End of the World Blues (16 page)

“The bowl was unfired,” said Kit, deciding this would make a difference. “And covered with a damp cloth…” Now Kit came to look, he could see the blackness inside the bowl carried a weave where cotton had smouldered and fallen to ash.

“Who found it?” Kit demanded.

Mr. Sato looked embarrassed. “No one seems to know,” he said, shuffling immaculately shined shoes. “It was left with a note on the doorstep of a small town house in Akasaka.”

“This house, did it belong to someone known to Mr. Oniji?”

Hiroshi Sato’s nod was so slight as to be almost invisible.

So beautiful.
Cold and beautiful and fragile and able to survive the ruining of his life, the bowl had Kit’s attention and held his gaze. Everything he’d loved and respected about Yoshi was represented in that bowl. As was everything he’d feared and failed to understand.

“You take it,” he told Hiroshi Sato.

The man opened his mouth.

“Return it with my heart-felt thanks. Ask Mr. Oniji to keep the bowl safe.”

Very carefully, as if suddenly aware he might drop it, Hiroshi Sato took the bowl from Kit and put it back in the noodle box. Then he began to pack the box with thin-bladed straw, while all the passengers and both of the women from behind the desk continued to watch in silence.

The battle began at dawn, in a blaze of outrage, long-focus lenses, and electronic flash. A couple of police vans pulled up, blocking the road south from Roppongi’s main drag. Having arrived, they proceeded to do nothing. Which was fine with the
bozozoku,
because it let them concentrate on one enemy at a time.

A row of bikes had been positioned to face away from the road, as if the owners planned to ride straight into Pirate Mary’s cinder-block parking area. At five minutes before noon, as baseball-bat-wielding
chimpira
entered the narrow road that ran along the lower edge of the graveyard, a girl carrying a cat slipped between two bikes and headed away from the coming confrontation. A second later, another girl followed. Although she went unwillingly, still complaining and almost in tears.

“They should…” Micki said.

But the ranks had already closed. Namiko left first because of the cat and because no one really knew why she was there in the first place. Micki went, under extreme protest, because her brother Tetsuo felt girls shouldn’t fight.

Micki had her own opinions on that. Which she was fucked if she was going to keep to herself.

“Go,” said Tetsuo. “This is going to get ugly.”

She went, low-level
Yakuza
thugs with clubs parting under the eye of the cameras to let her through.

“Wait up,” Micki said.

Namiko kept going.

“Wait,” demanded Micki, then added, “Out of my way…” But she was talking to a photographer who’d decided to get close and much too personal. Small, male, and not her favourite person, the man fired his flash right in Micki’s face.

“Fuck
off,
” said Micki, using up most of her English.

Gaz Maguire, erstwhile provider of portfolios to would-be models, grinned, stepped sideways to block Micki’s path again, and snapped another shot at the exact moment Micki stuck one finger up and scowled at the camera. “Perfect,” he said. “Thank you.”

Gaz was about to say something else when Namiko shoved him aside, grabbed Micki by the shoulder, and dragged her away from the photographers that had begun to gather around her.

“That’s enough,” said Namiko crossly, passing the cat to Micki. “Come on, we need to get out of here.”

“What’s going to happen?”

Namiko snorted. “They’ll fight,” she said, stepping around a vast stone torii near the entrance to the graveyard. Gravel crunched underfoot as they walked towards an old man leaning on a broom.

“Konichiwa,”
said the old man.

“Konichiwa,”
Micki and Namiko said together. Everyone bowed. After names had been exchanged, Mr. Ito made space for them by moving a pile of prayer sticks he’d leaned against a moss-covered tomb. “Big fight,” he said. “But over soon.”

“How do you know?” asked Micki.

“Bozozoku,”
said Mr. Ito, appearing to weigh the word in one hand. “Little monkeys…” He juggled his hands slightly, before finding the first heavier. “As long as the police stay quiet this will be quick.”

Mr. Ito was right. As a first wave of yelling
chimpira
charged towards the bikes, the
bozozoku
fired up their engines, blipped the throttles, and hit switches crudely wired to the handle bars.

Micki grinned. “Afterburners,” she said, as flame lanced from each bike and a
chimpira
dropped his bat and began clutching his ankle.

