End of the World Blues (6 page)

“You promised,”
said Yoshi.

That was the problem. Yoshi kept her promises. If she said she was going to do something she did it. Kit was into territory he understood, without actually feeling the intricate web of Japanese emotions that accompanied it.

“About No Neck…”

“I fired him,” Yoshi said crossly. “He kept saying you’d be back. I asked him where you were. He wouldn’t tell me.”

“I was giving an English lesson.”

Yoshi shook her head. “No,” she said, “that was over hours ago. Why wouldn’t No Neck tell me?”

“He didn’t know,” said Kit. “Mrs. Oniji booked a table at Red Bamboo. You know how long those things take.”

“You’re lying.” Yoshi’s eyes were large with tears.

“No. I’m not…Look,” Kit said, “why don’t we get you a taxi. Yuko will understand.”

“It’s too late,” said Yoshi.

He hoped she was talking about the taxi.

Neku’s cloak was actually a coat. That is, it was cut with sleeves rather than mere slits through which to put one’s arms, though its sleeves were very short, almost vestigial. The garment appeared to be modelled on one worn by Vampire Hunter D in an old film, with an upturned collar and a silk lining that glistened wetly as Neku climbed the stairs towards Pirate Mary’s.

In an ideal world the cloak would keep her warm at night, wrap itself around her against the rain, and harden to a shell should anyone try to kick her while she slept. But in an ideal world Neku wouldn’t be sleeping in doorways in the first place and she was in this world, so her cloak just flapped, although it still managed to look better than she did.

Wrapping the cloak around her, Neku knocked politely at the half-open door of the bar.
“Gomen-kudasi.”

“We’re shut.”

The voice was flat to the point of being hostile. So Neku knocked again, because she wasn’t sure what else to do, then put her head round the edge. The bar was empty, chairs upended on tables and the tiles wet from having been recently mopped.

“I told you, we’re…” The woman looked up and whoever she was expecting to see she saw someone else.

“Yoshi…”

Seeing the woman blink, Neku realised that perhaps she should have called the woman something more formal. Yet Yoshi was famous. People wrote about her in
Tokyo Today
. How could Neku not know her name?

“Who are you?”

“Lady Neku,” said Neku, bowing slightly. “In exile on this world.”

Yoshi scowled. “I don’t have time for games,” she said. “If someone’s told you about the bar job I’ll need to know your proper name. And you will call me
madame
.”

“Bar job?”

“You didn’t come about No Neck’s job?”

Neku shook her head. “Your man,” she said, looking around. “Is he here?”

“Why?” demanded Yoshi.

“Because we have business.”

“You have…?”

Watching the other woman’s eyes open, Neku wondered what this famous potter saw. A curve of cheek? A single line encompassing Neku’s nose, mouth, and chin…? When Neku caught herself in a shop window she saw a ragged
cos-play,
with flattish face and hunched shoulders. The lithe and deadly assassin Neku remembered had been missing for a while.

“What business?” Yoshi demanded.

“He has something of mine.”

“Of yours?” Yoshi must have known how lame that sounded, Neku decided, because the woman blushed and then shook her head in irritation. “What?” Yoshi demanded. “What could Kit-san possibly have of yours?”

My knife.

This seemed an inappropriate thing to say, so Neku just shrugged. “He borrowed something,” she said. “I want it back.” She looked round for somewhere to sit.

“He’s out,” said Yoshi. “Banking tonight’s cash. You can’t wait here.” She seemed torn between insisting Neku leave and a need to ask more questions. And it was obvious, at least to the younger of the two, that the fewer questions anyone asked the better.

“I’ll be downstairs,” said Neku.

“Wait…” Yoshi held up one hand. “This
thing,
when did he borrow it?”

Well,
Neku almost said,
it wasn’t exactly borrowed.
She’d gone back for her knife the second she realised it was missing and found the body, still warm and slumped against the railings, only her knife was gone and the police were due to arrive. So she’d come here because this was where the cat said the foreigner lived, and because her knife was important.

“About an hour ago,” said Neku, then wondered what she’d said.

