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“Ta-chan, you don’t have to do this.”
Mieko tried to pull herself out of his grip, just to stumble forwards. Her skin was alternately clammy and boiling hot to the touch, and her eyes couldn’t seem to focus on anything. She’d snapped one of her heels earlier, and now was walking on her bare feet across the grimy street, with him leading her around the bits of broken glass. He’d offered to carry her, but she’d said she was too heavy for him (he was certain that wasn’t true, her limbs looked like they’d snap under light pressure).
“I’m just walking you home. If I was really being overbearing, I’d be dragging you off to hospital,” Shinada replied.
“It’s really nothing, I just tripped over, that’s all.”
“Didn’t they find you unconscious on the floor? Kyoko called me in a panic, something about ‘Milky-chan has fainted and I don’t know if she’s okay and you’re not busy right so-’”
“I was tired and fell asleep. I’d be fine to walk home by myself,” she complained, leaning heavily against his arm. She was shaking slightly, and kept losing her grip on his hand.
“No way.” He grasped her hand tightly in his, feeling how slim and spindly her fingers were. “You need someone to look after you. Anyway, almost to your place.”
“How do you know where I live?” She giggled slightly. “One of my clients is becoming my stalker…”
She really must have been out of it. He’d been at her place just last week (him confessing to her that he hadn’t eaten in two days had led to her dragging him there to share what she had left in the cupboards). Didn’t sepsis or meningitis or something make people confused like this? He swore he’d heard about something like that. Or what if she’d caught something horrific from one of her clients, or she had some rare genetic…
“You worry too much, Ta-chan,” Mieko said, her voice wavering slightly. “It’s just a cold. It’s cold at the moment, and I’m sensitive to the temperature, and it was sort-of early in the day, and I wasn’t feeling great, so I just fell back asleep. Maybe I overworked myself a bit-”
He grabbed her arm tightly, and she turned around, a little surprised. Coherent speech was all well and good, he supposed, but she’d walked clean past the flats where she lived. Her place wasn’t so bad – the heating worked properly, and the walls never creaked that much, and the hot water didn’t take as long to start. Benefits of being out of the centre, he guessed, though that meant that she had to wake up earlier and got home later (which he didn’t think he could tolerate).
“Hey,” he said, trying to make his voice softer. “You completely fainted, you need to rest. You feel like you’ve got a bad fever too, it could be something real bad.”
She sighed, but when he moved to help her up the stairs, she let him. She rifled through her pockets for the keys, and unlocked the door. Her flat was neat (at least compared to his, with no rubbish anywhere) but perhaps the most bare living space he’d ever seen. He’d asked her why, once, and she’d only responded with some story about her brother going overboard on selling unnecessary stuff. That could be true – the place had only two rooms and still managed to seem completely bare. Her brother kept his stuff in the room with the bed (he slept there, it seemed) she’d said.
When she got to the couch, she slumped over. He sat next to her, and pressed his hand against her forehead. Burning hot, like he’d expected. He grabbed a blanket from the floor and wrapped it around her shoulders. She’d left her coat behind at Futo Momo, and had refused to take his jacket. He probably shouldn’t turn the heating on without her permission.
“Uhh, do you have a thermometer or something?”
“Ah, right. It’s in the cupboard under the sink. The third drawer.”
He opened the drawer and rifled through the stuff within it. Old mail, a plastic bag, a packet of batteries, a bag full of medication boxes, an empty jar… Ah, there was the thermometer, a relatively new one. The screen switched on after only pressing the button once.
“You should probably check your temperature. Here, I found it,” he said.
He passed the thermometer over to her and she stuck it under her tongue. She seemed fully aware and mostly awake, at least. She didn’t have purple marks on her arms or legs (that was meningitis, right?) and she didn’t seem to be in agony or anything...
“Ta-chan, you can go home. I’ll be fine by myself.”
“Nah, you’ll probably overwork yourself and pass out again if you don’t have someone to watch you.”
Mieko laughed weakly. She’d been basically the same since he’d first met her. Would work herself to death if her brother didn’t rely on her. She’d survived as long as she had in that industry for a reason, he supposed.
“It’s not like I have anything to be doing, anyway.” He put his hands behind his head and shrugged sheepishly. “Hey, uh, do you have anything in the fridge? I could make you lunch. Or, um, I could get you some. I have more money than usual, another good job… aha.”
“You can cook?”
The incredulity in her expression was a little embarrassing. Yes, he knew how to cook. He’d moved out of his parents’ place when he was sixteen, of course he knew how to cook. He wasn’t great, sure, but he could cook entirely serviceably. Just because he lived off a diet of out-of-date conbini meals and cheap restaurant food didn’t mean he was one of those idiots who’d burn water. Sure, he’d left his cooking pan in the sink for almost a month after he’d burnt noodles onto it, but it wasn’t his fault that he’d been tired.
