AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I’d felt light headed walking out onto the piste. My hands had been clammy, my gloves wet before I’d even started. I fought the dizziness until the final touch when I dove into a lunge. Suddenly, black spotted my vision and I had a moment of extreme vertigo. In a split second, it was over.
I still remember my father’s hand on my nape, large enough to be wrapped threateningly around half my neck. Taken out of the moment, what he’d said might not have seemed so chilling, but make no mistake, his words had been a threat.
“Failure is not an option. If you will not willingly improve, then it will be exacted out of you, inch by inch.”
I feel sweat beading on my neck just thinking about it.
That’s why Coach Krav was hired. To work me into the ground or until I’m a gold medalist, whichever comes first. The ends justify the means in my father’s eyes, especially if it has to do with the Matsuoka name.
He didn’t always used to be like this. When I was growing up, he put me into various sports to see if anything stuck. He came to my games and matches and cheered me on because he was the best dad.
Or so I thought.
Now I know that he was a concerned buyer anxiously checking in on his foal’s growing value.I didn’t particularly shine at anything, not until fencing.
It came naturally to me for some reason.
When I was nine, he’d entered me in a ten and under contest as a Hail Mary, and I ended up winning the tournament. The football classes I’d taken had given me good footwork, the dancing good mobility. Boxing made my dodging and defensive skills shine so that when I picked up my rented épée that day, I impressed the room full of pros with my potential.
Sometimes I wonder how different my life would be if I’d just sucked that day. Would my father have given up on his athletic aspirations? Would I have been the perfect debutante and made my mother proud?
That second one is more likely than the first.
My mum is English, she grew up in a posh suburb of London. She more or less ran away from a tyrannical mother and absentee father and decided to move to Tokyo for a summer.
She was two weeks into her hostessing job in a popular restaurant when she met my father, a Japanese businessman.
Her pursuit of perfection for me comes from the large chip she has on her own shoulder, both from criticism she received at the hands of her mother and from not being the flawless society girl on my father’s arm. She constantly had to prove her worth to his business associates – and, more importantly, to their wives – and fight to gain the respect of her peers.
Even now, almost twenty years after they were married – albeit only five of them happily – she still gets judging looks from across the ballroom like she’s a mistress, not a wife.We left Tokyo ten years ago and moved to Hong Kong and still, the sharp tongues followed.
She was put through the ringer so she knows how cruel people can be. She doesn’t want that for me. Her version of helping me is criticizing me before they can, making sure I’m not leaving anything open to their scrutiny.
Her efforts are misguided but not entirely bad intentioned and that’s what makes it so hard to hate her, even when I really do sometimes.
So, unless we go back in time to before my mum left home and redirected her to Sydney instead of Tokyo, there’s no changing that part of my fate.
“We should call for the chef, I’d like to speak to him,” my dad says, snapping his fingers at a nearby waiter.
It’s the peak of rush hour in a sophisticated restaurant and my dad wants to call the chef away from the kitchen. It’s the height of rudeness to even think about doing that now, but he doesn’t care. Worse, he feels entitled to this man’s attention solely because he sees him as being beneath him. Chef work is hand work and in my dad’s world the only time you use your hands is to sign a contract or raise your paddle to bid on something.
He snaps his fingers again, twice. Loudly.
Mortification crawls up my neck. “Father, I’m sure he’s busy, the restaurant is full. We shouldn’t–”
“Boy,” my dad calls across the room, and now I want a hole in the ground to open up and swallow me. Then I’d like to be shot down to the Earth’s core and burned alive to ensure I don’t have to sit through another second of this madness. “Bring out the chef.”
“Father,” I try again.
“Enough, Nera. If I want your opinion, I will ask for it. Just eat your food and be quiet.”
Rage simmers hotly inside me, unbridled and impossible for me to control as I usually would.
“That’s better,” he says, taking a sip of his wine and smacking his lips. “So, tell me, how’s fencing? Kravtsov will give me the unvarnished truth soon enough, but I’d like to get your take on it.”
“It’s going well,” I say from between gritted teeth as I try to smother my temper.
“How many touches scored?”
