Butterfly's Shadow (32 page)

‘True,’ Joey said, ‘the ending is a problem, but on the other hand it does have the greatest last line of any movie I’ve ever seen.’

Snip! She whipped the towel off his shoulders. ‘You’re done.’

Caught up in his defence of favourite movies Joey had neglected to check progress in the mirror. Only now did he register the full extent of the cut: his head shorn almost to the scalp.

‘Wow. That. Is. short.’

‘Yeah.’

She added crisply, ‘Actually, I preferred it longer.’

‘So why?’

‘Well if you decide to volunteer, you won’t be given such a hard time, without those cute curls.’

‘Only a mug would volunteer. Why would I do that?’

‘Sure. Smart-ass like you, why would you?’

Joey stared at her, baffled: why was he arousing this hostility? He stood up and asked what he owed her.

‘It’s on the house.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I feel like it. By the way, that’s where Shiro is. He volunteered. A mug, right?’

She began sweeping up the floorboards. As he reached the door she said, without looking up, ‘You have perfect hair.’

‘What, the cute blond curls you’re sweeping up?’

‘Hair grows back.’

Joey said, struggling against a wave of irritability, ‘I don’t know your name.’

‘I know yours.’ She closed the door.

That first evening in the army canteen, Charles had talked on, whipping up a blizzard of words just to hold Nancy’s attention. If she moved on, he was lost; he knew that, so he kept the phrases spinning. Until the patter ran out and he found himself left with the only words he actually needed – ‘Have dinner with me?’

She took a closer look at him: the oval face no longer anonymous, the brown eyes bright with amusement, the long mouth unexpectedly sensuous.

He was older than her, late forties probably, and she thought of him as old England; relaxed charm, old-fashioned manners. It was with considerable surprise that she found herself in bed with him.

Before Ben and Nancy were married she had expected Happy Ever After to follow the ceremony, which would be a fairy-tale affair: a white satin gown, the bouquet thrown to eager, giggling bridesmaids; speeches, her mother in tears, a honeymoon in San Francisco or Hawaii. Joey, and all that went with him, changed things: the wedding was less grand and more subdued than she had anticipated. As was the consummation.

Nancy was not a prude, but saving herself for marriage had always been the plan. That Ben had not similarly saved himself came first as a shock and then as a lingering disappointment. He was careful, even deferential when he approached her; she sensed no pulsing flare of arousal, an absence of passion. Their
couplings were restrained, without wildness, never soaring free of bedroom respectability. And she was unable to fend off thoughts that Ben had obviously done this before. Perhaps the Nagasaki woman had even taught him a trick or two.

Charles was gentle where it mattered, but he could be masterful, and she was grateful to be shown ways to please and be pleased.

Evenings usually began with a drink at the bar of the Benson Hotel – Nancy drinking cocktails! – another new experience that took her by surprise. She had hesitated the first time Charles enquired ‘What will it be?’ Her occasional, ‘medicinal’ thimble of bourbon was all she knew. Now she found she liked a Manhattan, just the one, enjoyed in comfort and the flattering glow of softly shaded lamps. She sipped, they talked, laughed. Later they moved to his neat rented apartment and made love for a leisurely hour, not always in the bedroom. Then perhaps a restaurant, though Charles liked to cook, transforming red snapper into British fish and chips, learning the American way with steak.

They both knew that he was only visiting, that one day he would get on a ship and go back to England, where life, he had murmured one day, was complicated. But words like ‘leaving’ or ‘going home’ never figured in their conversations, though there were times when he pulled her close to him and groaned with a sort of regret or when, close to sleep, he kissed and stroked her throat – a throat no longer as smooth and taut as it had once been. At those moments Nancy allowed herself to think that perhaps there might come a day when he would ask her how she felt about seeing England. But he never did. He told her about Italy, the curious Florentine mix of wool and art and history, showed her the correct way to season a
ragù
. His own country remained unexplored, though he introduced her to English poetry. In return she gave him Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens. Not Whitman.

*

From the bed Nancy could see the street beyond the window, partially obscured by Charles’s naked shoulder. The evening had gone well: the drink at the bar, the stroll to his apartment. The easy move to the bedroom, it was usually the bedroom now. They had made love, and soon it would be time to eat. She realised they had fallen into a pattern, and the thought gave her pleasure, lent a spurious permanence to their arrangement.

He lifted her hair away from her neck and breathed in the warmth of her flesh.

‘Thank you for the book. I liked the one about the blackbird.’

She said, sleepily, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking . . .’

The poem, he said, reminded him of Japanese woodcuts. Punctuating his words with kisses, he mumbled into her bare shoulder that he wanted to visit Japan one day.

‘But if this war goes on much longer, there won’t be much left to see.’