“Aha, yeah.”
“I don’t have much. There’s… ah… some natto and a bit of a bag of rice left in the cupboard? And maybe a couple noodles in the packet on the shelf below that. And half a carton of milk in the fridge.”
“I’ll go out and get something then,” he replied. “No, it’s fine. I have enough money right now.”
“I can go, I have enough money to-”
Mieko tried to push herself to her feet, only to stumble. He’d only noticed then that her face was flushed red. She looked exhausted beyond anything, like even speaking coherently used up all her energy. Her bare arms were covered in gooseflesh, and she was visibly shivering.
“Hey, sit down,” he said. He helped her back to where she had been sitting, wrapping the blanket back over her – she looked a little embarrassed, but at least she hadn’t fallen again. “What’s the temperature on that thermometer?”
He took it out of her hand. 39.5 degrees Celsius. Definitely a fever, though not concerning enough for him to drag her off to hospital. It was really just like her to do this, to work herself into the ground. Maybe the persona she liked to act out, the motherly one, was wearing off onto her real personality. She had helped him without any benefit to herself a fair few times, and he couldn’t imagine what she was getting out of that other than it being some kind of inherent compulsion.
“I’ll be back once I’ve got some food, ‘kay?”
----
The cold outside was sharp. The winters weren’t normally this vicious, but this year had been much harsher than usual. The calluses on his hands had began to sting whenever he was outside. He took a deep, shuddering breath as he opened the door.
Futo Momo was never properly heated, so the fact that it still got enough clients to keep Mieko busy was surprising. Apparently, they pay off the landlord of the place by giving him sessions for free (he hadn’t exactly heard that from the most reliable source, though). Not super sketchy, but probably not the nicest place in town – that’d be Club Eden, which was a hostess club and real proper place (unlike the clubs where he normally got sent to photograph). Not that he could afford to go there, especially not while still owing them money (it wasn’t his fault that he’d expected to be compensated, really).
How much money did he have, anyway? A little more than usual, seeing as he’d won that bet and his most recent ‘journalism’ job had paid the amount that he expected (for once). The owner of that place had even given him extra money, to make sure the photos were all from flattering angles, so to speak.
He rifled through his pockets as his walked. The crumpled 5000 yen note was still in his pocket (way too much, that guy’s loss) and he found a 100 yen coin and a few smaller coins alongside it. The other pockets only had lint, a bottle cap, and some pocket tissues. Hey, 5167 yen wasn’t bad. He even had money back at his flat, so it wasn’t as if this was all of it. Not much point in trying to pay off what he owed when he only had that much money, so he might as well spend it.
The M store was warm inside, at least. He searched the shelves to see if anything was discounted. An expired bento (score), a bottle of that lemon drink (vitamin C was meant to be good for illness, right?) and a pudding got tossed in the basket. If he could find the ingredients for something simple, cheaply, that would be good…
Man, why was the idea of getting something wrong here making him feel like a rabbit in the headlights. He was just doing a favour for a friend, it wasn’t as if she was going to kill him if he fucked it up. True, he’d probably feel kind of bad, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
Trying his best to shrug off those thoughts, he continued to pace around the supermarket. The chicken there was kind of cheap, so if he got eggs and some dashi, he could make oyakodon (which was easy, and he didn’t think that he could mess up). Not terrible in terms of nutritional value either, cheap protein. When he’d first got here, he’d eaten so many near-rotting conbini meals that he’d nearly gotten scurvy, so he did try and think about things like that nowadays. Mieko probably ought to as well, seeing as she was so skinny.
It worried him sometimes, honestly. She looked like she’d gotten thinner since he’d first met her, and she was sick pretty often. The dark circles under her eyes had gotten more prominent, certainly. He remembered having his hands on her waist and feeling her hip and rib bones sticking out, feeling fragile as the bones of a bird. It wasn’t as if there was anything he could do about it though.
Once he’d grabbed the ingredients he needed, and paid, he rushed back, attempting to beat the cold. It was sharp enough that he felt out-of-breath. He fumbled with the door to Mieko’s flat, the door slightly jammed.
With a loud crash, the door flew open, and he stumbled forwards. He managed to keep his shopping bag off of the floor, luckily, and somewhat salvaged his pride. The hand which he’d used to stop his fall was a little bruised, though – and worse, it was his right hand, which meant it would be painful after a few hours of practice. The floor was clean, at least, which he couldn’t say about his place.
---
He was fairly certain she was asleep when he switched the oven on, seeing her crumpled on the couch. She was muttering words in her sleep, entirely incoherently. Probably from fever-dreams.
