Tokyo (36 page)

‘Okay.’

There was a pause, then Svetlana bent towards me, put her hand on my shoulder and gazed into my eyes in a way that made me feel slightly threatened. ‘Now listen, Grey. You better speak to him.’ She jerked her head to where Jason’s door was tightly closed. ‘Something serious.’

Irina nodded. ‘He tell us, “Don’t look at me”. But we seen ‘im.’

‘Yes. We see him trying to move around, trying to … how d’you call it? Krewl? Down on his hands? Like dog? Krewl?’

‘Crawl?’ A nasty sensation moved across my skin. ‘You mean he’s crawling?’

‘Yeah, crawl. He been trying to crawl.’ She gave Irina an uneasy look. ‘Grey, listen.’ She licked her lips. ‘We think it true - he need a doctor. He say he don’t wanna see one, but…’ Her voice trailed off. ‘Something bad wrong with him. Something bad bad.’

The girls went, chauffeured away by a nervous-looking man in a white Nissan, a blue tartan child-seat in the back. When they

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were gone the house seemed cold and abandoned, as if it was being closed down for the winter. Jason’s door was shut, a chink of light coming from under it, but no sound. I stood, my hand raised to knock, trying to walk my mind through what I was supposed to say. It took a long time, and I still couldn’t decide, so I knocked anyway. At first there was no answer. When I knocked again I heard a muffled ‘What?’

I drew back the door. The room was freezing, lit only by the flickering blue of his small TV up against the window. In the half light I could see strange jumbles of things on the floor, empty bottles, discarded clothes, what looked like the tall aluminium pedal-bin from the kitchen. On the TV a Japanese girl in a cheerleader’s outfit was jumping across floating islands in a swimming-pool, her miniskirt flicking up every time she jumped. She was the only sign of life. Pushed in front of the doorway, blocking the entrance, was Jason’s desk.

‘Climb over it,’ he said. His voice seemed to be coming from the wardrobe.

I put my head into the room and craned my neck, trying to see him. ‘Where are you?’

‘Climb over it, for fuck’s sake.’

I sat on the desk and pulled up my knees, swivelled round, then swung my feet on to the floor.

‘Shut the door.’

I leaned over the desk and slid the door closed, then switched on the light.

‘No/ Switch it off!’

The floor was covered in handfuls of tissue and paper kitchen towels, all wadded and stuck down with blood. Soaking red tissues overflowed from the wastebasket. Poking out from under the bloodied futon, I could see the yellow handle of a carving knife, the tip of a screwdriver, a selection of chisels. I was looking at an ad hoc armoury. Jason was under siege.

‘
said, switch off the light. Do you want her to see us in here?’p>

I did as he told me and there was a long, bleak silence. Then I said, ‘Jason, let me get you a doctor. I’m going to call the International Clinic.’

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‘I said no\ I’m not having some Nip doctor touching me.’

Till call your embassy.’

‘No way.’

‘Jason.’ I took a step across the floor. I could feel the adhesive clack as my feet peeled from the sticky floor. ‘You’re bleeding.’

‘So what?’

‘Where are you bleeding from?’ ‘Where am I bleeding from? What sort of dumb fucking question is that?’

‘Tell me where you’re bleeding from. Maybe it’s serious.’

‘What the fuck are you saying?’ He hammered on the wardrobe door, making the walls shudder. ‘I don’t know what you think happened, but whatever it is you’re imagining it.’ He broke off, breathing hard. ‘You’re making it up. You and your dumb-ass inventions. Your weird fucking head.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with my head,’ I said steadily. ‘I don’t invent things.’

‘Well, baby, you’re imagining this. I wasn’t touched, if that’s what you’re saying.’ I could see him now, in the wardrobe, crunched up against the wall. I could just make out his outline, huddled under a duvet. He seemed to be lying on his side, as if he was trying to keep warm. It was spooky, standing there in the half-light, listening to his thickened voice coming from the wardrobe. ‘I don’t want to hear you even suggesting that WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING? DON’T STAND NEAR THE WARDROBE!’

I took a step back.

‘Stay there. And don’t fucking look at me.’ I could hear him breathing now, a laboured sound as if something was lodged in his airway. ‘Now, listen,’ he said, ‘you’ve got to get someone to help me.’

