There's been a strange kind of humidity in the air that reminds me in a way of Malaysia. In Kajang, in the kampung, it is was never cold, or even cool, but sometimes, near dawn, you could think that it was. It was always humid, so the heat seemed to suspend itself in the air, and as I said goodbye to whoever was in the house when I left on Tuesday morning, I couldn't tell if I was hot or cold. By the time I was at work and pulling my mask out of my bag, I was sweating, but once I stopped moving it settled back into that liminal space between hot and cold, where I looked out the window of my office and stopped working and just stared for a bit.
We've had our coronavirus scares over the summer, each one seeming more unlikely in retrospect then at the moment they happened. There was one night I started coughing and couldn't stop. There was the time everyone had a slight fever in March. This week, it was Mia's sore throat that we were told required a test so she could go back to school. I spent the day trying to get through the government website and in the end just went to a testing centre on the University of Birmingham campus, walking past the school of education with Mia in her pyjamas, holding her hand. The whole experience feels like the beginning of the end of everything, where we start to realise that the systems don't work and the fires that happen every year are getting bigger and there is no one to help us. You can't say that though, can you, when you have people looking up at you, expecting you to do something. Mia's sore throat passed and she went back to school — I went on the radio to talk about it, and the DJ said the experience of trying to get her a test sounded like it had circus music in the background. It did, I said, except that if she were actually really ill, I would have been terrified, the truth being worse actually — I was terrified, I just got angry to hide it.
Our yearly anniversary of coming to the UK passed and I made a point to plan something for it, fish and chips, and Beyond Burgers for dinner, not because I'm particularly happy to mark the date anymore, but because we needed something to celebrate this year. I wanted to ask Yoko if she regretted all of this, but I knew the answer wouldn't be simple and the question itself was the sort of thing I would think about, not her. I want black and white answers — no, I would say now with everything that has happened in the last three years. Conclusively, it wasn't worth it. In Japan, I lived the consequences of my decisions — here, I've forced them on everyone around me, my partner, my family, my in-laws, my own parents. Anything that happens is the result of that choice, any difficulty — a form, or a customs fee, or a lack of good-paying jobs, or planes that won't fly — don't exist if we weren't here, if I hadn't made this choice on behalf of all these people. Here, every problem is a British one, every car driving too fast or silly law or incompetent leader or stabbing: they are all British, primarily British, occurrences. How else can you read it as a foreigner. If we weren't in Britain, it wouldn't be British.
The truth is not that simple, of course, no one ever said it was despite my urge to make a consistent narrative in this novel I've been writing about my life where I used to be the protagonist. Now, my children, who are capable conversationalists and see my weaknesses and can exploit them, are the main characters. They say things like your tattoo has faded beyond recognition, what did it even say. They say I said something and when I dispute it, it turns out I'm actually wrong. I did say the thing I said I didn't say. I've become like the father from some Russian novel who is always in another room, absent except in flourishes, a necessary plot device, but not the most interesting person most of the time. And for all the talk of coming to the UK, this is not their story — it's mine and it's a story that's run its course without an ending. It just trailed off. No one remembers Japan, the blue and white Mini-Cub I rode to and from work, or their Mum's apartment before we married, where she had her whole life together that I just crashed into, a sloppy American tourist breaking glasses by accident and sputtering out Japanese verbs and taking whatever opportunity was presented. The story they know doesn't start there; it started here, in the same country that they are in now, with no dissonance in the narrative, Japan and America, places that you can visit, or see on TV, but not real in the way they are for me, like a deep trench underneath me as I tread water on the surface. Nothing is British here, it just is the thing it is. There aren't British problems, they're just problems.
We finished our dinner and although I kept turning back to my own nostalgia, there was nothing really to say. Here we are, another day in a pandemic, something we have lived with for so long it feels normal. I slouched down in one of the chairs we bought for camping, having eaten too much, Yoko starting a fire from dried branches and wood we have leaned against the back shed. The kids playing on Tik Tok, the sun setting, and the house on Victoria Road, the thing they've only know, glowing in the late light. In another world, this wouldn't be our reality, in another world, things would have kept going like we had agreed when we first met and I was less effective in my ambition. When I ran, but I ate meat and prayed and wasn't so crazy. I'm sorry, I say at some point during the day, when something else minor, something British, has not gone right and we are on the edge of things falling apart again into bitterness and frustration, the veneer of patience and duty that can slip down suddenly and expose the rotting undergrowth of resentment. It's a tension we've lived with for years, I realise, the consequence of entering this cave, and losing our way. It's not a cave, but if it helps to say that, to conceive of it that way, I'll say it. I've never said the right thing, and now I can't even try. I'm sorry, it's my fault. I didn't know. You can say, in some other world, it wouldn't be like this. What else can you say.