He set to cooking the rice. There was a rice machine on the counter, but it seemed to be broken, so he grabbed a pan out of the cupboard. Seeing that Mieko was sleeping peacefully now, he let himself zone out a little as he cooked.
Was Mieko a good cook? She seemed like the type who would be, especially seeing as she’d been basically looking after her brother for so long. Or maybe that was just stereotyping. It’d be kind of cute if she was a really bad cook, even though she seemed so responsible and mature. Maybe she was the kind of person to burn water (and also burn the pan).
She’d better not be really sick. It had better just be a cold. He thought about her enough already – whether the club kept her safe from bad clients, whether she had enough money to pay rent and buy food, whether she’d eventually start losing work as she got older – and if he tried to help her more it would probably come across as invasive and creepy. Or like he was looking at her like a charity case (which’d be stupid too, because he was even worse off than her). There wasn’t really a way to say ‘I think about you constantly, but not like an obsessed weirdo who’d try to follow you home’.
At least he was doing pretty well at the cooking, he thought. Or, at least, he was doing normally. Nothing had burnt yet. The dashi and chicken was cooking (he’d even found scallions in the fridge, and a tiny amount of sake in a bottle in the cupboard) and the rice was almost done.
“Hmm… mhmm….”
He heard a yawn behind him, and turned to see Mieko waking up. Briefly, the thought passed his mind that she looked really cute – her normally neat ringlets in a frizzy mess from the friction of the fabric, pink lipstick smudged over the corner of her mouth, makeup stains on the arm she’d had her head rested on. She was still sick, though, so that shouldn’t be important.
“Hey, are you feeling better now?”
“A little.” Her voice sounded strained and sleepy.
“That’s good,” he replied. “You can go back to sleep if you want, it’s not as if this is complicated.”
“’m not really tired. You’re doing a good job, you know.”
“Heh, thanks,” he said, putting his hands on the back of his neck awkwardly (again).
“You’ll make a great husband to some lucky woman, you know.”
“Over something as simple as this? I’m not sure. Besides, I think I’m getting too old for that.”
He continued to mix the eggs, feeling the weight of Mieko’s head resting on his shoulder. Out of fear that she’d see how his face had flushed pink, he didn’t look back at her. She felt skinny resting against him, too, her bony hips pressing into his side. He wished he could be a real man for her, to be able to take care of her. It was a stupid thought, though, and honestly condescending. She was better at surviving than him. Smarter too.
“If you’re too old, then I’m a rotten hag,” Mieko said, forcing a laugh. “You know what they say about Christmas cake. No one wants it after the twenty-fifth.”
“It’s bullshit! Like I always say, women are like wine. They only get better as they age.”
“Maybe I’m just too worn out.”
“That’s not true either! You need to stop listening to whoever’s saying stuff like this. Once you get out of here, things will be better. Besides, you’re pretty enough that men who are your age now will probably still be wanting you when you’re sixty.”
“I appreciate the attempt at flattery, Ta-chan.”
“It’s true.”
She laughed again, her voice hoarse. Moving so that she was leant against the kitchen counter, she turned so she could be looking him directly in the eyes. She did look tired. But she was more focused now, and more aware, and looking at him intently.
“Ta-chan, would you want me as a wife? Even though I’ve turned forty, and have spent more than half of those years working in dodgy massage places?”
“Sure. If I had enough money to sustain more than one person,” Shinada replied. “Though it’s not like marriage is your only choice. You could leave this place, and find a job which you could live off.”
“If I did, would you go with me?”
“Hell yeah, if I could afford to. Maybe we could run away together – that would be romantic, huh?”
She laughed again, and although her laughter was still raspy and quiet, it sounded warm this time. A pink blush was spreading across her cheeks, and he wasn’t sure if it was from the fever or not. She really was attractive, and despite what she said, would probably still be in five or thirty years. Even though so many years in Nagoya had visibly worn her down, she seemed more willing to talk back than when they’d first met (she’d been quieter then, and perhaps too willing to put up with his complaining without so much as a comment). He liked that, he thought.
“It’s nice to think about, even if it’ll never happen.”
He nodded, and ruffled the top of her hair affectionately. The corner of her lip pulled up a little. Man, if there was anyone in this place he could trust to always be honest with him, it was her.
“Ta-chan,” she said, her voice quiet.
“Yeah?”
“If you’re planning on lining up to be my house-husband, you’re going to have to learn not to burn things.”
He cursed as he moved the pan from the stovetop. Mieko giggled loud enough to make him (briefly) wonder if she was faking the sore throat. Her laughter eventually turned to rough coughing, her body tensing from the effort.
“And maybe you need to go back to sleep,” he replied, dragging her by the hand towards the couch.