into words.’ But she couldn’t say any more because her mouth fell off, into her drink, stealing her words away from her.
The woman fished it out and slotted it back into place.
‘Well that’s never happened before,’ Camellia said, startled, licking her lips.
‘Camellia,’ the woman said softly to her little sister. ‘You have to start taking care of yourself more. When a part of you falls off you should fix it straight away, don’t let it build up like this.’
‘The same goes for you,’ Dahlia said, looking at the woman. ‘As soon as you feel one little snag, you should get a Band-Aid straight away.’
‘As for you,’ Camellia turned to Dahlia. ‘You need to chill out. Stop being so hot-headed.’
‘I know, I know,’ Dahlia agreed.
‘Putting the pieces back takes longer than you think,’ Camellia explained. ‘You’ve no idea, or maybe you both do. I do try, but then who’s got the time to fix themselves at the end of every day? I just want to eat, sleep and go to bed. Get the day over with.’
‘You mean when you’re too busy feeling unfulfilled to make yourself stop feeling unfulfilled?’ the woman pointed out.
‘Maybe you’d feel more fulfilled if you didn’t keep hiding parts of yourself in your pockets,’ Dahlia said. She lowered herself to her knees and gathered the missing pieces that had fallen from Camellia’s pockets, while Camellia continued gently winding the woman’s skin back together again.
Dahlia helped Camellia, Camellia helped the woman who unravelled and the woman watched her sisters and wondered why they didn’t do this more often. She felt so much better already.
It took time for her toes to regain feeling. They felt numb until the blood started rushing and then, after the pins and needles, the feeling slowly came back. She placed her arms around her sisters’ shoulders and, using their support, pushed herself to her feet again. They walked up and down the snug very slowly, so that her joints could move again, and feeling satisfied Camellia had done a fine job of winding all the important pieces back together, she sat by the fire and allowed the heat to do the rest of the healing.
Back to themselves, the woman and Dahlia looked at Camellia.
‘What?’ she
asked, defensively.
‘It’s your turn. Take off your coat and show us the damage,’ Dahlia ordered.
Knowing there was no point arguing with her older sisters, she removed her coat and her bare arms were revealed. She waited for an attack about her allowing things to go so far, but none came.
‘Right,’ the woman said. ‘You know the rules; all the pieces face up on the table. Start at the edges first and work your way in.’
They were children again, back at the kitchen table solving a jigsaw puzzle together, but this time it was their youngest sister they were piecing back together. Camellia’s eyes welled, and a tear fell, with gratitude.
‘Thank you, I love you guys,’ she sniffed.
‘Oh sweetie!’ Dahlia stopped working to wipe her sister’s tear away. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you two either.’
‘Group hug,’ the woman said, and the three sisters huddled in an embrace. ‘To putting each other back together again.’
‘Hear, hear,’ they held each other tight.
The woman began working on the farm when she was fourteen years old. She and her two older brothers, Yamato and Yuta, were employed to work the farm during the summer months from June to late August, on long hot heavy days during lavender season. The farm was owned by the Chiba family and had fifteen hundred trees with thirty cherry varieties. The farm owner was a quiet man who worked hard; he had a noisy wife whose gift lay in giving orders. They had one daughter, a lazy good-for-nothing whom the woman used to find either asleep and snoring under a tree with cherry juice all over her face, her basket empty of cherries, or sitting under a tree scoffing cherries. It was always one of the two.
She had never eaten cherries before coming here. Her first taste was on the day they arrived, when all the cherry-pickers were summoned to the foot of the family porch for a lesson on cherries: which were the best-tasting cherries, how to identify each cherry, how to pick them correctly. They picked from a nearby tree under the farmer’s guidance and, if they made a mistake, the farmer would whip their fingers with a leather strap. Quiet men are not necessarily soft men.
The woman took an immediate interest in learning about the cherries. Unlike her mathematically minded brothers, this was a language she understood. Throughout the hour-long journey home on the bus and long into the night while everyone else was sleeping, she would read the pamphlets, learning the names of the cherries, learning to distinguish them by colour and shape. During the day she furthered her studies by tasting. She could quickly distinguish the high-sugar no acidity content of the Gassan-Nishiki. The popular large pink Nanyo was a textbook-perfect cherry. The Beni-Shuho had a less presentable dark blotchy outer layer, but its delicious flavour made up for its appearance, and while the hot pink heart-shaped Taisho-Nishiki was her favourite cherry to look at, she didn’t like the taste, therefore concluding that exterior and interior were rarely related – a valuable lesson. The Summit was the purple variety, the Yuda-Giant started out purple but mystically changed to orange and Red Glory, despite its deep red hue, was technically a rare black cherry.
She grew to respect and care for the Hanokoma. It was a soft cherry, but the tree bore too much fruit, which in turn starved the tree of nutrition and caused the fruit to be too sweet. For the tree’s sake they had to prune, but pruning caused a sharp pungent bitterness, and so it was a complex balance that needed delicate handling.
The Hinode was a black cherry, rich in anthocyanin, which was good for eyesight and relieving eye strain. She collected it for her grandmother; but while it was good for her grandmother’s eyes it was bad for her clothes as the stains were impossible to remove.
Thirty different varieties of cherries on fifteen hundred trees. The quiet farmer did not need to whip her fingers many times. She learned quickly. This was a world she wanted to understand.
