Chapter 10: Hunger
Rinko cursed as she twice missed pushing her cigarette between her lips. Her hands were shaking and her lips were quivering making it almost impossible to smoke; but still she persisted. A gust of wind caught her hair and wound it around her face making her curse again as the smell of burning hair reached her. She grabbed at her cigarette with one hand and pushed her hair back with the other. As she exhaled a swirling grey cloud of smoke she began to feel a little relief; but her respite was short-lived as her stomach contracted and growled again. She hurriedly clamped a hand over her mid-section and pushed her cigarette between her lips again, taking a long draw on it as her eyes wandered over to the cheerful little roadside café at other side of the road.
Sitting on a damp rock with nothing to sustain her but a handful of cigarettes and a half-drunk bottle of mineral water was starting to try Rinko's endurance. She had long crossed the line from hunger to starvation. Her every muscle ached from continually running from Kevin Mask and she had sweated into her clothes leaving her with a burning desire for a hot bath.
"Damn you Mantaro," she grumbled through a mouthful of smoke.
She hoped that he was alright but she also hoped that she would reach him soon. She had not expected to spend any great amount of time on the road – Kevin had been right in that assumption at least. She was not really sure how she had expected her pursuit of Mantaro to go, but she did have an image in her mind of Mantaro and herself hiding in a quaint little cottage somewhere in the hills. He would go outside and chop wood for a fire and hunt for food and she would stay at home and cook for them both and make clothes.
Rinko paused, frowning deeply and drawing on her cigarette again. That was hardly an exciting dream for a fifteen-year old girl and it was not even the sort of dream she would have wanted for herself at any stage in life. And yet still it seemed soothing to think of it.
It was romantic.
Romantic?
Rinko slowly ground her cigarette into the rock at her side. She did think that running away with Mantaro and living in a remote location with him was romantic so did it then follow that she was in fact in love with him?
Suddenly Rinko felt very small and afraid.
She was not scared of being in love. She not quite as enraptured by tales of candlelit dinners and moonlight picnics as her friends Tamaki and Keiko were (she was more of a practical person like Mari) but Rinko did still appreciate romantic gestures. She had never pictured herself as a homely type who would happily retire to the life of a housewife: yet she had just found peace in the thought of playing that exact role with Mantaro at her side.
It was almost as though he had changed her somehow.
Thinking a little harder on the matter Rinko realised that Mantaro had changed her. She had been a tough, independent, almost tomboy like girl before she met him, and yet since he had entered her life she had become gentler and more emotional and her entire life had become caught up in Chojin wrestling in much the same way Mari's life had been all about Suguru and his exploits a generation earlier. And that, for Rinko, was the real stumbling block. She did not want to become just like Mari and yet the more she thought about her future and Mantaro the more likely it seemed that she was deemed to follow in Mari's footsteps.
Rinko's mind suddenly went blank as her mouth began to flood and she was forced to swallow repeatedly to clear it. Her nose was picking up the warm and welcoming fragrances of freshly made miso soup, pork noodles and sweet green tea. She was beginning to understand why dogs dribbled saliva when they were hungry because she was almost certain that she was doing the exact same thing right at that moment. She could not understand why the smell of food was suddenly so pronounced since up until that point she had only caught the faintest whiff of miso on the air when the door of the café had been open and the wind had blown in her direction; but as a shadow fell over her she suddenly found the source of the smell.
Rinko slowly turned her head and tilted it back to look up at the darkened figure towering over her. Kevin was persistent, she thought irritably, and now he was going to torment her by indulging in breakfast whilst she sat and starved.
What a monster.
Rinko grunted and turned her head away from him. She tried to keep her head up high and maintain her dignity but promptly failed in her mission as the wind blew her hair wildly over her face and into her mouth and her stomach began groaning in hungered complaint. She struggled to smooth her hair back and started to stand intent on walking away before Kevin could anger her again, but as she started to lift herself from the rock she suddenly spotted something at her side.
"What's that?" she asked bluntly, pointing at the small tray balanced on the rock at her side.
"Where I come from we call it breakfast," Kevin replied.
Rinko looked down at the tray and carefully studied its contents. There was a small bowl of miso soup, a medium bowl of pork noodles and a half-empty pot of tea alongside an empty bowl.
"I didn't ask for your charity," she said stubbornly, crossing her arms and turning her head from him.
She sat back down next to the tray, silently telling herself that as soon as Kevin left her side and she was confident that he would not see her, she would gorge herself on the food and drink before kicking the tray and the bowls on to the road to give the impression that she had cast them aside out of disgust. Feeling a little happier in the knowledge that she would soon get a hot meal and the satisfaction of spiting Kevin – which was really how he deserved to be treated after what he had done to Mantaro – Rinko allowed herself to smile a little.
After what she felt was sufficient time for Kevin to have left her she turned back, starting in alarm as she spotted him sat on the grass a short distance from her side, his legs crossed in front of himself. He had apparently finished his own meal but he was still supporting a bowl of tea in one hand. Rinko's initial anger at his presence was momentarily replaced by curiosity: the food had clearly been eaten and some of the tea had been drunk but Kevin's large iron mask was still firmly in place over his entire head. She watched him carefully as she decided that he would have to take the mask off in order to finish his tea and if nothing else she would get to see what his face actually looked like.
It was an odd concept. Rinko had often wondered what Mantaro's real face looked like but she had never even considered what Kevin might look like. In fact, she thought to herself, she had never even thought of him having a face at all. Mantaro's face had been a more realistic ideal as his rubber mask was moulded to his features and showed all of his expressions, unlike Kevin's unmoving iron helmet. Also, Mantaro had occasionally torn his mask and of course Kevin had started peeling it off during their confrontation in the final round of the Chojin Olympics which had afforded Rinko a clear view of Mantaro's features from just below his nose downwards and a shaded view of the sides of his face after he had bitten down on the bottom of the mask and the sides had stretched and lifted.