“Clever,” Mr. Ito said. “Also inventive.”

What was most interesting was that the police continued to do nothing.

True, they’d left their vans. But that was the only movement they made, apart from securing both ends of the street and moving the press back slightly. And yet, in their black-visored riot helmets, body armour, and studded gauntlets they looked easily the most frightening of the three groups gathered at the site of Kit’s old bar.

“When it’s over,” said Mr. Ito. “That’s when they’ll move.”

Micki looked at him.

“I lived through the sixties,” he said, with a smile. “You watch. They’ll arrest the losers…”

Ito-san’s prophesy probably explained why the police eventually climbed back into their riot vehicles, having done little more than watch, keep casual spectators off the street, and stop the photographers from getting themselves hurt. Because when the battle ended, everything was pretty much as it had been.

Paramedics treated five
chimpira
with burns, but since all the burns were below the knee, the journalists were refusing to take the injuries seriously. A couple of
bozozoku
had broken heads and one
chimpira
had been carried away unconscious, his colleagues angrily refusing offers of medical help.

“Interesting,” said Mr. Ito.

“What is?” asked Micki.

“Most things,” he said. “Particularly this.”

Five miles above Siberia, with the clouds below the plane set out like a slab of ice, the youngest of the Japanese cabin crew brought Neku a copy of
TunaBelly
to sign.

Approaching diffidently, the girl dropped to a crouch beside Neku’s seat, before producing the battered paperback.

“I wondered, perhaps…?”

Without a word, Neku produced a pen and opened the book at its title page.
TunaBelly
was a million-selling novel about teenage lust, love, and murder set in the half-lit world of Tokyo’s Tsukiji market. It featured drugs, graphic sex, and a working-class boy who loved a twenty-eight-year-old
Yakuza
hit woman against his better judgment. The neatly made-up girl holding the book looked exactly like Neku’s idea of the target reader.

Cherry,
read the nametag on her jacket. So Neku inscribed the book to Cherry, added her best wishes, and signed the title page with a scrawl.

It was as well the real Mika Aiko was a recluse. This was the third copy of
TunaBelly
to be thrust at Neku since she presented herself at the check-in counter with a regular ticket and a fake passport. If anyone had known what Aiko really looked like then Neku would have been in trouble. As it was, the fake passport was a good one, its biological data was spot on, and fame, even borrowed fame, was becoming addictive. Not least for its ability to clear problems out of the way.

If the woman at the check-in counter had got her way Neku would now be travelling Business Class, maybe even first.

“No,” Neku had insisted.

“We must, please,” the woman had said. “It would be terrible for us to make Mika Aiko…”

Neku’s first excuse having faltered against the woman’s certainty that anonymity could be guaranteed wherever Miss Aiko sat, Neku admitted that her real reason for wanting to travel Economy was because this was how her next heroine would fly on a similar trip to London.

After that everything was easy. Neku was given a choice of the remaining seats and chose one right at the back—near the toilets—where no one could sit behind her. So far Neku had refused offers of wine, gin, and beer and turned away a meal one of the crew tried to serve her an hour after take off. This seemed to be entirely what the cabin crew expected of a media brat travelling as incognito as five piercings, red hair, and a ripped skirt allowed.

“Miss Aiko?”

Having checked that her celebrity passenger really was awake, the stewardess who’d wanted her book signed wondered if Miss Aiko would like to see the cockpit. Since refusing seemed rude, Neku agreed—and found herself being escorted through a darkened cabin towards the front.

A handful of people watched their screens in Premium Economy and a solitary man in Business was stubbornly working at his laptop, surrounded by darkness. Most of the beds in first were empty, with the only bed actually occupied carrying two people, though they slept chastely, curled around each other and half covered by a blue blanket.

Neku smiled, though mostly her amusement was reserved for Kit Nouveau and his companion. They were on this plane, as she’d been told to expect, on the far side of Business, their seats ratcheted back and their feet on flip-up stools. The woman slept with a whisky glass clutched in one hand. Nouveau-san had a copy of
Hagakure Kikigaki
open on his lap.

Those two were the reason she’d refused an upgrade. Neku didn’t want to be seen yet, and just agreeing to come forward like this had taken more nerve than she expected.

