The End of the World (14 page)

‘I know what they thought,’ I whisper.

‘What did they think?’ She checks the pad between my legs and tucks the sheet under my feet. There’s noise outside, voices and clanking.

‘They don’t understand. I don’t have a complex.’

‘You’re going to be fine, Lucy. Keep talking. You need to stay awake to see your mum. She’s gone to the hospital to meet you.’

‘My mum misses him too.’

‘Does she? Who does she miss?’

The stretcher arrives and two ambulance men lift me across from the bed. Lights in the corridor flash above my head. Outside is dark but the ambulance doors are open and light shines out. I tilt my head back so I can see the man pushing the trolley. He smiles.

‘It’s Lucy, isn’t it?’ he asks.

My head falls back on the pillow.

‘Lucifer,’ I mumble.

Distance Runner

Transienceξ

It is three o’clock on a black, icy spring morning in Tokyo. A small group clusters around a cherry blossom tree in full flower deep inside a vast, empty park. Rain drizzles down and the spectators hunch their shoulders and bow their heads. I am one of the crowd. We are watching a man dancing among the boughs of the tree. He is being filmed. He has shaved his entire body and covered his skin in white greasepaint. Only his black eyes and the scarlet cavern of his mouth show against the white. The camera films his grimaces and contortions as he wraps his thick, sturdy limbs around the branches of the tree. Each time he moves, the tree lets fall a sprinkle of pink petals and they adorn the hair and shoulders of the audience like confetti. Tom hands me a paper cup with a dribble of hot sake in the bottom and a cherry blossom petal pasted to the outside. As I raise the cup to my lips and taste the steaming drink I understand why cherry blossoms are so important. They show how transient life is. They are exquisite for a moment and then they are gone. Every petal will be dead and fallen within a week. And then I shiver because I am cold and hungry and tired, and most of all I am lonely.

Enclosure

We step into a room where a crowd is milling around an auditorium. Without warning, all light is extinguished and hands begin to touch us, herding us roughly into what seems to be a line. I can hear the breathing and coughs of bodies around me, but the room is without light and even after a few minutes I am still blind. Someone further ahead giggles nervously and is shushed. A hand grips my elbow and pushes me forward until I reach a ladder. I climb the ladder. At the top I crawl on all fours across a platform, sometimes bumping my head into the buttocks or the shoulders of another anxious body. ‘Sorry,’ we whisper to each other. I find a wall and sit against it. The probing hands of other people brush my body and hurriedly pull away as they search for their own safe space. When everything is quiet except for the breathing of the crowd, a voice tells us to stand up. Once we are all on our feet the box containing us begins to move. There is nothing to hold on to except the walls or other people. We stumble as the box glides around. I hit my head against the wall and tears start in my eyes. As the tension rises to the point where we are ready to rebel, lights flood into the box, a trapdoor in the wall slides open, and a grotesque puppet head lunges through the hole and screams with laughter. ‘Scared?’ it shouts.
Ω

Supplicationψ

We take a trip to Enoshima, home of the goddess of the arts. In midsummer the humidity wraps around us like the clinging arms of hot children and before we have crossed the bridge to the island I am flagging. We stop in the dusty town square to buy a drink. Outside the fish shop is a fibreglass statue of Benten, the goddess of the arts. Her black hair is pulled back from her face and held with a comb at the back. She wears a kimono draped over one shoulder so that her right breast shows. On her lap sits a lute. ‘Take a photo,’ I tell Tom. He wants me to stand next to the statue and put my arm around her naked shoulder but I prefer the picture of her alone, staring out across the bridge toward the mainland with a baleful expression as if she is wondering why she has been banished to this faded tourist island.

At the top of the hill there is a shrine where we buy lucky charms because Benten is one of the lucky gods. Tom buys a keyring with a glass vial attached. Inside the vial is a miniature statue of Benten. A man next to us at the stall warns us about Benten. ‘She is a very jealous goddess,’ he says. ‘You must not have other gods near her or she will be jealous of your love for them. She wants you all to herself. If she catches you with someone else she will destroy your artistic powers, take away all your money, ruin your life.’

