What Next?

Chapter 5

On my way out of the hospital I notice its early evening and the sun is setting in the distance. I walk into the car park and see Julie waiting by her car. I make my over to her and get in the passenger side. Without saying a word she gets in, starts up the car and we drive out of the car park.

We drive in silence for a couple of minutes before I break the silence, “where are we going? You don’t know the way to my place.”

“I’m not taking you home,” she says, “I’m taking you to a bar so you can drink and try to forget some of this.” She pauses for a moment. “Do you normally take your girlfriend with you?”

I smile at that, people always think Sera and I are together. “She’s not my girlfriend.”

“Oh… I just thought…”

“Most people do.”

“So is she related to you? She was the woman who you went on ‘holiday’ for isn’t she?”

I turn the radio on, “what’s with all with all the questions?”

She turns the radio back off, “I’m just intrigued. You live so privately no one knows anything about you, and today I find out you actually care about someone who isn’t a case.”

I stare out the passenger side window. “How I live is my business. Who I care for doesn’t have anything to do with work. I like being left alone by people, less complications.” Please take the hint and drop it.

“Okay, one last question. What do you want to drink?” I look out the front window and see a bar coming into view.

“I don’t drink alcohol. Never have.” She takes her eyes of the road to look at me with her left eyebrow raised. “I’m serious, it was forbidden when I was growing up.”

She pulls into the car park and parks up in an empty space. “You missed out growing up.”

We enter the bar and its practically empty, two men are at the far end of the bar talking to a middle aged man behind the bar. I walk over to the jukebox on the wall and put some music on. I’ve always found music calms me down when I need it. I turn round and see Julie walking over to me with a bottle of water and a glass of wine.
“You said you don’t drink and this way you know you wont be. Come on lets play some pool.” We walk over to the pool table and see it’s been set up for free play, I rack up the balls while Julie selects the cues. She does a decent break and manages to pot a yellow ball, followed by two more. I make my way over for my first shot when Julie decides to ask more questions, “You do know how yea? I don’t want to have to teach you to play pool.”

I chuckle, “just because I don’t drink, doesn’t mean I’ve never been in a bar.” I bend over and pot two balls at once. “Oh, forgot to mention, I’m good at this game.”

She laughs and I show her how good I am by potting all my balls and then the 8 ball in quick succession. I look at her and she’s picking her jaw up off the floor, “I told you I was good at this game.” We play another four frames and I let her win two of them.

The two men seem to take an interest in our games, and by the end of the fifth they come over to us. “”You two up for a game of doubles?” one of them asks. I look past them at the clock on the wall and see its just gone nine.

“Not tonight I’m afraid,” Julie replies, “got an early start tomorrow. Tables all yours.” We make our way outside and are at her car, when I hear the door to the bar opening again. I don’t need this. I look back and see them going in the other direction so I get in the car and give Julie directions to the house. When I get back I just go to bed and fall asleep.

…………………

I wake with the sunrise and look at the clock to see it’s just gone six o’clock. My body must have been more tired than I thought. I grab a quick shower and go for a jog; it always helps me clear my head. Without even deciding where to go I just start jogging and after forty-five minutes find myself outside the dojo. I stop to get my breathing back under control and notice the lights are on inside. I head round the back to see Haley’s car parked up. Finding the back door open I head in to the main hall of the building. In the middle of the hall I see Haley going through a Wu Shu style kata, I thought her style seemed familiar.

“You might want to lock the back door if you don’t want visitors” I say.

She stops and looks around till she sees me in the doorway. “If anyone got in I could defend myself, it’s my dojo after all.” She then finishes her kata as if there were no interruptions. When she finishes she walks over to a gym bag I didn’t notice before and pulls a bottle of water out of it. “I thought you and Rachel were stopping by last night to do a training session?” she asks.

I decide to tell her a half truth, “we did a training session elsewhere. I put her through one of the most exhausting sessions she’s ever had.”

“Rachel told me your sessions were a bit hard on her, that you push her to her limits every time.”

“Sera asked to be trained the same way I was, I was pushed a lot harder than what I do to her. I allow her to make mistakes without punishment, my master wasn’t so generous.”

She looks wide-eyed at me, “you were punished if you didn’t get it right first time?”

“In the beginning, I wasn’t allowed to learn anything new till I learnt the skill I was being taught. As I got older the physical punishments started. Every time I messed up it would be five hits to the body with a kendo stick.” Why am I telling her all this?

Haley makes her way back to the middle of the hall and drops into a stance. I make my way into the hall and stand opposite her and drop into the same stance. She makes the first move with a feint right kick to my stomach, which would allow her to raise her leg for a sidekick to my head. I duck as her leg goes up and left sweep her left leg out from under her. She lands on her butt hard but immediately flips her self back up and goes on the attack. I can feel myself smiling as I block every blow and sidestep every kick; it’s been a long time since I had a good sparing session.

We carry on like this for about twenty minutes, with me taking everything she can throw at me. I think she needed this and it has definitely done me some good. She breaks off her attack to get some water and throws a bottle to me. “Thanks for the work out,” she says, “I can’t seem to find anyone willing to spar with me, not even Rachel will do it.”

“She’s afraid she would hurt you.” I say.

She looks right at me, “why? You haven’t and I was going full speed at you.”

“I’m different. I was only blocking and weaving, if I had gone on the offensive I would hurt you. Sera doesn’t fully trust her own skills.” Haley just looks down at this. “What has she told you about her life before you met her?”

Haley looks back up and makes her way back over to the mats. “Rachel likes her privacy. I knew about her father’s illness and he helped fund this place in the beginning, but I don’t know a lot about them. You are a mystery she wont explain either.”