It had been Kit’s friend who had told Neku where Kit was going and why. She’d found him in a
gaijin
bar, along with two girls, half a dozen
bozozoku,
an English photographer called Gaz, a black cat, and a map of Roppongi spread out across a table. It was the third Irish bar she’d tried.

“Ah,” said the huge man. “It’s the goth kid.”

A couple of
bozozoku
looked up.

“Which kid?” demanded one.

“That one,” he said, nodding towards the door. “She’s friends with Kit…”

A girl snorted.

Making herself approach the table, Neku bowed slightly. “Can I talk to you?”

The man pointed to a stool at the next table and made dragging motions, indicating that Neku should join them.

“Not here,” said Neku.

The man sighed.

His name was No Neck and his first kiss tasted of beer. There wasn’t a second, because Neku had turned her face away by then. “It wasn’t like that,” Neku said, when he asked how long Neku and Kit had been friends.

“Wasn’t it?” No Neck looked doubtful. “You sure? I mean, everyone knew he had a Japanese lover.”

“Yoshi,” said Neku.

No Neck shook his head. “Yoshi wasn’t his mistress. Not sure what she was,” he added, half sobered by Neku’s mention of the dead woman. “It was complicated, that relationship.” No Neck stared at Neku, suddenly seeing her. “Until I saw you,” he said, “I wasn’t sure Kit did normal…”

“I’m seventeen,” said Neku, adding another two years to her age.

“Yeah,” said No Neck. “That’s what I mean.”

“Are you all right?” Cherry was looking anxiously at her celebrity passenger, who’d stalled a handful of steps from the cabin door.

“Just thinking,” said Neku. About what was not a matter for sharing. Life was complicated and death made it more so. Kit Nouveau owed her a life, which meant he was bound to her. Although Neku wasn’t sure Kit understood that. But in saving him, she’d assumed responsibility for his happiness. She wasn’t sure he understood that either.

He also had her memory beads, or what was left of them. At least, Neku hoped he had.

“Through here,” said Cherry, knocking twice on a door.

Neku heard the sound of a lock being flicked on the far side. It made sense to secure the doors, she supposed. Neku might have been anyone.

“Is this Miss Aiko?”

The stewardess nodded.

Somehow, Neku had expected the pilot to be a man. Maybe middle aged, with swept back hair going grey at the temples. Instead the woman wearing the Captain’s uniform looked young and businesslike.

“Konichiwa,”
said the Captain.

Neku bowed slightly.
“Konichiwa,”
she offered in turn. Since it was dark in the main part of the plane but daylight outside,
konichiwa
was just as good as
konbanwa
or
ohayo gozaimasu
. It being neither morning, afternoon, or evening, but something out of time, in between.

“God,” said the Captain. “Will you look at those studs.” Her words were for the co-pilot beside her. “That’s what Annabel wants. You wouldn’t believe the fights we’ve been having.”

“How old is your daughter?” asked Neku.

It was meant as a simple question. Although, from the shock on the Captain’s face, Neku assumed her question had been taken as criticism. And then Neku understood the truth was simpler still…the Captain simply hadn’t expected Neku to be able to cope with colloquial English.

“I spent…” Neku paused. She had no idea if Mika Aiko had spent time in America or England. And while the Captain was unlikely to know, it was possible Cherry might. “I learn languages fast,” Neku said, then smiled.

Like all the best lies it was impossible to refute. Not the least because it happened to be true.

Chaos began with six words, Lady Neku could remember that much. It was a simple enough statement…little to suggest her life was about to change irrevocably.
Your mother is looking for you.

The voice came from an alcove, where a marble statue glared at the floor of a corridor few even knew existed. The corridor was wider than it was tall, windowless and lit with flickering globes set into a low ceiling.

Lady Neku sneezed—dust had that effect on her.

A simple maintenance duct under a hydroponic farm, before title inflation hit High Strange and the farm became the Stroll Gardens and the duct acquired statues, the metal tube ran the entire length of a bigger spur, from one side of the ring all the way through to the other. Doors sealed the duct where it left the spire, clumsy welds holding them in place, though these looked newer than the seamless joins found on most doors leading off the maintenance tunnels.