Excerpt: The Shut Ins by Katherine Brabon
I
Mai
Winter to Spring, 2014
I wake up and know that something is not right. My face is hot, and my chest, stomach and arms are covered in sweat. In my whole body, I feel an unnatural heat. Across from me, J sleeps, one thick arm over his forehead, loud breaths. It’s the alcohol, spreading like a wildfire through me. With J’s every breath the nausea increases. I run and vomit into the toilet.
J comes to stand over me.
‘What is it? You’re sick?’
I keep my head low.
‘Are you pregnant?’ he asks. I can’t hear any tone in his voice.
‘No!’ I spit into the toilet.
I crawl back into bed, even though it’s a Saturday morning, when I would normally have somewhere to be or errands to get done. J brings a cold cloth for my forehead, a glass of water. The next hours, I have dark, strange, liquefied thoughts. I remember something I had forgotten. Hikaru and I, when we were young, probably thirteen, left Nagoya together one weekend. Although we took the subway alone at that age, and the local bus, we had never left Nagoya without our parents. We took a train to Yokkaichi. It was not far, less than one hour from our homes, but it was a different city - a place where our parents had never taken us. Not somewhere we had to be, but somewhere we had chosen simply by looking at a map of Nagoya station.
We took a Kintetsu line train to Yokkaichi Station. We got off the train and walked past convenience stores and takeaway food places. It was just the two of us, beneath the long fluorescent lighting that makes every station seem like a city of the same world. From the outside, the station was tall and white, with large bluish windows on one side, a few trees at the front. Around us were concrete and roads and signs for shopping malls. The sky was blue. We looked at each other and smiled. We walked away from the station, which felt like ridding ourselves of our last safety. We came upon LaLa Square shopping mall. We went inside, passed restaurants with food displays, a cinema, a cosmetics shop, a candy shop where we filled our hands with plastic-wrapped sweets in many colours. We went into a gaming parlour and tried to win a toy but lost every time. People old and young sat in front of gaming machines in rooms that seemed to be made only of light and noise. The mall was just like Nagoya’s shopping malls, but it was also very different. Everything was significant because nobody had brought us here and nobody would tell us when to leave.
I could see that Hikaru was happy. I guess you could say he looked like he was exactly where he was meant to be, under the precise conditions he needed.
We went back outside, our eyes shocked by sunlight. We returned to the station.
‘Do you have any more money with you?’ Hikaru asked.
‘Not much.’ I pulled a few coins out of my pocket. ‘I don’t think it’s enough for two train tickets.’
We went to the information help desk at Kintetsu-Yokkaichi Station, where Hikaru explained that we didn’t have enough money to get back to Nagoya. The woman took us to the police office at the station and a man arranged for us to be driven back to Nagoya at our parent’s expense. Hikaru gave them the address of the Satōs’ apartment. Mrs Satō paid the fare to the driver, with a thousand apologies, a horrified face. My father laughed when he heard. Yokkaichi? Couldn’t you choose a city with a little more class? Haven’t you heard of Yokkaichi asthma? It’s a dirty place Yokkaichi! My mother was angry - mostly, I think, she was ashamed that we called Mrs Satō and made the Satō family pay for our trip home.
*
The morning nausea continues; my temperature remains high. Hikaru is in my thoughts all the time, like he is no longer alive and is haunting me. I know that I would like to see him, but he has not replied, has not come out of his room.
After a few days, J buys a pregnancy test and says, Do it. I refuse; I have nothing inside me, I tell him. I promise there is nothing there. It must be a virus, or the after-effects of drinking at the work party. I take several days off work. I spend those days drifting in and out of sleep, drinking soup, always thirsty and too hot to be comfortable.
After one week I am not as sick, though my body is still warmer than usual. I return to work and my desk where, surrounded by lesson plans and textbooks, telephones and colleagues, I write more letters to Hikaru. I recall our trip to Yokkaichi. I ask him, does he remember it? Does he remember the construction site where we sat together before school, where he stayed for the day while I wasn’t strong enough to do the same? I don’t know if he remembers. He never responds.
The visits to Hiromi Satō become regular, almost ceremonial. Hiromi accepts each letter and gives me an envelope in return. I have around ¥70,000 now. I don’t know what to do with it. It does not seem like enough money to do anything significant, and I do not know what something signiciant would look like.
As the weeks pass I feel less guilty, more content with this thing inside me, this gestating secret.
***
This is an excerpt from The Shut Ins by Katherine Brabon (Allen and Unwin, 2021). It is available here.
To read our review, click here.
Katherine Brabon’s debut novel The Memory Artist won The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award (Allen and Unwin, 2016), was shortlisted in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and longlisted in the Indie Book Awards. She was co-winner of the 2019 David Harold Tribe Prize from the University of Sydney for her short fiction, and a runner-up in the Gwen Hardwood Poetry Prize in 2020. Katherine was an ambassador at the Melbourne Emerging Writer’s Festival in 2019 and enjoys an active role in Australia’s literary community. The Shut Ins is her second novel.