Transition and Restart, book one: Arrivals

Chapter one, 2016, school start, part three

Yes, he was a foreigner despite looking like a Japanese teen with marginally dyed hair. No he wasn't fluent in Japanese. Yes, he spoke English. No, he didn't come from the USA. Yes, there were other places than the USA where people spoke English, hence the term 'English'. No, he didn't come from England.

So tiresome. His plans to keep a low profile didn't seem to work. He was too much of an outsider. Just how much of an outsider his classmates apart from Yukio didn't know. Only a few did, including his guardian.

Thinking of her made him ashamed. His legal guardian. Thirty years old and part of the police force. She really was adorable, more like a daughter to him than a younger sister. But she hadn't been adorable when he first met her, and he had hurt her badly.

Ulf turned left at the corner and brought his bike straight into the wind. Has it really been a year already? Those first days here had been madness, and that interrogation hadn't helped at all. He hit the brakes, wheeled into a playground and switched from his bike to a bench. One year ago. Gods!

And in his mind he travelled that year back in time.

"Are you trying to tell me that unless I can express the feeling of loss I'm not an adult?"

Ulf waited for the translator to relay his question. When the unexpectedly callous affirmation was delivered he sighed.

"Look," Ulf started. "I could talk about a funeral, my grandparent for example, because that's what I assume you expect, but I won't."

In one corner the female police twisted uncomfortably as did her older uniformed companion, but the investigator in civilian clothes just smiled condescendingly. Ten years my junior, tops. Probably younger, and more arrogant in his belief that he's seen life. "I could," Ulf continued and let his memories wander a decade, "try to make you understand the ugly feeling of relief you feel when your wife calls you from the hospital."

The female police shuddered and shook her head, silently begging him to stop, but Ulf relentlessly moved on: "You know, it's funny how calm you are in a taxi from work to the hospital when your daughter has her final treatment. You realize that you'll have your life back again." The older uniform held the hands of his younger colleague in sympathy, and her hands were clenched into hard fists. I'm stirring a bad memory here. The arse facing me could stop this if he wanted, but I'll take him down if he doesn't.

"Did you know that back home in Sweden, when there's no more hope, they let you inside? You can see the monitors spewing numbers that even a layman can understand." Ulf glanced at the woman in uniform. She was whispering something in Japanese. Ulf didn't need to understand the language to know that she was pleading with the other two to end the interview. The translator had gone ashen as well and translated tonelessly from English to Japanese. There were no longer any phrases to be translated the other way.

"You go thinking: Hey kiddo, when did you grow so small?" Ulf locked eyes with the investigator. "Because that bony ghoul in the hospital bed is still your little girl, and all that plastic tubing makes her look so much smaller than the laughing bundle of chaos you remember from a year earlier."

The sound of a sudden gasp reached him from the end of the table. Then the female police suddenly turned expressionless as if something had died inside her.

"The numbers get lower and lower, and you watch those damn displays in trance, because that way you don't have to look at your dying child." But I watched my wife as well. Ulf forced down a lump in his throat at the memory. She sat there staring out the window. She had nothing left by that time, but the shit hole here doesn't need to know how she had to make all the ugly arrangements alone earlier that morning, so that I wouldn't be disturbed during my business meeting.