The trees were low to the ground, enabling younger, smaller workers to pick. Even though she knew it was her job to pluck from the lower branches, she climbed to reach the cherries higher up. She learned to recognize the best-tasting ones from afar.
Each day she would take the bus to the farm with her older brothers, tagging along with them, mostly being ignored. But as the weeks and months working on the cherry farm went by, she became choosy about everything, deciding one morning that she did not want to get on the bus that stopped for them. She wished to wait for the next one, a better one. She insisted. She fought. She told everybody who would listen that this bus was not good enough. Her brothers dragged her on kicking and screaming, against her will. Ten minutes later the bus broke down, and they were stranded, forced to sit in the searing heat while waiting for the next bus to collect them. The following day her brothers listened to her. They got on the third bus and still got to the farm before the first bus had left. The following week, everybody at the bus stop listened to her.
Learning to evaluate the cherries slowly changed her, broadening her perspective on life. She learned to analyse, inspect, and scrutinize the taste, smell, feel, shape and colour of everything.
When asked to dance by a boy at a local dance, she refused him. He asked her friend instead and trod on her toes with almost every step; the friend’s feet were bruised and close to bleeding by the end of the night. The young woman waited for the perfect partner to ask her, someone with an expert sense of rhythm with whom she danced the night away. She chose not to kiss him as he wished, as she knew there was a better kisser in the room. She, like the quiet farmer, wanted the best, and everything in her life required careful judgement. She learned to evaluate her requirements precisely at any given time, and then choose. Sweetness or acidity. Kissing or dancing. Humour or conversation. Entertainment or knowledge. Safety or excitement. Always right, never wrong.
She watched the quiet farmer at work, but soon he was watching her, and learning from her. They all learned to follow the woman, allowed her to be their guide.
She helped the farm grow. The Chiba family bought new land, extended it to forty-seven thousand square yards, equipped it with rain covers, and began family all-you-can-eat days. She encouraged a side business for the noisy wife and lazy daughter of selling the cherry pies, cherry jams, cherry vinegars that they made to feed the workers on their breaks. The quiet farmer won awards for his farm, the noisy wife bought expensive dresses, the lazy daughter was gifted a car.
After four years the young woman walked into the farmer’s office.
He looked up at her from his paperwork and she set down the basket.
‘Mr Chiba, it’s time for me to move on.’
He was a stern man, a quiet man, and he was a proud man. He didn’t beg her to stay, but he offered her more money. When she refused the generous offer he would never considering offering anybody else on his farm, he knew that she had a path clear in her mind and there would be nothing he could do to change it. Witness to the tremendous gift he wished his lazy daughter had been blessed with, he recognized that the woman’s trained eye could see that something better lay just ahead, up on a higher branch. She needed to climb.
When she finished school she moved to the city, where she chose to rent the fifth apartment she saw, to live with the seventh roommate she interviewed. She worked in a factory on a production line. After the first day, she was called to the office.
‘You are not working as fast as the others,’ her line supervisor chided her. ‘You are slow. You just stand there, scanning pieces. I want to fire you now but the boss insists you get a second chance. You have one more chance to move more quickly or you are fired!’
‘But, Mr Maki, I am not being lazy.’
‘You could fool me,’ he said, waving his hand dismissively at her.
‘I’m choosing the best pieces,’ she explained. ‘I’m sure that there is something wrong with many of the pieces that go by.’
He snorted and sent her on her way, but to her utter satisfaction at the end of the day, she knew by the look on her line supervisor’s face that, after the boss had visited the flo
or to carry out testing, her batch was the only one free of any defects.
After a time, she saw a higher, more tempting branch and she left the production line and took a job in human resources, choosing the best people for specific jobs. She was recognized for her attention to detail, her ability to pinpoint the desired character traits and required attributes. The company soared with the right people in the right positions and the team was rejuvenated, revitalized and enthusiastic. She was the secret to everyone’s success.
She agreed to marry the third man she dated, on his second proposal, and they bought the sixth house they viewed. She loved all of her three children from the first second she saw them.
She didn’t trust the two doctors who diagnosed her when she became ill, and against everybody’s advice sought the opinion of the third doctor, who started her on the cancer treatment that saved her life.
To entertain herself, she learned about the Tokyo stock exchange. She watched, she analysed, she plucked. She outperformed everybody, and offers rolled in. She rose in the ranks, stock trader to chief risk officer. But then, when feeling comfortable, she remembered the Hanokoma cherry, how she had appreciated the trees’ complexity and difficulty in bearing their sweet fruit. Complexity and failure made eventual success so much more satisfying. She ultimately became the head of an international I-bank, and given that banks are largely political institutions, she discovered a new strength: she had a natural flair for politics.
She rose and rose, and when the woman found herself at a podium, at a prestigious event, being honoured for her contributions to business and culture, she looked out at the sea of faces, all looking up at her, waiting for her to say something profound. She wondered what to say. She saw her two brothers and their wives, her elderly parents, her children and their spouses, her grandchildren.
She thought back to the quiet farmer on the Chiba cherry farm when she was fourteen years old. She recalled the first day, when they were gathered by the steps of the Chiba household porch. The farmer had stood before them with a bucket of cherries in his hand, ready to begin the first task of identifying the different varieties of cherries. He had lifted the bucket of cherries in the air and instructed them all to look at it. Then he looked them all in the eye, one by one, ensuring he had their attention. After a long silence, he spoke three words that made a deep impression on her and had never left her.
Roar Page 22