‘—of the Tsukamoto wine brothers, the geniuses behind this place. Satoshi, this is Sadie, my baby brother Jonah’s wife. They’ve just moved here for work.’
Satoshi was tall and lanky, somewhere in his mid to late twenties, black hair bleached ashy blonde. He was wearing a tailoreddove-grey waistcoat over a crisp white shirt, which would have been a conservative look if it wasn’t dotted with brightly coloured pins: little glasses of wine, little stacks of books, a map of Tasmania, the Japanese flag, the progress pride flag, another one I was fairly sure was the pansexual flag.
‘Delighted to meet you, Sadie.’ He shook my hand. ‘Genuinely. Fiona needs some reliable babysitters. My bar is in danger of collapsing without her patronage.’
‘Satoshi!’ Fiona exclaimed, laughing.
‘Welcome to Tsundoku,’ Satoshi said, talking to me but wrinkling his nose affectionately at her. ‘Let’s get you a drink. Inside or outside?’
‘Inside, I think,’ Fiona said. ‘I’ll take you out to the back deck another time, Sadie – it looks over the water, it’s beautiful – but I love it in here with the books best.’
Satoshi led us to a table under a chalkboard, the specials written up in the same flowing hand as the engraving on the window. ‘Are we drinking by the bottle or the glass?’
‘Tempting as a bottle sounds, just a glass,’ Fiona said. ‘I left Jonah alone with the kids, and if I expose him to the girls too long, he will take his beautiful new wife and move back to the mainland before you can blink.’
It was only the leaden weight of exhaustion in my bones that stopped me from sayingfuck it, let’s get a bottle, then.The thought of Jonah being so overwhelmed by babysitting that he packed up and got out of my fucking face had taken on a new appeal.
I’d forgotten it lately, what with all the cardigan-y kindness he’d been showing me, but there was a reason he’d been the face of the establishment to me for so long. No matter how snuggly his knitwear was, strip it off him and there was a tweed bro, having a little cry about how hard it was to have a rich well-connected daddy.
That was who I’d blown up my relationship with Chess for. That – how had she put it?That entitled prick from a whole line of entitled pricks.
‘We might take home a bottle to have with dinner, though,’ Fiona told Satoshi, oblivious to the fact that on the other side of the table, I was imagining dunking her brother’s head in the toilet. ‘Oh, and I need a few books too, if you don’t mind. I had to bribe Lex to run interference if the girls get too… themselves.’
‘I can provide all those things,’ Satoshi said. ‘I’ll be back. I’m going to pour you something special.’
He disappeared. Fiona turned her smile on me. I tensed, bracing myself for some horrifying question likeso tell me exactly when you fell in love with my brother.
But, ‘I hope you don’t mind me commandeering you into coming out for a drink,’ was all she said. ‘I love my kids to bits, but God, I need a break.’
There simply wasn’t anything I could say to that. There was no even vaguely truthful response that wouldn’t make me sound like an absolute monster.
‘Of course I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I needed a break too. As I’m sure you could tell.’
Fiona chuckled. ‘If there’s one superpower I’ve developed as both a Fisher and a mother, it’s knowing when two people who love each other very much need a time out.’
At least she was still buying the ruse.
Satoshi reappeared, setting two glasses down in front of us. ‘Isamu finished his special project,’ he said to Fiona. ‘How do you feel about being the first Tsundoku customers to taste the fruits of his labour?’
‘Oh my goodness, honoured!’
‘Has Fiona told you much about what we do here, Sadie?’
I shook my head, preparing to ask many follow-up questions. Being dragged around by Chess had given me a passable wine vocab, and every second we spent talking about this bar was another second I didn’t have to spend lying to Fiona.
‘Tsundoku is one arm of a business run by my brother Isamu and I.’ Satoshi poured red wine into our glasses with a deft and practiced hand. ‘We’re a wine bar, serving wines from many vineyards – as well as selling second-hand books – but we also have our own vineyard, so we like to showcase our wines here, which Isamu makes.’
‘He’s an incredible winemaker,’ Fiona said. ‘Seriously.’
‘Shhh,’ Satoshi said. ‘Don’t let him hear you. You know how committed he is to never smiling. Anyway, this is his most recent baby, a wine he’s been nurturing for a while which I’ve finally bullied him into letting me pour. Meet Bibliophile’s brand new kyoho akai, one of the first wines in Australia made from a Japanese grape.’
Fiona held up her glass, beaming at me again. ‘Cheers.’
‘Cheers.’
I clinked my glass against hers. We both drank.
It tasted like… wine. Nice wine, but wine. I must have heard Chess have a thousand intense wine-bar discussions about bouquets and tannins and ‘the nose’, but despite my acquisition of the language, I could really only distinguish between three types of wine: wine I liked, wine which was good enough to drink, and paint thinner.
