The Devil of Nanking (17 page)

I stood for a long time, staring after her, the blood pounding in my temples, astonished that everything had changed so rapidly. I had been ready to concede to her, prepared to flee the city. But her taunts had me leaping in defence of a position that I am quite unsure of.

I might have stood there for ever, staring at the empty staircase, had the pheasant not begun to struggle. Wearily I took its feet in one hand and whipped it through the air in the swift, curling movement my mother had taught me as a child, windmilling it down at my side as if I was shaking water from a cloth, once, twice, until the bird’s neck was broken and I was left holding only a limp clot of feathers. I locked the shutters and carried the dead bird, wings lifting feebly once in a death spasm, into the kitchen.

I rarely go into Shujin’s kitchen, but now it was the only place I wanted to be. It comforted me. When I was a boy I would sit on the floor of the kitchen and watch my mother drop chickens into boiling water to soften the feathers. Now I filled a pot with water, lit the fire and waited until the bubbles rose to the surface. Moving in a daze, I scalded the bird, holding it by the feet, then sat at the table, plucking it, scraping at the pinfeathers on the breast, letting my mind rest on the familiar picture of my mother’s kitchen. I recalled her face in the days before my father’s business began to thrive and we could afford an
amah
, when she would spend all day in the kitchen, patiently packing cooked ducks in salt, wrapping them in cloth for storage, winding the birds’ intestines on to a skewer to be dried out in the pantry. Chiang Kai-shek, I thought dully, wants China to look forward. But is it so simple for a nation to rip the history from inside its heart?

I finished plucking the bird and carefully tucked its head under its wing, tying it with string the way my mother used to, the way Chinese women have done for generations. Then I put it into the pot and sat, the brilliant wet feathers sticking to my arms, and watched the bloody foam rise to the surface.

Last night I boarded up the house, nailing wood across every window and door. (Shujin would not help because her superstitions tell her that hammering in a nail will cause a deformity in our baby.) All evening we heard strange noises coming from the east, and before we went to bed I rested an iron bar against the spirit screen. Who knows if I will be able to use it, should the need arise? This morning we were woken by a distant rumble, like thunder, and half an hour ago Shujin filled up a pan to boil noodles for lunch. When she went to rinse her fingers the tap bucked and shuddered and only a thin brown liquid came out of it. What does this mean? Does it mean that the Japanese—

It’s happening even as I write! The single lightbulb overhead has just died. Now we are . . . We are in semi-darkness and I can hardly see my words on the paper. Outside the house the dying whine of failing machinery is terrible. The city is shutting down around our ears. Shujin is rummaging in the kitchen, trying to find our oil lamps, and from the end of the alley I can hear someone shouting hysterically.

I can’t sit here any longer. I can’t sit here and listen. I am going to investigate.

When I went upstairs, the house seemed very dark and cool after the hot garden. I had a bath in the echoey old bathroom, with its green mould between the tiles and the pipes all showing. I washed carefully, staring at my reflection thoughtfully, at the way the running water magnified my white skin, the silvery hairs and pores. Shi Chongming wanted me to get Fuyuki to talk. What he was saying, I was sure, was that I had to flirt with him. He meant I had to be sexy.

In the hospital they had never got tired of lecturing me about my sexual behaviour, so I decided fairly early on that it wouldn’t be very bright to tell them how I’d really felt about the boys in the van. I could guess what they’d say: ‘Ah! See? An entirely inappropriate response!’ So I didn’t admit the truth: that after the boys had all taken their turns, and we’d got dressed and were heading back along the A303 the way we’d come, I was happier than I’d ever been. I didn’t tell them how bright everything looked, with the stars shining and the white line in the road slipping under the van. The four in the back kept yelling out not to go over the bumps too quickly, and I sat in the front humming and listening to a battered tape called XTC that kept
wah
ing and cracking up through the van’s broken speakers. I felt light inside, as if something dark and secret had been washed out of me by the boys.

We got to the place on the country road where they’d picked me up and the driver pulled the van over to the verge. With the engine still running he leaned across me and opened the door. I stared at him, not understanding.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘see you around.’

‘What?’

‘See you around.’

‘Am I supposed to get out now?’

‘Yes.’

I was silent for a while, looking at the side of his face. There were some pimples on his neck just above his collar. ‘Aren’t I going to the pub with you? You said we were going to the pub. I’ve never been inside a pub.’

He pinched out his cigarette and threw it out of the window. There was a little line of turquoise still on the horizon over his left shoulder, and the clouds were rolling across it as if they were boiling. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said. ‘You’re too young for the pub. You’ll get us chucked out.’

I twisted round and looked into the back of the van. Four heads turned away from me, pretending to stare out of the windows. The sandy-haired boy was at the very back, meeting my eyes with a serious expression, as if he’d caught me stealing. I looked at the driver, but he was staring intently out of his window, tapping his fingers impatiently on the steering-wheel. I opened my mouth to say something, then changed my mind. I swung my legs out of the van and dropped out on to the road.

The driver reached over and slammed the door. I put my hands on the window and started to speak, but he’d already taken the handbrake off. The gears squealed, the indicator came on, the van rolled away. I was left on the roadside, watching its lights dwindle, then disappear. Overhead the clouds rolled and rolled until they’d entirely obscured the moon, and the little part of England that I stood in was completely dark.

