‘He did?’
‘Yeah, you were the fridge lady. We used to blame you if we’d run out of milk,’ jokes another. He comes over to introduce himself.
‘Well… welcome, everyone. I can’t believe you’re all here.’
‘More of us should have come for the funeral,’ a girl at the back of the group adds. ‘I’m Robyn.’ She approaches to give me half a hug. All I know about you is that you have five brothers whose names all begin with R. That’s all I have, these little factoids and big group pictures of them singing karaoke or outside an izakaya getting drunk and eating five hundred sticks of yakitori.
‘You’re all here now. Happy for it to be a reunion of sorts as well,’ I announce.
‘Thank you for sorting it all. How are you coping?’ Robyn continues.
‘With the memorial?’
‘With Tom’s death.’
Wow, Robyn. Talk about rendering the room dead quiet. Sometimes I cry myself into a bottomless void and talk to him. Other times I tick along and go about my day. There’s no happy medium. They all look at me with pained expressions, with sympathy but also like they’re waiting for me to collapse to the floor with grief.
‘I’m OK. I’m just glad you all could come. You all meant a lot to Tom.’ The girl at the back of the group is definitely crying. I need to change the subject. ‘And as a treat from me, I’ve organised the evening for you.’
I have more handouts. Is this too much? Tom would say this is too much because I printed them in booklet style but they’re all foreign to the area and I don’t want to deal with lost sheep.
‘So I have maps and a table booked for six p.m. at a Japanese restaurant not far from here. And then into a karaoke bar across the way.’
Pablo and another teacher high five. It has a touch ofTop Gunabout it.
‘You did that for us?’ asks Robyn.
‘Tom loved you all very much. You became surrogate friends. It felt important to treat you for coming all this way.’
That girl at the back is really sobbing. I feel Naoko’s arm fall to my shoulder.
‘We loved him too.’
Oh, Tom. Your influence stretched far and wide. What terrible advice and wisdoms did you share with this lot? You were the fun one, I bet. You started the parties and poured all the shots. Did you teach them how to cook that pasta with the Doritos topping? Expose them to the supposed genius of every Adam Sandler film? I see them itching to tell me their tales, pour out their memories. People do this to me all the time. They tell me a story that will warm the cockles but then be like a punch to the guts. There’s sadness that I wasn’t there to witness peak Tom in his prime, at his liveliest. Afterwards, they will give me that look. It’s a muted sad look of tender resignation. It says,I’m sorry. That’s all I have. Hold me?It will be a night of that, won’t it? A night of hugging.
‘But first, how about a drink?’ I say.
Lots of drink.
* * *
Wow. Karaoke. I experienced karaoke when I went to Japan. It was my second night and Naoko took me to some building that looked like a bingo hall with its lights and open foyer and I sweated cobs to think I was going to be performing ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ in front of an auditorium of Japanese people who I hoped were both tone-deaf yet would be appreciative of my bravado in trying to entertain them for the evening. Instead she led me inside a small room where there were neon lights, sofas and tambourines and huge tome-like bibles of songs to choose, like a phone book of all the songs, ever.
Naoko had brought me along with local friends and a range of different teachers from the school. I observed at first. I watched as alcohol got wheeled into the room, whisky that was strong enough to embalm your bodily organs, and I noticed that the singing wasn’t meant for show, for an audience. It was a release. It was belting out a tune as loud and as hard as you could to let go of something within the very depths of your soul, the sheer meaning of catharsis.
I watched as a young lad sang a song by Queen. He channelled his best Mercury and, boy, he went for it. He even lunged. And so when it was my turn, I did the same. It would have felt like an insult to do otherwise. I went safe with Elvis because it had meaning and I think he’s an artist where one can achieve an acceptable tone, safer than Adele, for example. I sang, I danced, everyone joined in. The joy was unfathomable. I remembered a moment bent over in laughter trying to curl my lip and for one moment I did but didn’t think about Tom. Naoko got it completely. We sang until 1 a.m. that night and, the next day, she got her elderly father to take me there again and we sang the whole Beatles back catalogue together over cups of green tea.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask Naoko now, straining to hear her as a group hammer out ‘I Want It That Way’. That’s not harmony, lads, but you crack on. This room is not that room in Shunan – it’s a strange, digitalised version in Bristol that’s dark with suspiciously sticky floors. There are also no tambourines, but the fact this gang are back together seems to be carrying the evening. Naoko is scrolling through her phone.
‘I am very drunk,’ she tells me. ‘I have sent many selfies to my fiancé back home.’
‘It’s five a.m. back there.’
Naoko covers her face playfully. I’ve seen her down whisky back in Japan so a couple of jugs of watered-down cocktails should be nothing to her, but there’s a sense of drunken wonder in her eyes. Soon, she will be married to a man called Hiroshi so I suppose this final fling with travel acts as some sort of hen do, too. The biggest of adventures. She liked those.Come, Miss Grace, let’s go somewhere today, she used to say to me. We had these tiny folding bikes and we’d cycle down these narrow urban Japanese streets, punctuated with the smallest of houses and cobwebs of telephone wires that linked into reaching tower blocks. And then we would turn a corner to a vista, a shrine. It was so silent and green and we would sit there to take it in, to reflect, to pause. With two coffees, piping hot in their tins from a vending machine, and bento, wrapped in cloth like newborn babies, all prepared by her father. I ate it all. I didn’t question why there seemed to be a fascination with mayonnaise.
To me, Japan was full of these quiet corners. It jumped from moments of complete density and action to corners of peace where I was allowed to contemplate what had just happened in my life. I will always adore Naoko for letting me find those corners. She grabs me in for a selfie and I oblige, teeth gritted slightly. Peace signs. We have to do peace signs in every picture. Everyone’s been doing them tonight. Her body is still swaying. To the music? Or the alcohol?
‘It’s the cider,’ Naoko tells me. ‘In America, cider is like apple juice. It’s not alcoholic so when you bring us to the Coronation Tap? Yah, we thought you took us to a juice bar.’