Nancy felt warmth and well-being draining out of her, and turned away, drawing the blanket close, thrusting her face deep into the pillow. She wanted to say, I went there once, I went to Japan and saw nothing. Just the inside of an office, a church, a rickshaw. A small paper house on a hillside and a woman in a white kimono. A child, screaming. A woman who is still there, the unprotected target of our bombs.

She wrote every week to Joey, telling him what she was reading, what music she had heard. She found these letters difficult; censorship made information suspect: even something as bland as a new movie. She held back from describing a trip to the coast, a swim in the ocean, knowing it would make painful reading to someone walled in by barbed-wire fences and watchtowers, living in a wooden hut with bare floors. What would have become of her happy-go-lucky Joey by the time they set him free?

‘Hey there,’ Charles murmured into her ear, his words
muffled by the pillow. ‘Come back; you’re a long way away.’ Tactfully, ‘How about supper?’

This was one of the times when she was tempted to tell Charles everything; she had a feeling he would understand. But an unspoken pact had been established: they existed in the here and now, within a bubble of warmth and security. What was outside remained outside. Were she to say ‘I have a son. He’s in a prison camp for enemy aliens and I’m sick with worry’ – worry for his well-being and, unacknowledged, worry too that he might be drifting away, becoming less her son, indeed someone alien – what could Charles say? Comforting her, he would need to say . . . something. Did he, too, have a son? A daughter? Did he have a wife? He surely had a life. A complicated one.

She twisted back into the circle of his arms, clinging to the warmth of him, swept by the fear of another loss; drawing him into her. They fitted together like a soft jigsaw puzzle, breast, belly, thighs, flesh to flesh, her legs trapping his.

‘Later,’ she said.

Letters from home. On days when a dust storm lashed the barracks and whipped the faces of internees hurrying to mess hall or shower block, Joey, alone in the hut, ran his fingers over the thick, creamy paper Nancy favoured, and pictured her writing at the kitchen table of a narrow house in a street with a dry goods store on the corner where once he had sat on the porch steps and watched shabby men buying sardines and Saltine crackers before trudging on towards the endlessly receding horizon.

‘Dear Joey . . .’

A letter required a reply. His pen hovered, as usual. There were letters unwritten, that sang their silent words in his mind; revised, refined, endlessly qualified to be ever more precise. These were purely theoretical letters. Head stuff. There were others, written but not posted: jottings, despairing or angry, scribbled, torn up. There were, finally, those Joey completed and entrusted to the collection bin, to the trucks, trains and delivery men. These were the envelopes Nancy opened, the pages she read and reread.

One of these was the brief note that told her he was leaving the camp.

He never intended to enlist. Anger, resentment, a sceptical view of the government’s change of heart, all pushed him towards non-involvement. In the hut, late at night endless conversations took place, as they took place in other huts. Kazuo and Taro the smart ones, Ichir
the joker, Joey the oddball.
Debating, questioning. What if . . . or if not . . . Would it help to . . . but on the other hand . . .

Afterwards, Joey tried to pinpoint what tipped it for him.

Partly he was doing it for Ben, who had carried a burden of guilt for being the brother too young to go to war, the brother who survived. Partly he was doing it for a whole heap of people who thought they were American until told otherwise; when they suddenly discovered they were enemy aliens. He wanted to peel that label off them: smash the wire fence, yell at the guards, ‘Category error! Category error!’

Perversity played its part: he disliked being called a smartass who felt he was too clever to be gun fodder. And there was revulsion from his surroundings, a flight from apathy. If he signed, wherever they sent him, he would be out of here. He needed space to breathe; he was twenty years old and his body itched for action.

The decisive moment crept up on him unheralded: in the confines of the hut they were arguing fiercely, Ichir
, pacing and turning; Taro and Kazuo on the floor, backs propped against the wooden wall. Joey, cross-legged on the narrow bed, as always when thinking, had reached for pencils and paper and was scribbling aimlessly – patterns and curlicues, geometrical shapes, boxes within boxes. When he had used up the page, he saw that at the bottom he had drawn a rectangle. In one corner of it was a small square filled with dots, and across the rectangle were scrawled scarlet lines. The star-spangled banner.

The ingredient at the heart of the simmering mix: an unacknowledged need to be part of something. To belong.

When he found himself on the train (once again, the sound of wheels on tracks, the locomotive smell of coal fumes, old songs and echoes of his father’s journey from disengagement to commitment), he was wryly aware that he was leaving one camp for another, one form of discipline for another, one label for another: student, enemy alien, evacuee, internee, soldier . . .
She had it right, the hostile girl who snipped off his hair: he made a habit of categorising people. He was certainly categorising himself.

He had mentioned the haircut episode to Ichir
at the time.

‘She was incredibly bad tempered.’

‘Oh.’ Ichir
looked amused. ‘That means she likes you.’