“I am sorry she doesn’t tell you anything about herself, I knew her to be a very open person.” I pause for a few seconds, “if you wish to know anything about me feel free to ask, I just wont guarantee an answer.” I take a swig of water while she digests everything she’s just heard.

We both sit down crossed legged on the mats and I can see her brain going into overdrive about what to ask me first. After about a minute she asks her first question, “I know you were adopted and learnt the martial arts through your master/adopted father, but what styles do you know? And how come you don’t teach anyone but Rachel?”

“I wont answer the first question” I say, “as I like to keep my opponents guessing, but the reason I teach Sera is she asked me to.”

“She asked and you said yes?”

“No”

“Then why? I don’t understand.”

Where to begin, “we ran in different circles growing up. She was popular and I was smart. One day a couple of boys at school decided that she needed to be ‘broken in’. By the time the news got round to the lower groups it was to late to stop it, so I found out where it was planned to happen and ran the whole way there to try and save her” Haley sits there in silence with tears running down her face. “We didn’t go to a nice school, I was forbidden to fight the bullies but was aloud to defend myself only. I beat her there and found five guys waiting. A fight broke out and I beat them all to bloody messes while they did the same to me, but at least Sera was safe.” She is crying harder now but I carry on with the story; “my master was enraged when he discovered what I had done, until he found out why I had done it. That night Sera asked her father to teach her as he was teaching me. He refused. She ran away that night and stayed at a friends house for a few days.”

Haley is crying a lot harder now, “so she approached you and you decided to teach her to defend herself, so that would never happen again.”

“No”

“No? What kind of man was training you?”

I spent a long time trying to figure that out. “He was teaching me bushido in his own way, that just because you have the power doesn’t mean you should wield it. I was a lot older when I realised that.” I give her a few seconds for that to fully sink in before I carry on explaining. “He told me that Sera needed to turn her back on the life she was leading before she could be trained, but she needed to learn this herself. The next day at school she was tormented for my actions against her so called ‘friends’ and was cast out of that group. She spent weeks trying to get back in but they wouldn’t take her. She blamed both me and her father for being a social outcast.”

Haley decides to ask me another question, “but if you got her ousted from her friends and her lifestyle why would she ask for your help?”

“I didn’t take the crap they threw at me, I learnt years before hand that nobody’s opinion of you is valid unless you allow it to be.” I take a swig of water, its hard on me to re-live this all again. “It took her some time to come to this conclusion herself and when she did she approached both her father and myself and asked for our forgiveness for her behaviour. I waited for her father to forgive her but he didn’t and I couldn’t figure out why. It was about ten minutes later I figured it out, he already had and she knew it. She had stayed with us the whole time and watched my lesson for the day. When the lesson was over she asked her father again if he would train her as he was training me, and again he refused. She said she would find someone to train her and show him she was ready, but I knew then she wasn’t as she still had too much anger inside ready to consume her. They made a deal in front of me that if she got her grades up in a month he would find a suitable teacher for her.”

Haley wipes the tears from her face and has another question ready, “so she got her grades up and asked you to teach her? You told me she asked you to teach her.”

I take another swig of water and stretch my legs out before crossing them again. “It was a conscious effort on her part to ask me to help her get her grades up. I accepted and said I would tutor her when I wasn’t training and she could do her homework with me. In that month she became the woman you know now. I was taken back by the fact that she was as smart as me but chose never to show it, it was as if she did her friends wouldn’t want to know her. At the end of that month her father said he would find her the right teacher and she could study the martial arts. She said he didn’t need to as she had already found one, if I was prepared to teach her to which I said yes, if she stuck to certain ground rules that I set for her.” I leave out the parts Haley doesn’t need to know, like the beating I took for taking her on as my student.

We sit there in silence for a couple of minutes as Haley takes it all in. I try to look at it from her perspective but can’t. She asks me another question, “So she worked with you to be better at school and then followed ground rules? Are you sure we’re talking about the same woman? The Rachel I know doesn’t follow any rules but her own.”

I chuckle at this remark, “Yes we are talking about the same woman. She lives by the rules she created for herself to live by, as I live by the rules that I created for myself. You have to remember we didn’t learn like normal people do, we trained privately and in a different way. We created the rules to keep us in line.”

“I’m getting a headache from this” she responds, “Are you joking with me? I’ve never heard of anyone training like that.”

I need to explain this a bit more. “We lived outside the martial arts community, we never bothered it and it never bothered us. Because of that we had to have rules to govern our training, and its uses. We created these rules ourselves so they are our responsibility to live by them and enforce them.” The look on her face shows confusion. “As you know the world has it laws and everywhere you go has its rules,” she nods in understanding, “these govern the ways to act. We train without those particular rules in place. So to compensate we created rules to keep us in check so we wouldn’t run amok. Do you understand now?”

She nods in agreement “I think I do, you give yourself rules that you cant break without feeling shamed and dishonoured.” I nod my head to show she has got the concept. “But all rules can be bent or broken so how do you stop yourselves doing that?”

“Good Question. We rely on the training to stop us in time. We train to never bend the rules we place on ourselves.” I can see she has heard a lot that explains how we live. “That’s all the questions I’ll answer for now, but feel free in the future to ask me anything that is on your mind.”

She nods her head and gets up and heads for the changing rooms. Before she exits the door she looks back and poses one last statement, “it’s good you’re back in Rachel’s life, I think she needs you now more than ever.” And leaves before I can ask her what she meant by that.

I leave the dojo five minutes later and head back to the house. I need to change and go to the hospital to get Sera and check up on how the kids are all doing.