Till take you to a doctor and—’

‘No!’ I could hear him trying to control his voice and get his thoughts in line. ‘No. Listen. There’s - there’s a number written on the wall. Next to the light switch. See it? That’s my - my mother. Call her. Go into a phone box and call collect, reverse the charges. Tell her to send someone for me. Tell her not someone

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from Boston, tell her it’s got to be one of the men from the house in Palm Springs. They’re nearer.’

Palm Springs? I stared at the wardrobe. Jason, part of a family where there were houses in California? Employees? I’d always imagined him as a real traveller, the sort I’d seen at the airport: a battered Lonely Planet under one arm, a toilet roll hooked on the back of a rucksack. I’d pictured him washing dishes, teaching English, sleeping on a beach with just a calor-gas stove and a patched bedroll. I’d always believed he had everything to lose just like the rest of us.

‘What is it? What don’t you understand? Are you still there?’ An advert for Pocky chocolate wands came on the TV. I watched it for a moment or two. Then I sighed and turned for the door. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll call.’

I’d never made a collect call before, and when the automated operator asked my name I almost said, ‘Weirdo.’ In the end I said, ‘I’m calling for Jason.’ When his mother answered the phone she listened in silence. I recited everything twice: the address, how to find the place, that he needed a doctor urgently and to please - I hesitated at this bit, thinking how odd it was talking about Jason like this - to please send someone from the west coast because it would be quicker. ‘And who, may I ask, are you?’ She had an English accent, although she was in Boston. ‘Would you be polite enough to give me your name?’

‘I’m being serious,’ I said, and hung up.

It was dark now, and when I got back to the house I didn’t switch on too many lights - I couldn’t help thinking of what it would look like from outside, blazing over the darkened neighbourhood. I didn’t know a customer who could lend me money, it was too cold to sleep in the parks, and I wasn’t sure Mama Strawberry would give me a sub before payday, certainly not a big enough one to afford a hotel. I couldn’t beg from Shi Chongming. After the club I might have to come back and sleep here. The thought made me cold.

It didn’t take me long to find a selection of tools from the store rooms - there were a lot of things in that house if you’d decided

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you had to defend yourself: a mallet, a chisel, a heavy rice-cooker that you could probably throw if necessary. I weighed the mallet in my hand. It felt good and heavy. I took them all to my room, rested them against the skirting-board, then packed my holdall with a few things: a big sweater, all the notes and sketches of Nanking, my passport and the remainder of Irina’s money. It reminded me of the earthquake kits we were all supposed to have - the few things you’d need in an emergency. I went to the window and, holding the strap, dangled it down, gently, gently, until my arm was straight. Then I let it drop the rest of the way. It fell with a very small bump behind the air-conditioning unit. From the alley no one would know it was there.

While I was standing at the window, suddenly, out of nowhere, it began to snow. Well, I thought, looking up, Christmas isn’t far away. Soft flakes whirled against the thin slice of grey sky between the houses, obscuring Mickey Rourke’s face. If Christmas was near then it wouldn’t be long before my little girl had been dead ten years. Ten years. Amazing how time just gets packed away into nothing, like an accordion. After a long time I closed the window. I wrapped a plastic carrier-bag round my hand and went out into the snow. Using my fingernails inside the plastic I scraped up the dead kitten and took it to the garden where I buried it under a persimmon tree.

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5&

50

Nanking, 20 December 1937

I am writing this by the light of a candle. My right hand is painful, a thin burn running diagonally across the palm, and I am cramped on the bed, my feet tucked under me, the bed curtains drawn tight to make sure that there is no possibility, absolutely no possibility, of any light escaping into the alley. Shujin sits opposite me, mortally terrified by what has happened tonight, clutching the curtains closed and shooting glances over her shoulder at the candle. I know she would rather I had no light at all, but tonight of all nights I have to write. I have an overwhelming sense that any history written in these days, however small and inconsequential, will one day be important. Every voice will count because no one person will ever contain or calibrate Nanking’s story. History will fail, and there will be no definitive Nanking invasion.

