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The fish hits the dock with a wet slap and thrashes as Yuki fumbles out the tape measure from his backpack, exhilarated, breathing hard. “That’s got to be at least forty centimetres! – forty-five, maybe!”
“W-w-what are you talking about?”
“That fish!”
“What fish?” says Haru.
Yuki looks at the fish. Its tail beats wildly against the stone; its scales shimmer dirty silver. Seawater is splattering. “The fish,” he says. “This fish.”
“Um,” says Haru. His expression shows only tender concern. “What fish?”
The fish is right there. Its gills flutter less rapidly. The slap of its body on the dock is weaker. Yuki nudges its belly with the toe of his trainer and its flesh is soft. “The one I just caught,” he says, but it comes out far more uncertain than he thought he’d meant it to.
“Um.” Haru wrinkles up his nose. “Um, um ummmm. Yuki, I don’t get it – you haven’t caught a fish.”
“But,” says Yuki, and Haru tips down his shades to stare, eye to violet eye.
“Your lure came loose,” says Haru. “You’ve got to tie it properly, Yuki! You’ve got to do pro – per – knots!”
The fish is limp. Its mouth gapes open. “I – must have forgotten,” says Yuki.
“Well,” says Haru, “don’t.”
There’s a splash, a few moments later, and when Yuki glances up from the lure he’s carefully retying, the fish has gone. Haru’s reeling in his line, humming, content.
There’s a damp smear across the stones, dragged from where the fish had lain to the edge of the harbour wall: but Yuki doesn’t ask.
---
“You’re a fish?”
“Fish, fish, fish!”
“But,” says Yuki. His gaze flickers across and up and down Haru. No scales, no gills, no fins. “But you,” says Yuki, and Haru tips his head. Sunlight winks blindingly bright from the plastic lenses of his plastic shades.
“Yuki?”
The icebox sits between them on the dockside, its lid flipped back. Inside there’s one long silver saury, half-packed in ice with its frilled fins miserably fluttering. Haru caught it. Its guts are in there with it, sloppy and pale, sealed in plastic and buried in ice.
“Are you upset about me being a fish?” says Haru, conversationally.
Yuki shuts the icebox. “It’s fine,” he says.
“Yu-u-uki?”
“I’m not upset!” says Yuki. It was Haru who gutted it, too – slit its belly open and scooped out the insides with his penknife, humming the Enoshima song all the while. “I’m – nothing. It’s nothing. It’s fine.”
---
He comes down from the shower with his hair damp and his feet bare. The radio’s playing the weekend countdown and he pads through the living room to soft tinny pop and the rapid thud-thud-thud of a knife on the chopping board, and he stops where the smooth floorboards turns to kitchen tiles, and he wipes away the drops rolling down inside his collar and he watches. The saury is gutted on the counter with its scales scattered like glitter around it, raw pink flesh opened to the air.
“Is it my go yet?” says Haru.
“How about you wait till I’m done with the knife?” says Kate.
There’s a pan already heating on the stovetop. There’s the hot pepper smell of horseradish. Haru chops his hand against the counter and copies Kate as she dices down spring onions into little white rings. “I like fish best when it’s not too cooked,” he informs her.
“Is that so?” says Kate.
“Mmm-hm!”
A mildewed log lifted just enough to show the heaving mass of woodlice squirming in the dankness beneath: inside Yuki’s mind, something is turning slowly, blackly over. Something is coming slowly, blackly loose. “Haru,” he says, and Haru jolts around toward him, one hand clenched tight on the narrow handle of a paring knife.
“Fish for supper!” he announces, as though it isn’t always, every day, every night.
Yuki’s hands uncurl and curl again at his sides. They’re shaking; they’re cold, clammy. “I’m not hungry,” he says.
“But, um, Yuki, I caught it! This one’s my fish! You should have some!”
“Your appetite might come back,” says Kate, “once you find out how delicious it is.”
“But –”
“Why don’t you just try a little?” Loose scales flake away when she wipes down her hands on her apron. Her voice is gentle. Her smile is kind. “Haru caught it, after all. He’s ever so proud.”