When Kit got back he found the outside light still on. That was his first warning all was not right. His second was that the
cos-play
sat on Pirate Mary’s bottom step, wrapped in her cloak. Kit’s third and final clue came when Yoshi threw an ashtray from the top of the stairwell. She threw it badly, possibly because tears ruined her aim. It was also possible she intended to miss.

“How could you?”

“What?” Kit asked.

“Look at her,”
said Yoshi.

Neku clambered to her feet. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to cause problems.”

“She’s just a kid,”
said Yoshi.

Neku’s chin came up at that. “No, I’m not.”

Kit looked between Yoshi and the
cos-play,
who were now glaring at each other. “God,” he said. “Yoshi. How could you even…”

The girl stamped, it was a very childish gesture. “Look,” she said, holding out her hand. “Just give it back.” Her fingernails beneath her lace gloves were bitten and broken, the gloves themselves were torn.

Pulling 15,000 yen from his wallet, Kit held the notes out to her. “Find somewhere to sleep,” he said. “Have a shower. Get something to eat.”

“I want my—”

“I don’t have anything of yours,” said Kit. Turning to Yoshi, he shrugged. “She’s a street kid,” he said. “I’ve given her a couple of coffees, bought her a bowl of noodles, that’s all.”

“Kit…”

He hadn’t expected Neku to know his name.

“Leave,” he told her. “Before we call the police.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“Try me,” said Kit. What else could he say? Yoshi was within listening distance.

“Yeah,” said the girl. “Ain’t that the truth…”

When Kit got back after locking the door to the alley where the bins were kept, and the door at the top of the stairs, which let customers into Pirate Mary’s, he found the dishwasher rumbling and Yoshi nowhere in sight. So he checked the window locks, wiped down the counter one final time, and began to type out a note advertising No Neck’s job, since this looked like the price Yoshi intended to extract for making peace.

“You okay?” he asked, having tracked Yoshi down to the bathroom. A question too stupid to merit an answer.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “we’ll talk tomorrow.”

Kit shut the bathroom door on his way out. He shut it softly, climbed the stairs to the next level, and walked out onto the balcony, to watch Tokyo’s lights twinkle like a mat of stars around him. He no longer felt drunk, he no longer felt afraid. Kit was coming to accept that he no longer felt anything very much at all.

The bath was large enough for two adults to sit upright, and so deep when filled that the level would reach their necks. Made from cast iron, it had been dragged to the third floor years earlier and sunk so far through the floor that it protruded into the area below, which was the bar these days. Above the bath was a shower that took water from a rain tank on the roof. The spray was warm in summer and cold in winter, which was the way Yoshi liked it.

The house had belonged to a grandfather on her mother’s side, and when Kit put up the money it had been to buy the wreck of a building from Yoshi’s cousin, the old man’s heir. The price had still been low enough to make the rest of Yoshi’s family mutter.

It was her grandfather who originally dragged the metal bath to the third floor, before the walls had even been put in place. The bath was destined for the top floor, but her grandfather settled on the floor below, having decided that getting it that far was a miracle.

Such a bath would never now get planning permission. Partly this was because its weight made the cast-iron bath unsuitable for a wooden-framed house and partly because electric cabling ran close to one side. But mostly it was because the bath was heated by a gas burner bolted directly to its rim.

Naked flame played on metal and this heated the water. The only time Yoshi slipped as a child she had burned herself so badly the scar on her hip was still there, although growing had shrunk it to the size of a flower.

As always, Yoshi showered before taking a bath. Her other grandfather had squatted naked at an outside tap and rinsed himself with a cloth, but most of the old man’s children and grandchildren had grown up with showers. Kit was the first person Yoshi met who actually washed in the bath and he stopped the moment he understood how much this upset her.

She was no fool. Yoshi knew Kit didn’t love her. At least, not any longer. He was fond of her and put up with her moods and bound her tightly when she demanded it, but that wasn’t love. He admired her work, the way she had of throwing pots so fine they looked too fragile to exist. And he admired her body, which was lean and spare and his whenever he wanted. But he didn’t love her. Which was fine, because she’d always been honest about not loving him.

