Tokyo (33 page)

I bent to her. ‘Turn over,’ I said. ‘Roll on to your back.’

She remained motionless, only the shadows of a maple branch overhead moving across her back. I bent, took her by the arm, and turned her on to her back. She was as light as firewood, and once on her back her hair and arms lay where they fell, loose and spread out in the snow. I took a step back, choking a little. The front of her trousers had been cut away and a hole about the size of a rice bowl had been scraped in her right side, just below the ribs where her liver would be. I could see the blackish stain of gangrene around the edges of the wound, where she had been gouged at, and the smell made me grope instinctively for my sleeve, fumbling to hold it over my nose and mouth. It was the smell of the most vicious gangrene. Gas gangrene. Even if I could get her to a hospital she would not live.

I stood with my arm across my face, staring at the hole in the child’s stomach, trying to imagine why it had been made. It was not accidental. It was not a stab wound. This hole had been carved out of her body with a purposefulness that made my blood run cold. ‘What is this?’ I muttered to Liu. ‘Is it a trophy?’ I couldn’t think of any other reason for such a mutilation. ‘Is this a trophy he’s taking?’

‘Shi Chongming, don’t ask me this question. I have never seen anything like this …’

Just then the child’s eyes opened and she saw me. I didn’t have time to lower my arm. She caught the disgust in my face, she saw

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my sleeve held tightly against my mouth, trying to block out her smell. She understood that I was sickened by her. She blinked once, her eyes clear and alive. I dropped my arm and tried to breathe normally. I wouldn’t allow my disgust to be one of the last impressions she had of herself in the world.

I turned to Liu in anguish. What should I do? What can I do?

He shook his head wearily, and went to the side of the road. When I saw where he was heading I understood. He was making his way to a place where a heavy paving-stone had come loose at the foot of a building.

When the act was complete, when the child was quite dead and the stone smeared with her blood, we cleaned our hands, re buttoned our coats and rejoined the boy. Liu took his son in his arms and kissed his head over and over again until the boy became embarrassed and struggled to get away. The snow was falling again and we all headed in silence in the direction of our houses.

Old Father Heaven, forgive me. Forgive me for not having the energy to bury her. She is lying in the snow still, the reflections of clouds and branches and sky moving in her dead eyes. There are traces of her on the front of my greatcoat and under my nails. I am sure traces of her are sticking to my heart too, but I can’t feel them. I don’t feel a thing. Because this is Nanking, and it is not new, this death. One death is hardly worth mentioning in this city where the devil stalks the street.

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45

Around me the room was emerging slowly from the darkness. On the futon I sat very still, my heart thudding, and waited for the noises outside to become recognizable. But every time I thought I’d got the tail of it between my fingers it faded under the racket of the storm. Shadows of leaves carried by the wind passed the window, and sitting in the semidark like that I began to imagine all manner of things: I hallucinated that the house was a little raft in the dark, juggled on the waves, that outside my room the city was gone, blasted away in an atomic attack.

The sound again. What was it? I turned to the door. My first thought was of the cats in the garden. I’d seen their kittens sometimes, clinging like monkeys to the mosquito screens, screaming into our rooms like baby birds. Maybe a kitten was in one of the other rooms, crawling froglike up a screen. Or maybe it was …

‘Jason?’ I whispered, sitting up straight, my skin crawling. This time it was louder, an odd, ululating sound lisping round the house. I tipped on to my hands and knees and crawled to the door, opened it a little way, very silently, trying to take its weight so it didn’t shriek on the runners. I peered out. Several of the shutters had been pulled back and opposite Jason’s room a window stood open, as if he’d stopped there after our argument just long enough to smoke a cigarette. Outside, the garden was rearing and thrashing in the wind - branches had broken, and near the window a Lawson’s Station carrier-bag, brought on the

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wind and caught in a tree, shifted and hissed and crackled, throwing its eerie shadow skittering round the corridor, up the walls and across the tatami matting.

But the storm wasn’t what had woken me. The more I looked at the familiar passageway, the more I knew something was wrong. It was something about the light. Usually it wasn’t this dark. Usually we left the overhead lamps on at night, but now the light coming under the doors from the Mickey Rourke poster was the only source of luminance, and instead of a row of lightbulbs, I could see jagged glitters of broken glass. I blinked a few times, my thoughts moving curiously slowly and calmly, allowing time for this to sink in. The lightbulbs in the corridor had been smashed in their fittings, just as if a giant hand had reached up and pinched them out.