By the time we are trudging down the hill back to the tram stop, I am exhausted. Tom strides ahead then waits for me to catch up. The afternoon sun bores through my black straw hat, but when I take it off the sun’s rays burn the skin of my face. I am wearing a short dress with thin straps and my shoulders are turning bright pink. Men turn to stare when I sit down on the kerb to rest and try to tug my tight dress further down my thighs. Tom strolls back to where I sit. He stands in front of me, blocking the sun.

‘Stay there a minute will you?’ I say. ‘It’s very cooling.’

He lifts his arm to shade his eyes. The Benten keyring is looped around his middle finger. The charm dangles from his hand, and Benten’s tiny body rattles around in her glass cage as Tom wipes the sweat from his forehead.

‘That’s no way to treat a goddess,’ I say. ‘Do you mind if we rest in a coffee shop for a while?’

He laughs and takes the keyring off his finger, then places it with mock respect in his pocket. But the image of her dangling from his finger, trapped in her glass prison, has lodged in my mind. We sit in a coffee shop and drink iced tea and wait until I feel ready to set off again.

Patienceω

This day I am waiting in a dim corridor. People occasionally walk by. One or two nod. I sit there for an hour listening to bodies moving about in the room opposite my bench. When I am allowed in, three people dressed in lead costumes are waiting like an audience. I am the performer. The three leaden people move behind a screen. Two arms, encased in lead-shielded gloves, reach out from behind the screen and take the lid off a container, then use tongs to pull out a large pill which they place in my hand. I swallow the pill and wash it down with a glass of water. The leaden people are all standing far away, but one of the people takes off her mask. It is the woman doctor I know well. She smiles at me and tells me I have been good. I remember her with fondness. She is the woman who has said to me over the past few months in her broken English, ‘Do not be exciting. You can die. Remember, no exciting.’

‘It’s all right,’ I always assured her. ‘I am not exciting.’

That night I say to Tom, ‘I can’t sleep with you. I have to be alone.’

He pauses. He looks around the room and frowns. ‘Oh, okay,’ he says.

‘I mean, they told me I’m radioactive. I’m dangerous. For two nights.’

‘Only two nights? I could tell them you’ve been dangerous longer than that,’ he says.

ξ Let’s say I told you this story and you asked me, ‘Is that a dream you had?’ I would answer, ‘No, that is my life on the night of my thirty-third birthday.’

Ω If I told you this you might laugh and say, ‘Well, you shouldn’t keep going to see experimental theatre.’ And I would probably answer, ‘These shows sometimes hint at how your own life is going.’ What would you say to that? I imagine you would say, ‘Oh, you drama queen.’

ψ
Just like everywhere else, the gods in Japan are capricious. The link between what you have done wrong and why you are being punished is rarely clear. Do you remember when you saw my collection of brightly coloured charms and prayers to the different gods? When I told you I was covering all my bets you said, ‘That only works if you know the whole field.’ I laughed at you then. ‘Does this mean you’re afraid?’ I asked.

ω
When you are sick for a long time, you learn to wait in a new way. You learn the art of waiting. Each spasm of pain or thundering heart or cramped muscle has its own span, its own rhythm, and you learn to wait until it is done. A part of you counts the beats of your body, and another part of you keeps walking, keeps talking, lifts the shoulders and shortens the stride and makes you move forward. You move through the pain, knowing that it will end. Knowing, at the same time, that this illness is your companion and will greet you again soon.

Stirringσ

Tom has been away for work and his friend has decided to look out for me. Hermann takes me to a theatre one night. We watch the performers careen across the stage like kamikaze. The words make no sense but in the final scene the back of the stage falls away and the skyline of Shinjuku, its mad burning neon face, is revealed to us like an epiphany. Afterwards we run to the nearest café and eat and drink and joke. At the end of the night, as we are walking to the last train, always the last train, he pulls me to him and kisses me on the lips.

