Page 133 of When Worlds Collide
And still, we didn’t talk about it.
My mum’s surgery date was in a few days, and I couldn’t fucking concentrate. I’d somehow gotten through the entire day on autopilot, following around the seniors and doing whatever they needed me to.
When I thought no one was looking, I aimed a swift kick at the cardboard box of packing peanuts, sending it flying across the floor of the warehouse with a satisfying hiss as it scraped across the rough floor.
“Whoa, what did that box do to you?” A jovial, New Zealand accent called over to me, and I felt my shoulders slump in annoyance, and yes, embarrassment.
“Nothing,” I grumbled, as surly as any teenager might be.
“Bullshit, you’ve been in a right snit all day. What crawled up your ass and died?”
Hana moved towards me, stepping into the circle of light cast from the only window in the storage cave. I admit, I had been hiding out down here, under the pretence of ‘reorganising’.
I took a breath, choosing my words, choosing whether or not to even tell her. I hadn’t even told Becka. It felt like the more people knew, the more solid it became. A thing to deal with, something I couldn’t ignore.
But Hana didn’t know my folks. She’d never come to stay with us in Cumbria, she’d never had dinner with us. They weren’t real people to her.
I wouldn’t have to deal with her grief, like I knew I’d have to deal with Becka’s.
The decision was only half-formed in my head when I blurted out, “My mum has breast cancer, and I don’t know if I should stay in Korea, or go home, and I’m so fucked up I can barely think.”
Hana pulled up short, blinking at me like whatever she’d thought I was going to say, this was not it.
“Well, fuck.”
“Is that it?” I said.
“Wanna go get drunk?”
A pause. And then; “Yes, please.”
A couple hours later, Hana and I were sat in a bar a few streets over in Gangnam. It was a trendy, but noisy bar, seemingly modelled on a typical sports bar from the States. A football match was on the big screen on the far wall, but people seemed more interested in the baseball game being shown on the smaller TVs held above the bar.
I, however, was more interested in beer.
We sat at a small table out of the way, companionably sharing anju – snack food platters – between us of savoury nuts, dried squid, pizza strips, and some dried fish. Being a total wuss,I mainly stuck to the pizza and nuts, which only made me thirstier, thus… more beer.
“Whoa, slow down there, English.”
“England,” I corrected. “You call me England.”
“I call you all sorts of shit you don’t understand.”
For some reason, I found this incredibly funny, and it took me several minutes before I was able to lean back in my chair, gasping for air. Hana just watched me, playing with the label of her green bottle.
“You’re really going through it, huh?” she asked, in what I imagined was a sympathetic tone.
“I just wish I knew what the right thing to do was,” I lamented, feeling the warm buzz of beer bubbles as they danced pleasantly through my veins.
“What does your boyfriend say?”
“We’re not really doing a whole lot of talking right now.”
I swirled the tip of my finger through a ring of condensation on the table top.
“That bad, huh? What’d you say his name was, again?”
Something about her tone made me look up at her. She was a little fuzzy around the edges, which was probably why her expression seemed… triumphant?