Someone’s in the house, I thought, still strangely calm. There’s someone else in the house. I took a breath and stepped silently into the corridor. All the doors on this side of the house were closed - even the kitchen door. We usually left it open, in case someone was hungry or thirsty in the night. The toilet door, too, was shut tight, eerie in its blankness. I took a few steps up the corridor, stepping over the broken glass, trying to ignore the howling wind, trying to concentrate on the noise. It was coming from the third section of the corridor, where the gallery bent sideways and Jason’s room lay. As I stood there, breathing carefully, the sound began to separate itself, detaching minutely from the wind, and when at last I recognized it my pulse leaped. It was the soft sound of someone whimpering in pain.

I stepped sideways and opened one of the windows a crack. Another noise was coming from the same part of the house: an odd, furtive rummaging, as if every rat in the house had converged on one room. The trees bent and whipped, but from here I had a view directly across the garden to the far corridor. When my eyes got used to the tree shadows bouncing off the glass, what I saw made me drop to a crouch, gripping the frame with trembling fingers, peering cautiously over the sill.

Jason’s door was open. In the half-light I could see a shape in his room: a hideous, stooped shape, more a shadow than

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anything. Like a hyena crouching over a meal, intent on disjointing its prize, unnaturally crabbed, as if it had dropped straight down on to its prey from the ceiling. All the hairs went up on my skin at once. The Nurse. The Nurse was in the house … And then I saw another figure in the room, standing slightly to one side, half bent over as if he was looking at something on the floor. He was in shadows too, his back to me, but something about the shape of his shoulders told me that I was looking at the man who had sworn his allegiance to Fuyuki earlier that evening: the chimpira.

I blinked a few times, thinking in a surreal, fevered way: What is this? Why are they here? Is it a joke? I straightened a little, and now I could see the top of Jason’s head and shoulders: he was face down, prone, pinioned to the ground by the chimpira, whose foot was planted directly on the back of his head. Just then the Nurse shifted a little, and settled herself in a sitting position, her big, muscular knees in the black nylons parted wide and high either side of her shoulders, her arms straight down between them. That thin, awful sound I’d heard was Jason pleading, struggling to get free. She wasn’t listening to him - she was going about her business with unnerving concentration, her shoulders hunched, rocking herself calmly back and forth. Her hands, which were just below the frame of my vision, operated in small, controlled motions, as if she was performing a complex and delicate operation. I don’t know how I knew, but I had a moment’s rare clarity: You’re watching a rape. She’s raping him.

My trance fractured. A sweat broke out across my back and I stood up, opening my mouth to speak. As if she had smelt me on the wind, the Nurse looked up. She paused. Then her huge shoulders rose, the polished wig swayed round her great angular head, which she held back a little, as if she was rising from an interrupted meal. I froze: it was as if the whole world was a telescope, containing me at one end, the Nurse at the other. Even now I wonder how I must have looked to her, how much she saw: a moving shadow, a pair of eyes glinting in an unlit window at the far, lonely end of the house.

At that moment the wind made a ferocious lap of the garden,

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screaming like a jet engine, filling the house with noise. The Nurse tilted her head and spoke in a low voice to the chimpira, who immediately became rigid. Slowly he straightened and turned to stare down the long corridor to where I stood. Then he pulled back his shoulders and flexed his hands. He began to amble casually towards me.

I lurched away from the window and bolted for my room, slamming the door and locking it, tripping and scuttling backwards like a crab, stumbling over the books and papers in the dark, banging into things blindly. I stood, pressed against the wall, staring at the door, my chest as tight as if I’d been thumped in the ribs. Jason, I thought, feverishly. Jason, they’ve come back to get you. What games have you been playing with her?

At first no one came. Minutes seemed to pass - time when they could have been doing anything to Jason, time when I thought I should open the door, get to the phone, call the police. Then, just as I thought the chimpira wasn’t coming, that he and the Nurse must have left the house in silence, I distinctly heard, through the wind, his footstep creak in the corridor outside.