Everything I thought I believed has fled - in my heart there is a hole as naked and rotten as in the body of the child outside the factory, and all I can think about is what this occupation has really cost us. It means the end of a China that I haven’t valued for years. It is the death of all belief - the end of dialects, temples, moon cakes in the autumn and cormorant fishing at the feet of our mountains. It is the death of lovely bridges spreading over lotus ponds, the yellow stone reflected in the silent evening water. Shujin and I are the last links in the chain. We stand on the cliff face, holding China back from a long fall into nothing and

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sometimes I startle, as if I’ve been awakened from a dream, thinking that I am falling and that all of China - the plains, the mountains, the deserts, the ancient tombs, the festivals of Pure Brightness and Corn Rain, the pagodas, the white dolphins in the Yangtze, and the Temple of Heaven - everything is falling with me.

Less than ten minutes after old Liu left our house, even before I’d found a way to tell Shujin we were leaving, the terrible screaming of motorcycle engines came from a street somewhere to the right of the house.

I went into the hall and grabbed the iron bar, positioning myself behind the spirit screen, my feet wide, the bar ready over my head. Shujin came from the kitchen to stand next to me, silently searching my face for answers. We stayed that way, my trembling arms raised, Shujin’s eyes locked on mine, as the dreadful thunder of engines funnelled up the alley outside. The noise grew and grew, until it was so loud that the engine seemed to be almost inside our heads. Then, just as I thought it might drive straight through the door and into the house, there came a choked rattle, and it began to diminish.

Shujin and I stared at each other. The sound headed away to the south, gradually faded into the distance, and silence fell. Now the only thing disturbing the quiet was the unearthly echo of our own breathing, hard and hollow.

‘What… ?’ Shujin mouthed. ‘What was that?’

‘Ssh.’ I gestured to her. ‘Stay back.’

I stepped round the spirit screen and put my ear to the barricaded front door. The engines had faded, but I could hear something else in the distance - something faint but unmistakable: the pop and spit of fire. The yanwangye is going about his diabolical work, I thought. Somewhere, in one of the streets not far away, something was burning.

‘Wait there. Don’t go near the door.’ I went up to the next storey, climbing two stairs at a time, still carrying the iron bar. In the front room I ripped away a loose slat of wood and peered out into the alley. The sky above the houses opposite was red: snarling flames leaping twenty and thirty feet into the air. Little black

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flecks floated down, pitted and scarred like black moths. The yanwangye must have come very close to our house.

‘What is it?’ Shujin asked. She had come up the stairs and was standing behind me, her eyes wide. ‘What’s happening?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said distantly, my eyes fixed on the falling snow. The flakes were speckled with greasy soot and, riding on the tide of black smoke, came the smell again. The smell of meat cooking. The smell that had been haunting me for days. Earlier we’d filled our stomach with buckwheat noodles, but there had been no protein in the meal, no cai to balance the fan of the noodle, and I still craved meat. I drew in a lavish lungful of the smell, my mouth watering hopelessly. It was so much stronger this time - it coiled round the house, getting into everything, so pungent that it almost overpowered the smell of burning timbers.

‘I don’t understand,’ I murmured. ‘It can’t be possible.’

‘What can’t be possible?’

‘Someone’s cooking.’ I turned to her. ‘How can this be? There’s no one left in the neighbourhood - even the Lius don’t have any meat to cook …’ The words died in my mouth. The black smoke hung directly over the alley where Liu’s house was. I stared at it in a trance, not speaking, not moving, hardly daring to breathe as a dreadful, unspeakable suspicion crawled into my throat.

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51

When I got to the club that evening the crystal lift wasn’t at street level: it was up on the fiftieth floor. I stood for a while in the empty socket it left, my handbag tucked up under my arm, staring up, waiting for it to come down. It was a long time before I noticed a sign printed on A4 paper and taped to the wall.

Some Like It Hot is open!!!!! We’re waiting to see you!!!! Please call this number for access.

I went to the phone box opposite and dialled the number. As I waited for an answer I stared up at the club, watching snowflakes piling up on the front edge of Marilyn’s extended leg. They built into a little ledge, until, every tenth swing or so, the movement dislodged them and they tumbled down, lit by the neon bubbles, glittering the way I imagined children’s play snow did as it fell from Santa’s sleigh.