A glum, middled-aged man in a suit called out in a shrill voice, ‘
‘Well, I
The passengers flowed their way around her – not a single person stopped to help her to her feet. They stepped on her and even kicked her.
Her fiancé may have been stolen but perhaps she did have it coming, taking her revenge by crashing their wedding. Though it would have seemed more fitting had the thief and her fiancé himself been the ones knocked to the ground.
Shoko slowly got to her feet, confirming that she had banged her knee quite hard and there would be a bruise forming beneath the fabric of her trousers.
‘Are you OK? That looked bad.’
Shoko stood up. Someone was holding out the wedding favour bag to her. A group of high-school girls were gathered around her, one of them clutching the bag. These girls had been in the same car as Shoko, making enough of a ruckus to disturb the peace and upset the standards of decency, which had provoked the grownups to glare at them.
‘That guy who shoved you sucks!’ The girl stuck out her tongue in the direction of the man who had raced off.
Those fine grownups who had scowled at these girls hadn’t bothered to say a word, but here were the girls themselves, checking on her and picking up the remnants of her wedding favour bag.
‘It seems like whatever it was is broken.’ The girl holding out the paper favour bag shook the contents a little. ‘Should we tell someone who works in the station?’
‘Thank you but it’s fine.’ Shoko smiled as she took back the bag. ‘What’s inside isn’t important enough. But I appreciate you picking it up for me.’
There was hardly anyone left on the platform.
Shoko bobbed her head in thanks at each of the girls as they went on their way, then she leaned against a railing on the platform and inspected the contents of the bag.
A box, weighing more than might at first appear, wrapped with decorative noshi paper personalized with the bride’s and the groom’s family names. Inside was a set of tumblers. The glasses featured a fanciful design that seemed fitting for that shrewd yet dreamy-eyed quiet type who had stolen her fiancé. They were tacky – not to Shoko’s taste at all.
When the groom had still been her fiancé, they used to laugh and make fun of wedding favours like these, wondering who on earth would ever pick out something like this as they flipped through the catalogue. Clearly at some point he’d had a change of heart.
Four out of the five glasses in the set were broken. There was no point in bringing home a tacky gift that was mostly in pieces.
She took them all out of the box, wrapped each one with the paper that had been used to pack the glasses, and disposed of them in the station’s glass recycling bin. She threw away the empty box and the bag in the regular trash bin.
At last, there was not a single remnant left over from that tainted wedding – from her stark white dress to their naff wedding favour, it was all gone now. She felt pleasantly refreshed, as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.
‘Time to go home,’ Shoko said as she started walking along the deserted platform.
She would have expected her feet to be tired from wearing high heels all day, but her step felt lighter. Maybe it was her imagination, and even if it was, best to hurry home before her feet did start to ache. It was still a long way to Ibaraki, the town where she lived.
Shoko headed for the stairs up to the concourse.
Having resolved her feelings of lingering attachment after eavesdropping on the chatter of Et-chan and her high-school friends, there was no longer any hesitation in Misa’s step.
Deftly weaving her way through the crowd, she headed towards the wide stairs that led up to the concourse.
Her boyfriend Katsuya had left her at Nigawa to go to the racetrack, but there probably weren’t that many races left in the day, which meant that she didn’t have much time.
She needed to retrieve her things from Katsuya’s apartment before he got home.
Katsuya lived in Rokko, which was five stations away from Nishinomiya-Kitaguchi.