Discarding her dressing gown once the water was hot, Yoshi sank beneath its surface, letting the heat make her sleepy. And as she sat, with the water up to her neck, barely half awake and trying not to get the pages of her paperback wet, the frivolous flickering of a billion stars fought the city’s sodium glare for the right to the night sky beyond her window. Silent backdrop to the street noise of Roppongi.

Drunken tourists leaving a club. A motorbike at the lights, something large. The dying howl of a cop car and an amplified order to
behave properly
. A woman in a house opposite having sex, more noisily than was strictly necessary. Yoshi knew her city and its sounds. Kit might insist he belonged here. So he’d told her, right at the beginning, the summer he arrived at Narita with one suit, three battered Murakami paperbacks, and a Berlitz phrase book. She’d been right not to believe him.

She heard a cat first, then a bin going over.

“Kit…?”

Yoshi listened in vain for his answer.

“You want to check that?”

The cat was expected, round here there was always a cat; but the bin was heavy, too large she’d have thought to be knocked over by an animal that small. Sighing, Yoshi climbed out of the bath and reached for her dressing gown, without bothering to dry herself first. She shuffled on some slippers and climbed the single flight of stairs to their bedroom to fetch her husband.

The sheet was thrown back and his
yukata
was missing from its hook on the door. Since it was hardly worth going back in her bath, Yoshi collected her book of poems, relit the gas to heat the water for Kit, and returned to the bedroom, climbing wearily into bed.

Outside, a car started up and a cat yowled, wooden walls creaked, as they often did, and a metallic clang at ground level told Yoshi that Kit had opened the grill which covered Pirate Mary’s rear door. She fell asleep to thoughts of Yuko, her sister’s new baby, and how she’d telephone in the morning to apologise.

Kit wore a jacket over his
yukata,
though he’d forgotten to put on shoes. The baseball bat in his hand came from a stall in Asakusa and was so old it had a facsimile of Babe Ruth’s signature, the words
1948 Memorial Edition
and
Produced in Occupied Japan
stamped into the handle.

Flicking on the overhead lights, Kit said, “I know you’re in here.”

Halogen strips stuttered into life overhead, revealing three microwaves, a Zanussi deep fat fryer, an industrial-size dishwasher, and a butcher’s block that had been there when he and Yoshi bought the building.

Other than this his kitchen was empty.

Bat in hand, Kit returned to the bar, realising too late that he’d just provided a perfect target for anybody now hidden behind the door.

“I’m armed,” he added.

Kit recognised the snort before he saw the girl. She was over by a window, wrapped in the folds of her cloak. It would have made more sense to Kit to discard the thing before she broke in, but then he wasn’t fifteen or a
cos-play-zoku
and who knew what rules they worked to?

“Found it,” she said, holding up her knife. “That’s all I wanted.” Neku did something clever with her fingers and the blade disappeared, only to pop back into being when she reversed the movement.

“See,” she said. “Not hard.”

Another twist of the wrist and it was gone again.

“I’m leaving now.”

Kit nodded.

“I won’t be back.”

“That works for me,” he said.

“Okay, I’m off…” Neku hesitated on the edge of leaving. “Can I ask you something?”

“You can ask…”

“How did you know I was down here?”

“That bin lid,” Kit said. “You shouldn’t have knocked it over.”

Neku looked puzzled. “I haven’t been near the bins,” she said, before shifting to her next question. “And why did you buy me coffee?”

“You looked cold,” said Kit.

She sighed. “You know,” said Neku, “I’m not sure I’m ever going to understand this world.”

“I’ll see you out,” he said.

Stepping onto cinder block, Neku flicked open her cloak and twisted one hand, summoning the knife she’d taken from the bar. A flick of her other wrist and she had the second knife. With a twirl, she cut one blade through the air and then cut again with the other, folding them out of sight with a simple twist of her fingers.

And then—and this is where it became impossible—Neku forced her fingers into the cut in the air and began to prise it apart, the tips of her fingers vanishing from sight.

“Wait,” Kit demanded.

Neku shook her head.