“Ever so proud!” Haru mimics immediately back. He’s jumping on the spot, knife still in hand. “Proud, proud proud proud, Yuki, c’mon, Yuki –”
---
In the first bite he reluctantly takes there’s a bone. It jabs into the roof of his mouth; he coughs; he spits it furtively into his hand and lays it down on the rim of his dinnerplate. It’s hair-thin, white, fragile as a feather stem and just as light. Across the table Haru sits in short sleeves, skinny elbows propped either side of his plate, plucking bones from his own dinner with sounds of interest every time one’s particularly long, or particularly flexible, or particularly stuck between his teeth. His forearms are pale and bare and narrow and when he reaches to pat Kate’s shoulder the bolt of his wrist juts out and Yuki’s staring: he can’t not. The shift of the tendons in the back of his hand – the curl of his knuckles – the char-streaked grilled fish on his plate and the small pile of small bones – and if that’s a fish, and if Haru is a fish, and if the shallow bob of Haru’s throat is one fish consuming another fish, a fish Haru caught and killed and disembowelled and cooked himself, then –
“This fish’s got lots of bones,” says Haru, thoughtfully.
Abruptly Yuki pushes back his chair and stands. “I’m gonna go to bed,” he says. “Thanks for the meal.”
“You haven’t eaten much,” says Kate. “Are you feeling okay?”
“I’m – probably sick. I think I’m sick. Good night,” he says.
“I’ll come too!” says Haru.
“No,” says Yuki: and Haru, already halfway to standing, sits back down with a bump.
---
“If there’s something on your mind,” says Kate, “and you’d prefer not to tell me, you know you can always tell Haru.”
Yuki doesn’t answer. He’s sitting hunched against the headboard of his bed, duvet wrapped around his shoulders. A line of light cuts through the darkness of his room where his door stands cracked open.
“He cares about you,” says Kate. “And he’s worried about you, Yuki.”
“Are you?” says Yuki. His voice is dry.
Kate is backlit by the lights of the landing; her expression lies in shadows. “I’m worried that you’re worried,” she says, after a moment, “but I trust you. I trust both of you.”
“You trust us,” says Yuki.
“I do,” says Kate.
“Okay,” says Yuki. “Okay. Well, I’m – I’ll see you in the morning.” She doesn’t move. He stares down at the glossy copy of Tokyo Fly Fishing Quarterly spread across his lap, though he can’t read a word in the dimness. “Good night, Grandma.”
“A friend who cares about you the way Haru does,” says Kate, ever so soft, ever so gentle – “that’s a friend you should treasure. Good night, Yuki.”
His door shuts; the bright slice of light from the landing winks out. The text of his magazine is indistinct in the dim moonlit shadows. There’s a picture of a fish. He doesn’t recognise the species. It doesn’t matter. He wants to cry, but he’s afraid of what Haru could do with the moisture.
---
They’re on the first floor balcony. Haru’s put his feet through the railings and he’s kicking them from the side, one flip-flop dangling. “Yesterday,” he says, “when I was in the sea, a huuuuuge big fish tried to chase me.”
“Did it,” says Yuki.
“Mm! But you fished it out, Yuki, this morning – the huge big fish you caught before breakfast, that was it. The one that tried to chase me.” The sun is bright and Haru’s straw sunhat is cocked at an angle Yuki would read as careless, if he still thought Haru was capable of any action not minutely calculated to terrify. “So I’m going to have it for supper.”
Yuki’s back is to the railings and his knees are pulled in close, but he pulls them closer. “You’re going to eat it,” he says. His voice feels hollow and his mind feels haunted and he hasn’t slept through the night for the last two weeks – sloppy fish guts – narrow fish bones – fish scales showering in a constant rain, sick confetti – night terrors jolt him awake and sweaty with fear and there’s Haru, always Haru, and cold mackerel for lunch and sea bass for dinner and fish skin gently blackened, crisping away from the flesh. “A fish tried to chase you once,” says Yuki, “so you’re going to eat it.”
“With some fava beans!” says Haru. “Um, and a nice cherryade. You can have a teeeeeny bit if you want, but you can’t have all of it, okay, Yuki?”
Yuki presses his forehead to his knees and doesn’t answer. Below them, in the garden, the sprinklers are whirring, droning on.