And so I had to agree with the doctors – the immediate result of sex hadn’t been what I’d expected. And with the way my body was now, there probably wasn’t ever going to be a chance to find out if it could be different in the future. I didn’t dare tell the doctors this, I didn’t dare say how much I wished I could have a boyfriend, someone to go to bed with: I knew if I said anything they’d tell me my outrageous impulses were the root of a greater evil, that I was walking around with a wolf living inside me. I listened to the lessons about personal dignity and about self-respect, all the complex stuff about consent and self-control, and it didn’t take long to decide that sex was dangerous and unpredictable, like Shi Chongming’s magic crane of the past, phosphorous on a cloudy day. I came to the conclusion that I’d be better off just pretending it didn’t exist.

In the end it was the girl in the bed next to me, the one who taught me how to smoke, who gave me a kind of solution. She used to masturbate every night. ‘Jigging’, she called it. ‘I’ll stay in here for ever, me. Don’t care. Long as I’ve got me fags and a good jigging I’m sound.’ She’d do it under the covers when the lights went out. She wasn’t ashamed. I’d lie in the next bed with my sheets up to my chin, staring with wide eyes at the covers going up and down. She made it seem so gleeful, as if there was nothing wrong at all.

As soon as I got out of hospital, and wasn’t being watched every five minutes, I began my own guilty experiments. I soon knew how to make myself come, and although I never actually squatted over a mirror (the jigging girl promised me there were people who did) I was sure no other girl on earth had got to know the dark tract between her legs the way I knew mine. Sometimes I’d wonder about the wolf. I was afraid that one day I’d reach down there and my fingers would brush over its wet nose.

Now in the bathroom in Takadanobaba, I rinsed out the flannel and looked thoughtfully at my reflection, a thin-limbed spectre squatting on the little rubber stool. The girl who might go to the grave with only five boys in the back of a Ford Transit to reckon as her life’s loves. I filled up the little plastic bowl, swirling the hot and the cold water together, and tipped it down my body, letting the water lift and furl in the hollows of my collar-bone, filter down into the scars on my stomach. I put down the bowl and slowly, dreamily, spanned my hands across my abdomen, linking my thumbs and fanning my fingers into a frame, staring vacantly at the way the water gathered in the hatched gouges, silvery, reflecting the light like mercury.

No one, only the doctors and a man who came from the police to take photographs of them, had ever seen my scars. In my daydreams I imagined there was someone who would understand – someone who would look at them and not recoil, who would hear the story and instead of burying their face, averting their eyes, would say something sweet and sad and sympathetic. But of course I knew it would never happen, because I’d never ever get that far. Never. If I imagined taking off my clothes, if I pictured myself revealing the truth to someone, I’d get a sickening, rushing sensation in my inner ear that would weaken my knees and have me tugging frantically at whatever I happened to be wearing, wrapping it tightly round my stomach as if I could hide what was there.

I suppose there are some things you just have to be grown-up about. Sometimes you have to take a deep breath and say: ‘This is not something I can expect in my life.’ And if you say it enough times, it’s surprising – after a while it doesn’t even feel that horrible any more.

While I was in the bathroom, thinking about Fuyuki, the Russians had got dressed and now they were going down to the garden. They must have seen me out there and decided that if I could venture out so could they. Svetlana was dressed in only a tiny lime green bikini and a straw sun-hat, which she held on to her head with her free hand. When I was dried and dressed I stood in the upstairs gallery and watched her make her way through the undergrowth, her tanned limbs flashing through the leaves. Irina came behind in a bikini top, pink shorts, sweetheart sunglasses and a bright pink baseball hat, worn backwards so her neck was shaded. She’d shoved a packet of cigarettes into the strap of her bikini top. They both picked their way out through the undergrowth, squealing and bickering, and lifting their feet in their high heels like odd wading birds, coming blinking out into the sunshine. ‘Sun, sun!’ they chorused, adjusting their glasses and staring up at the sky.

I put my nose silently to the window and watched them rubbing on sun lotion, undoing packets of cherry KissMint chewing-gum and drinking beer out of frozen cans they’d bought from the machines on the street. Svetlana had fire-engine-red polish on her toes. I stared down at my white feet, wondering whether I had the courage to paint my nails. All of a sudden I had a hot, overwhelming feeling that made me shiver and rub my arms – it was something about wasted time and how lucky they were to be so comfortable in their skin. To move and stretch and be at home in the sun, nobody accusing them of madness.

And right there and then I made up my mind. As long as I was dressed, as long as my stomach was covered, there was nothing, no physical mark, that gave it away. If you didn’t know, and no one here in Tokyo did, you’d look at me and say I was normal. I could be as ‘sexy’ as anyone else.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Fuyuki. Every time the lift bell rang and the hostesses swivelled round to yell in unison across the club, ‘
Irasshaimase!
Welcome!’ I’d sit forward on the edge of my seat, my pulse leaping, thinking I might see his wheelchair gliding across the floor. But he didn’t come into the club that night, or the next.

Over the days that followed, I would take out his card and look at it several times a day. Sometimes I went into a kind of trance holding it, turning it over and over in my fingers. His name meant Winter Tree and something in the combination of the calligraphy and the nature of the characters was so powerful that I only had to glance at the black on white to visualize, in astonishing clarity, a forest deep in snow. I would retrace the
kanji
with my calligraphy brushes, picturing a mountainside, a pine forest, snowdrifts and icicles in the trees.

Now that I knew what would make Shi Chongming relent and give me the film, now that I was going to make the leap, I had become a serious student of the erotic. I started to watch the Japanese girls on the streets in their Victorian petticoats and lacy pumps, their ‘loose socks’ and short kilts. In traditional Japan, eroticism was something slender and pale like a flower stalk – the erotic was the tiny patch of bare skin on the back of a geisha’s neck. It’s something different the world over. I stared for hours at the Russians in their big high heels and orange suntans.