I shot to the side window, scrabbling crazily at the edges of the mosquito screen, breaking my nails. One of the catches gave. I flung away the screen, threw open the window and looked down. About four feet below, an air-conditioning unit that might hold my weight stuck out from the neighbouring building. From there it was another long drop into the tiny space between the buildings. I turned and stared at the door. The footsteps had stopped and, in the awful silence, the chimpira muttered something under his breath. Then a kick splintered the flimsy door. I heard him grab the frame, getting a hold so he could punch his foot straight through.

I scrambled on to the windowsill. I had time to see his arm splinter through the hole, his disembodied hand in the lavender suit groping in the dark for the doorlock, then I pushed myself out, landing noisily, the air-conditioner shuddering under my weight, something ripping my foot. I dropped into a clumsy squat, scrambled on to my stomach, dangling my legs out into the darkness, the wind whipping my pyjamas around me. I pushed away and dropped straight to the ground with a soft thud,

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rocking forward a little so that my face slammed against the plastic weatherboarding on the neighbouring house with a painful thuck.

Another splintering sound came from above - the noise of something metallic - a screw or a hinge, maybe, ricocheting round the room. I hauled in a breath, sprang to my feet and flew out into the alley, diving into a gap between two buildings opposite where I crouched, the blood thundering in my veins. After a moment or two I dared to shuffle forward, my hands on the two buildings, and peer up at the house in mute horror.

The chimpira was in my room. Light coming from the corridor behind amplified every detail of him, as if through a magnifying glass: individual hairs, the light shade swaying above his head. I pulled the collar of my pyjama jacket over my mouth, holding it there with both clenched fists, my teeth chattering, staring at him with eyes as hard and round as if I’d had adrenaline dropped into them. Would he guess how I’d escaped? Would he see me?

He hesitated, then his head appeared. I shrank back into the gap. He took long, patient minutes to study the drop from the window. When at last he pulled his head inside, his shadow wavered for a moment, then he disappeared from view, almost in slow motion, leaving the room blank save for the swinging light bulb. I started to breathe again.

You can be as brave and confident as you like, you can convince yourself that you’re invulnerable, that you know what you’re dealing with. You think that it won’t ever really get too serious - that there’ll be some kind of a warning before it goes that far, danger music, maybe, playing offstage, the way you get in films. But it seems to me that disasters aren’t like that. Disasters are life’s great ambushers: they have a way of jumping on you when your eyes are fixed on something else.

The Nurse and the chimpira stayed in our house for over an hour. I watched them roaming through the corridors, slamming into rooms, throwing the shutters off their hinges. Glass smashed and doors were ripped away. They overturned furniture and ripped the telephone out of the wall. And all the time I sat

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squashed and frozen between the buildings, my pyjama top pulled up over my mouth, all I could think was: Shi Chongming. You shouldn’t have let me get into this. You shouldn’t have let me get into things so dangerous. Because this was more, much more, than I had ever bargained for.

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46

The way I remember the rest of that night is like one of those time-lapse films you sometimes see of a flower opening, or the sun moving across a street - jerky, with people shooting suddenly from one place to another. Except my film is all lit in the electric cordite colour of disaster and the sound has a horrible slowed down underwater quality, with the creaking noise that you imagine big ships make. Zoom, and there’s the terrible shadow of the Nurse and Jason, making me think of something in a book, beast with two backs/beast with two backs, then zoom!, there’s me crouched between the buildings, my eyes watering, the muscles in my flanks twitching with fatigue. I’m watching the Nurse and the chimpira leaving the house, stopping briefly at the door to cast a glance up the street, the chimpira swinging keys on his fingers, the Nurse tightening the belt on her raincoat, before melting away into the dark. I’m frozen and numb everywhere, and when I touch my face where I banged the wall, it doesn’t hurt as much as it should. There’s just a little blood coming out of my nose and a little more where I bit my tongue. Then zoom again, and the Nurse hasn’t come back - the alley has been quiet for so long, and the front door is wide open, it’s been popped out of its catch, so I’m creeping back up the staircase, shivering crazily, hesitating at each step. Then I’m in my room, staring in disbelief at the devastation - my clothes scattered on the floor, the door caved in and all the drawers open and rummaged