From what little she had actually seen of Mantaro, Rinko had thought that he looked quite cute.
But she could not even begin to picture how Kevin might look. She tried then to think of any Englishmen that she knew: but the only two that came to her mind were the soccer player David Beckham and Jack the Ripper, a monstrous man she had learnt about at school, who had become famous for murdering and mutilating women. Although neither really helped her picture Kevin's face she did find it quite amusing that one had the appearance of a suave and sophisticated gentleman and the other was a monster, and that the two combined made Kevin Mask's personality.
Kevin produced a straw, seemingly from nowhere, dropped one end into the bowl and fed the other end through the eyehole of his mask down to his mouth.
"That's stupid!" Rinko spat angrily. "That's the most stupid thing I've ever seen!"
Kevin ignored her, apparently drinking his tea as the liquid began shooting up the straw and draining from the bowl. The moment seemed to drag on until eventually the bowl emptied and Kevin placed it down and pulled the straw from his mask. Rinko watched him gather up his bowls and stack them back onto his own tray. He then started across the road to return them to the café. Rinko was so distracted watching him leave that she almost forgot all about the food at her side; only when another gust of wind brought the smells of the warm food to her did she turn from Kevin to the food, delighting that she finally had the chance to eat without him seeing her.
She hurriedly poured herself some tea and then grabbed up the bowl of soup, lifting it to her lips and gulping down the contents in a way that would have made Mari faint to witness. Once she had finished the soup she hurriedly dragged her sleeve across her mouth to clear any residue it may have left before greedily gulping down some tea and then turning to the pork noodles. She moaned happily as she munched her way through the noodles, which tasted divine to her starved senses.
"I thought it was pretty poor myself, but I suppose you can't really expect much more from a substandard establishment like that."
Rinko froze, a wall of noodles hanging from her mouth making her look like a fat-cheeked cthulhu.
"I think you have something in your teeth," Kevin added.
Rinko tried to swallow but found herself stuck, her mouth jammed with food. She briefly wondered how Mantaro managed to stuff food into his mouth the way he did and not die of indigestion. She chewed as vigorously as she could in an attempt to regain some dignity, inwardly cursing as Kevin stood casually over her, watching her every move as though he found her predicament entertaining. She thinned her eyes at him in the hope that a stern look would deter him; but still he did not budge. Deciding that her secret was out anyway Rinko proceeded to finish her meal and drink before calmly stacking her bowls on her tray.
She quietly stood with her tray and gave Kevin one last scowl before spinning on her heels and marching across the road towards the café. Once she was inside the café she chanced a backwards glance, rejoicing as she saw that Kevin was still standing where she had left him, presenting her with an ideal opportunity to escape him. She quickly deposited her tray on the nearest table and ran to the toilets at the back of the café where she wasted no time climbing up to the window and throwing it open. She flung her bag out of the window and scrambled at the window-frame, hoisting her head and shoulders out through the opening.
The drop on the other side was a little higher than Rinko had expected it to be and she was sure that it had not been so high from the inside, but she was determined not to waste her chance to flee and so she pushed onwards wriggling the upper half of her body out of the window. As her hips passed through the window-frame she momentarily found herself stuck. Her weight rocked from one end of her body to the other and she waved her arms about at her sides to keep her balance silently hoping that nobody could see her stuck in her prone position.
As she finally found her balance Rinko looked up and found that the window she was hanging from faced the rock she had eaten breakfast on. Kevin gave her a small wave but otherwise remained still as he watched her.
She cursed and growled as she tried to free herself, her struggles causing the balance of her weight to shift again. For a brief moment she thought she might slip back down inside the café; but a second later her hips scraped against the wood either side of her and with a scream of alarm she fell to the ground where she crashed in an ungraceful heap. She quickly recovered herself and grabbed up the items that had fallen from her torn bag on impact with the ground before getting to her feet. She was not entirely surprised to see Kevin approaching her as she found her feet again but she focussed her energy on calming herself down as she could feel her embarrassment burning in her cheeks and she did not want to him to see that she cared about anything that he thought or did.
"Here," he said.
He stopped at her side and held out a bottle of mineral water towards her. She looked down at it blankly for a moment before looking up at him questioningly.
"I noticed that yours was nearly finished," he explained. "So I got you another one. You'll probably need it. Especially right now, you look like you need to cool down."
Rinko snarled angrily and snatched the bottle from his hand. He ignored her response and lifted his coat up over one shoulder before holding out his other hand to indicate that she should walk ahead of him. She looked down at the bottle in her hand, which she was gripping into so hard her fingers were white and the plastic surface of the bottle was warping.
"I don't care that you bought me food, or that you got me this," she said, looking up at Kevin and shaking the bottle at him. "And now you're pretending to be all polite by letting me walk first. None of those things make you a gentleman. You're still just a monster to me."
Kevin's hand lowered a little and again Rinko wished that she could read his expression, but as always his emotions were hidden behind metal and shadows.
"You have to walk first," he eventually said. "I'm following you, remember?"
Rinko felt her face become hotter still as her jaw tried to work through some words that her voice failed to give any volume to. She again saw a slight change in Kevin's eyes and she was unsure if he was mocking her or just being the horrid monster that he was; and, she thought miserably, if she did not find Mantaro soon, she would have plenty of time to find out which was the correct answer.