‘Come with me,’ Hermann says. ‘Come now, quickly. I’ll make love to you, any way you like. I’ll do anything you like.’ He kisses me again and his tongue creeps between my lips and his left hand cups my breast while his right hand pulls me closer. I push him away and look at his face.

‘But Tom is back tomorrow,’ I say. ‘What are you doing? And you have a wife.’

‘I know,’ he says. ‘That’s why we have to go tonight. To a hotel. A park. Anywhere. Come on.’

I feel the wine running through my veins and his cock against my belly as he presses into me again and his mouth writes messages on the skin of my throat and, for a moment, I consider going with him. Even though he is nothing special, just Hermann, Tom’s friend. Then I pull away.
ϕ

σ
‘Come on, you either did it with him or you didn’t,’ I hear you say to me. ‘I won’t tell,’ you mock whisper and nudge me in the ribs.

ϕ
Sometimes just the sensation is enough to let you know you are still alive. Without the act.

Distance runners

We have been given tickets to an athletics competition. World stars have come to Japan and we sit in plastic moulded seats attached to a long steel bar watching as the competitors run and throw and leap on the field below us. The sun is strong and we are very high in the stand. Below us, the field lies in the bottom of the bowl created by the stands. The surface of the field is dull red, painted with white lines. Circles within circles, long tracks of lines, tiny triangles. Like writing we can’t understand.

Tom hands me the binoculars. I know I am supposed to be looking at the other end of the field, but I focus the binoculars on the faces of the competitors nearest us. There is a long jump below where we sit. Competitors are sitting and stretching on the red surface. They are frowning with concentration, moving their lips in some mantra, focusing all their thought and mind on this one task. One girl has bandages taped tightly around her left calf. A cheer goes up and the girl in my sights lifts her head like a wolf sniffing the wind.

‘Did you see that jump?’ Tom laughs. ‘Amazing.’ He puts his hand on my thigh and squeezes, then looks down and frowns, just like the competitors on the field.

‘You’re getting thin,’ he says as though he is talking to himself.

‘I’m going to get a lot thinner,’ I answer.

Tom swings his head away from me and breathes in deeply through his nose. I go back to watching the field. Around the outside of the field is the running track with its white lines to designate running lanes. In the sprints, the runners run inside their defined lane. But the long distance runners are different. The distance runners start in separate lanes, then race for the inside lane of the track. Later on, when they leave the stadium, they scatter across the road, then bunch up, then scatter again like a flock of birds wheeling around the sky.

‘Where are the marathon runners? Aren’t they supposed to be finishing now?’ I ask Tom.

He shrugs. He glances down at my thigh occasionally as if he is still shocked by what he has seen. My thin thighs. My bony knees. My wrists like swollen wooden joints. Sometimes I can hear my heart beating against my ribs, knocking up against the cage like an unhinged door in the wind. Tom puts his arm around me and cups my left shoulder with his hand. I sense him exploring bone structure, gently tracing the knobby bones through my fragile skin and flesh.

‘I see them,’ I tell him.

The runners have appeared on the big screen at the other end of the stadium. They’re turning off the road and heading into the tunnel that leads to the stadium. Soon they appear at the mouth of the tunnel. Their thin bodies are strained and the sinews and muscles flex and tremble with each step. Their faces are haggard. Three men stagger along the track, heading for the finish line. Two are close together and the third man is making a heroic effort so that by the time they reach the hundred-metre mark they are three abreast.

Tom gives me a quick kiss on the cheek, then lets go of my shoulder and stands up to watch the distance runners through the binoculars. His armpits are soaked with sweat, even though he is only a spectator. I look around, take in the scene, mark this point in time as another moment that I will be sure to remember.
ο

ο
I once heard a marathon runner talking about how he stayed the distance. He said he studied the route and made marker points for himself. This place or statue or checkpoint meant he had got so far, had so far left to go. He buoyed himself up with checks on his own physical state. Legs aching but no cramps. Not dehydrated. I can imagine you asking me about that. ‘Have you made preparations?’ you would ask me. I might feel like crying then. I might tell you I want to talk it all out. My whole life.